Sort of makes sense if he's going to do revisionism on so spectacular a design fuckup as the Pinto where even a layman can see the accident waiting to happen.
Next up - revising the "Liberty Ship" fuckup and extended coverup that led to more sinkings than the German U-Boat fleet until the press took a photo of one broken in half in the fitting out dock. Let's revise it to it all being OK because the corner cutters made a pile of money out of it thanks to the taxpayer and that's the way corporate American should be - none of this pesky accountability.

Bullshit. That was before high strength low alloy steel shaved a lot of $ off the price of the car. There were expensive bits just for cosmetic purposes back then.
The Japanese were building cars for a lot less than Ford back then but Ford and GM didn't care or notice.

IMHO it's nowhere near ready yet but other opinions can vary.
I think like Pulseaudio and NetworkManager before it the software has been rushed out in an alpha state and that's a systemic problem with RedHat and gnome which has spread to other distros (via gnome).

The problem above was on a developers machine where he had a typo in the hostname of an NFS mount so the entire thing locked up on boot and needed to be started up from a rescue CD. That's a newbie level fuckup and not something a person writing an init system should have problems with by the time they tell people their software is ready for release.

I've seen another where a system just would not start because the network card had been replaced - what a piece of crap. It's for laptops and not for hardware that may change.

And who answers questions about the lectures?

Nobody, that's only for traditionalist nations that make things or do things instead of providing kiddies with childcare while they do the important tasks of networking so some can be bankers and Hollywood stars while the rest get thrown away.
Cost cutting and appearance take a priority over supplying a useful education.
We laughed at the Reagan era "ebonics", but now take a look at youtube for 1970s science clips aimed at small children and you'll see how badly things have been dumbed down since then for everyone.

Is that any excuse for just hanging indefinitly (5 minutes my arse - saw one hang overnight) without any output to anywhere to tell you what is going on?

It wasn't even for sale in my area until the USB problem had been fixed. Funny thing is I got a replacement one "new" for a friend whose kid wrecked the keyboard in late 2013 - the repair centre still had some unused.
The dismal battery life is with WiFi turned on, so it only lasts uncharged about a day at work with WiFi on or three days at home with WiFi off.
Something with the same form-factor and more modern (less hungry) hardware would be nice, even if it is android and not real linux.

went from over three minutes to down to less

Something is definitely seriously wrong in that case. Are you sure it wasn't a change to autofs to mount them on demand instead of boot or using more correct NFS mount options that made the difference?

The other bits are interesting and make your point but that final one is a somewhat pathological case.

As for my example - a eeepc with an SSD but not a very quick CPU. Boot time with the stock distro (xandros) was about 15 seconds, around 45 with a cut down recent Fedora with hardly anything starting. It now has FreeBSD10 on it.

Yes - the correct behavior as Lennart sees it is to halt and wait for the user to insert a rescue CD.
I don't see that as correct myself but he has a desktop perspective inspired by growing up after Win95 and not paying much attention to server environments.

Considering how it blocks (with no output as to why) if a filesystem is not present is it REALLY doing enough in parallel or just enough to have race conditions in the binary logs?

most importantly, things are improving.

They certainly have to continue to improve before systemd becomes a more worthwhile option than the things it is replacing.
The only problem systemd solves is to replace things so old that they are maintained by people that have been coding for longer than Lennart Poettering.

The systemd suite provides features such as faster boot times

I haven't seen any sign of that anywhere and I saw the opposite on a eeepc by about half a minute when I put a newer distro with systemd on it. Is there any proof or are the faster boot times just on the wish list?

It got stuck and needed a reboot two or maybe three years ago and has been rock solid since. Still nothing viable to replace it without having to use two separate devices.

Can you imagine millennial parents giving their precious offspring pocket knives?

I was about to reply that I've seen a few young kids with pocket knives but their parents grew up in places like China and have associated more with older generations in the west than people of their own age.

I had my own .22 rifle by the time I was 10.

Maybe if we had more of that now people would see the things properly as tools instead of the NRA insanity of it being an external sign of manhood, patriotism and being ready to overthrow the USA in a minute.

From mucking about with it professionally (foundry sand packing test - pump mercury under a little bit of pressure through a sand sample) and reading a lot about mercury safety at the time it's the fumes that are the problem. Don't breath in mercury fumes and you'll be as fine as the gold miners working outdoors that used to stick their hands in the stuff and far better off than the hatters indoors that were poisoned by the fumes from heating the stuff up.
Washing it down the drain to where it can end up in small organisms then concentrated into top level predators that people eat is also very bad news.

Only if you do something as insane in hindsight as put lead acetate in the wine as a cheap sweetener. Lead pipes give you tiny trace amounts. Guzzling down cheap vino with a lead based sweetener like the Romans did is a few orders of magnitude more.
The lead pipes myth came from someone who knew about the poisoning but not about the wine so made a bit of a guess - lucky for us a wrong one since there's still some lead plumbing around.