Doesn't matter. The point is they have no skin in the game wrt federal taxation, and given that the federal government has gradually crept up to about 25% of American economic activity and is 1.5 years worth of GDP in the hole, the fact that nearly half the people have nearly half the vote but zero financial obligations is unhealthy and potentially dangerous not just to the other half.

that the new TLDs were a stupid idea and the only reason they were implemented is that the beancounters are in charge instead of the car guys.

Check your privelege my friend. I know the poor don't pay taxes. As Romney famously said, the bottom 47% of the economic ladder pay no net taxes, which is to say what they get deducted from their paychecks (if any) they get back in welfare and subsidies.

No, but I do think all tax rates (personal, corporate, and capital gains) should be flat and equal.

Peo[le have freedom of association and freedom of speech. The 1st amendment actually lumps them together as peaceable assembly. Corporations are a peaceable assembly of board members and/or shareholders. Therefore they have speech and property rights like people, and tax burdens like people.

No dude. They don't want to end up in court for running a high speed line for a paying customer who wants equipment on both ends connected to the public internet but only their traffic allowed on the pipe.

Parallel line internet protocol. Get ahold of a floppy drive for your main PC and put a micro linux distro on it, including the module for the plip protocol. Then boot off the floppy. It'll take like 3 or 4 disks to hold the full kernel, but once you're there, you can rsync your drive to something else with a parallel port or a parallel port dongle.

And the difference between having that happen with a robot and a human caregiver is...

The problem isn't one of ethics. The problem is one of people with no understanding about how robots work, are designed, and are programmed to act pontificating from their armchairs.

I went to an accredited school but I work in a R&D lab so I never had cause to get a license, I still develop requirements and design and build stuff to them. I don't build bridges, overpasses, or power plants, but I'd still call myself an engineer.

Some of us draw the line at typing in our circuits by hand into command-line Spice. Layout and such will be done on a nice GUI on whatever platform it runs on.

Local power lines routed through trees. High tension lines on rotting wooden towers. Welcome to the People's Republic of Massachusetts, where the buses are always on time, the subways never stop running, and town-owned sections of the sidewalk are always the first to be shovelled.

And these people have no business setting up servers and clusters and embedded systems and all the other sorts of techie things that initd did and does just fine as is, but with more than zero brain power required. Is it tricky to get going on the $200 PC you bought for Grandma from some Taiwanese sweat shop? Yes. Yes it is. But that's not what Linux is for. It's for real work environments where 1) people are on staff whose job is to take the day or two to work through that setup process and 2) it is very rare that you have more than 1 or 2 machine types around so you can use the same image on multiple systems.

Meh. Those who know don't talk and those who talk don't know. Sometimes it's coordinated evil, sometimes it's just a single idiot who manages to gain influence by a combination of dumb luck and people being to disgusted to argue.

This post is the prime example of the way people on opposite sides of the debate are talking past each other. Given Linux's historical roots as a hobbyist OS, with almost all of the mid-late 90's spent as an academic OS that gradually worked its way into the enterprise environment by displaying commercial Unix distributions, a very large part of the folks who use Linux use it because it is "harder" to work with which is to say "easier" to tailor to their particular applications away from the desktop.

I use it on my desktop because I like it, but I learned to like it because I used it in scientific applications where I needed something I could customize and go deep on without being forced to follow Microsoft's or Apple's design decisions or having to fork over tens of thousands of dollars for VxWorks or QNX or HPUX or whatever and some more for ports of software that just happen to already exist in the GNU/Linux/FOSS ecosystem.

Did it take me a good couple of hours of googling to figure out how something worked? Sure. Lots of times. I'm pretty sure it would have taken me days to get the same result with Windows or Mac, if it was at all possible, becaues those were commercial OS's geared toward nontechnical consumers, with all the ambiguity and flexibility taken out. The most famous example is Steve Jobs deciding that the average luser was too stupid for more than one button on their mouse. But that's cosmetic. There are deep technical places where that sort of limitation does matter.

So why the bitching about systemd? Well, that core of people, few of whom really cared about widespread desktop adoption to begin with because their attention was spent on backend or niche scientific and technical applications, are seeing the push for Linux On The Desktop take the predictable direction of removing flexibilty from the system and, here's the important bit, forcing other software in the echosystem to remove flexibility to conform to The SystemD Way. Speaking for myself as a decade-long user of Linux, this came out of left field and looks like trying to solve a problem that never really existed for the Linux userbase by removing the very characteristics of the system that attracted folks like myself to use it for scientific and technical applications where Windows and Mac don't cut it and Big Blue and its equivalents are too damned expensive to be worth it.

So here's how we're talking past each other: you're trying to solve a problem I don't think needs solving, and you don't understand why people who use Linux now use it at all.

I know that, and you know that. But you use the magic words and there's a type of person that thinks the boat can change mission profiles at the push of a button transformer-style.