Well actually yes there are some very offensive hysterical pro choice nut hubs out there. I knew one of those in university.

In Canada where I am there are literally no restrictions at all on abortion. The court struck down laws decades ago and it is such a sensitive topic no restrictions or regulations have ever been put in to replace them. Though in reality medical professionals would never do so, from a strictly legal standpoint a woman could abort a healthy viable fetus at full term for any reason at all, including gender selection or other non medical reasons.

While watching TV a nurse was being interviewed and her opinion that abortion should be regulated...not even restricted much but that guidelines requiring counselling for late term abortions and limiting reasons beyond 30 weeks or so to medical issues like birth defects and threat to mothers health.

This person I knew was watching this and declared she was "such a close minded bitch" and left. It was her opinion that a woman should be able to terminate any pregnancy for any reason whatever at any time, including during labour and right up to the point of delivery. Literally. And if you thought otherwise in any way she had no time for you. She was VERY judgemental on that fact and would say a young woman was foolish for keeping an unplanned pregnancy if they weren't done school and so on.

She called herself pro choice but I called her anti abortion. I never liked to call wing nuts who threaten abortion doctors or picket clinics pro life...I call them anti abortionists. After I met this young woman I stopped using the term pro choice so freely too. They are pro abortionists. The issue is abortion and you are pro or anti.

I was amused at the term inactivity. Clever. But the issue is circumcision and you are pro or anti. And people have their reasons and there has to be some open mindedness to those points of view on both sides.

What attack surface?

Systemd *the project* is a repository of a large number of individual binaries. The init system is separate from the logging is separate from this time sync thinf and so on.

Systemd is NOT one monolithic entity (which linux OS people haven't seemed to mind in other respects--the kernel is monolithic after all). It does not have any one large attack surface either.

The issue that makes it contoversial is that it is not "unix like" enough for old grey neckbeards. It has binary log stores, the various components interact with binary APIs and it is designed to work specifically with Linux rather that being kernel agnostic. It is "different"...the init system appears to be the free software equivalent to Microsoft svchost...or so goes the argument.

The other argument..or conspiracy theory or whatever, is that the *project*, irrespective of how modular or componentised or how much is optional, is that forces from the evil-corporate-redhat camp are somehow coercing distro maintainers to adopt the whole works carte-blanche, perhaps before its time.

None of this really has any bearing on the security of its design or attack footprint however. It has been in use for a few years now and no heartbleed scale issues found yet.

I did find it disorienting at first to work with systemd and i wouldn't have implemented it exactly that way, but on the whole it is far better than the inconsistent, crufty, not broken per se but very brittle sysVinit.

Anyways i see the whole systemd controversy as being indicitave of a 'UNIX old guard' culture. Not universally in open source but a loud segment of it. Sometimes what aint broke is worth fixing, because it is brittle, or it actually has cracks and holes unseen like metal fatigue. And in the case of low level stuff like this it is thankless work. Systemd is in that realm with openssl and ntpd and consolekit. Systemd takes some old poorly supported and outdated stuff and replaces it with something radically different, and for their efforts they are shat upon. Yes they have big egos but so do most free software leaders. If you create and maintain something and are more meek or deferential then this kind of un sexy software ends up in a state like consolekit or ntpd or openssl...no new ideas, no scrutiny, no appreciation... Until the developer just gives up or thete is a big bug missed or whatever.

Attitudes have to change. Stop bitching about the efforts of people like Pottering and Sievers and contribute! Don't agree with the state of things? Spearhead an effort for an alternative. Systemd is not compiled into GNOME and other software though it is packaged with that depenency most often. The APIs and peotocols are open. Alternative implementations can be made.

I have the utmost respect and admiration for those who put in all the effort on systemd...AND uselessd AND systembsd. They want to make software better even if we dont always agree with their approach. And in the interest of avoiding monoculture I really hope the alternative implementations gain traction...and that goes for alternatives to openssl anf ntpd as well.

Curious, i have not in the past year of using NFS mounts on systemd based systems encountered 90s hangs you describe. What distro do you use? Did you set up the unit files yourself or stick with packaged ones?

Sounds like a configuration problem to me, not specifically an issue with systemd doing something wrong. It is simpler and more complex than init scripts. Enabling concurrent service startup by its very nature is more complex, regardless of the implementation. But if it is configured right systemd won't even try to start nfs if the network is not reporting it is up....if it is configured right ;-)

You boast of running enterprise class systems that certainly command six figure budgets just to set up. Whether or not systemd is involved you should be using the aforementioned tools.

...it is the way Ubuntu has been for a long time.

Nobody is pushing systemd into the OS any more than any other big change. Ubuntu has done, or tried to do, the same with pulseaudio, unity desktop and mir and even upstart. At least systemd has cross distro support. Usually Ubuntu charges ahead with something invented in house at canonical and then try to own it completely and alienate development community.

Also though systemd is not how i would exactly do things i am getting used to it and it is WAY WAY BETTER than the old init and isnt the odd man out, not invented here solution that is upstart.

But whatever you think of systemd...even if you love it or dont care either way, Ubuntu is repeating history by doing major screwing with things at inappropriate times in the release cycle and it really should have been put on the 15.10 roadmap instead. Part of the reason people jumped on the systemd hatewagon, or kde4 or gnome3 pulseaudio or whatever, is because of how aggressively they were adopted in general releases before their time. All of the above are just fine...now..but all were barely beta quality when they started to receive wide adoption. The antics of Ubuntu management and their ilk don't help engender support.

I will likely stick with Debian. As painful as it was to witness the immature sh!t-slinging by political factions on both sides of the debate that added nothing useful to the discussion, at least there was a debate, and a very extended time with systemd being an optional experimental/unstable package. That has never been the ubuntu way. The systemd suite of software may be finally ready for prime time, but nothing of that sott of nature should be done on an apparent whim. Thats why i stopped using Ubuntu after lucid lynx.

Besides the geopolitical fantasy required in your fairy tale solution is the requirement to have unlimited availability of non existent superconducting transmission lines.

Big copper cables have electrical resistance which results in line losses. In the winter in much of the world peak power usage happens after sunset, which often is the calmest time of day too. That means power woulf have to be transmitted across the continent, or even from another continent. The line losses would be tremendous...most of the power would be lost to heat and RF emissions.

It is far more efficient to have highly distributed generation AND storage than to have an intercontinental power grid of supersized transmission lines. Skyscraper sized batteries ate stupid too, but to make solar and wind work you probably would need every household to have a refrigerator sized battery permanently plugged into the grid, and for all users connections to the grid to be bidirectional.

Who decides what is indisputable? A crew of experts hand picked by google executives? A computer algorithm that does big data analysis of mob rule?

Once a thing becomes indisputable and thus factual, what happens when it is disputed in the future? When is dispute just crackpots and when is it valid? I remember 16mm films in school talking about how smog, particulates and so forth could block sunlight and bring about cooling that could trigger an ice age. Today clinate change is about heat trapping gasses heating up the planet. The idea we are heading into an ice age is laughable.

Nutritional facts are notoriously fluid and disputable things. All fatty foods used to be fattening and bad for the heart. Then it was discovered some fats...unsaturated vegetable fats...were good, and margerine consisting of hydrogenated vegetable fats were widely thought to be better than butter for the heart. But hydrogenation transforms such fats into trans fatty acids, which are virtually toxic to the heart. Also some saturated fats like coconut oil are supposedly healthy now, and eating moderate amounts of beef and other meats with saturated fat are better for the heart than a very low gat diet.

Facts are not simple clear cut things because nothing is absolutely indisputable. And often determining what is fact is tainted by political and commercial conflicts of interest.

Quite frankly i do not think Google is capable of being a trustworthy arbiter of what is an indisputable fact, no more than Microsoft, or Apple, or the Republican party, or the Democrats, or the UN or any institution.

Can we even say that it us a fact the sky is blue? We cant even agree on the colour of a woman's dress ;-)

I think it is a mistake to try to rank degree of "factualness" for these reasons...it reinforces conventional wisdom when sometimes it should be challenged. More important to me is to link information better to original sources. I would prefer Google work to trace statements/content to their origins and the relationships of content creators, then let searchers judge for themselves. For example, in researching climate change solutions, how much of it is funded by nuclear energy industry? It is a valid question to consider, since agressively shutting down fossil fuel power generation can be hijacked by such interests to further their own interests. This doesnt mean facts publushed by the nuclear industry are not valid, it just provides context so you can make informed decisions.

Ranking should remain based on how highly cited tge results are, with the "chain of citations" easily accessible, because the most highly cited information probably deserves the most scrutiny.

Mostly wrong. Emissions from burning biomatter are less than coal, and particulate emissions from power plants are very stingently regulated.

Particulates, called "fly ash", are removed electrostatically and collected along with the bottom ash--particles that are too heavy to go up the stack. This ash can be pelletised and used as a high quality fertiliser.

Processing food waste is a big challenge, from straw, husks, peels and such to animal waste (you can feed a lot of food products to livestock but you still have manure to handle). Such waste is not immediately useful...it must be composted or cooked or otherwise processed otherwise it does more harm than good.

I do not support subsidised production of " fuel crops" like switchgrass and surplus corn, but food waste in the developed world is almost tragic. Developing biomass energy technology is vital to recover this wasted energy source. Making it into automobile fuel is a bad way to do it, but burning it to make electricity or heat homes or capturing the methane (much more serious source of greenhouse effect) from landfills or stockyards or barns to use, well, solar be damned. This is recovering wasted energy anyways.

It should be said that though studies like this are scientifically valid, they are commissioned with a political agenda in mind. First we had peak oil, we were going to run out so we had to get off oil, which was a valid observation at the time. Then technology made more oil recoverable and now we have reserves that could stretch out centuries. But wait, if we burned all that oil it would release all this carbon and make our climate like it was when the dinosaurs were alive--also a theory with scientific merit. But then we use technology again to try to solve the issue and it gets shot down as well. Biofuels are inefficient and compromise food production. Nuclear is dangerous and makes toxic pollution. Wind is unreliable, destroys habitats and kills birds. Solar is similar in that it destroys habitat and is unreliable--we need to store and transmit power at night time. Hydro ruins rivers and floods lands and so on.

There is a pattern here. Scientific studies funded with the purpose of starting at a pre determined conclusion and working back to a credible theory to back it. Just like science funded by big oil or ither industries, governmental entities do this too. In cases like this it is done to justify ideological policies or the creation of bureaucracies.

Case and point...Kyoto and related accords spearheaded by the UN, which is dominated by developing and undeveloped nations and representatives that lean heavily socialist. The whole world needs to address climate change, but developing nations get a free pass and the rest enforce emissions caps through elabourate trade and credit schemes adminustered by a large bureaucracy. The real problem of climate change continues apace, but the agendas of developing nations to get a competitive advantage in industry and socialists have a means of wealth transfer/equalisation as well as guaranteed jobs running the cap and trade market...a handy nest-feathering scheme for them too (nothing is more treacherous than a wealthy socialist ;-)

It sure would be nice if we all did what is sensible and simple while we thought of all these wild future schemes...biofuel is a great concept when viewed in the "reduce, reuse, recycle" mindset. Using up thousands of acres to grow switchgrass for the sole purpose of making ethanol to put in cars is asinine, but so is building a solar array in the desert the size of Phoenix compared to making pig poop into electricity, which would have otherwise polluted waterways and released much more damaging methane into the atmosphere. Bonus is that the byproduct of creating electricity with pig poop is a quality, much more eco friendly fertiliser to *increase* food production.

But then that doesn't create scarcity which can be used to hold power over a population, nor does it advance the socialist cause of wealth redistribution. Also the concept is too simple there must be a catch...to get big government/corporate buy in a solution must be complex, intrusive, widespread and expensive.

You are wrong. It is illegal to fix most proprietary software yourself. The EULA for most closed softwats, including all Microsoft's propritary software, prohibits all reverse engineering by end users. You could issue a binary patch if you wanted perhaps, but creating that patch would violate license agreements and be illegal under copyright law.

These long standing flaws in free software are not there because of the development model, they were eventually found because of it--people eventually looked hard enough for them. Closed software in widespread use may...no DOES... contain flaws of this magnitude. It is just that the POTENTIAL number of eyes is limited in closed software, and most if not all of those eyes belong to people who have a disincentive to reveal bugs.

I agree there, especially if you are coming from the purgatory of VB6 or .NET line-of-business apps, and there are good frameworks out there.

The original poster does want to know about traditional client-server, and there is a Python business application framework that is a closer fit: Tryton

It is not web centric and has a GTK based client, although there is integration with Flask for web based applications (the Nereid module) and a big push on for a full fledged web client alternative to the GTK client (plans are to give it a "material design" look and leverage all the best tools and practices etc).

It has a very extensive API so if the provided front ends do not suit your needs you can make a front end tailored specifically to your needs and leverage Tryton for the model, business rules, workflows and such. The database of choice is PostgreSQL, though you can implement SQLite or MySQL I think. ERPNEXT I think is limited (or was when I last looked) to MySQL and seemed to lack in documentation and testing, but it might be simpler if you can live with web front ends.

Hope this helps...

WINE is NOT emulation. The name was not chosen just because it is a clever reverse acronym. Emulation implies that there is translation going on at the binary instruction level. An emulator system like MESS takes binary executables from a completely different system, such as an old 8 bit Z80 or 6502 based home computer, and interprets them one instruction at a time by translating on the fly into native instructions and hardware calls.

WINE does none of that. With WINE the windows executable runs directly without any interpretation and translation, like any other binary executable does in Linux. Wine merely provides an environment of libraries and hooks and helper programs to the .exe file to handle all the numerous windows specific function calls. Merely is not really accurate i suppose, since wine re implements a large part of the windows os to do its job. But is DOES NOT EMULATE. You could not make an ARM build of WINE and use it to run a typical .exe, since it is x86 binary and the system would be ARM and WINE executes the .exe natively.

As such, WINE is more accurately described as a windows compatible operating system environment, more like DR DOS as an MS DOS Alternative rather than MESS emulating an old Spectrum.

How this pertains to AMDs drivers i am not certain. WINE i think would have nothing to do with the windows drivers...am i correct in assuming wine provides equivalents to GDI and directx and other graphics library calls to make an .exe run and those WINE libraries use linux drivers to interact with hardware? I've not tried to install windows drivers of any kind into WINE, just used it to run a few windows apps on occasion. If i need to do anything involving significant windows work i use KVM or virtualbox (all my computers run a Linux os, usually Debian, and my need for windows is small enough that i only need windows occasionally, but since it is to support industrial automation Using software that won't work using WINE and should be used under quarantine, virtualisation works very well)

So whether you use wine or not, good linux support is probably important in a video driver. I am not a big gamer so i don't bother with catalyst, but the open amd driver is very reliable for me, plays video very well and for what 3d I have done it has been alright, as good as or better than intel anyways.

That is why i selected amd for my current machine...i avoid the closed drivers and when i looked at the open driver situation nvidia was quite a bit behind intel and amd for reliability and performance and vendor support. Perhaps if i was looking for peak 3d performance i would have picked differently, but closed drivers have ALWAYS caused me more trouble than open, on any OS platform, and i go with reliability over performance when i can.

My Jeep has a QNX based touchscreen that is very responsive and fast and reliable, plus it had physical knobs, switches and buttons for climate control and radio as a backup. The backup radio controls are on the steering wheel. I can change the station or audio track, adjust the volume and answer or make handsfree calls and use cruise control without taking hands off the steering wheel. Climate control knobs are logical and nicely sized so they can be operated without taking eyes off the road.

The Ford Explorer i rented had miserable controls. Slow confusing touchscreen and the "physical" climate control buttons were capacitive touch points. Ford should be sued for that. I rented that Ford in the winter -20 weather and had to take my gloves off to turn up the heat. Very annoying!

Two reasons i got a Jeep instead of the Ford. The above was one. And second, for my model year the jeep grand cherokee and the jeep patriot had better reliability records than the similarly equipped ford escape and explorer. The in laws bought a ford around the same time and have spent considerably more on repairs and maintenance than i have on my jeep. As a chrysler brand there is a perception of unreliability but specific models are average to very good so they can be a good used choice if you research.

That said, ford has worked hard to improve its reliability, and ditching mytouch sounds promising so i may consider them again some time.

Pot does not affect reflexes the way alcohol does, though I do believe it affects perception enough to be dangerous to drive at elevated concentrations in the body. Even someone who is totally baked NEVER stumbles around and slurs speech the way a drunk person does, but such a person certainly doesn't exhibit good enough judgement to operate a vehicle.

I followed a stoned driver to her home one evening way back when..i was invited over. That experience convinced me driving stoned is a very bad idea. This person took a "creative" route home, changed lanes randomly, drove 65km/h on a 100km/h freeway, tapped the brakes to the tune on the radio at one point, used the turn signals randomly...there was most definitely an impact on driving skills. Plus she invited *me* over, which in itself probably said something about her impaired judgement ;-). If I were to replay those events i would have given her a ride home and worried about getting her car later...

Just because you are not physically impaired by a drug does not mean you are not impaired, and just because you are not speeding does not mean you are not a danger. A stoned driver has no judgement skills and in one way is like a drunk person; his or her recollections of events while impaired are skewed. Other drugs may even make your reaction times better but severely impair judgement. Drivers on cocaine, heroin or meth have caused mayhem because of their erratic mental state.

The most dangerous form of impaired driving, in fact, is not physical impairment and does not involve any chemical impairment at all...that would be texting while driving. When a driver texts in a moving vehicle that person still has full physical abilities and quick reactions, however judgement is severely compromised due to the distraction. Talking without hands free is almost as bad. Distracted drivers behave very much like an amplified version of a stoned driver.

Driving stoned is illegal for a good reason and should remain that way...just because other impairment is worse doesn't mean it is ok. By all means, if you want to kick back and have a toke go ahead, not judging anyone for that, but a person should take some responsibility when driving out of consideration to others. Put away the mobile, get some rest, don't be drunk, don't be stoned, don't be high. If you can't do all of those, make alternative transportation plans.

The sarcasm on this site is usually a bit more obvious. Needless to say...or maybe not...Debian is the most forked linux distribution on the planet. Its the prison b!tch of distros ;-)