The same inadequate reasoning that makes people think their could be meaning to the universe is the same lack of reasoning that causes smart people to be religious.

You make the mistake of categorizing all religion into one big bin. Thinking about our place in the universe is a religious activity, but also a very human one. Deciding we have no place in the universe, or the universe has no meaning is also in that same category. By seeking to escape religion, you're only being ensared by it.

More than a legal precedent this needs solid regulations with teeth. I suspect that if you walk into whatever the Italian equivalent of Best Buy waving this judgement around and demanding a refund that they will just have security escort you out. But if refusal to even offer a Windows free machine was worthy of a fine, let alone not removing it, then windows free machines would be widely available.

I've spent some time living and working in Italy. I'd be very, very careful before I simply apply US and Canadian ideas and norms onto Italy. Italy isn't filled with big box stores. I don't know that there's an equivalent mass retailer that sells everything from PCs to appliances in Italy. Rome at least is more filled with smaller retailers rather than enormous mega-retailer stores like in the US. There's some big retailers to be sure, but there's a lot more smaller ones.

But the one thing you should be VERY wary of is applying the rule of law to Italy. The normal rules of fines, and governments imposing restrictions on things doesn't always apply. Italian courts are a mess, and regularly change verdicts. So I wouldn't just naturally expect Italian retailers to suddenly start offering Windows free machines available for sale. Italy isn't like the US, or even the rest of the EU.

$.06 is about 80 cents today. That's not free. You may think it's a minor distinction, but the truth is it's not. We know from repeated sociological studies that people treat free as a different category than something that's charged for. And if you establish the value early on as free, it's VERY hard to go back and get people to pay later on.

That's totally different than charging 80 cents in 2014 dollars. I'd also imagine that being in the military has different expectations than civilian life. It's a donation the publishers gave to the war effort. Once the war is over, nobody would expect to go back to being given cheap books anymore.

Before you go around calling people morons, you might want to learn a little about how software is horribly insecure, even when designed to be. The recent OpenSSL vulnerability is a good example.

If you think "slapping encryption, message signing, and sanity checks" is going to save you, you have a LOT to learn.

That and credit card companies are too fucking cheap to switch to chip and pin. The only reason the rest of world switched was because the companies were forced to. Not in the good old USA.
Well, you're going to start getting your (and my) wish starting around October 2015. That's the date the liability shifts. Then the liability shifts to the party implementing the least technology. So if the card issuer issues a chip and pin card, and the retailer has only swipe, the retailer is responsible for any fraud from customers with chip and pin cards. If the retailer has a chip and pin machine, but the card issuer has only swipe, then the card issuer is liable.

So essentially you're going to start seeing big retailers upgrade to chip and pin machines sometime around Oct 2015. I'm sure it'll be a slow process, with small retailers taking many years to finally upgrade. But it'll happen.

  If you are still skeptical, I invite you to go to talk to HR and ask them what it would take to get entry-level job without a degree.

Not all companies have HR gatekeepers. HR is their to filter out job requirements. If the job requirements say "Or equivelent experience", that's your ticket. If there's no HR department (the case with many smaller companies), then that barrier is gone.

Bascially, I'm calling bullshit here. I've known many people, including myself with very successful careers in IT without college degrees. Please stop applying your experience to everyone.

To me, that indicates a JAVA vulnerability, not a Linux vulnerability.

Right. Just like Nigerian 419 scams are conducted in English, so English is a vulnerability.

  For real business purposes, though, you'd be bonkers to accept bitcoins.

Bonkers like Newegg, and Dish Network? Both of which accept bitcoin.

This is exactly what I'm talking about. Yes, it has worked for years, and that's why you like it. You (we?) are now that "old generation" that I was referring to, and I'm not about to become a grumpy old admin.

Some things are basic to design. The design philosophy of Unix/Linux has nothing to do with technology, and everything to do with human beings. Technology changes, human being stay the same. I'm a developer now, and that same design philosophy is how people create good programs. It's the same human element at work.

Simple designs are really quite lauded across all of design. It's not just software. Complexity is what you get when you don't have any other choice. It's not really an old fashioned value at all. Einstein said "Everything should be as simple as possible, but no simpler".

Worked just fine. I also worked for vendor J, who used one big binary: rpd handles just about every routing protocol you can imagine. Is J bad and is R good? According to the market, J is doing very well, while R has been acquired and assimilated by a another company.

Well, that might be OK. From an admin perspective, what's the difference since routing is really routing. One binary is easy to deal with. If they architected the software in a sane way and devided the big binary into sane objects, it might even be easy to code as well. It makes sense because networking is networking. I just don't see the same thing being true for system services. Starting up services is ENTIRELY different from mounting a share. Why would you group those two functions together?

But really though you're judging the goodness/badness from the wrong angle. Which company is successful has zero to do with which is a better design. Success has as much to do with marketing, price, luck, branding, and golf outings as it does with the design. Deisgn is just a small part of success.

The question should be, which did YOU find easier to deal with, and which one do the software developers find easier to code and add new features to.

a) the ubiquitous availability of information is a relatively new thing. Public libraries didn't even really exist until the latter 19th/E20th centuries. The internet is less than a generation old.
b) governments and power structures have controlled such information throughout the span of human history.

I'm not even 100% convinced that the ideal of universal access to information is an unalloyed good.

Nothing is pure good. Fortunately that's not the standard for good. Unfettered access to the Internet merely has to be better than government censorship of the internet. That's the real choice, not internet vs no internet. Unfettered access to information is one the founding principles of Democracy. Western nations have embraced this idea for around 200 years. Developing nations that aren't particularly democratic or are newly democratic are having to come to grips with this fact.

A country where the Government gets to censor what we see and hear can't function as a democracy. Democracy relies on the citizens being able to freely communicate. That can't happen under censorship. In the US the founding fathers reconized this because they were subject to a government that tried to control them. That's why the created the first amendment, and why other countries equally recongized this basic fact of a functioning democracy.

I don't think the seasoned admins will argue that systemd is bad because it doesn't follow history, they'll argue it's bad because it doesn't follow well established design principles.

(I'd also dispute that there really were a large percentage of Network engineeres who really disliked Ethernet. I heard some complaints 20 years ago from people who did real-time process control systems, but that's quite a small nitch.)

I've been doing Linux admin in some fashion or another for 20+ years, so in many ways I'm part of the "old guard". The argument about small being better, making programs that do one thing well, etc is a good design element that's worked for years. At the same time I've also often been bitten by the problem of having to port "yet-another-shell-script-for distributiion-X" problem that seems like it should have a more standardized way of doing things. So from a replacing init-scripts perspective, I can see the appeal.

I'm not heavily involved in administration like I once was, so I don't have experience with systemd as of yet. (My systems run Ubuntu or Debian, no RHEL7). With that said, the monolithic design and trying to do everything sounds like a major design flaw to me.

Your question is far too generalized. You don't mention what your product is, what your firm does, or what the risks you're trying to protect from. Nobody can give you any meaninful advice unless you provide real details. What is it you're afraid of exposing? What's the IP you're afraid of diluting? Is your company a 100 person shop, or a 10,000 person shop? It matters.

Those risks may be illusory, depending on what this code is. I've had a few project I'd like to release as OSS, but there's zero IP dilution and zero risk of exposing anything. Despite what people tend to think, code isn't a commodity. The specifics matter quite a bit. The only answers you're going to get with the information you provided are very generalized useless ones.

C has been replaced with C++, C# and Java.

In some cases, yes. But that doesn't mean C is dead or dying. It's just not as dominant as it once was. Languages are like living things, they compete with other languages for space. There's still a TON of applications written in C. The linux kernel is a major example. C isn't as dominant as it once was, but that's a natural development of diversity. Greater diversity doesn't mean the death of what was once dominant, only that what was once dominant fills a smaller niche.

You just listed 3 buzzwords. None of them are "big ideas", they're vague concepts, of which a subset of the vague concepts are good ideas.

Java is a programming language. Can you expound on what exactly Java is missing to embrace whatever it is you think is good about them?

Java is becoming the new COBOL.

I'd like to be the first to say... huh? I'm sure Java will become a legacy language some day, but hipsters don't really define much of anything. Hipsters are against anything that's popular (because popularity by definition isn't hip), and go for the obscure things. That's why PBR became popular. It's not good, but among the younger set microbrews are very popular, so a hipster has to go for something unpopular to distinguish themselves from what's popular.

20 years ago people used to say that about C. C is dying, C is going to be replaced, etc, etc. Didn't happen. By popularity C has a lot more competition, but it's alive and well and not going away. People hate COBOL because it was a badly designed language. If anything is the new COBOL, it's PHP. I've known several PHP programmers, and many of them have switched to another language not because of a lack of jobs, but because they hate the language. I'm not old enough to have been around for the COBOL era, but I'd guess it was the same then.

The death of a language starts when developers leave it in droves for something else. I don't see that happeneing for Java. Do you?