I once thought the same. But investigating with a "OMGF!!! THE SERVER IS DOWN!!!!" over my head just doesn't work well in practice - so I tend to end up restarting the service anyway, in which case the difference between a program doing it and me is just loss of availability (and worse working conditions for me).

Have you ever found any practical advantage of doing this manually?

Your logic is flawed. Random bit flips sometimes happen. They don't necessarily take down the whole machine.

The reality is that before systemd showed up, there wasn't really any project with an active upstream that tried to solve the plumbing problem (I'm not talking about init in isolation here). Each distro had to invent their own hacks, some of them good, some of them not.

The fact is that the community that is beginning to form around systemd is much more healthy than the scattered bits and not-quite-fitting pieces we had before. Maybe that's sad, I don't know. I think that in the end, the unification around systemd will allow competitors to form (just implement the interesting subset of the systemd interface and you can integrate with all distros!). So long term we'll end up with a much more vibrant plumbing for Linux.

Obviously you haven't learned your lesson yet. Hardware failures happen.

I like that in the future when the integration is more complete, I'll be able to install a database or a webserver and then once in a full moon when a cosmic ray hits the process and kills it, systemd will just restart it.

Yes, you can do that with other tools too once you've learnt your lesson (many years ago I had 1.5 year uptime with Apache and then it suddenly crashed) and I am using one of those at the moment. What I like is that this will just work out of the box for newbies and veterans alike with no clunky configuration/interfacing.

Will the pope declaring this really have an effect on people who are deeply entrenched in anti-scientific teachings? It seems more likely to me that these people will reject the pope. Or find a way to twist his words so as not to contradict them.

If you are full-time sysadmin having setup the perfect shop with sysvinit, you'll probably not see that many benefits. However, lots and lots of people don't have access to a resource like you. When systemd is properly integrated, these people will get a much better experience out of the box, e.g. daemon supervision, watchdog integration or better on-demand startup of services (for really cheap VPS stuff).

If you know your stuff, you'll have configured this by hand long ago - but most people don't know their stuff. systemd allows distributions a better default experience.

It's not really intended for tablets, AFAIK the primary target is the touch screens you can buy these days and which some laptops come equipped with. Without some help from the desktop environment and applets, the touch aspect of those screens is more or less completely useless. Maybe you don't care, but the people who buy those screens probably do.

Actually, this is not entirely true. If the security concerns over nuclear weren't so high, you wouldn't have to shutdown everything, and vice versa even without monoculture, you may have to shutdown the whole industry if flaws in inspection rules are found (witness Japan for a recent example).

I think it would be brave of you if you would acknowledge that you made a logical error in calling him a coward as was just pointed out to you, instead of hiding behind a curtain of words.

What? No evidence? Have you researched the recent whistleblower/leak cases? Did they get a fair treatment?

When people are saying he won't get a fair trial, they aren't necessarily talking about the courts as such.

It's like the Guantanamo prisoners. The court system only works if it's not circumvented.

I think the reason is that once it becomes widespread, all browsers will have to carry the support forever, not just distributing the code but also maintaining it (fixing security bugs etc.).

Judging from his words and actions, it's seems unlikely to me that he'll exit as long as there is still potential to change the world. Once electric cars are common (and they will be if the current trends in battery tech and oil prices continue) then I could see him exit to pursue other things. But we're a long way from that happening.

I think the summary has this backwards. Of course there is a market for a vehicle (let's not call it a car for the moment) that drives you around without your input, think of buses, trains, planes, taxis. If the price is right, it will definitely be a success - it doesn't really need to compete with cars to be useful, although it seems likely that many of those who think of their car as an expensive annoyance they have to have to get around would be interested.

But the thing is that this is still a prototype. The technologi is in fact not there yet - it may be in a couple of years, but we don't know yet.

IMHO the prototype makes sense as a statement and as a challenge. With no steering wheel, there's no 99% self-driving non-sense - they have to have a plan for all corner cases, even if that's something like car stops and is remote-controlled around obstacle.

Actually, as he points out in one of the answers, it isn't because in one case there's a practical reason (you can't have two people renting the same car), while in the other case if you had access to the source code, there would be no practical reason.

That's the crux of the argument - computers are general-purpose devices and (according to RMS) we should not accept restrictions to that. Period.