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.

Overlords, you do not live in a vacuum. You live in a country with a Bill of Rights and a Constitution. These rights apply to everybody. Ignoring them will be bad for you. Don't do it.

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.

I remember it well enough.
Read under "its expenses". All this is extremely costly and needs skills I started to enumerate. It is also cheap today, but it will not remain so.
If not for the Chinese factor, prices would have skyrocketed already. Real competition there is what keeps prices in check. And this, while being good for us, is not so good for (esp. US) AI industry. No real perspective on ROI, and we have yet to see what happens when the bubble bursts.
Just the other day, I compared AI agent use to the Icarus flight.

since AI agents became usable and started to bring results.
Of course, you must have skills usually not associated with the manager caste - ask precise questions, be realistic in expectations, and be ready to jump in and fix in ten minutes instead of spending time on 5 prompts. Among others.
So it is not a question about AI being usable or not; it is a question about it being useful enough to cover its expenses and ensure ROI.
An improbable thing to happen.

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.

I have Macs, a Windows laptop, and several Linux laptops and workstations.

I think I remember a few crashes per year in the last 16 years I have been using Macs. Caveat - I reboot them when I see signs.

Linux boxes are more stable than Macs. I do not have to reboot at least once every two months because it's starting to slow down.

Windows has problems every single week.

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.