the borg only "exist" so that the star trek universe could remain happily socialist whilst still giving american viewers an evil communist menace to fear.

(also, the zombie obsession is ultimately a reflection of american paranoia about fifth-column infiltration by communists....any contact - or a bite, in the case of the zombie commies - with them and their insidious ways will doom you to become one of the enslaved communist hordes)

That's a lot of projects created to replace something that didn't need fixing. Seems to me there must have been a lot of affected people, not "a vanishingly small number" to make all those projects happen.

and NONE of them (with the possible exception of upstart because it was the default on ubuntu) gained a "market-share" of more than a few percent *UNTIL* systemd forced itself on people by becoming a hard dependency for consolekit/logind, gnome, and soon udev.

that indicates to me that whatever problems sysvinit might have, they're not annoying enough for most people to care about....and certainly not annoying enough to do anything about.

Sysvinit requires a f'ing shell to operate.

no, it doesn't. there's nothing in sysvinit that requires init.d scripts to be shell scripts - they can be perl or python or anything else. they don't even have to be scripts, they can be compiled binaries.

the fact is that people write shell scripts - for sysvinit and for other tasks - because it's an easy and convenient language to write in.

ps. sysvinit isn't the only alternative to systemd. there are others, like openrc, that offer the fairly trivial init & cgroups features of systemd without the huge disadvantages of monolithic borging of networking, logging, ntp, udev, login etc.

the two most important things you're forgetting are a) that 99% of that functionality is in the kernel, not systemd and b) it's possible to have an init system that assists configuration and use of those kernel features without borging dozens of other unrelated functions (like logging, ntp, networking, firewall, udev, consolekit, and many more)...openrc manages to do that, for example.

if systemd restricted itself to just init+cgroups, it wouldn't be hated anywhere near as much as it is - because there would be nothing to really hate.

where the fuck do these idiot boosters get their moronic examples of how wonderful IoT would be? nobody would want their fridge to turn off if the electricity price went up.

my fridge needs to keep things cold even if the price of electricity goes up for a few hours.....ruining hundreds of dollars worth of food to save 10 cents on electricty is not a good idea. food poisoning's no fun, either.

it doesn't have to be conscious and deliberate to be propaganda. simcity definitely pushes specific beliefs about how cities work and people behave. to play the game, you have to internalise those beliefs, at least for as long as you're playing.

patenting particular methods or specific inventions is such an old-fashioned and obsolote view of patents.

no, these cunts don't patent a particular method for doing anything - they claim ownership of the entire fucking idea so that nobody can come up with any alternative non-infringing method.

the thing that most players don't realise about games like simcity (and other "simulation" games including civilisation and clones, the sims, and many others) is that they're not just simulations, they're also propaganda tools with a particular model of how reality is, or should, be.

for the most part, these games push the theology of "meritocratic" free market laissez-faire capitalism - with the deserving rich being those who worked hard and the undeserving poor being worthless lazy slobs. this simulates american moralising and judgemental opinions fairly well, but not the real world.

Origin may be basically a steam-wannabe, but it's without realising that the reason steam doesn't piss people off very much is that they're not arseholes about what they do - the DRM is minimal and mostly unobtrusive, and they ASK people if they want to participate in their surveys rather than just abuse the fact that their software is installed and simply steal the information.

i can say that because i have real world experience rather than just libertarian fantasy dreaming - i've lived my entire life in a country that provides socialised health care, and it works exactly as i said: they provide the health care to everyone with NO attempt to weasel out of obligations. anyone here can go to a doctor or to hospital without having to worry about whether they can afford it or not.

people get the treatment they need without any lifestyle or morality or financial checks.

furthermore, medications are both price-regulated and subsidised so that nobody pays more than about $37 for a month's supply of any drug (or about $6 if they're a pensioner or on the dole).

i know all this for a fact because a) i live here and have benefited from it, and b) i'd be dead several times over (and my family would also be hundreds of thousands in debt) if i lived in some healthcare hellhole like the US rather than a civilised country like Australia. or the UK. or Cuba.

so your god is a sadistic arsehole too? it would punish me for not believing when it refuses to provide any more evidence of its existence than shiva or zeus or thor or the invisible pink unicorn?

a god like that isn't a good god, it's evil - or, in your terms, it's the devil.

it's funny how libertarian nutters believe in the exact opposite of what happens in reality.

in the real world, governments - i.e. providers of socialised health care/health insurance - don't give a fuck about what you do or eat, they provide the health care you are entitled to (i.e. whatever you need without regard for your finances) no matter what you do.

private health insurers, on the other hand, leap at any excuse to get out of their obligations - if there's anything, no matter how tiny or how irrelevant they can use to blame the patient for their misfortune, then they'll use it.

it's not true that science *can't* prove that a god or gods exist - it's more that a god which can't be proven to exist is a god that does absolutely nothing (if it did anything then that would leave some evidence which could be used to prove its existence) - and is therefore a god that may as well not exist, and is exactly the same as a god that doesn't exist.

a faith-only god is irrelevant - pointless.

anyone who believes in a creator god that made us into rational beings and then demands that we ignore our rationality and use only faith to believe in him/her/it (because it refuses to provide evidence of itself) is a fuckwit of the first order.

nobody needs to disprove Middle Earth or Beowulf because nobody believes that they're literally true. more importantly, nobody uses them as justification for murder, rape, torture and slavery - or for the violent suppresion of rational inquiry.

do you want a permanent underclass of people who have no *legal* way of making a living? when the only options people have are violent crime or starving to death, then they're not going to just give up and die for the convenience of a society that offers them nothing. only an idiot or an american - but i repeat myself - would think that is a good thing.

OTOH if they are given a chance to become part of normal society then all but a handful of the seriously fucked up and psychopaths (most of whom will shortly be back in jail) will settle down into relatively peaceful, normal lives.

the fact that the law permits such discrimination is the problem - as i said, except for some very obvious exceptions that ought to be as illegal as discrimination based on colour of skin or sexual orientation.

btw, you can shove your obvious over-compensation for your inferiority complex up your arse - the notion of american superiority is laughable. you've got more guns and more violent crime than anywhere else but you're trailing the world in pretty much everything else. i wouldn't even want to visit your fucked up fascist police state of a country, let alone live in it.