I can buy alcohol because I don't live in Saudi Arabia. I can have an OS that doesn't know or care how old I am because I don't live in California. That law literally doesn't apply to me. If I make a distro where I am, why should I bother with age verification at all? It's none of my business if a friend of a friend or a complete stranger decides to download it and install it on a machine in California. Not my circus, not my monkeys.

You can get fired at the drop of a hat for no reason at all. Bosses blow their top over being 1 minute late. Fill out these forms you just filled out last week and again online before you can see the doctor. IRS knows exactly what you made and what you paid in witholding, and what you owe but YOU need to compute it, better not be wrong! Don't be late! Rent and mortgage take up an ever increasing portion of your monthly income (if any). 23 calls a day, mostly scams. You have health insurance even though it was damned expensive, but somehow you still owe a heap of money you don't have after a single visit to the ER.

Meanwhile, you're getting badgered about your "credit score". If you let it get bad everything gets more expensive and it gets harder to get a job (for some reason).

Yeah, you're less likely to actually die today than years ago, but your place in life is far more precarious than it was even 20 years ago. More things demand your attention.

We would have to re-arrange society to ease many of the stressors in life. I predict we'll be needing those drugs for a while.

Based on the cost of products from China vs the price of products made in China but sold by non-Chinese companies, I'd say the price well more than covers the cost of everything for practically any product where they also choose to display ads.

They just want more, more, always more.

It's also possible that Dolby is twisting logic into a pretzel in order to make this claim. It wouldn't be the first far-fetched theory of infringement to go through court.

The first thing I do on installing Linux is nuke NetworkManager and it's ilk.

There's no reason a smart TV MUST have an account with the manufacturer or seller unless they want to enshittify it.

You may want to have accounts with various streaming services or perhaps you just want it to stream video you have on a NAS.

Simply download Ollama and run a few cellphone-sized models locally.
you can see exactly how Fing useless this whole idea will be for nearly all cases of trying to get anything useful with ah high degree of inaccuracy from it.
If you're stupid enough to hand any control of your life to Openclaw, then you deserve all the bad things you will inevitably get. Let's just call openclaw "Darwin in action"

No what is un-slashdot worthy is posting a reply while clearly being completely uninformed about the subject.

OK Mr. smarty pants. Please inform yourself about the case, (watching Moment of Contact is a good entree) then you provide a rational alternative hypothesis to us all.

I suggest you inform yourself about the case, perhaps watch "Moment of Contact" first, before you make a fool of yourself by posting a derisory "noting unusual happened" post.

A lot of apparently credible people (including doctors etc) have a common story. A cop actually died as a result of handling the alien. You can;t simply make a death up and it's clearly being covered up by governments. There are too many credible witnesses to say nothing happened at all. The only question is what.

Yes it really has.Just some (far from all) more recent examples where Dems have tried to remove personal freedoms:
Gun ownership and Second Amendment Rights, Healthcare Mandates (The ACA), COVID-19 Mandates (Vaccines/Masks), Environmental Regulations, multiple Labor and Economic Regulations.
Before you incorrectly label me a Republican, I don't support them either.

History has shown us that if anything, Democrats are even less inclined to personal liberty than Republicans.
All it takes is one "think of the children" argument and all the Dems will be lining up to sign.

..with only US-made gear, the NSA can get their hooks and backdoors in everywhere?

On the other hand, take notice. There's a bunch of ideas being kicked around out there to subject ALL drivers to an automatic intoxication screening, even life-long non-drinkers. Might be worth looking at what could go wrong.