There is a nicotine source that isn't at all age locked. I guess the teens will move on to these "cigarettes" you hear about from time to time.

They even come in cool Menthol.

The laws are a joke by people who apparently flunked "Hello World".

They demand a mechanism, but don't even offer guidance on what mechanism it should be. You can technically comply while having no 2 Linux installs following the same API, making it effectively useless.

A better approach would be a purely optional userspace package (perhaps call it "Californication") that returns 1 dword with the age information encoded in it. Each person installing it gets to decide what that encoding will be.

Yes, it returned 0x0BADF00D, that's the code for 18+.

Someone else might decide 0x0B00B1E5 means 18+.

Some early adopters of "Here's a complaint one, pretty please use it" included small operations like PGP. Others were small companies then, later to become large.

Not too long after, there was the whole flap around DeCSS for DVDs. The medium itself is nearly dead now, but it was individual efforts that rendered region coding largely a joke. The Chinese vendors whose DVD players didn't give a damn about region codes came second.

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.

Grok was constantly say it was doing something that it had ZERO ability to, and I kept calling it out and it kept apologizing and then immediately doing it again.

As a guy who spend 5 figures a year on Ai, the last thing I want is that. I know Claude and ChatGPT also do it, but Grok was doing it CONSTANTLY.

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.

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.

So let's not poison the sea life with mercury from coal and choke the birds on smog.

Nuclear could be a good option if we would actually reprocess the spent fuel.

That also explains the hairball of dependencies.

It's indeed a "Duh" moment for sure. We remember this happened to the printed news and the musical industry who refused to embrace the new digital format.

It's always like that with anything old, it will cling onto it's old ways and old times, because it's their business model, when a business model no longer is viable and they failed to find a new way to create a new model, this is inevitable.

The same happens to broadcast media, here in our country they finally moved to "forced pay via taxes" because their model no longer works, they had for decades used so called TV-License vans, meaning they would actively seek out who had a television and did not pay for the TV License with so called TV Detection Vans, they would be equipped with RF radio gear to look for the local oscillator found in a Television to detect who secretly watched TV and ring their doorbell to get them to report themselves or face fines.

This happened in Denmark over 15+ years ago when the state enforced TV License was moved to the mandatory "Taxes" instead of an separate bill in the mail.
Happened in Sweden about 7+ years ago, they finally caved and did the same - moved the Mandatory TV License as an "internet media bill" instead which is added as tax into the national taxing system so everyone is forced to pay for "Public Service".

It's he old Elite of people who decides who gets to be employed and approved as artists, who gets to distribute the "official news" etc. Gov don't like to lose control of that, when people moved to other medias, most people got fiber and got rid of their Antennas country wide, the Gov saw it and thought, dammit - we can't have this, we must get payment somehow, so let's introduce it into the Tax system instead - to be permanently mandatory.