I think you are including the wrong variables in your probability calculation. You are looking at a calculation of how much life is likely to be out there and using that to come up with how likely that life is to find a way to 'junp' to our star system.

The problem is that you are making the assumption that such a thing is even possible. What we currenly know about how the universe works basically says it is not possible to excede the speed of light. We have a few theories about 'loopholes' in the physical laws that might allow for it but that has not been confirmed.

Given the aparent size of the universe and number of worlds in it I would agree that the 'life' side of the equation is pretty high however if FTL travel is not possible then it simply doesn't matter. No number of aliens given any amount of head start over us will develop technology that the realities of physics doesn't allow to exist!

You need to multiply your high-probability of advanced alien life against some probability of FTL being possible. Do you even have a number for that? If so where did you get it? Does it smell like the ass it was pulled from? I'm guessing so because we just don't know that yet!

Oh please! That is a really stupid reason to do nothing.

The money spent on space exploration is virtually nothing compared to the rest of what the government spends. Diverting just a month or two's bill for removing foreign dictators so that religious wack jobs can take over would be enough to really start to move forward as a species.

Your grandchildren wouldn't notice the money as it would be just pennies compared to dollars spent on much less productive stuff.

Even if we could fix the patent system to stop allowing for bad patents to be created someone would have to go through and challenge all the existing shitty ones. That would take years and that would be IF there were a budget for it. Expecting inventors to do it by challenging them in court isn't going to help because it is too expensive. Meanwhile technological progress is at a crawl compared to what it should be. Even if cleaning of the existing system began today all present would be too old to enjoy the benefits before it was done.

Throwing away the whole thing and starting over is a much quicker and more practical solution.

hackerspaces.org.

I worry about the day when they start selling them to domestic law enforcement agencies.

"Slackware is 1990s-era relic."

I wouldn't know, I don't use it. I find it hard to believe that it has continued this long if that is true though.

"We're looking to use a modern Linux distro, like Debian from just before the switch to systemd."

Well.. there's Devuan which was specifically a response to systemd. Of course it is totally unproven that they will stick it out though. But.. one thing about Debian.. it has always had countless sub-distros built off of it. This is nothing new. I'm sure some of them will not adopt Systemd. You will have your pick!

"I don't want to wait a week for Gentoo on my laptop to finish compiling Xfce."

Hmmm.. where to start...

First off.. save your straw men for Burning Man. The only way it's going to take a week to compile Xfce is if you bought that laptop back in the 90s. (probably at the same time you were last trying Slackware) Furthermore.. there is no reason you should be waiting for anything to compile. That's what screen or tmux are for. You can even throw nice levels into the mix to lower the priority on the compile task if you really need all that processor available to you as you work in the previous version of Xfce.

"We want Debian without systemd"

So?

First off, back to my whole baby and bathwater point BSD isn't Debian either. How does switching to BSDs get you back to old Debian?

Second, no-one owes you old Debian. Did you pay the developers for it? No. But... you are free to make it yourself. Or.. just sit back and relax because with soooo many people bitching... I'm pretty sure someone WILL make 'old Debian' for you. It might have a different name is all.

Well.. your example hardly forces you onto BSD then does it.. seeing as you listed BSD as something that is NOT supported.

As for Symantec.. if as many of Symantec's customers were bitching to Symantec about them only supporting distros that use Systemd and if they were threatining to put their money where their mouths are and walk away... Symantec would be supporting something else.

Seeing how many desktop machines I have seen totally trashed by Symantec software I find it interesting that the 'big Enterprise' user should care.

I don't know much about various certifications including FIPS but first off.. if users were demanding a non-Systemd FIPS compliant distro and ready to spend their money on it wouldn't it exist? Even if the Slackware and Gentoo people were totally uninterested wouldn't someone else see an opportunity to make some money and go for it?

Second.. from the outside it's amusing how much credence 'Enterprise' types put into those fancy acronyms. I realize that you need some paper to CYA but you do realize that it's all the same GNU running on a Linux kernel right? Wether or not your environment is secure has a lot more to do with wether or not you spend the time to properly secure it than what name is on the boot logo.

It seems like Enterprise types tend to make the shittiest decisions when it comes to which distros to invest in anyway. Has RedHat done anything positive since they adopted Yum? And that only after years of being in the dark ages as compared to Debian's Apt?

Why are Enterpirse users so stuck on distros with periodic releases? There is nothing that warms my heart more than logging into my bank account only to find my bank's computers are down for maintenance. In 2015, really? How many decades have distros with rolling releases been available?

Also.. listen to Lennart Poettering talk some time about the various controvercial changes he has made. He defends everything by explaining how it was done to meet X, y and Z that RedHat ENTERPRISE Linux customers were demanding.

If (and I'm not even sold on that) Systemd is half as bad as people say then if anything it's Enterprise users that we can thank for it. Maybe our "little playgrounds" as you so condescendingly refer to them would be better off without you anyway.

Are these maintainers then going to maintain a BSD port? How does that work? Is someone going to port Systemd to BSD? And if so then what did you gain by switching?

"...I can say your advice is a very bad one."

I think you might be missing the fact that my "advice" was meant to be read in comparison to writing one's own operating system kernel from scratch. Certainly you don't think that would be better advice do you?

What I wrote was not intended to be serious advice as to a course of action. There are many shades of grey in between such a from-scratch system and just installing the latest RedHat or Debian Jesse and taking what you get.

" If you do what you say here, you will have a very limited setup that must not be a moving target,"

Yah.. I believe that I mentioned that. If you want a really simple system AND you want things like hotplugging hardware, sleep, dynamic cpu speeds and other power saving measures... well that's kind of a contradiction isn't it.

But.. on the other hand some of us do still have static desktops and servers that go for years without chaning hardware. It's not all laptops and USB. Some people seem to be forgetting that and force a lot of laptop/portable cruft on people who don't need it. I think it may be a generational thing.

"Even your network interfaces or your disks can appear too late for your script on a very basic setup."

I never said it would be easy. But there are simpler solutions to such things. I remember running ancient old versions of Linux like RedHat 2.x or Mandrake something or other. They had a lot less complication than what we have now and yes.. sometimes I did have to run mknode myself to get various hardware to work. But... once it was configured it worked. I never had networking or disk access or any of that stuff fail just because of a time to startup issue.

" old hardware support is technical debt if it holds you back"

That would be where I was asking for an example. GP claimed that scripts are overly complicated with old hardware support. I am calling him/her out. What scripts? I'm not used to seeing specific hardware support in scripts.

Of course.. if he/she did provide examples... So what? Why should LINUX get rid of hardware support because some distro coded their scripts poorly? There are plenty of ways to modularize things so that one doesn't have to sift through all that stuff to configure the hardware that they do have. If some distro isn't good at that then if it's open you can fix it. If not.. well... either way you can chose a better distro.

What is an example of how old hardware support is burdening you in any way?

Wouldn't you be better off signing it with your private key and letting the recipient decode it with your public one? Anyone could encrypt something with the recipient's public key. Using your private key prevents a man in the middle attack.

How do you know? Who is there and why is a secret! Anybody could be in Guantanamo if you can't find them!

We didn't buy A home. We bought two.. a duplex. We rent out the other side and make most of our monthly escrow payments back that way. With what we are still left paying out of our own pockets we could have an apertment... an apartment where we sleep with roaches and worry about getting caught in the neighbor's crossfire.

But.. go ahead... keep telling yourself that buying a home is a bad idea!

It will always be cheaper to buy than to rent. If it weren't then why would the landlords bother? They have to be making more off of you then they pay out themselves! And yes.. that's after taxes, mainenance and everything else that goes along with home ownership. The landlord has to pay for that stuff too.

Most people I know that excercise already take their smartphones with them. It's their music player. Then again, it's also their fitness tracker already. This is not news!

"Live and let live. Find ways to cooperate."

Ummm... wouldn't that mean supporting both sysvinit and systemd? Wasn't there a vote about that a while back and the Debian maintainers decided not to?