Essentially we've twisted society up in knots until increasing numbers of people can't tolerate it and then rather than fixing the thing, we prescribe drugs to make it sort of tolerable.

Offtopic, really?!?

That's more or less my feeling on it. Perhaps an early fork will afford the opportunity to assert a proper design on the thing and salvage a win. Some of the individual features of systemd are good in themselves and I believe most of the cons can be fixed with a proper design.

You have been served! :-)

Perhaps you could try dancing back?

That's what they did when IE6 won the browser war!

Even MS can't say exactly what that spec is. Sure, there's an alleged standard but Word never actually followed it and in spite of over 1000 pages of documentation, it's incomplete.

I keep seeing things with several regular screws and one a funky type (security torx and such), If they want to make it tamper evident, put a dot of acrylic on the screw,

Then there's clips that will snap together to make a tight fit exactly once. And of course the stupid plastic rivets.

I have no idea what devices you are seeing.

So you're claiming it is somehow cheaper to produce 10,000 desk fans with 3 phillips head screws and one security head crew epoyed in than it is to produce the same run of fans with 4 phillips screws?

You claim the parts are interchangable on the assembly line but somehow not on the repair bench?

Or are you claiming somehow that it's cheaper to have employees assemble random piles of parts in bespoke fashion than it is to have them putting the same parts in the same place every time?

On the other hand, there are plenty of LCD monitors thrown away even though a $25 CFL and 10 minutes could have it up and running if you could get the right CFL.

And don't forget that the time to go get a new whatever isn't free either. Some problems can be fixed in less time than it takes to buy a new one if it's reasonably made to be repaired.

The problem is devices that WOULD be significantly cheaper to repair if parts were more easily (and reasonably) available and if the things weren't designed to be harder to repair.

Often the repair hostile design isn't in any way cheaper to manufacture.

Blocky, pixellated sex, I imagine.

Kind of like the GIFs we downloaded from BBSes in the 1990s.

My safe word is "ZMODEM".

The trick is to grasp that at high RPMs, it's not pressure that drives the work. A light touch will make more progress.