Chinese law is arbitrary and selectively enforced, often with no penalty for certain things. For example, smoking in certain areas is illegal, but there is no punishment for doing so, so people just smoke wherever they like.

They nixed breeder reactors because they would put weapons grade plutonium into civilian hands - creating proliferation concerns.

Fission of the nuclear fuel in any reactor produces neutron-absorbing fission products. Because of this unavoidable physical process, it is necessary to reprocess the fertile material from a breeder reactor to remove those neutron poisons. This step is required if one is to fully utilize the ability to breed as much or more fuel than is consumed. All reprocessing can present a proliferation concern, since it extracts weapons usable material from spent fuel.[21] The most common reprocessing technique, PUREX, presents a particular concern, since it was expressly designed to separate pure plutonium. Early proposals for the breeder reactor fuel cycle posed an even greater proliferation concern because they would use PUREX to separate plutonium in a highly attractive isotopic form for use in nuclear weapons.[22][23]

Depends on who you're killing with those bombs. Civilian deaths I have a problem with, but I have serious doubts on the civilian death toll numbers provided by our enemies. If we've killed thousands of militants to prevent them from killing, raping, or enslaving hundreds of thousands more, then so be it.

Yeah, you'd think he was in charge of the State Department and the Defense Department, with a constitutional mandate to defend the country and exercise diplomacy or something...

Reagan's justice department broke up Ma Bell, concluding the lawsuit filed by Nixon's justice department.

Blame the following issues on Obama's amateur hour policies:

1. Isis - directly resulted from Obama's premature pullout in Iraq and subsequent flip-flop on intervening in Syria
2. Benghazi
3. Gridlock - if he hadn't rammed through his healthcare bill without compromising with Republicans, they'd be much better at doing the political horse-trading it takes to work across party lines to get things done. By pushing it without any buy-in from the other party - something that has never been done for a law on this scale before - he inaugurated a new era of do-nothing politics. The Republicans have held a grudge ever since. Hopefully when Harry Reid is out of the Senate majority post next week, we'll finally get some bills to the White House, where they're sure to be vetoed. He's been protecting Obama for years, preventing him from taking a formal stance on so many bipartisan initiatives by preventing bills from coming to the senate floor for a vote. O's going to pay a political price for each veto, I'm sure.
4. Mexican drug cartels invading Texas and Arizona
5. Russia's return to cold war stance, thousands dead in Ukraine
6. China's emergence as a belligerent military power in the pacific region
7. Botched diplomacy with China, Brazil, India, Russia, Europe, Egypt, Israel, Iran, Saudi Arabia, the list goes on and on...

Sounds like classic case of voter intimidation - but threatening voters *to* vote is new. Go vote for a third party or something.

That's the Koch Bros. if memory serves..

> American POS systems have no support for chip+pin

My new cards came with chips, and the POS systems that have been deployed to the stores I've visited in the last few months have readers. Chip+pin is coming to the US sooner than you anticipate.

Yeah, these minimum income guys are out of their minds.

so what?

I have been a consistent Linux user since the 1.x kernel back in the 90's. Before there was even X11 integration, before there was Red Hat even. I have never had a problem with changes to the ecosystem - Switching to Xorg? Fine. Ditching LILO for Grub? OK. But this... this systemd is terrible. It's replacing half the OS, it's fixing stuff that ain't broke, and honestly causing more frustration with trying to troubleshoot compatiblity, daemon startup, and whatnot...

I'm to the point in my career where I no longer need to care about this stuff. My server admin days have given way to more major infrastructure issues. The only things I use Linux for anymore is for my personal file server in my basement, and even that is running old Fedora 17. I've been messing around with SteamOS to play video games in Linux - a long held goal of mine - but I'm asking myself now, do I even care anymore?

I'm done with Linux. Screwing around too much with stuff that doesn't need to be messed with is giving me headaches and sucking up more of my time that I can better spend on other pursuits.

Goodbye, old friend. Maybe we'll meet again once this systemd bullshit passes.

But it is on the Google Play store.

It's right here.

*YAWN*

You're an oddball if you're doing that kind of work.

In most modern IT departments, nobody does custom programming anymore. Solutions are purchased from software vendors, and 90% of those vendors write software for Intel platforms. The long tail uses Sun, IBM, or HP platforms, but those are getting more and more rare as the cost advantages commodity hardware outweigh the performance advantage of proprietary hardware. HP is exiting the business, Sun crashed and burned into an Oracle only platform. The only one left in the space is IBM.