Well for one thing you are conflating two very different groups of activities commited by two very different groups of people. You are conflating the actions of soldiers with the abuses committed by spies.

As far as "destroying all the surrounding stuff", that's just basic warfare. Whatever propaganda you've been feeding yourself has got you convinced that there's such a thing as "surgical military action".

Combat is not surgery. Never was.

This is something that I addressed in my original post and something that you chose to ignore and remove.

> So, live your entire life as though you're going to get fired tomorrow. Sounds like real fun.

If you work in IT, the whole "disaster recovery" thing should not be new to you. It doesn't just apply to technology. If problems are readily forseeable then certainly you should try to plan for them and be as prepared for them as possible.

You don't necessarily have to go overboard. With many things, the most effective measures are the initial ones that are just past total apathy.

Being slightly more prepared than the next rat is a very useful thing.

Plus, if you are a slightly more prepared rat then the thought of being fired tomorrow won't weigh on you quite so heavily.

Slave is a pretty accurate term for that arrangement. It also works for midieval European peasants too.

...and the Easter Island heads "walked" into place.

They actually could have. A team of scientists actually worked out how this could be done and did a trial run with one of the heads.

The "walked it" down one of the roads from the stone quarries.

> You're talking about totalitarianism under the false guise of socialism.

What's what you tend to get when you grant the government ever increasing powers. If not outright genocide you will end up with more and more meddling and the expansion of government power.

That's what beaurocracies do. They seek to expand themselves.

Also, they don't seek to be efficient. So they will seek the most costly path possible. They are not run by altruists but by the same greedy crass types that fuel capitalsm. They're out to increase their personal power, wealth and influence.

You have the same problem with corporations but they aren't supposed to be monopolies. You should have the possibility of playing one off the other in order to get what's good for you and the public in general.

Of course "net neutrality" is ultimately a (natural) monopoly problem much like AT&T before it.

Communism in practice devalues labor. This is especially true if you aren't in one of their selected groups. Then your labor gets really devalued.

Just about everyone here would be a victim of Maxist-Communist labor devaluation. You think it's bad being a geek now. You don't even want to know what it was like when the Soviet Union was still around.

> They ate meat when they could get it, which wasn't 100% of the time, and the meat they got was lean.

Um... no.

If they had an animal, they used all of it. They didn't waste any of it. They would not have turned up their nose at any part of the animal because of modern diet fads.

They would have eaten the fat and been happy to have it.

You can see how the same pragmatism manifests in older food cultures where pure fat may be eaten as a delicacy. Humans for the vast majority of history have eaten whatever they could acquire and digest. Doesn't matter if you're talking about a farmer or a hunter/gatherer.

We might not need to relent from any of those allegedly "bad foods". We may just need to lay off the recently invented industrial food chemicals.

I have a family member that's just fine with white wheat flour products as long as the flour in question is not brominated. This easily could have been misread as "gluten intolerance". You gotta wonder whether these "allergies" are the real thing or just chemical sensitivity.

Plus there is always moderation to consider. Just about anything is harmful in excess.

> Barring allergies, most humans are fully capable of assimilating anything they throw at their GI system

No they aren't. This can be readily apparent as inappropriate things leave your GI tract. A lot of this boils down to individual variation. We aren't machine stamped machines, but modern political correctness has us thinking we are. The idea of "being equal under the law" has been perverted into "being exactly the same".

We aren't all the same. Some of us do better with some things than others. Some cultural traditions actually acknowledge this.

A little science and some self awareness goes a long way. Both of these are actively discouraged by American consumer culture.

I don't find upstart easier. I don't find it easier at all. If systemd is anything like that, then it's not making things easier either. If anything, it sounds like it's making things more complex and harder to debug and easier to screw up.

That's the value of "old and primitive". It's easy to keep the whole thing in your head rather than it being a big mess you can't get your head around.

> Only in the open source community would people that think it is perfectly fine having to compile drivers every time a kernel gets a .1 update

Must be a FreeBSD thing since this is a solved problem in Linux.

You need to update your FUD playbook. It's out of date.

> GNU/Linux is still pretty irrelevant outside of cheap server

Linux is the flagship platform for a leading enterprise software vendor that sells their product for 60K per CPU.

One single server installation of their product can cost more then your domicile. This is true regardless of where you live or what kind of structure you live in.

Linux isn't just "relegated to cheap servers".

> Who cares if you have to relearn stuff?

Anyone that uses something besides Linux. One great thing about Unixen is how they share common interfaces. The more you change that, the less interchangeable the various Unixen become. The more reason their will be to resist moving from one to another.

This is something that has benefited Linux greatly in the past: the fact that a Solaris user could feel fairly comfortable with picking up Linux and just dive in.

The anti-dinosaur sentiment should not be an excuse to blindly and gratuitously change things just because of "new shiny shiny".

All of your substantive complaints seem to be a direct result of ignoring the principle "don't fix what isn't broken".

> Fundamental changes in the structure of most Linux distributions should not be met with such fervent opposition.

Sure it should. At the very least, such sweeping changes should be met with some skepticism based purely on mundane ideas about change control. Why are changes with such a massive impact being considered? What is being done to mitigate risks? How is this going to impact how Linux fits in with other Unixen?

What's broken exactly?

A beheading? Really? You think that's gruesome? There's probably footage from the evening news from the Vietnam era that's more disturbing. If you widen the scope to historical documentation in general, things get even far more disturbing.

The Nazis were proud of what they did. They were also highly organized and highly diligent. They documented their own atrocities.

Stuff they produced makes an execution look positively tame.

Suppressing or hiding from information in a free society is really not a productive or healthy thing. This includes things that will scar you for the rest of your life (and I am not talking about some mere execution video).