Sure they did. They stole time from millions of people. They deliberately screwed with the expectations and plans of millions of people, all for a little bit of cash and bragging rights among their fellow assholes.

You're right, all those people should have chosen to buy fun, well-developed, richly supported gaming platforms from one of the many providers who offer open source, freedom-minded, anti-IP, systems that have a large selection of really cool massive multiplayer games with giant networks supporting all of that activity. There are so many to choose from that I'm sure it's why you just didn't have time to list them.

It's idiots like you, who think that businesses, networks, people's entertainment time, and the like "aren't real" that give comfort and encouragement to idiots like the guys who pulled this. They did it to be dicks, just like other dicks might throw a rock through your window and nail your TV right before you were going to watch the World Cup match you've been waiting weeks to watch with your friends. Or, in a closer analogy, waiting until moments before the game starts, and then cutting the cable that services your house or apartment building.

Let me guess: that soccer game's not real! They're not at the stadium in person, so denying them the chance to watch it as they planned isn't actually harmful! Destruction of the time someone plans to use in a certain way is a theft more real, in many ways, than stealing physical objects. You'll never be able to replace the time. Which is one of the reasons these guys are dicks. Deliberate, purposeful, not noble in any way, dicks.

Great, we look forward to seeing your new upstart-based distro, since everyone else has abandoned it.

The point is that that's the opinion of people who dislike systemd. That doesn't automatically mean they'll also dislike "a Systemd like init".

People like that might not (those who think it's implemented poorly). The people who will are the ones who insist on an init system that follows the "Unix philosophy". They're not going to be satisfied with anything other than sysvinit.

I do, actually. Well, they're more partners than customers, since we give them our code and they sell it. But, yes, I have a lot of meetings with outside parties. We convince about half of them to join our Hangouts from their laptops, the others we add to the meeting via phone. Outside of meetings, we communicate entirely via e-mail. Voicemail is still irrelevant.

At IBM, my role was entirely customer-facing. Voicemail was still fairly rare, though teleconferences were the norm. Most communication was, again, via e-mail or face to face.

Which means absolutely nothing because you can't actually use any of that firepower in any conflict short of "Civilization as we know it is coming to an end." That's not to dispute the rest of your points, which are mostly valid, but let us leave the SSBN out of the calculation of modern naval firepower. They have a specific mission: deterrence. The day they are called upon to loft their birds is the day that mission has failed.

There is an argument to be made that we need more ships, particularly attack submarines and surface combatants. The former will prove decisive in any conflict with the PRC and the latter are needed for missile defense, amongst other missions. Unfortunately most of the shipbuilding budget is going to the Gerald Ford CVNs while the looming Ohio replacement is going to consume billions more. Both are needed at the end of the day, so unless we're going to throw more money at the Navy I'm not sure what the solution is. I'd opt for throwing more money at them, since it takes decades to build a modern Navy, and it can't be used (as easily) for interventionist adventures in the same manner as a standing army....

Well said.

Jackson ends up telling NO story - just a vomit of computer-guided coloured lights. Sound and fury, signifying nothing...

I was more worried about replenishing Red Vines, than seeing what happened next.

As a result, the money is stolen not from the customers, but from the bank itself.

"Party on, Garth."

Bizarre argumentation. One hardly knows where to begin with your assumptions and red-herring analogies.

To address your first point - with it's ill-considered implications of parity between democracy, capitalism and actual worth or value: Commercial success at this scale simply indicate how thoroughly that vulgarity and thoughtlessness have been cultivated and encouraged by this media-driven culture over the past 90-100 years or so.

When people make "free choices" in such a society, they do so in appalling ignorance, with a maximum of empty stimulation. This is the post-Edward Bernays world.

The vulgarity of this decadent age. So? He rapes the corpse of JRR Tolkien and that's just fine if it earns a bauble and a penny?

That was a case of "resource constraint".