Your claims that systemD is well engineered are a little eye-raising. We're talking about a replacement for the init system here, and you say the main feature is logind. That's not really part of what I expect Init to do.....

In any case, in a few months, I'll have time to read the systemD source code, and I will have a better idea if it's well designed or not.

Chromebooks don't support dialup to the best of my knowledge. Some models have cellular modems, however, and that might be an option here.

I guess you ought to leave the thinking to grown ups. So why would "neo-cons" want to foreclose on a zillion underwater (in the sense that the debt owed is more than the price the home can be sold for) home loans? That turns a temporary shutdown of the loan repayment revenue stream into a large permanent loss. They haven't bankrupted themselves enough that month?

Altruism is only one of several survival strategies. As you point out (quite rightly) there are other survival strategies that work. They exhibit the same traits as parasites or diseases - taking enough to survive and flourish, but not enough to kill the host. If everyone goes all-out exploiter, the species dies out, so the exploiters must never get to the point where they fatally injure the species as a whole.

Unfortunately, for this form of self-regulation to work, exploiters would have to become altruistic, not something they're capable of (the closest is "benign self-interest"). And it also ignores the fact that exploiters DO kill their hosts. And species DO go extinct.

I agree with your ultimate assessment - the future looks bleak. Is there a solution, or will we get lucky? I just don't know. I DO know that altruism does exist. I've certainly done what I felt was the right thing trying to help others knowing that it would probably bite me in the gluteus maximus.

If that is ever proposed I will be against that.

Wear a MacDonalds outfit instead, if that's what makes you happy.

If you can't see a difference between a viralant deadly disease and an ongoing tribal war then you have a problem. The former is countries asking for international aid to fight a deadly disease using doctors and a small security force. The latter is a foreign military force entering a country after years of tribal war where they are not welcome by some and forcibly preventing people from killing their neighbors. The main difference is that one disaster is caused by a virus and the other by people's decisions.

The bottom line is the the Hutu could have decided not to kill the Titsi but didn't.

Yes, and most cases such services are paid through property taxes. If the company owns the plant and its grounds, they pay substantial property taxes. If they lease the property, the property's owner does (and passes those costs along in the lease).

We're not talking about property taxes, we're talking about income taxes.

I have no opinion on Torvalds having no opinion on this matter.

Goodie, two corrupt banks backed by UK tax payers want to leave an independent Scotland.

Sounds to me like just the kind of thing independence is actually supposed to accomplish.

Unfortunately, they are probably just saber rattling.

Salmond has been saying 18 months, that's his timetable.

That's a tentative timetable for formal independence; it says nothing about a timetable for how economic or other relations change. And even that tentative timetable can be changed and postponed at will.

The fact remains that there is nothing in the vote that either mandates a timetable or necessitates any kind of "messy or painful split", and pretending otherwise is FUD.