"It also opens the door to running alternate desktop environments if youâ(TM)re not a fan of the Windows user interface (although the method described in that link uses Cygwin rather than Ubuntu on Windows."

Now if you could only get rid of that pesky spyware laden operating system under it then you would be golden.

Forgive me for asking but, what is systemd's main benefit? If i don't mind that my system boots up slower and in a sequential order, how does that affect the systemd's benefits for other users?

I really don't understand that statement. It sounds like nonsense to me. Please tell me because I honestly don't know what the snot he is talking about.

If systemd's main benefit was to obscure the boot process to prevent users from knowing what was going on during the boot process in order to squeeze in weird or unwanted code, then it would make sense that they don't want any users to know about that potentially questionable stuff so letting them use init would be detrimental to their efforts.

I can't see how that benefits me though. I don't care about what benefits them. If i'm trying to build a secure, manageable system, i'm looking for something that benefits me.

"Prime costs a lot less than the shipping charges it replaces."

It doesn't. Unless you are ordering everything including your groceries from it every week, you are spending more at the end of the year on your prime membership than just ordering more than $35 worth of stuff and selecting free shipping. I've personally worked out the numbers and two day shipping isn't worth the cost of prime for me. I probably order $2000-$3000 worth of stuff from Amazon every year and I probably pay shipping charges of between $10-$40 in a given year for all of it. That includes the stuff where they don't offer free shipping. Have a little patience and you can save quite bit of money.

HPE is not a Microsoft shop. Perhaps in some other division.
Source: I am an HP Employee. (HP Enterprise)

I'm skeptical about the whole thing. The base platform is a chromebook. By definition, chrome and anything developed by google has hooks which phone-home. If you are going to build a locked down system, you should probably start with something that doesn't already leak like a sieve and have build in backdoors and malware in the operating system.

Great, who is making the car again? Are you telling Porsche that they cant make money on additional functionality like this? Even if they said yes to google, they could still turn the functionality off and on based on some premium pricing. That wouldn't change. It seems a lot more likely that they didn't like Google's terms in relation to the way the data is used, handled, processed, and transmitted. Porsche could even write the app themselves if they wanted to. My guess is that they don't want some company telling them what information they need to give up about their customers. Customers that pay a premium price already for the name and functionality of the vehicles they produce.

I'm not asking for it. What choice do I have if I wanted to buy a Porsche?
The car isn't made by google and they don't get to decide what the customer wants. They have apiece of software that is being licensed by Porsche.
Porsche, being a luxury sports car maker is uniquely in a position to decide not only what they want to put into their car but also what their customers want.

What customers are these anyway? I don't remember hearing about any such survey or study to determine what functionality that users wanted that wasn't already there in the Porsche audio/entertainment system. Remind me again who is supposed to make the decision what customers are probably going to want in a product made by a specific company.

You sound like a paid shill. Just sayin'

The point is that Porsche should be telling google what they want their entertainment system to do and how much information they want to send to it. Google should not be asking for this information and they should definitely not be the one dictating what information is required for an embedded audio entertanment system. the next thing you know Google will be sending all the data back to their datacenters, monitoring not only where you are but how fat you are diving, what rpms you are changing gears so they can let your insurance know if you have a lead foot, and your auto mechanic if you like to bounce off the rev limiter a little too often.

losing out on my privacy and autonomy in the name of someone elses stupid feature is the wrong way to go. Google making demands on a car company when the car company is the one who should be making decisions about the features and functionality of the car is the wrong way to go.

Google should STFU and be happy that someone wants to pay to license their technology and then they should work to provide the features that the licensee wants.

I suspect well be getting the always on, talk to your web browser functionality so you dont have to click anything when you want ot make a call. You can just say "skype, call my mom" and and bing, skype will inform microsoft, the nsa, and your mom that you want to talk. And when you dont want ot talk to mom, skype will make sure any naughty keywords you use while sitting at your computer are also promptly forwarded to the NSA as well.

It's not a flaw of architecture or implementation. They implemented it this way on purpose. Its a flaw because they either didn't see or envision someone using the data they provided in a way that they thought made them look bad. And it does. He also brought to light to the world that this information was freely available with their implementation when they would have rather kept that a secret to the general public. Because of the public starts to realize how much of their information is available to others and how other can manipulate and use their data without their consent, the less and less they are going to be happy with that. That information should not be provided at all if they care about their users privacy as they are saying that they do. But that is all baloney. This is their business model.

It's facebook's privacy through obscurity policy. What the user DOESNT know we are taking from them or how it can be used will not make the user unhappy.

I'm sorry but your baby and cat pictures aren't "media" just like your family photo album isn't an "art gallery".

It is a social networking site. a site to talk to your friends and share personal experiences. Its media is only the sharing of personal thoughts and pictures or the passing on of useless cultural memes.

I think the word media get banded about far too much these days. Not everything is media.If you were a professional photographer, then your pictures could be considered media. And you probably wouldn't be sharing them on facebook. If you were a professional writer, you certainly wouldn't be using facebook as the means to share your professional works. That is not what the site it build for. Its built for interpersonal interactions. (with people you probably don't know or don't know well and you probably even care less about.) And then for facebook to draw up a statistical profile of you so that you can be put into various groups for others marketing opportunities.

It would not have ever been their first inclination to do that. Despite all the free and charitable projects that google does to make people forget what they actually do, they are at the very root a marketing and data warehousing company. Google's primary business is gathering information about you and using it to market to you or selling your information off to people who want to make money off of you. Secondarily, they act as an arm of the surveillance community providing information by request about their users to law enforcement.

All of those other projects they have which really don't make them any money are just there to help people forget what type of business they are really in.

With that in mind, how are they going to track and create profiles about you if you are using names which they cant directly link to you as an individual? Sure, they can be even more sneaky and just figure out its using using behavioral analysis. It's much easier though if you willingly give up all that information in different ways and on different sites and they can just correlate it all together to paint a picture of the human mess that we all are to some degree in our lives. Nothing is too private. Good wants you to believe you can trust them with that information that is private to you and that you wouldn't normally share. And they want you to forget that they in fact do intend to share it. Even if you don't get a notification about it.

"At least with Facebook, you generally knew what non-FB sites would post on your FB, as it would ask for your FB login."

I find this to not be true these days. This may have been true early on. Now, if you are logged into facebook in another window and allow scripts to run, lots of web pages have scripts from facebook.com and other facebook related sites that will automatically tag you when you visit the site and send some information back to facebook about your visit. Exactly what information gets sent back, I do not know. So, everytime you visit the site, you are running scripts originating from a facebook domain.

This is easy enough to spot if you use noscript and don't allow any site related scripts by default. I will selectively allow (temporarily) sites when I need to get a website to work properly and will stop if they are requiring me to add some sites that I absolutely do not want to be associated with.