And if you do leave the house, cover yourself up to protect you from all the raping animals out there.

Seriously, why don't you fuck off to Tehran or Riyad? You'd be perfectly at home there.

Now, if you were honest, you'd apply the same standard to SysV init. If that doesn't start syslog, guess what, you'll have no logs either.

The Unix way of things? That has always been the pragmatic way: adopt what works for most cases, worry about the details later. It gave rise to an entire movement of people who hated it for that, see the Unix Haters Handbook for examples. Unix is not a static monolithic system, complaining about systemd as 'against Unix philosophy' is merely the UHH in another form: pining for systems that history and technological development have surpassed.

The reaseon Venezia perceives the discussion to be heated is rather simple if you see the earlier article linked in this story. If your opposition to systemd comes down to a hate-fuelled rant against the developers, you shouldn't be surprised if you get heated reactions.

TL;DR: Venezia is a troll

1) The developers are often uncooperative assholes

How cooperative would you be if you get called asshole?

I have no idea what the point of comparing those two particular statistics is.

Maybe the point is to point out how stupid it is to concentrate advertising and journalism on a very vocal minority?

Of course, there's a possibility that it's the other way around: faced with more women playing games, 'gamers' shift the goalposts so that their self-defined boys club remains free of cooties.

Here's your 'strawman'.

Since I am not even asserting what you are saying I am in your second sentence ("Europeans brag..."), I am not even going to dignify this with a rebuttal. You can fuck your strawman for all I care.

Hahaha, you make it sound as if "being licensed" has some implication of advanced skill.

In Germany? You bet it does.

I wish people would stop projecting American incompetence at running government services on the rest of the world.

Oh yes, the Jezebel editors should just grow a thicker skin and take all the abuse they get, but God forbid they post a tongue-in-cheek reaction to a newspiece that might be construed as hurtful by the little boys, then it is suddenly 'criminal domestic abuse'.

Grow the fuck up.

The problem with Slashdot is that the moderation system actually works. You mention AGW, but I've found that while there is a strong denier community here, on AGW articles they mostly end up at +5 in equal proportions to the people posting scientifically more accurate responses.[1]

Why is this a problem then? Well, it takes several hours and rounds of moderation to bring a comment section to that state. By that time, although the discussion has become readable and interesting, it hardly pays to add your viewpoint, as most people will now be paying attention to newer threads.

[1] Note to the peanut gallery: read very carefully. Nowhere in that statement do I equate 'scientifically more accurate' with being pro- or anti-AGW.

Of course he's not kidding. There's plenty of men around who seem to think that anything beyond "Yes master, I will blow you right now" is militant feminism.

Well, obviously the cutters get traction because no-one on the government side is willing to call them on their stupid arguments; that they have right wing media moguls backing them doesn't help either.

And to get this in before one of the many idiots that plague this site tries to put words in my mouth: if after rationalising the spending it turns out that we can deliver equal or better quality services on a lower budget, by all means return the excess budget as a tax cut.

You want to know why the tax cutters are so strident? It is because they are so badly outnumbered by the tax squanderers.

Which is a stupid argument. If tax money is being spent unwisely, the solution is obviously not to cut taxes, the solution is to fix the spending.

Anyone who seriously tries to make this argument is obviously not interested in fixing the squandering issue at all, but merely wanting to cut his tax liability. Why can't they be honest about it?

No, I didn't 'read an opinion on pros and cons of large-scale snooping' as an anti-government rant. I read an anti-government rant, which had nothing to do with the topic at hand, namely Microsoft snooping on your mail.

My exact opinions don't matter, and I don't have to provide a complete essay to tell you that you were off-topic.