In engineering and academia, I've appreciated those rare black colleagues. For one thing, they were all much more social (and it is well established that culturally and/or genetically, africans statistically have superior social ability to whites and asians), so I could enjoy hanging out with them more. Another is that they had different things to say, making our work environment litterally more diverse in terms of ideas.

However, in many ways, those black colleagues were not extremely "black" culturally. Dialectally, they sounded more mainstream, along with their general comportment.

As others have pointed out here, the biggest barrier to blacks getting into white collar jobs is black culture. Those who manage to escape the anti-education indoctrination demonstrate themselves to be just as smart as everyone else. It's not politically correct to suggest that different genetic sub-groups (i.e. races) might have different intelligence levels (albeit just averages), but it's anthropologically, it's an important question. However, what we find is that the culture dominates so strongly that we can't even begin to explore that question. (And of course, it is both stupid and unethical to assume that every member of a race is equivalent to the average (whatever that is) and prejudge them on that basis.)

Turns out 60% of my class is Indian.

Here's what happened: I'm teaching one of two sections of a CS course. On one of my homework assignments, I borrowed two of the questions from the other instructor. However, I altered them so that the numbers were different. The other section's answer key came out just before mine was due. Nevertheless, about 60% of my class turned in exact copies of the other section's answers, which were not correct for the assignment I gave them.

Call me lazy if you want, but coming up with good questions isn't as easy as you might think, so instructors often reuse their own questions (with some facts altered), and this isn't a whole lot different. This gave me an opportunity to explain to the students the meaning of the term "honeypot."

Anyhow, India isn't unique in developing this sense of entitlement to do what you want and to achieve grades, regardless of what you might actually learn. Some people will spend more time trying to evade learning than actually doing the learning. But some people find the piece of paper to be more important than having job skills.

You seem exceedingly rational, which is actually rare among netizens (male or female). I'm concerned that the abuse you receive may be mild compared to what some people have to deal with, where the abusers intrude on real life or at the very least make it difficult to do anything on the internet without having to wade through tons of crap.

People should not send you threats of bodily harm by any medium, whether we're talking about snail mail, phone, fax, or Internet.

Unlike those other things, religion is something you choose and something you can change. Moreover, religions are responsible for (directly or due to perversion) for countless atrocities. For gender, race, and sexual orientation, it is only bigotry against them that has lead to atrocities (although bigotry applies to religion too). Finally, many aspects of most religions don't make logical sense or are in direct contradition to established scientific fact or well-supported theory.

Therefore, I say that people should be subject to verbal criticism for aspects of their religions that are stupid.

That being said, many religious people are not intellectual enough to be able to question their religions, and due to the all-encompassing role that most religions play, religion is an integral part of their normal function. It's one thing to pick on someone for being intentionally stupid, but what about the cases where people are simply unable to think beyond their upbringing? You're not going to train me to want to eat grub worms any time soon, although it's perfectly normal in some cultures, so maybe I'm stupid in that way. There are some aspects of one's upbringing that are difficult or impossible to shake.

Consider sexual orientation. Mostly or strictly gay people make up only about 10% of the human population. Something we don't think about is the part of the population that is strictly straight. There are cultures where homosexual acts are or have been expected, and some people naturally are unable to bring themselves to participate, making themselves outcasts. Let's say for the sake of argument that that accounts for another 10%. That suggests that there is about 20% of humans who fundamentally have no choice about their sexual orientation. What about the remaining 80%? Some identify as something else (like bisexual, pansexual, asexual, etc.). But most of them identify as straight. Why? Cultural indoctrination. They could have, if raised differently, been more flexible, but they had that flexibility trained out of them. Religion is really no different from that or any other aspect of culture that we take for granted.

Which is why it's unethical (I didn't say it should be illegal) to discriminate on the basis of religion. That being said, facts are facts, and when someone is wrong (regardless of how deeply ingrained it is), they should be subject to criticism. The rest of us should not be contrained by other people's backward cultural hangups, just because we apply the label "religion."

As I have been coming to understand, you have a good point. What I don't know is if these components have well-documented interfaces so that they can be swapped out.

Systemd is also modular in that it is comprised of multiple components that run in isolated processes, which avoids having one service crash due to bugs in another. It's also not as spaghetti as people say it is. As I said in another post, the high level differences between systemd and sysvinit are:
- sysvinit starts a whole bunch of services whether you need them or not sequentially at boot time, and the startup is controlled by shell scripts.
- systemd starts services entirely on demand, only when they are needed, automatically managing dependencies, and the startup is controlled by C code.
So basically, they're a lot a like, except that systemd maintains more components internally to the project, and it's smarter and faster.

Wow. The usual complaint is the myth that systemd is monolithic. It's not. But now you're complaining that it's broken up into too many services? And how is this any different from sysvinit, which also starts any number of different binaries?

All they've done in systemd is write C code to start up services that used to be started instead by shell scripts and added the ability to make dependency resolution automatic so that services are only started when they need to be. So basically, they made it smarter and faster. The complaint that it's got too many binaries is moronic and a complaint just as well against sysvinit.

Systemd is modularized into a number of different binaries, each of which handles a different service. Thus, different functions are isolated from each other. This enhances stability and improves startup performance when not all need to be running first thing at boot time.

Oh, and all of systemd's config files are written in ASCII, in the traditional UNIX way. One cool thing they've done is made a single parser implementation (in a shared object library) so that all of the config files have the same syntax. Also, when you debug a problem with parsing for one service, you automatically debug it for all others at the same time.

We're talking about low-level system services here, where it's not really necessary to have swap-out options. Ok, sure, we have nano and vim, less and more (which nowadays are just the same program), variations on cron, etc. But a any one time, we just need to pick ONE. Moreover, most of us don't care which cron was chosen, as long as it does the right things at the right time.

With systemd, there is CURRENTLY less choice in some cases, but probably for ones that don't matter. Most components are already optional, and sooner or later, there will be multiple choices for a given service. (The lack of that is due to the young age of the project.)

As for duplication, you're not getting it. In a good system, common functionality is bundled into shared object liibraries so that they can be dynamically linked into multiple programs that need the same capabilities. Those are mapped to the same physical memory pages, so it saves memory too. It's also good to avoid reinventing the wheel. How many different config file parsers do we really need?

This sounds like a bug. Systemd is new, so it will have bugs. This is not, however, a design flaw. It is merely something that needs to be fixed. It's only a major problem if the devs refuse to fix it on the grounds that they don't think it's a bug. However, I've mostly only encountered that attitude when reporting Chrome bugs to Google.

Systemd is modular:
    - It's broken up into multiple independent processes, each of which handles one major thing well.
    - It's broken up into libraries so that commonly used code (such as parsing config files) is implemented once and shared among the services, saving memory (because you know how shared object libraries work, right?) and ensuring that there's only one implementation of any one thing that needs to be tested and debugged.
    - Interdependence among services is minimized, although as with any real, complex system, there are chains of dependencies.
    - Dependencies on and among services are handled on-demand so that only the services you need are running (often started well after boot). As a side effect, boot time is shortened.
    - Process 1 (init) is very small, with minimal functionality, in order to minimize the chances that it will crash.

The above are all true, or at least they are consistent with claims made by the developers. Sure, I have negative things to say, which are also true, but I don't want to add to the noise of all the false negative claims floating around.

Holy crap, dude. It was a joke. Things like "magical" and "zero runtime overhead" and "including ones that haven't been written yet" didn't clue you in?

The OpenBSD developers are so awesome that they've found a magical way to make modules unnecessary: Magical code compression with zero runtime overhead. As a result of this new approach, every possible kernel module (including ones that haven't been written yet) is stored in less space than an otherwise completely stripped kernel from the prior revision.

I said what I said because I had believed some of the myths promulgated about systemd. In fact, it's highly modular, and the main init process is actually quite small and not as much of a risk for crashes as people say it is. The main difference between systemd and sysvinit is that systemd is not based on shell scripts. Other than that, it is a collection of system services that are started up on demand and in logical order of dependencies, which was already a feature of Gentoo's OpenRC. Systemd's main objective seems to standardize and optimize many things about Linux that were previously (unnecessarily) inconsistent between distributions. Other than that, the main UNIX philsophy of making lots of specialized tools is not changed. Moreover, it's improved on the basis of sharing more code (in shared object libraries, I presume) between tools, such as code to parse configuration files and communicate with other components (which is based on dbus). They've taken the best UNIX features from various independent tools and system services and put them together into a single coherent implementation.

You really should read the page dispelling myths here, as pointed out by someone who replied to my earlier post: http://0pointer.de/blog/projects/the-biggest-myths.html

The more I look into this, the more I see the anti-systemd people being like creationists. Their view of the world is out-dated and replaced by better science (creationism isn't science at all, while sysvinit is not stupid, merely out-dated). Nevertheless, they fight to protect their old religion. And they deal with the new science mostly on the basis of total lies about their opposition.

I really have nothing invested in this, though, so my opinion my change yet again. I'm sure there are some disadvantages to systemd, but so far, all of the disadvantages I've seen people talk about have been fabrications, and it makes the adherents to the old religion of sysvinit look like luddites who can't separate fact from fiction and are merely afraid that their way of life is going to be taken from them, even when the new ways are better than the old ways. Quite possibly, some of the systemd opponents are INTENTIONALLY fabricating these things, and when things get to that point, I feel that their cult needs to die purely on principle.

Let's start by saying that the death threats against Lennart Poettering are ridiculous and should not be tolerated.

That being said, the design of systemd confuses me. It seems ripe for all manner of stability and security problems. As I understand it, it bundles a large number of services into a single process, which takes place of the init daemon. That's guaranteed to cause all kinds of system crashes.

What I don't get is why it isn't split up into multiple processes. All the same functionality could be provided by having a simple core init daemon that loads a set (perhaps a small set) of child processes. It wouldn't take longer to load. The services and behavior would be identical. But it would be a lot more stable, because a child process could be restarted if it crashes, keeping init to a bare minimum.

What's even more surprising is that someone with some sense hasn't done exactly that: Make a wrapper for the systemd build that patches a few things and just compiles it differently, into a slightly larger number of binaries. This way, we can benefit from the unification of services, while maintaining stability, and Poettering would have to be intentionally self-destructive to try to keep breaking that wrapper every release.

Instead of writing off creationism as pseudo-scientific clap-trap, why don't we start referring to it as a sport? Kinda like how curling and checkers are sports. When I was a student at Ohio State, studying computer science, I stayed way away from the campus during every football event. The traffic was a nightmare, and you'd have to park miles away and walk to every game, probably getting a ticket because where you parked was vaguely marked, and Ohio cops will use any excuse to get more ticket revenue. Hell, parking for a football game at the Ohio stadium was in itself a sport on many levels!

Anyhow, so how interested we are in sports, as scientists, varies quite a lot. Some of us care. Some of us could take it or leave it. Either way, a sport is mostly an event of mindless brutes kicking balls around and running into each other. Either that or it's comically painful like curling. Or self destructive like base jumping. So if we start referring to creationism as a sport, we'll be able to be clear about just how we think about it: A generally pointless exercise that makes whoever runs the event an ungodly amount of money. The debate as to whether or not creationism is serious science is about the same as the debate over whether or not it's possible to have a sport that involves ice skating and sweeping at the same time without being reduced to uncontrollable laughter.