That isn't what I said. You can run systemd without running all of the other components. I use systemd for init but networkd or firewalld, for example. The reverse may or may not be possible for any particular component within the systemd "brand", and I don't see any problem with that. These programs are add-ons designed to work with systemd. If they happen to work without it as standalone daemons, that's a nice coincidence, but by no means essential. Anyone using sysvinit already had their own cobbled-together shell scripts for managing these things.

Anyway, why would I want to? Systemd works just fine for me as it is. I have no need nor desire to split up the package. Don't fix what isn't broken. (And yes, sysvinit was well and truly broken. Linux was one of the last Unix-based operating systems to cling to it; everyone else had already moved on.)

Having looked over the source for systemd-networkd, I see no particular reason why it couldn't be used outside of systemd provided dbus was up and running. I'll grant that systemd depends on systemd-journald, or at least something implementing the same interface. That's one of the few "hard" dependencies; most of the remaining services (like networkd, hostnamed, localed, and timedated) are optional. I assume you were exaggerating, but just to be clear: it is not necessary to run all of the programs which make up the systemd "brand". With the exception of a few core dependencies like journald, you are free to pick the components you wish to run.

I agree that the real problem is ultimately with human nature, but "not complicated" is not the same thing as "easy". Everybody being nice to each other and getting along is a very uncomplicated solution, sure, but getting people to do that is really, really hard, if not outright impossible.

Given the unfeasibility of getting everyone to just play nice with each other, the next best solution is for enough good-intentioned people to band together into some kind of social institution to keep the bad-intentioned people from doing bad things. That in turn requires that institution to decide just what it's going to consider "bad things". The bad-intentioned people are of course going to do everything they can to game whatever system the good-intentioned people come up with. Which begins an arms race where the bad-intentioned people try to figure out clever holes in the rules to exploit to do bad things without getting called out on it, and the good-intentioned people try to recognize those exploits and patch those holes. What I was doing here was calling attention to a hole in the stated rules that's being exploited, and suggesting a patch for it.

In the end it does still all hang on having enough good-intentioned people standing up to the bad-intentioned people to stop them from doing bad things, but it also hangs just as much on the good-intentioned people correctly identifying all and only the bad things the need to be stopping.

You're right, automation throws a wrench in the works of the self-correcting dynamics of my usury-free market system, by completely devaluing labor; and the only way to prevent that is to make sure that everybody ends up owning a piece of the automated means of production, preferably before complete automation occurs. I think basically every possible scenario will eventually end up with everyone who is still alive living for free off the labor of robots: the questions are, firstly, who of those alive when full automation is finally achieved will live through the transition to enjoy it; and secondly, who among them will own the automatons and thus control the world when it's all through. I can see four general possible scenarios:

A) The owning class secures their power with things like robotic security and such to the point that they no longer need the working class at all, all the workers get laid off, starve and go homeless, try futilely to riot but can't overthrow the owning class's secure position, and eventually die off entirely. The remaining owning class and their descendants live in a blissful labor-free utopia for all of time afterward, and the death of the working class is remembered as a tragedy of history that none of the survivors are personally responsible for.

B) The owning class secures their position of power, the working class becomes entirely unnecessary, but out of some little shred of humanity (or possible uncertainty in the security of their position), the owning class keep the working class around, but now wielding absolute power over them as the owners have absolutely no need for the non-owners and the non-owners are absolutely dependent on the owners for their "charity".

C) The revolution comes before the owning class can totally secure their position and the working class are able to overthrow the owning class, either violently or somehow through nonviolent political means. Some traditional form of state socialism is enacted to redistribute wealth, and everyone now lives on the welfare of the state and its robot armies, which in turn (its leadership that is) wields absolute power over the people as it has no need for them per se and they are entirely dependent upon it.

D) The revolution comes soon enough to succeed by whatever means it does, and a more distributivist, libertarian-socialist solution is enacted: divisions between owners and non-owners are dissolved, everyone personally and privately owning some of the automatons, without eradicating all personal liberty in the process.

I think B and C are probably the more likely options, but A is still a frightening possibility, and it depresses me that nobody even seems to consider the possibility of genuine solutions in category D. The best-case plausible scenario is likely to be B or C eventually transitioning into D.

For a B-to-D transition, once automation is so complete that it literally costs the owners nothing (but control) to give it away, even a small trickle of genuine social charity could distribute ownership of automatons to the dependent (no longer working) classes over time, finally giving them independence. Successive generations raised in such a post-scarcity society might see less and less reason not to give their poor automaton-less friends some automatons of their own, and those given automatons could in turn use them to rescue others in the same boat at themselves, accelerating the process.

For a C-to-D transition, the electorate could simply vote to devolve ownership of the automatons from the central control of the government to the people individually. I think pragmatically, aiming for a C outcome at first with an eye to eventually transitioning to D is probably the best strategy we can hope for: a straight D solution is too unlikely to gain traction until it's too late, and a C outcome is the easiest to transition to the ideal D solution afterward. It concerns me how similar to the "dictatorship of the proletariate" that strategy is though: for the interim we have a people's government in absolute control of everything, to keep it out of control of a malevolent few, with the intention that it will devolve that control to the many individually afterwards... but what if it doesn't?

In any case, on a very long scale I think the outlook for people born in the distant future looks good. The big concern is how much it will hurt some of us alive today (and our children, etc) on the way there.

That assumption is the problem. Congress can pass whatever it wants, and if the Supreme Court doesn't deign to overturn it, it's presumed constitutional—anyone who disagrees is referred back to the Court. That attitude effectively makes the Court the final arbiter of constitutionality, when it is in fact the responsibility of every individual involved to judge the constitutionality of the law and refuse to enforce those which Congress had no authority to pass.

That may not technically be called "judicial review", but it's what the OP was complaining about—not the practice of overturning unconstitutional laws, but that of upholding ones of dubious constitutionality which the Supreme Court, for whatever reason, has not chosen to strike down.

Exactly. It's not a single application, it's a brand. Separate applications developed in a common repository and intended to work well together. One might as well complain about all the basic utilities under the GNU project umbrella. Or consider the various BSDs, where the entire userspace (including the init system) is developed in the same repository as the kernel.

I think the default animation time in windows 7 menus is 200ms. Or at least that's what ClassicShell claims it to be in advanced mode that lets you adjust the timing.

If they actually push animation time as far as you suggest, I think that would just become another reason why people will stick to 7. OS needs to be functional first and foremost. That's why 8 failed, vastly impaired desktop desktop functionality. Too pronounced/delayed animations would likely fall in the same category.

Excellent. I think we should also throw the same book at all those women in possession of smutty image-featuring faux-rape novels. While at it, we should also prosecute every single store selling them.

Because you know, just because it's faux rape and just because so many women find it enjoyable, it's still clearly a way to satiate those urges to rape. Which is clearly something society finds unacceptable. So jail them all, the filthy criminals.

In real world on the other hand, definition of crime is usually something that has a victim. Of course, in puritan Anglo states, and especially that with for profit prison system of US, that doesn't apply. In there, crime is something that is used against weak people to extract profits from large tax pool. We've seen it with ridiculous child rape cases of two teens going to jail for "raping each other", and we're seeing it with people using drawings to satisfy sexual urges.

Frankly, I find the very notion of labelling this kind of activity a crime to be far more obscene than actual pornography, real or drawn.

UK deserves an honourable mention in this particular insanity, mostly because of its hysterical for-profit printed media that has been trumping up the pedo-scare all while the child rape numbers have been in free fall. https://www.youtube.com/watch?...

It's perfectly reasonable for the Supreme Court to have the power to review laws and strike them down as unconstitutional. The problem enters when they presume to declare a law constitutional, or when failure to strike down a law is taken as affirmation of the same. An unconstitutional law is void whether or not the Supreme Court rules against it. It is not within Congress's authority to pass such a law, nor does the Executive have the authority to enforce it.

Only if your end goal is to ignore the entire argument and just ram in your strawman so you can defeat it.

The entire fact that you openly claim that erecting a strawman argument is a "reasonable assumption" shows very clearly just how much of a troll you really are.

DX12 is highly unlikely to become popular any time soon because of the whole 7 uber alles situation. At best, it'll be where DX10 was.

DX11 while popular is not mandatory for most games that come out. A lot of games still have separate DX9 and DX11 rendering paths. As a result, while you'll have to give up some bells and whistles you will be able to run the game just fine as long as you have DX9 rendering path available.

There are some games that require DX11. Those are usually latest and greatest that require decent hardware as well. But these are far from the most played games out there. Making a quick list of the few games I played during last month, several have both rendering paths (and in one, I actually use DX9 instead of DX11 because DX11 path is much more buggy), several don't have DX11 path at all, and one doesn't have DX9 at all.

No, I'd say that's closer to what I was describing. The UI is a separate component which is hosted on the server but runs entirely in the browser, on the client side. The UI makes remote API calls at the UI/backend interface level back to retrieve data or perform actions. With the more modern web applications, interaction with UI elements results in running local Javascript code in the browser rather than communicating low-level UI events like button pushes back to the server.

I think the reason you don't see such systems very often is that in the end it's simpler to just run a normal local application for the UI and have it connect back to a separate server app for the heavy lifting, rather than making it all one app which runs on the remote server and exports the UI through some generic mechanism. As a bonus, with the split UI/backend approach you can probably reuse the same APIs for an AJAX web app and a CLI interface suitable for automation.

If you put in the effort up front to separate the UI and backend logic into separate processes, which is generally worthwhile for other reasons, there's really not much incentive to run the UI process remotely. Network transparency works better at the UI/backend level than at the display/UI level.

Mind you, I'm not suggesting a direction of causality here. It could be that the nobly-intended increased state power came first and then attracted the big market players to seize it, or just as plausibly that the big market players seized control of government first and then gave it that power so they could use it to their advantage.

It can be, and plausibly is, both.

The state has more legal power to intervene in the market than before.

The bigger players in the market then have seized the reigns of that power to their own advantage.