With the protests going on every other day here in Oakland, CA and the authorities apparent need to keep an eye on them with three helicopters in the air, hovering in place, I've been thinking a lot lately about how much fuel they'd save if they got a clue about lighter-than air vehicles.

Fads in IT? Unheard of.

The idea that the risks of nuclear power are anywhere near the scale of the problem with global warming is completely deranged-- the fact that someone who can string coherent sentences together is willing to embrace blithering idiocy on that scale is a sad comment on the state of our intellectual discourse.

The bit I like:

Q: "Why did they use segmented SRBs?"
A: Because Morton-Thiokol is in Utah, without a sea-port, and the pieces had to fit on trains or trucks.

Q: So why didn't they go with a company that did have ocean access, like Aerojet in Sacramento? A: James Feltcher was from Utah.

The way this argument goes is that the shuttle would've been able to take lighter payloads to a higher orbit, but the USAF design contraints screwed that up. So we got a shuttle-to-LEO when all the action (the satellites it was supposed to service) were up in GEO.

Now now, no point in arguing with a slashbot response. "Oh who cares about this, I thought of this in high school."

Actually, I think it's a problem that the anti-systemd forces keep going on about "the unix way" and what-not... haven't they been paying attention to the way things really work? (Hint: if esr says it, it's probably not quite right. [1])

Perl kicked Bourne butt by merging nearly everything you want into one process-- that's something you'd think a sysadmin would've noticed.

It is however a point that betting your system security on a new, gigantic project is kind of dubious, and I have a lot of sympathy with people objecting to gratuitious changes that obsolete decades worth of learning on how to manage a unix box.

[1] The actual "Unix Way" is "do one thing sort-of-okay and trick it out with options, configuration files and customization languages until you can't tell if it's going to fry eggs or go to the bathroom".

No, it'll all be rolled into libgnome. One library to rule them all.

There's no way I'm going to compromise with those no-nuclear people. They say they care about climate change, but are willing to risk the planet as long as they don't have to admit they were wrong.

if you can't use it to drop bombs, what good is it?

Clearly if the OP really wanted to talk about systemd, he should've asked people to talk about pulseaudio.

This certainly explains web designer syndrome, doesn't it?

Yup. Famous blowhard makes noise about something else for for awhile. Time to worry, but maybe not about GMOs.

"Sys-V is an utter shambles"
Yeah, I wouldn't say I'm up on the SystemD controversy, but I would've thought that was the whole point. The old-style of system startup fires off so many processes, I've often thought you might be able to speed up a laptop boot quite a bit if you just wrote one perl script that did all of that stuff. It could even use the existing rc.d mess as an input format, read it all in once, and stash the info in a sane, single-file format...

That happens to me all the time, too. I haven't yet sat down to track it down. If I cut and paste some text from slashdot into a firefox textarea (also on slashdot), it gets converted to Latin-1 somewhere along the way. I sincerely hope this is not a slashdot bug in this day and age. I would guess it has to do with my linux configuration... I run icewm on a stale version of ubuntu at the moment, maybe something more gnomeish would deal.