I graduated from CMU in 1994 with a Math/CS degree. I went back there this spring with some college friends for the first time in about 20 years.

There are alot of new buildings, and they are ridiculously opulent compared to what we had. Instead of the bare concrete corridors of Wean Hall (which they've actually tiled and put drop ceilings in sometime in the past 20 years - way to spoil a mood!) students now walk through gleaming glass and natural wood interiors.

I must say it all seems about 1,000 more cushy than we ever had it, and CMU lost a little of its stark barrenness in the process. As an old timer I lament that but I can certainly see how it makes the place more comfortable and attractive to the young-uns.

I expect that the same is true on many campuses in the USA, perhaps especially the CS powerhouses. I live maybe 20 miles from Stanford now and although I haven't been on their campus in maybe 15 years I have heard that there has been tons of development there as well (probably more than CMU given how ungodly rich Stanford is).

I haven't been to MIT since 1993 maybe but I expect they also have had a glut of fancy new buildings in the past 20 years.

While I don't agree with much of what you say, I do agree that there is something to be said for social pressure against being fat, and losing that social pressure is on balance a bad thing.

I noticed maybe 10 years ago that it had become acceptable for teenage girls to wear low cut jeans and short tops with rolls of fat sticking out. Girls would wear this fashion with pride regardless of their physique. This is very different than when I was a teenager in the 80s and looking like that would generally subject a person to ridicule.

Whether or not that just kept fat girls from feeling pretty, or if it actually encouraged greater concern for one's weight, I don't really know; but a little shame about any of one's faults is unpleasant but necessary if you ask me.

Wrong again, coward. "I think you have to" is a different way of saying "you should", in this case "you should" being shorthand for "I believe it would be better for you to do this and here are the reasons".

No, I don't see it. I was offering an opinion, and used no derogatory terms or insulting language. But then I don't get offended when others offer their opinions, especially when those opinions are explicitly requested.

Thank you again for your response, very interesting. And I mean that sincerely, and did also in my previous reply. I feel a little better educated for having read your posts and that's a rare thing on these forums :)

Your statements are more prescient then I think you realize.

It IS kind of like the Borg; there is kind of like a "hive mind" in open source; whatever the most people think should happen, is what will happen. There is no central authority to dictate that anything other than what the majority wants should happen.

In this case, it's pretty clear that, since all the major distros have accepted systemd, that it's been accepted by the majority of users and become the de facto standard. There seems to be alot of momentum behind it.

I could of course be wrong; maybe it just looks that way, and maybe there is enough of a seething hatred underneath the covers for systemd that it will be ousted soon. But in the meantime, what are you going to do? Just hope, pray, and wait for that to happen? Why not try to improve the thing instead of complaining about it hoping it will go away?

An alternative to my suggestion that people accept systemd and learn to use it, and work to improve it to make it better, is the suggestion that you "take to the streets" and actively fight against systemd rather than accepting it.

You can suggest that to people if you want to; it's just that I don't think it will work and I think those people will waste their time and energy. And I won't suggest to people that they should waste their time and energy on something, especially something that has no moral or ethical implications and is just freaking OPEN SOURCE SOFTWARE that we can all change for the better if we want to.

The difference is in "I think you have to" versus "You have to".

Yes, there is a difference. Saying "you have to" is a command, and it does take away freedom when it is spoken by someone with authority to do so.

Saying "I think you have to" is the same as saying "you should". It's not a command, it's a suggestion.

Do you see the difference now?

How long until all of the software packages that BSD wants to use require so much work to retrofit to use a different init mechanism that they just throw in the towl and accept defeat?

OK fine then, don't accept it. Waste your time and money fighting the inevitable, just so that you can be "right", when you could have spent less time and money cooperating on fixing the thing so that you can be "right" *AND* have more time and money in the end, and a better outcome all the way around.

Look, I don't love systemd; I quite dislike it in fact. But it should be pretty clear to any moron that it's already become entrenched and it's not going anywhere. So you can cry and try to take your ball and go play in your own ever shrinking room, or you can try to improve the bed that you are inevitably going to have to sleep in.

My advice was to wake up, wise up, and try to positively affect the ecosystem that you live in, instead of crying and living some kind of pipe dream that you'll be able to use Linux and not have to use systemd.

Also, all you anonymous cowards can kiss my ass.

Specious argument. Nobody said you *have* to accept systemd. I said you *should* accept systemd, and I gave reasons why you should. You still have the freedom to disagree and do your own thing regardless of what I say.

I would have thought that were so obvious that it didn't even necessitate your reply, but since you've been modded "+5 Interesting" I guess lots of people also completely missed the point.

Whether you love, hate, or are ambivalent about systemd, I think you have to accept it at this point. If there are things you don't like about it, trying to use an alternate init mechanism is only going to cause you personal grief that will likely only increase in severity over time as it gets harder and harder to retrofit software packages to use other init systems as systemd further embeds itself into the Linux software world.

If there are things you don't understand about systemd, you should read as much as you can to try to figure it out for yourself, and if you can't, you should write up coherent questions and post them in the appropriate forum for help (what is the appropriate forum? I don't know - someone jump in here and help me out. I personally often have no idea where the best place is to ask questions about things like systemd).

If there are things you don't like about systemd, you should write up coherent bug reports or feature requests, and get them in front of the right people (once gain, someone jump in here and say who these people are and how to get these types of requests out there, I actually don't know). Or better yet, make the improvements to systemd yourself if you are capable of doing so.

Your goal should be to improve both systemd itself and your knowledge of how to use it to the point where it is something you are happy to use, not work around it. By hook and by crook, systemd has become the standard way of doing many things in a typical Linux system and it's time for all of us to just accept that and to make forward progress. It's too late to try to work against systemd; it's time to "embrace and extend".

If systemd is so onerous to you that you can't use Linux anymore, then I guess BSD is a possible solution for you. But who knows, maybe BSD will eventually adopt systemd as well?

I just think there's a difference between "caring that the government can track people via cell phones" and carrying a pager so that you can be paged, then decide to drive to some "neutral place" where you can make a call back, so that the government can't know where you were when you received the page. That's just a level of paranoia completely inconsistent with rational behavior, unless you have specific reason to believe that the government is targeting YOU with some elevated level of tracking and also are doing something that you believe the government will try to prosecute you for and for which your location when you receive phone calls will contribute to their case against you.

I mean, the government also sends swat teams out to break down people's doors when they are believed to be holed up in their house with weapons -- does that mean that we should all be ultra paranoid and build our doors out of 3 foot thick steel and sit in the far corner of the house worried that the swat team is going to descend at any moment?

No - that's absolutely unjustified paranoia. So is refusing to use a cell phone except via pager-initiated callbacks.

Well thanks for the well though out response.

I guess it really comes down to what question is being asked.

I believe that most people think of "base" as the number of symbols that can be used in a "standard math system" using symbolic representations that can be written and operated on using the same "rules" as in base 10 math, but with a different number of symbols.

It is true that you can define the rules however you want, so we could even define a system where "base CmdrTaco" has meaning, because we could make the rules be whatever we want.

But nobody actually means that when they talk about "base N" because it's kind of pointless. Why even ask the question about what it would be like if we could have "base N" if the answer is, "it would be however you want it to be".

Therefore, I believe that you have misinterpreted the question, by applying the most liberal possible interpretation to the concept of "base".

I believe an analogy would be if someone asked you "who was the first president of the United States" and you answered "James Bond". And then you explained your answer by saying "Oh I assumed you were asking about who the first president of the United States was in the invented universe I made up in my mind". I mean sure, if we can interpret any question in the most liberal sense possible, then any answer is possible to any question, and that's kind of pointless.

You cannot because it's not possible. A 'base' is the number of unique symbols in the number system. You can't have partial symbols; you can have 3 symbols for base 3, and 4 symbols for base 4, but you cannot have 3.1415xxx symbols for base Pi.

You might as well ask what it would be like to have a "base yellow" number system or a "base CmdrTaco" number system. Meaningless.

Can someone explain to me exactly what is so marvelous about what this dude can supposedly "see"?

A google search reveals a history of his story popping up from time to time - probably whenever he can find a venue to promote himself, and whenever sites like Slashdot get duped into posting about him - but I found nothing that describes anything that he's actually able to intuit about math since this injury other than a bunch of crap about how he can 'see mathematical patterns' now. Awesome - so how about parlaying that into any statement that demonstrates any extraordinary grasp of math? Because in all my searching, I haven't found this dude to have ever said anything that anyone couldn't easily just make up.

I also found this comical link to "End of Pi Found" on some Physics forum:

http://lofi.forum.physorg.com/...

Not sure if it's the same guy but it was posted by a Jason Padgett who says he is a "math/physics student in Washington state", and the Jason Padgett in the article is supposedly from Tacoma, Washington. Note that the post was from 2008 and the article that Slashdot has linked to describes Padgett as a "sophomore in college". Some math genius - still a sophomore in college 6 years later!

Slashdot, why do you waste my time with this crap?

I swear, Slashdot editors are worse than the patent office; they don't do even he smallest amount of verification before rubber stamping what is presented to them and pushing it out.