and I've lost count of the amount of times when I simply wanted to just find a way to make the init system restart a service automatically when it crashes

I cannot understand what your problem is. I have systems that run continuously for years without processes dying. I have systems where the OOM killer inadvertantly kills some system task, in which case, simply re-starting that task isn't likely to be a helpful response.

From the perspective of re-starting system tasks, systemd is a solution to a non-problem.

The point is that although it happened it's isolated

My point is that your experience is meaningless in the context of how many machines are affected. Yes, it may be a small percentage of machines that are affected, but how small? 1%? .1%, .01%? I have not seen any figures published on this.

PS. Please, please, look up the definitions of "to affect" and "to effect". Make sure you are looking at definitions of the verbs, not nouns.

Yes there was and as I read about it I thought "Oh crap, We have 40k systems that might be effected." but not one had a bsod so I was very relieved

And in my small office, we had one machine that was affected. So what's your point? Clearly MS screwed up with bad updates. You were just lucky, probably because you buy from a single supplier, whose machines were not affected.

It is a single council, speaking as a single entity. One council says; two councils say.

This is British English style. In British English, when referring to certain entities that are made up of many people (such as sports teams), the plural is often used. However, in the case of this story, I am not sure that this would apply to "Council" in this manner.

He should have held on to the domain name. He may have been obigated to shut the site down, but nothing requires him to give the name over to them.

It appears there was some negotiation over the shutdown and perhaps giving up the domain name was done in order to secure the user database:

With the user database secured, an agreement was quickly reached to close down the site and transfer the domain.

I should also point out that tax revenues per head are only higher in Scotland if oil and gas revenues are included in the calculations. Otherwise, they are broadly similar to UK average.

Even if oil and gas are included, spending per head in Scotland is approximately 1,400 more than UK average, while revenues are about 1,700 more than UK average -- really quite a small difference.

Half of your argument is missing. You need the revenues collected information ("taxes per head"). If you get that and do the math, then you've got something.

Really? That's all you have? Not even a citation to prove a point?

The GGP claimed 2 things (1: more taxes per head, 2: less spending per head). I showed that the second was false. The other claim (greater taxes per head), I left alone. There is no math involved.

We've actually paid more tax per head, and received less back per head, than England for every one of the last 110 years,

Oh, really? Because Wikipedia doesn't agree with you. Spending per person:

The persistence of per capita public expenditure lower in England than elsewhere continues to attract calls for the formula to be renegotiated. Using figures for the financial year 2006/2007,[4] if a UK-wide per capita average were a notional 100%, identifiable per capita expenditure on services in England would be 97%, in Scotland 117%, in Wales 111% and in Northern Ireland 127% (this does not take account of non-identifiable expenditure, such as defence and debt interest, which are deemed to be for the benefit of the entire UK, regardless as to where the money is actually spent). In cash, this would work out as (per person):[5]

England £7,121

Scotland £8,623

With that said, I think governments should use open standards for data, document storage and interfaces where available, and avoid products (proprietary or otherwise) that do not support such standards.

As long as the products really do support the standard and the standard doesn't allow blobs of proprietary data formats.

Which means when you get a kernel update things stop working until you fiddle with the drivers.

No, what it means is that you completely failed to understand what the KMOD drivers and DKMS do.

In the case of the former, they ensure that the drivers work over multiple kernel revisions and in the case of the latter, the kernel modules are automatically re-built on boot up.

In neither case do "things stop working".

I think it was just a few years ago that they stopped reimbursing, saying that home Internet is now normal, and the VPN use doesn't increase the cost.

Since the Appeals court decided that plans with unlimited minutes and text were not a barrier to employers being held responsible for a portion of cellphone fees, the ruling could also apply to home Internet connections.

Employees may not be called on their cellphones about work-related matters.

In Linux, there is no ABI. Drivers have to be accepted and included in the kernel source tree. Yes really. It's that fucked up.

This is complete BS. Drivers can be delivered as source and built on the target machine or as binaries with the appropriate packageing. For example, drivers can be delivered like the ElRepo kABI-tracking kmods (this includes such things as the Nvidia drivers), or installed via DKMS.

What is true however is that, without an open-source shim layer, drivers have to be delivered as source, which some closed-source bigots hate.

That's dead. Today, if the destination mail agent exists, it's probably up and immediately reachable via a fast connection. So a modern mail fowarder should accept the incoming email via SMTP, and then, while holding the incoming connection open, send the email on to the destination mail agent. Any problems are immediately reported to the sender via SMTP status code.

1. Not quite what you suggest, but close.

2. Exchange (default setup) accepts all emails to the destination domain and later sends a reject message if the destination mailbox doesn't exist, so your proposal adds nothing to systems where the end mailserver is Exchange.