That's interesting. What I saw just there was technical arguments, summarised in a comprehensible, mostly non-technical fashion.

I'm not. Given your situation, I'd now have to know two init systems to manage all the machines which happen to be running the same operating system.

And these forkers didn't. As a result, the people who DO want systemd won't have their choices forced upon the people who DON'T want systemd.

I started as a desktop user who was learning network and system admin. Now I have my lap/desktops and a NAS and a server which I run myself rather than cloud-insanity (and someday I hope my job will involve me administering something other than Windows). But systemd has already impacted me negatively even on just the desktops.

Don't you mean "Schools of Game Design and Computer Security"?

... but not Yori, Quorra or even Vanellope?

Not to mention... isn't there a good chance they might be using much of the same infrastructure?

Hi. I'm not American. But my country has been in a formal alliance with America since about 1951, about 20 years before I was born.

I'm an IT guy. The closest I've ever been to any government-type work is when I spent most of 9 months working with the State (not Federal) Government office as a part of a Master's-by-Research degree at looking into whether Open Source software might possibly be feasible for such office use. The research was not completed, however. Now I just work back at the same university where I was doing the research study. At the moment, I'm working in the IT security team.

So: am I "foreign"?

Do I deserve to have my communications tracked?

If I send/receive encrypted e-mail to/from one of my colleagues who got me into the habit of sending such an e-mail, which basically consists of bitching about our (public, education-sector) boss, then do I really need to have that e-mail stored on an NSA server until they expend the resources necessary to crack my GPG? Do I really need to be considered guilty before there's been any kind of assessment as to exactly what I'm hiding from whom?

Or, to put it slightly more crudely - do you think the definition of "foreign" makes any damn difference to the great majority of the Internet (read: world) who are inappropriately impacted by all this NSA bull?

> I suggest that some people need to grow up, and realise that the West is the absolute paragon of virtue compared to what Russia, China and Muslim countries are doing.

> I shudder to think what will happen to the world when the baton of world domination is handed to these despots. I know the techno-libertarian crowd will be celebrating.

That Russia is, as you put it, "the Devil Incarnate" and America opposes Russia in certain areas does not make America "the absolute paragon of virtue compared" (and you might want to think what "absolute" and "compared" mean).

Instead, let's look at it this way: does the average Russian/American have any reason or want to harm the average American/Russian? No?

Maybe the Good/Evil split should be viewed along different lines: does the average American/Russian have their lives made any harder by the American/Russian government, to the benefit of that government? Really? Well, maybe the American/Russian people might be viewing the government the way you think one "country" views another.

Sure. But you don't risk arrest and losing the ability to feed your family by working for the government.

The AC's "infallible government leadership" comment got downvoted to zero. The "Crikey Dingo" comment got karmaed to 5. This is the kind of crap I usually return to Slashdot for after getting disappointed with the massmind idiots on Reddit.

... NSA... :-)

Hi. I'm from a country that isn't America and the great proportion of these ads are from companies that don't exist in my country.

You bet I do research instead of looking at the ads. You say it works. Global economics demonstrates that it doesn't.

Why, exactly, is the NSA planning to invade parts of America?

That debate appears to have already been concluded. The debate now seems mostly about how to push forward what is right, rather than let your elected government, the premiere power of your land, run roughshod all over people using the very same rules that are supposed to prevent them doing just that; how to make the laws/crimes match what's right/wrong.

Not likely.

The old Doctor Who had the occasional grim-and-gritty (the kind that made Question Time in Parliament complain about it). The new Who is full of "if you hope and feel hard enough, you can overcome alien technology, incomprehensible gods and the laws of physics". Even the last episode was proof enough of that.

I've met Gareth Thomas. I weep for Blake. The new Avon will probably look like Sheldon Cooper, Vila will be cool and Cally will probably be slutting up to everybody. Remember what Galactica's new producers said in an early interview - we're gonna modernise. That means sex with hot blonde robots.

Respectfully, nothing "just works".

Funnily enough, I do believe that's the point on which we were previously relying.

You seem to be bringing a lot of personal snark into this. Not to mention, this was never originally pointed at any of the users (as you're quite clearly saying with your "inferiority" comments).

This was about Microsoft's plan to circumscribe search results depending on the user's "mood" and "intelligence"; what this implies in a future when people are already burying their heads in the sand, as it is.

And - I'll reiterate, seeing as you seem to have missed this the first time - this is about people who keep using these tools and
choose to not learn more about the tools they're using. Would you like me to say that I feel superior over people who refuse to learn things; when I don't refuse to learn things outside of my own scope? Would that satisfy your need to feel superior?

Furthermore, you comment about stating "Apple users are idiots who don't know a thing about their computers"; I would rather say that "people using Apple or Windows and don't know anything and refuse repeatedly to learn about their tools are idiots".

... much like people who can't seem to read comments with a sufficient level of comprehension, but with plenty of personal issues brought in to cloud said comprehension.