Well, I don't know how old you are or maybe your reality is really impaired but in the end, I looked it up.

I'm a 35 and I got my license when I was 18 so I was curious. It did use to 21, but that changed in 1922 (from 21 years old to 18)... ;-)

As for alcohol, you're half right: one used to be able to buy "light" stuff (cider, beer, wine) between 16 and 18 but it changed 2 years ago. Now it's 18 for everything.

You're wrong:
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Fuel_efficiency#Energy_content_of_fuel
http://auto.howstuffworks.com/diesel3.htm

Your "almost identical" is something like 10%...

I'm not sure where you got your facts but they're wrong, that or I missed the irony (in which case it was funny). You can start driving only if you're at least 18 (you can have a learner permit at 16 but you cannot drive by yourself) and even if you can get away buying alcohol, legally you have to be at least 18 too (the reason why one could get away is because we don't card)...

Don't sweat too much, at work we're still hitting some serious UFS bugs on patched Solaris 10 (mainly FS corruptions, huge slowdowns like a fstat taking 20 real minutes, ...). That said we're a little bit shy of 2000 Sun SPARC servers so that's why we "often" see these bugs...

Straight from the 2.4 maintainer: can't be better than that!