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.

>arguing it unfairly advantages startups

Way to say your dealers suck.

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.

Simplify. The best part is no part. The parts omitted never fail. They don't require maintenance, supply chains, continuous improvement.

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.

Mostly just in the bulk, low barriers to entry, and pervasiveness(like a lot of things social media). The case of actors actually goes back a long way; state laws regarding compensation of child actors were spurred by the case of one who was popular in the 1920s and litigated with his parents over where the money wasn't in 1939. That case doesn't provide for takedowns; but it's also the case that filmmakers are normally looking for children to play characters; rather than to do 'candid' intense documentaries of them at home; so the degree of public exposure of private life is presumably deemed to be less; with the main issue being children who were...definitely...getting a solid education while on stage finding that all the money was gone when it became their problem.

Child-blogging, by contrast, seems to reward verisimilitude (if not necessarily truth) and invasiveness, relatively pervasive in-home mining for 'content', so presumably seems better served by removal-focused options; though there has definitely been talk about covering the economic angle in line with child actors.

I don't even know what the deal is with child beauty pageants, or how something you'd assume is a salacious bit of slander about what pedophile cabals are totally doing, somewhere, is actually a thing a slice of parents are into, way, way, into. Apparently that's a third rail to someone, though, as the only jurisdiction I'm aware of with significant restrictions on them is France.

Unless quantum computing becomes cheap and comparatively widely available quite quickly after becoming viable passwords seem like they'll be a manageable problem. Nobody likes rotating them; but it's merely tedious to do and the passwords themselves are of zero interest unless they are still being accepted. If it does go from 'not possible' to 'so cheap we can just go through through in bulk' overnight that could ruin some people's days; but if there's any interval of 'nope, the fancy physics machine in the dilution refrigerator is currently booked by someone with a nation state intelligence budget' you can just rotate older credentials.

Now, if you were hoping that encryption was going to save any secrets that are interesting in and of themselves that got out in encrypted form; then you have a problem. Those can't be readily changed and will just be waiting.

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.

I love that it didn't occur to you that just because YOU can't source any, then it means that no one "on earth" can get any, lol.
Who's your copper guy? Maybe contract with a new one if yours can't get you "the good stuff"