I think the best thing in the world for internet privacy/security would be if the laws were changed to state: "You have no expectation of privacy in any plain text email (other other communication) on the internet. Any such content can be freely used by your ISP, email hosting service, governments, ad-agencies, spammers, etc. If you want your email private, encrypt it.".

With such laws, it would be a billion dollar opportunity overnight, and the internet would be much safer for it.

But instead, corporations trust policies and laws to keep email private - even though those policies can and do change on a whim (or a Patriot act).

Instead of relying on policies/laws to keep email confidential, I wonder if the internet would be a much safer place if the laws said that any unencrypted email has no expectation of privacy.

Unencrypted email should be thought of as more like a post-card -- where governments routinely scan them all for law enforcement.

If you want anything private in email, encrypt it.

And if it were widely thought of that way, corporations would insist on encrypted emails, so the email client vendors would make encryption easy instead of the pain in the neck it is today.

Because that would mostly hurt poor innocent people, and make more people hate the US.

If instead they could provide those people with reliable water, food, etc, it would become harder to radicalize them.

So wonder how many of the GuantÃnamo confessions worked this way.

If you're having difficulty communicating with Engineers and part of your job is reading their status reports and documentation, I'd argue that the problem is on your side.

Their job is to do engineering well. Your job sounds like translating between their attempt to translate technical nuances into stuff that upper management can understand. Perhaps you need to spend more time learning more about what they do.

I half agree....

Agree that systemd's pretty much going to make Linux into more of a small niche product than it ever way.

But this seems to go far beyond RedHat --- with systemd advocates pressuring to Extend/Embrace/you-know-the-rest Linux from many sides.

And just because something's launched often doesn't mean it has to be sucked into systemd. Angry Birds is launched on Linux more often than most stuff the systemd guys play with -- but that doesn't mean all games need insane dependancies on an init system.

Your container example seems to be taking the wrong approach too.

Lightweight containers like Docker seem to suggest it's best to run a single service within a container --- so the last thing such a system needs an init system -- let alone the most bloated init system in the world. A it turns out, it's quite a pain in the neck to run systemd in a docker container.

You do realize OpenOffice does run in a server-mode.

It's useful for doing thtings like batch-processing word documents.

Same for Gimp: " This command will start a server, which reads and executes Script-Fu (Scheme) statements you send him via a specified port. ".

I don't understand why 90% of the crap systemd's trying to suck in (like networking). Yet the systemd guys continue to glom everything in there.

For example, in the US, I could imagine there were buyers from DEA, FBI, some DHS agencies, some DoD agencies, maybe even NYPD (heck, NYPD even has a branch in London, Israel, and Hamburg ) -- and that's just one country. Multiply by a couple hundred countries, and that really might have been a significant fraction of the market.

Are you forgetting that emacs has a pretty nice vi-mode?

Guess the NSA beat them for funding that project?