We will not solve the problem with illegal immigration until we figure out how to do something sane instead of the War on Drugs. Right now the unintended consequence of the War on Drugs is that south of the border, drug lords are about as well (if not better?) funded as the governments, destroying the local economies. Some of the people seeking jobs in those economies end up coming to the US in search of work.

Seconded. When the power and everything else is out, I call to report it on my land line.

Maybe there's another reason that our infrastructure is crumbling...

(Line up the conspiracy theories.)

Now we need the quasi-obligatory response that this is really a government problem, and if government weren't in there mucking about with needless regulation the free market would address the problem and we'd all be in broadband utopia at reasonable prices.

Nothing shy of a nearby gamma burst or the eventual day when the sun goes red-giant is likely to end all life on Earth.

But there are a lot of things shy of that that can make life really uncomfortable for us, perhaps terminally so. It's happened 5 times before, to longer-lived species than us.

Don't forget that your insurance company would really like to get their spy dongle onto your ODB II port, too. So this HUD is really the third usage for the ODB II port, the first of course being the diagnostics that it was designed for. How soon before we have ODB-splitters?

I'm sure your insurance company would like their spy dongle to be the only thing plugged into your ODB II port while driving, especially if the only other available driving-time plugin was a HUD/distraction. But what if other more sensible plugins became available, even safety improving ones, say a breathalyzer lockout...

As long as the guesture input subsystem isn't connected to the in-car weapons subsystem.

I certainly believe that there are new things under the sun. I just don't believe that there are as many of them as our trendsetting media would like us to think. Come to think of it, I'll bet that the truly new things under the sun are seldom well covered. I guess Sturgeon's Law applies.

Or the paraphrase, "History repeats itself because nobody listened the first time." (In practice, the singular "first time" is insufficient.)

We had that "pull-down mirror" in our 2008 bottom-of-the-line Sienna. I called it the "bratfinder", at the time.

There's the snarky answer, and what I suspect is the real answer.

First, systemd and everything associated with is just so kewl and shiny that's it's a privilege to even use any of it, which makes it all the more amazing that they're actually welcoming us to do so, instead of making us fight for a place in line.

Second, X11 goes way back before anyone was really concerned with security. I suspect from a core competence point of view, the X11 coders are far more comfortable and far more engaged with the graphical display code than the input side. I get the impression that a lot of effort was spent in properly cleaning and separating the root-requiring functionality. I know I've read of KMS and DRI work for years now. It's been a long road, and I believe it may have only been in the past year that the display side has gotten to the point where they could think about going rootless.

I also suspect that the input device part is not their core competence - they'd like events coming in from "elsewhere" and get back to their graphics work. So along comes systemd, saying, "We'll handle the gnarly details of console access and security for you," and X said OK, if only in the spirit of modularity and going back to their graphics work. (Graphics work includes processing the inputs, not just drawing outputs - I think they'd just like the inputs to be clean and handed to them.)

I've also found that sadly enough, there are plenty of people around a big company who are really good at appearing essential, while really doing nothing themselves and in fact are very good at creating work for others. Unfortunately they also tend to get retained through job cuts, because they appear so essential.

Though I work in a big company we generally manged to have a small, well-focused team. That makes it a good place to work, as long as you can keep your head down, have fun, and not see the chaos and decay around you.