I wasn't referring to them. I thought we were talking about people who care enough about iTunes to complain about it stopping working. They probably still use iTunes because in the past they have bought something from the iTunes Store.

And at least a few of them genuinely believe in the magical thinking, while most are just there from social peer pressure. But it's still a dire problem.

I think it refers to the fact that not all builds of HandBrake for all variants of all platforms include the DVD and BD decryption code. This page states that Windows users have to install Kodi (formerly XBMC) and dig the CSS library out of that. On which platform are you running HandBrake?

What does Xubuntu 15.04 leak back to Canonical or any other "home base"?

I suffered through Ubuntu Unity on my laptop for one month until I did sudo apt-get install xubuntu-desktop. I wonder what'll break in a year once I upgrade from what amounts to Xubuntu 14.04 LTS to 16.04.

And expensive connections. The going rate for a cellular Internet connection in the United States is $10 per GB uploaded or downloaded.

I agree with you that copyrights are too broad. Now how should I go about convincing a majority of American voters to remove from office all representatives and senators who support keeping copyrights too broad?

Because that would require national legislatures to actually do non-trivial work. They're already busy enough deciding whether and how much to spend on particular military, entitlement, and military entitlement projects. Nor have they seen any evidence that reforming overly broad copyright would win them more votes, especially when Hollywood promises them essentially free ad time to reach their constituents during election season but only if they "behave" (FOX News; The Hollywood Reporter).

From the FAQ: "For best results, you should feed HandBrake unprotected video." Yet the vast majority of DVDs and all BDs are protected.

Does Winamp work with movies purchased through iTunes Store without having a working copy of the iTunes client on the PC?

Such a copyright term applied to works with an individual author would violate the Berne Convention, which all World Trade Organization members must adopt. The Berne Convention requires a minimum term of 50 years after the death of the last surviving author or 50 years after publication for works with a corporate author. A country adopting such a copyright term for works with an individual author would get kicked out of the WTO and see its exports in unrelated industries become subject to prohibitive import duties.

Was that an exercise in truth inversion?
The Linux ecosystem is exactly what made systemd "win". And the rise of systemd occurred in a bottom-up manner actually.
systemd actually didn't win anything, it just allowed the streamlining of using the Linux kernel specific features that nobody used because of catering to the lowest denominator. I was not surprised at all at how fast true admins got rid of sysvinit or even Upstart.
On the machines I control, I've done this more than 15 years ago, going with simpleinit-msb for most of this time, before having to switch to an alternative because maintaining it was leaving me sometimes with security vulnerabilities to fix alone.

Exactly! When you have several layers on top of your block devices, like RAID and LVM, it's even worse.
It was such a pain before, despite the LVM or multipath daemons, I was never sure the servers would reboot correctly, or the config freeze or corrupts itself.
Such a nightmare before systemd tackled the problems and sometimes the bugs in kernel or daemons, now it just works.

I won't do your work for you, and you must be a pretty bad one to talk about things you don't even know about.
If reading skills and understanding skills are so challenging to you, you won't understand a thing, which is probably what happened already, given the copious amount of documentation available on systemd. There never were any for sysvinit and its scripts, and a very bad one for Upstart.
Besides, you need experience with sysvinit or Upstart to understand the biggest advantages of systemd.
Given my experience, I just don't take people that say sysvinit (or Upstart) had no problem seriously, less of my time lost this way.

Stop making fool of these veteran good unix sysadmins please. I will not associate with some fool like you. You people that know nothing love to give yourself a false authority by saying this nonsense everytime. But a good sysadmin will see through you without any problem.
You trolls are so nonsensical that you say Upstart WORKED WELL and was available in the 80. Linux is not Unix BTW, if you were a seasoned Unix sysadmin, you would loathe Linux more than systemd, systemd is only possible because of Linux.
You are wrong on all counts, so blinded by your hatred for something you don't even understand, it's pathetic.
I've encountered very few admins that even understand how a Unix-like boots anyway, lots of seasoned admins just have no ideas.
I've encountered far more Linux sysadmins that had this knowledge than anything else.
At best you're one of them.

You're wrong, plain and simple!
Upstart was trying to solve lots of problems of sysvinit that a seasoned Unix admin should know about, it even used dbus.
And the decision to use systemd by default in Ubuntu was the distro maintainers choice.
No good reason to make better than sysvinit? I've seen reasons 16 years ago, that's why since then I never installed sysvinit init anymore on my own made Linux OS. And yet, in my work environment, I'm still to this day the most knowledgeable around about how all this sysvinit crap works, be it SYSV or BSD style.

If that's the only reason you know about, it just confirms you know nothing about systemd. This is not even one of the main advantage of systemd since years.
The dynamic nature of the Linux kernel and its devices is one main reason.