The Earth's radius was pretty well known, yet still Columbus worked with a few very wrong assumptions. His expectations of the distance to China (on the "known" route to the East) were vastly overblown (mostly because a good deal of that distance estimate came from Marco Polos expedition there some three hundred years earlier), while at the same time his estimate of the size of the Earth were a bit too small. Search for Behaim Globe (Behaim was a German cartographer who made globes before America was discovered) to see what his expectations of Earth would have looked like.

From this point of view, his idea wasn't as idiotic as it may initially appear. Actually, he expected to hit China or at least Japan approximately where the US midwest would be.

Damn those treehuggers for wanting breathable air! It's so Un-American!

Is it sad that I've actually written VAX assembly before? Ah, college.

I use XFCE as well.

XFCE 4.10 came out in April/2012. I'm honestly worried maybe things have stalled. I use Funtoo(/Gentoo) Linux, so I see from time to time things get updated in the various applications that make up XFCE, but I'm still worried about its future.

That's very honest of you. Don't know what you've been doing in Unix, but not knowing how to issue a SIGHUP signal (or why) after working with Unix for 20 years is not particularly a recommendation.

Probably best not to mention that on any future interviews.

I'm in the same boat. Is linux so unreliable and prone to disaster that "kill -1" used on a regular basis?

Why do we need this? I've been in unix for over 20 years and never even heard of kill -1.

I would say the same thing, but there are several countries that can effectively impose their will anywhere within the Moon's orbit and a handful that could manage anything within the solar system. That said, having navigational control of a big rock on the edge of a gravity well may prove to be a hefty bargaining chip.

I've used your analogy before. And USA law is that the USA corporation is legal obliged to instruct and take measures to get the data from the UK subsidiary. Nothing is changing here this has always been the case.

No, the evidence is not the property of a US company. The evidence is the property of a US citizen and is being held by a foreign subsidiary of a US company and is, therefore, exactly like the hotel example.

The world really would be simpler if we stopped trying to define how information on computer is the same as information on paper in some circumstances and different in others and just say that correspondence is correspondence, personal effects are personal effects, etc.

So you're "fixing" a bad application by changing the OS?

Sounds like those issues are implementation based.

Ok - well your talking about desktop stuff here, which is an interesting perspective that I didn't really consider, however I still think that is doable in inittab with much less effort. rc is only a runlevel solution, whereas inittab would be more relevant to desktop. I don't need to keep track of the process and it's children because init can maintain the parents state for me - if the parent isn't signalling it's children then we are back to implementation issues again.

jeeez. I'm just trying to figure it out. I'm not being a jerk about it, I'm trying to gauge other peoples experiences. I don't give a fuck about init if systemd is better - it's just another technology. But if it is better than shouldn't it be immediately apparent *WHY* it is better?

It could be argued that such things are simply not the responsibility of the init system. I think that is where much of the complaints about systemd come from, the perception that it is taking the roles of other things and folding them into itself. Given how it has been expanding to include more and more services and has increased coupling, they kinda have a point. Many see systemd as solving problems that are philosophical in the first place as opposed to practical.

What daemon manager solves those problems? And what is the point of having an init that basically does nothing but spawn a daemon manager and a few gettys? Why not just move that code into the kernel (oh wait, it is already there - it launches init)?

If your daemon manager really did do all the stuff you want it to do, and it dies, then the effects would be about the same as init crashing anyway.