Snagging him right at the arrival gate seems pretty reasonable, and certainly security has done so after flights for many various offenses in the past.
But yeah, at the very least they should know who the guy was and be able to provide information to the authorities in order to press charges.
There are a few episodes where various people mention putting a lot of time and wish into building holodeck sims. I'm guessing it's more like having a futuristic version of Unity/UnrealE/etc, with a common asset pool and an AI assisted interface
With the efforts to neuter regulatory and inspection agencies, it's surprising they caught this, but who knows how long it's been going on even just the one company
Thing is, many of these things grow over time, and - especially with the active gutting of regulatory and oversight bodies - there's a decent chance that the list isn't comprehensive.
It's also one of the reasons why I have avoided US meat products and grabbed stuff with a maple leaf instead, because it wasn't hard to see this coming (and coming and coming)
I'd be surprised if a single one of them got the payout, and I don't feel sorry for any of them
But if they were open source they'd have the worst name possibly, and possibly an equally awful UI.
I guess we can be glad that "the GIMP" is taken so nobody will reuse that for a future FOSSeporter
Oh dear lord. Yeah I could definitely see a variant where the hell dimension is just "work all the hours that it would have taken to traverse in normal space so that EvilCorp can generate profit for the pan-dimensional empire"
Assuming age ID wasn't invasive and stupid to begin with, there could be other ways to set it that would be much less invasive for many devices, such as setting an "IS_ADULT" flag on devices (or even an associated account) at the time of registration.
"Hey Mr Smith, it looks like you've never registered a device on our phone network before but you've got a driver's license from 1979 so we'll just set the age code on your account aaaand, done".
Then you get a sheet of random scratch-off AV codes pulled from a drawer that you can use on other shit, similar to how VPN providers do to separate payment vs login. Nothing should ever say who you are or even your age, just "hey this person is old enough, fuck off and let them at it".
It's still annoying, but less privacy invasive. And it'll never fly because what they really want is to tie all communication back to a person not just an age.
They don't give a shit about any of that they just say "jump" and expect people to do something in response
The are other methods from Star Trek that could potentially be size as well.
Like "hey you actually travel through this other dimension where your physical form is undisturbed and no time passes in this dimension"
Which sounds ok, but "by the way it's kinda a hell-dimension and your consciousness gets tortured for a distance-relative time there but won't retain the memories after..."
Nah, Google would just lift your interests and then inject time-delayed ads into your brain...
Destroying what (appearance of) democracy they had as well