Embrace, extend.....

You have a lot of rational paranoia here. Tin foil or no, I often wonder if some of the VPN services are just honeypots.

There's always spinning up free instances in Azure or another host like AWS, and trying your hand there; at least the circuits would be somewhat secure. But if you're doing something at a monitored host and its record list is tracked, your IP access would at least be tracked. You might need several of these in a tawdry, highly latent chain to make things tough. That said, for some that need this, diligence might pay off. For others using such circuits for evil, I wish them failure.

That's their retail value. If you're suing Anthem in a class action because of their breach, the value will be astoundingly different.

A nice VPN is a great idea. The very idea that your privacy is worth such a pittance is really insulting.

Not broken. It's an improvement. Devices needed organization. It's not a perfect solution. Nothing is.

Slow down. We disagree on all your points.

First, use grub2 to set alternate boots. Not tough.
Second, use rsyslog or install syslog-ng to push out the logs to a log server so you can see why it goes down.
Third, BIOS is still the longest part of my boots; not sure what you're using.
Fourth, the file format you loathe is easy pushed back to half-ASCII if you simply must; you can ask chron to push it for you regularly, if you're really anal.

As far as stability is concerned, mine are just fine, thanks, doing their jobs nicely. This .ini problem you speak of is no different from the madness of other conf files that permeate the landscape, and prior versions are worse. I can squirt plentiful relevant system calls to one freaking spot, not eleven, and not nineteen different goofball apps twisting relevant settings through backdoors going back to Minix. I call that progress. It enforces a little discipline.

Oh, sure. Are you sure it wasn't the fact that all of the Sun engineers exited for greener pastures, and Oracle left the openness in a ditch? Took all of Schwartz's pile of open goodies and stepped on them like they were cockroaches?

C'mon. Say something real.

Along the way, your RHEL6 will be fine, and it will grow cold, like they all do, as will your skills. I don't particularly care for systemd, but I learned it in a couple of hours, and yeah, it works.

I've been doing Unices for longer than most slashdotters have been alive, a very long time. This isn't much to get outraged over. Many changes meet resistance. I saw this changeover first in Solaris; I knew it was coming. First few times, PITA. Now, I shrug.

Stuff is going to change. This one's for the better, IMHO. I would change other stuff, too, but that's another thread. This one was ripe. If it's too hot in the kitchen, go back to the dining room. Find another dining room. Linux has more darwinism in it than any other OS I've seen. I used think that fact was forboding, but it's not. It's pressured evolution.

Wrong question. The problems that led to systemd weren't built in a day/week/month/year, and neither will be the maturity that it needs to work.

Regardless of how shitty? If you're unaware of bad implementations, I can suggest many places to turn towards to find pretty ugly stuff, no matter the OS. The pain of systemd passes easily. Not rocket science. Pretty consistent.

It's my humble opinion that if systemd stops you cold, you ought to be in another profession. Just surrender your capacity to adapt and move on, hang up your holster and belt, and go into automotive tech or something else where the rules change less frequently.

Using systemd isn't rocket science. It a simple change that cleans up a lot of old code and retirement plan permutations.

Maybe I get marked as troll. Guys that can't think out of an ipconfig box need to embrace their brittleness and just bug out into early BSD or similar. The world's gonna pass you by.

I would agree, and add that we haven't seen the end of this, as HTML5 is changing everything. Chrome development seems to not only be heavy-handed, but sometimes smacks of the old days of Microsoft in terms of compatibility/heterogeneity. Plodding as it might be, I'll take FF, just like I'll wait for Debian to do something. I seem to be rewarded by being a little patient.

The revenue per subscriber is way off, too. Consider a base charge, Spotify, NetFlix, Apple/Microsoft/Google/Amazon TV, SmartHome/Alarms, and all the other value-add/combo services. Revenues 2x that price aren't out of the questions. Say-- $110/mo.

Add in the fact that the citizens, and the local govs have the rights-of-way, easements, and knowledge of the underground infrastructure. High-density installations benefit first, but whole suburbs can be serviced without huge capital outlays.

Not magic at all. I have solar panels and electron wells. Wind energy around my environs is much tougher. The power company here burns coal. The less of their electricity that I use, the less coal that burns.

To your point, however, once a cogent third party says Yucca is safe over that term, the happier I am. The NRC is a self-serving adjudicator of this sort of information, and frankly, I have little reason to trust them.

E85 lacks basic energy, not to mention the hideous cost of manufacturing. Methane recovery is a great idea and there's an abundance of methane (just look at Congress-- they need a dome over the dome).

Ultimately, producing heat for use with transducers just isn't going to work, and doesn't scale. Passive solar scales. Active solar (wind/volcanic) lunar (yeah, waves) are all vastly underdeveloped resources where at least the energy coefficient comes free-- the transducers and business models cost.

Nevada already has its own background radiation levels problem. Part of this is to stick it to Harry Reid.

Just because the NRC says it's ok, there's no third party corroboration that ground water contamination won't be a problem soon, and then for another half-million years. Yes, something needs to be done with the waste, but I'm hoping for a future disposal method that brings the waste to the average background radiation levels tolerable by simple burying.