At least that problem will eventually fix itself >-)

Well-regarded? By whom? They're the Oprah of private key management, even India got them. Sure some enterprises used them (because they put the word enterprise in their product name and made it look very exclusive) but besides some large idiots most smart people ignored them.

systemd is fine if you don't want to fiddle with anything. It is great for the current cloud/virtualization hype because it doesn't use arcane text files which are different for each daemon but rather everything is uniformly structured so you can spin up entirely self-automated datacenters with a few presses of a button in a web interface. If you want to change your hostname, you issue a command and everything that supports systemd now has your new hostname.

However if it breaks, it is bad. Things are a mess for humans to read or change, it seems to be entirely built to be used in purpose-built GUI's and web interfaces. It has or will become the registry of Linux. If you want to use something that's not systemd-aware you're either stuck encapsulating old scripts in systemd scripts or building an entire infrastructure of dependencies and requirements around the daemon.

They're smileys. You know, the ;-) and :-D will get converted in one of those yellow characters if you form it in this particular way: :bowtie:

Prices vary by country as well, sometimes as much as $10k. Car pricing is really just what car makers can get away with based on the market, there is no reason a car should be that expensive, it does not really cost $700 to make 4 car mats.

A 10MB spindle on an IBM mainframe
A floppy drive (5.25 or 3.5)
A 5.25" full-size hard drive (the size of two/three full size CD ROM drives)
A ZIP drive also made a distinctive noise
CD disc changers and disc robots
External CD readers/writers
Data tape
Cassette (VCR or audio)
24 pin Dot Matrix Printers (24 pins are still used in banks etc but I grew up with an 8 pin)
The death rattle of the IBM DeathStar series
A computer user reading the OS handbook and looking at the internal circuitry of their device

The thing is that a quality laptop (which Apple is one of) will continue to work at full load. As the OP stated, "others", especially custom builds have random issues ranging from shutdown/reboots, severe throttling or even hardware damage if you keep them at that load for a while. There are few laptop builders, even big names, that take care in what they put together.

Dell is one of those that will mash together a laptop, sometimes even with a full-blown desktop processor and whatever else you can specify without actually knowing it will work. IBM used to be a good name, Lenovo not so much anymore, Fujitsu-Siemens is/was a good name a few years ago at least but haven't had an experience in years, Asus is decent but their cheaper models are hit-and-miss. HP, Toshiba, Acer, ... stay away from those. There are/were some companies that will custom-engineer a model and test configurations for you but you will pay a hefty premium.

There exists no PC that costs $300 that will match up to a $2k Mac. Even if you plunk down $700 for a Mac Mini with AppleCare, it will be hard to find a similar machine with a similar service contract (think Dell Gold Service Contract).

Apple will come to you within 24h or ship you a new machine overnight but even after the warranty expires you can still call them and they will answer you. I have dealt with Dell, HP and Lenovo, it doesn't even come close.

I don't know what you're doing with your laptops to cause such issues, are you working in the Sahara?

There are plenty of laptops out there but if you want a somewhat decent one, go for a Macbook Pro. Sure they're a bit more expensive (although not as expensive per feature as Dell) but I haven't had issues with them doing serious dev, cross-compilation and heavy computation (MATLAB, Python etc) work that can take 100% of all cores for days on end.

If you need desktop performance, get a desktop or get the building/compiling to work on your compile farm. A laptop with a desktop processor will overheat/melt/break and there are plenty of builders that will mash together whatever you specify without any real testing. And "boost" speeds are just that, they're only there to boost the occasional spike, physics will take over at some point. For the work you describe (prime calculations) you'll get much more efficiency out of a decent set of servers and have your coders check in their work after which a bot will automatically attempt compilation.

Depends on what you declare as modern. I have a Sun UltraSPARC box from the mid-90's which is still used to cross-compile things. Some things just stick around especially in government and research but also in established businesses, things are kept alive for decades because there is no funding to replace it and for most projects the people that maintain it are cheaper than establishing a new project.

This is mainly due to the inbreeding and subsequent incompetence on behalf of the people in charge of finance and IT but also incompetence on behalf of the other managerial staff to recognize that those people in charge are incompetent.

To this day there are very few projects in large organizations like governments, schools and old businesses that include line items for security, maintenance and replacement. Most managerial types still think that solutions are a one-time cost and that, like machinery, it will run fine as long as a mechanic puts some oil and parts in it and when they need something faster or better, they can simply sell or reuse the old 'machine' and recoup 50-80% of the investment in the 'faster' machine.

Why not? Science proves all mainstream religion and religious leaders wrong. Science DOES get to comment on what you believe and whether or not it is wrong because otherwise it would have no point.

Business folding to the religious as usual. Hope we don't offend anyone by saying their religion and religious leaders are wrong about everything.

Really? Any coder able to find issues like this should be able to fix issues like this if they have the proper source code. Most issues are trivial to fix, substituting an unsafe call with a safe(r) call (eg. strcpy vs strncpy) is often enough to fix most issues.

Sure there will be some side cases where it is really hard or there may be better solutions than your patch (eg. I recently found a bug in the MariaDB optimizer which leads to bad data being returned) but then at least if the product on top of it (CiviCRM and Drupal in my case) is also open source, at least I can modify the query to fit my needs even though both Drupal and CiviCRM people say 'not our problem'.

I don't and I hope you don't. Unless you consider murder moral.

But you're supporting said hierarchy by word and probably with money too (if you go to church and put money in the collection scales). By saying you're Catholic you're saying that the pope is your supreme leader and infallible, if you don't you are not a Catholic according to the definition in the Catechesis .