I have a T-Mobile phone with Wi-Fi calling; it keeps turning the feature on by itself; and it sucks with dropped calls continually.

T-Mobile has had this service for years, and it used to work really well. In-call switching between cellular and WiFi, etc..

My current phone has the same feature, but I can set it to use the cell network if possible and only make calls over WiFi if the cell network isn't available. Because of this setting, I don't use the WiFi calling very much, but it is great for making and receiving calls while abroad without paying huge roaming fees.

Because all the "problems" you cite are generally overblown or not problems at all.

While that may be true, the same could be said for all the claimed advantages of systemd -- that they are overblown or not really advantages.

this will not have been done out of charity purposes. my guess is that MS gave something on the order of 2 billion dollars.

It's probably part of this deal

You can also do that with the systemd journal. Where's the problem?

That systemd's journaling log is not required for security, thus removing one more justification for the use of systemd.

Each entry is digitally signed with the hash of the previous entry. So any attacker that gets root can rewrite an entry, but in order to make the digital signatures pass verification he's got to rewrite the digital signature ....

Or, I could just send the logs to a remote, hardened log server so that an attacker has no way to modify the logs immediately prior to the compromise.

i never said I wanted to undo SS. But I do think people should be given an option. I would much rather put my SS money in an IRA or something that is mine, and mine alone. I worked hard for my money, I want to keep it.

You are so naive. In the UK, many people had final salary pension schemes. The schemes were run by the employers (only fair since they guaranteed certain payouts). The schemes had to be fully funded, so that the benefits would be paid out if the employer went bankrupt. Well, guess what, the laws changed in respect of taxation on these schemes and suddenly the private pensions were under-funded.

Yes, maybe you could do well investing your own money, but do you really want to bet against a future government making a tax grab on that money? It's not just the present goverment you have to worry about, but every government in power until you die.

The point is that under GNU your labor will almost certainly be forced to be free as in "not paid"; that's the practical consequences of the license. Under BSD you don't have that problem at all.

Under the GPL, companies can collaborate in ways that are possible but less likely with BSD. With BSD, there is a strong incentive for an individual company to put out closed-source binaries with some extra "secret sauce" over and above the open-source versions. Think of it as a tragedy of the commons or prisoner's dilemma where there is a strong incentive to defect. Using the GPL, this isn't possible.

Instead, the GPL promotes collaborative projects. Look at the Linux kernel, which gets contributions from many, many companies.

Can you name a single primarily psychopathic society to provide even anecdotal experimental evidence for your claim? Theory is nice and all, but is notoriously inapplicable to human behavior.

That's the point, isn't it? There are no primarily psychopathic societies because they are unsuccessful -- they die out too quickly to create records.

He's on the opposite side of the political spectrum as the source you have issues with, and is an authority in places ot know such things, *and* he said this stuff under oath to Congress.

The IRS is *very* clear on this. The children must have SSNs and must have lived in the USA. So, even if they get SSNs for the children, unless the children were actually in the USA for those years, it would still be tax fraud.

Incidentally, you clearly are concerned about the credibility of your original source, because I did not disagree with you based on the source of the information, instead, I disagreed with you on the *content* and *gasp* I compared it with the advice that the IRS and other organizations give on this topic. But I'll let you into a clue. A publication that quotes someone with "an unindicted co-conspirator in the cover-up ..." makes me suspect that the quote is not accurately portrayed.

So I looked at the page you referenced and all the commisioner stated was that amnestied aliens would be able to amend prior filings. All that stuff about kids -- that came from the (obviously biased) author of the article.

But even more, you were not able to accurately read the article, since it gives an example where the credit would be clearly fraudulent -- the claimed-for children were not in the USA.

The ACTC is a fully refundable credit of up to $1,000 per child to help working families who have children at home.

Problem is, that home may not be here, but back in Mexico, and the children claimed are often nieces and nephews in what are often rather large extended families. An investigation done in 2012 by NBC affiliate WTHR in Indianapolis found four workers claiming 20 children living in one residence, with the IRS sending these aliens tax refunds totaling $29,608. The children did not in fact reside in the United States.

This is over-hyped BS.

Yes, the amnestied immigrant may get some tax credits, based on his/her newly-aquired SSN. However his/her foreign children won't be able to get a SSN, without which one cannot claim EITC.

So, yes, there are probably a few cases where these large tax credits will be available, but not the vast numbers breathlessly reported.

Login requires a set of 3 numbers from PIN and a set of 4 letters from password. If the browser is not recognized, it needs more verification.

Money transfer requires me to insert the debit card into a card reader, give it the correct PIN and then allow the card reader to process a number provided by the website (website gives me the number, I enter it into card reader, which then replies with a new number. I enter that number into the website.

Well, you know, when everyone has a problem with you, the problem isn't everyone. The problem is you.

So you are blaming the GP poster for being bullied? There is a word for people who blame victims like that: bullies.

I would heartily recommend investigating the choices for charter and non-traditional schools.

We live in the attendance area for some of the best schools in California, yet educated our kids in a hybrid manner. Our kids "attended" a charter school that supported homeschooling. They had monthly meetings with their teacher and some specialized classes. When they were older, they could take classes at the local community college and get high school credit for this. Utlizing the local networks of homeschoolers, my kids got plenty of social interaction with other kids.

They all succeeded academically, going on to graduate from excellent universities.

Clearly, you haven't worked in tech support, or known anyone who has, or read any of the blogs or horror stories, or, really, informed yourself in any way about this. Humans have a bell curve of both "crazy" and "mean", and the tail end of either is not something you'd ever want to come into contact with.

It's the *job* of the people who work in call centers to deal with these people. That's what they are paid for. Do you think that plumbers like dealing with pipes full of human waste? No, but it's their job to do so occasionally.

Yes, I goofed. However, believing that 11.4 years is what you'll get in practice is also naive,

Not, it's not your basic conversion error that's the problem.

A MTBF of 11.4 years does not mean that a typical array will have a lifetime of 11.4 years. From Wikipedia:

Once the MTBF of a system is known, the probability that any one particular system will be operational at time equal to the MTBF can be calculated. This calculation requires that the system is working within its "useful life period", which is characterized by a relatively constant failure rate (the middle part of the "bathtub curve") when only random failures are occurring.

You are conflating "useful life period" with MTBF. They measure different things.