My connections the last six years:
100/100 fiber
60/60 fiber
70/10(?) cable
25/5 cable

I used to envy the US unlimited dial-up. Then the cable as we were on crap ADSL. These days, not so much. Here in Norway the median broadband connection is now 20 Mbit/s and the mean 28 Mbit/s and no, we're less densely populated than the US. Over the next year there'll be major gigabit rollouts as well, we're not slowing down but rather accelerating.

Mainly that it was big in Europe and they used pay per minute to bleed you dry. Nothing wrong with the technology as such, then again I've been on dial-up, ISDN, DSL, cable and fiber with roughly the same stability assuming you had a properly buried copper/coax/fiber line. That said these days I'd say 10 Mbit is the least I'd want.

Actually, the stick is the fact that Gimp and some other notable software now depend on systemd. I have no idea why an image manipulation application needs any particular init daemon, but that is the case.

Laziness, in my case. I've just upgraded with each new version, no crapware has been installed and the ads... I don't spend any time in the uTorrent UI, I don't understand how they make money. I launch torrents and is gone, occasionally I check if something done but it's just open -> scoll list -> yes, launch file or no, oh well. I literally can't remember any product or service they've had an advertisement for. Before that I used Azureus Vuze, but it turned into such a horrible mess. I'm sure there's other alternatives but I haven't seen any reason to bother.

Interestingly enough, 15.04 is deep into the Beta status and due for release next month. A major change, such as swapping out the init daemon, should be done in Alpha, and far before any Beta release. Certainly not in the month before a release!

Why is everything connected to systemd pushed out in such a hurry? Why isn't systemd getting proper time for review?

Here is the Ubuntu 15.04 release schedule:
https://wiki.ubuntu.com/VividV...

That is pretty much what happened to the space industry, until SpaceX came along. And until SpaceX came along, nobody would have believed that space could be done both more cheaply _and_ more reliably.

If the two of us ever get into a fight to the death, I'll gladly be the loser walking away.

There have been a few proposals recently to abolish SIMs. They were created back in the days of rented carphones so that people could move their phone number and contacts between phones easily. Now, they basically serve the same purpose as a WiFi password. It wouldn't be too difficult to provide the keying material in a QR code or similar so that when you get a new phone you just photograph it and have an app provide it to the baseband processor.

Carriers are very hostile to this, because if the SIM isn't a physical device there's no constraint on the number that can exist in one phone - you could easily have an app that would select the best rate from a dozen or so pre-pay virtual sims for whatever country you happened to be in.

That's not what I'm talking about, because it lacks the "distribution" part. What I'm talking about is what level of detachment is necessary to say that these bits of software depend on each other, but they're not derivative of each other. And thus the GPL wouldn't apply, even if you distribute them together.

Haven't you heard that NFC is now the hip, cool thing? That is so last year.

Somewhere else, maybe... at the border crossing they have near infinite power to mess with you by insisting on an extended identity, security and luggage check and usually to detain you for a short while too for almost no pretext at all. In fact your "defective phone" is now a possible terrorist bomb, let's just put you in a holding cell until we can determine it's not.

Actually the ugliest part of the GPL which is clear as ink in law is what - if anything - makes inter-module communication derivative. The theory of derivative works mainly involve sections or elements reappearing in the derivative, like a composite made from a photo. It doesn't cover interfaces where independently developed code calls each other at all. If I wrap a GPL library into a web service, is calling it derivative? If the answer is yes, the GPL is extremely viral. If the answer is no, the GPL is in big trouble. Which is why you never get a straight answer.

This directly links in with the "mere aggregation" clause, if you can for example distribute a distro that has an application that sends mail and a mail server without those being derivative, can you also distribute proprietary software and this web service? Your software needs it, this software happens to provide it but it could in theory be provided by a different implementation. I'm sure Stallman says no, but it's entirely unclear to me if a judge would agree.

And it's silly. You can give an 18yo (around here) that just got his license a Ferrari, that's legal. You can give him a 3500 kg van + 750 kg trailer, that's legal. Of course you shouldn't drive a car you can't handle, but learning it on your own would be no worse than a lot of the other "self-learning" on the road.

The main reason to have pilots is that you have someone with "skin in the game", not because they're actually good backups. Like in your linked case there's several major pilot errors that were only possible because the safety systems were disabled due to a 30 second glitch in the sensor. After the sensor recovered the pilots were given multiple warnings about what was happening but instead caused such a massive stall that the computer refused to believe the sensors, going silent as the pilots slammed the planed into the ocean killing all on board.

If the computer had taken a HAL 9000 with "I can't let you do that, Dave" and taken the plane out of the stall once it recovered they'd be alive. If the computer had been forced to carry on despite the faulty sensor, it would still have engine power and altitude to infer that air speed is wrong and keep the plane flying and it would almost certainly have done a better job. They died because the default was in any out of the ordinary operation to let the humans take over. It's a better poster child for a self-flying plane than against it. But since the pilots paid with their own lives they become the lightning rod for the anger, while a self-flying plane crashing would be become a corporate nightmare.