I believe at that point the poster child was OpenSSL/SSH, not a kernel.

Right, which is why I added the second sentence. My point is that it could've been phrased in a manner that avoids implying Moscow is a trap, e.g. "unable to return home." I'm sure there are schools of propaganda training that are more subtle and don't pooh-pooh that sort of structuring, but at the very least it implies some restraint on the parts of the authors away from being a proverbial anti-US slant.

I'd really love to see some examples—I've been watching demo competitions for years and I can't recall any efforts that really focused on authentic portrayal of humans.

Yes, I'm very aware that demoscene groups form (often very excellent) game companies, but I don't think any of those endeavours have resulted in products with anything like the quality shown in the video.

And! And: it says Snowden is "trapped" in Moscow, which is not very agitprop-friendly. Workable, but not exactly jingoism.

What does that really matter? Almost by definition, a demoscene prod involves clever choices in what to make and display on screen in order to achieve an effect. I'm pretty confident the winners of the competitions for the last few years (a) don't have the same flexibility for artists working with their demo engines as Square-Enix does and (b) would never be able to assemble enough assets and people to do the facial expression stuff with anywhere near the same quality (an area in which, AFAIK, Nvidia has been almost entirely pioneering.) The achievement of this video isn't diminished by the achievements of the scene, nor vice-versa.

Don't get me wrong, I was a pretty loud critic. Right now I work on embedded ARM where most COM vendors are still - in 2015 - selling brand new kit which can barely run kernel 3.2, let alone 3.7 required for cgroups/systemd - most systemd fanatics try to tell me to compile from mainline kernel sources, which ignores the fact that these things are all one-of-a-kind once-off type systems where I'd have to port the shitty once-off BSP code which barely made it over the wall in the first place (which I have done - and took weeks on my last attempt, due to shitty quirky b0rked interrupts on the MMC interface for that board), not just "yolo, git pull && recompile dawg # to hell with re-certification and customer revalidation" that web hipsters seem to assume is the case.

But honestly, the technical committee in Debian were the ones we entrusted to make this kind of decision, so it's a meta-lesson in community participation. You can make all the RedHat conspiracies you want but at the end of the day the technical committee volunteers decided it was too much work (read: they didn't have the help like you or I around) to take on spinning a distro with the option to install without systemd.

So all I'm saying is that the Linux ecosystem is shit, but we have only ourselves to blame.

No, you don't have to do it with preseed. Just sudo apt-get install sysvinit-core. At any time, for the entire lifecycle of your installation. You can switch back with sudo apt-get install systemd-sysv at any time too. Change back and forth at will; I have, and whilst I initially had big problems with it, Debian's packaging now even has filled in the gaps that the systemd project themselves seem uninterested in fixing, such as full crypttab support/compatibility that the old sysv/cryptmount ecosystem had supported.

...I think you're the first person in history to call Windows 8.1 "good" and Windows 2000 "bad." What's your secret?

There's no point in acting all surprised about it. All the planning charts and demolition orders have been on display at your local planning department in Alpha Centauri for fifty of your Earth years, so you've had plenty of time to lodge any formal complaints, and it's far too late to start making a fuss about it now.

What do you mean you've never been to Alpha Centauri? Oh, for heaven's sake, mankind, it's only four light years away, you know! I'm sorry, but if you can't be bothered to take an interest in local affairs, that's your own regard. Energise the demolition beams! God, I don't know⦠apathetic bloody planet, I've no sympathy at allâ¦

I think there's already a 2030 mission in the works to send the boulder back with flowers, chocolates, and an apology letter inscribed on a golden disc that reveals a YouTube compilation of Carl Sagan quotes if placed in a laserdisc player. (The instructions on the sleeve for constructing such a device simply say "This product has been discontinued" in a mixture of pulsar coordinates and atomic oscillations.)

Not that far from the truth.

As someone who went to a relatively unknown university (internationally at least), I can also say that the only part of my degree that I simply had to accept with blind faith ("unless you've done maths post-grad, we don't have time to teach why all this is so and how it's derived") was much of two control systems theory subjects. The rest, I could usually derive from first principles. We certainly also studied semiconductors (Si, SiC, GaN - in conjuction with a quantum mechanics subject) such that we could model transistors and other elements from physical fundamentals: exploring different quite complex models and computational approaches, down to simplified formulae, when and which to use for convenience or accuracy.

I get the point you're trying to make, but I'd say most good engineering programmes are throwing up disclaimers in the course material whenver a "recipe" (as opposed to principles) is being taught due to lack of time. Good courses should provide caveats around such things, and make the students understand that they're applying something they don't understand. And hopefully also show what branches of knowledge a "faith item" is derived from so that students can explore on their own if they wish (I hope mose EEs are being taught how to teach themselves and know the limits of their own knowledge). In order to give the physical sciences and mathematics the depth that you would apparently approve of, it would squeeze out so much of the EE domain knowledge and analytical/process/systematics part of the discipline I'm not sure you'd be left with much other than an applied science degree.