The libertarian response to this in several replies has been "how dare anyone tell us what to do on my own land". I do have sympathy with this view. However the abiding principal of liberalism (i.e. traditional European meaning) or libertarianism is that one should be allowed to do what one likes which does not disproportionately damage other people. In many suburbs the constant loud buzz of the leaf-blowers is some weeks difficult to put up with. I would prefer the ban was on noise rather than a particular type of engine, but I would be so happy were my town to implement this same rule.

Of course, by the same reasoning, one ought not to do things which damages the climate for others either, but some of us conveniently don't believe that's happening.

There was no Brexit manifesto. There could not be. Brexit had broad support and opposition from every party, every part of the country, all sectors of the community. Nobody was in a position to make or extract promises. It was a one question referendum.

I bought a cheap SSD headless PC with 4 network interfaces and run plain old Devuan (Debian without systemd) on it. I tried all the packaged router software such as pfSense but it's actually easier and less learning to do just to use the already built-in iptables etc etc software. Rock solid and safe.

That UBI implemented properly - replacing all the other schemes - would only cost 20-30% of GDP seems a great and fair outcome to me. In most mixed economy social welfare states (as found in Europe for example) the cost of all the benefits (unemployment, housing, pensions) is around this level anyway. What a wonderful thing it would be to throw all those petty bureaucrats out on the street and restore autonomy to people. Everyone gets enough for a room and food and clothing and the TV and Internet and the odd movie or game of bowls and - who knows? books! And if you take an odd job here or there you're not breaking the benefits rules, and no set of self-important ne'er-do-wells is monitoring you. Of course income tax relief for the low paid must go also. That some experiments in UBI were no such thing is admitted in the summary and the article! I think the author had made up his mind beforehand.

Such authority you write with, not all correct, and contradicting some things which are correct.

C'mon Slashdot! You can do better than this!

I remember the Samba delay, but I think all distributions have their errors and their faults. That you find one with Devuan is firstly inevitable and secondly of small consequence. Any other distro would be subject to the same criticism. More generally, abstracting ourselves, the discussion here, this topic at Slashdot, and in the whole Linux systemd debate is one about progressiveness. People keep on thinking very arrogantly that the number of problems can be significantly reduced. What actually stops this being possible is the wholesale turning over of established paradigms. What this does is usually to introduce more problems than are fixed, and when these in turn are addressed you end up in the same semi-satisfactory situation - an operating system annoying in some ways. No real progress.

I don't deny that there can be some progress, that things can get better, it's rather that there is an illusion that there can be great progress. The mostly small, quite manageable manageable, known and well understood problems in pre-systemd Linux have been substituted with a different set some of issues some of which are huge, not manageable, not well known and not well understood in Linux+systemd.

The same happens here with the wholesale destruction of a known interface to the network provided by Unix. I see no list of well defined problems produced by those substituting the known with their own arrogantly devised code. Were there such a list then they could be addressed. Instead we get some bored young bright and arrogant new kid foisting solutions on us like Pottering.

There is a Unix philosophy which the new pretenders seem either not to know or to ignore. This philosophy got us to where we are today. One tool for one task. Loose coupling. KISS. These are fundamental engineering principles - all disciplines - ignorance of which betrays any deep understanding of what makes good elegant design.

Devuan is a most useful up(!)grade from Debian which is systemd free and has a mindset that will resist this nonsense too. I'm using it on embedded devices, servers and as my desktop environment - the only exception being my Android/Chromebook devices. http://devuan.org/

Magical thinking. Perhaps they could sell a skull cap for my cat? Wouldn't want any processing power going to waste.

Hmm, doesn't follow. Physical proximity doesn't help much with online attacks.

The privileged are far more likely to be diagnosed mentally ill. Being a PhD student is a prime indicator of privilege. To think those stuck in menial dead end jobs are not more likely to be mentally ill is merely not to properly consider the question.

In the [UK] The Guardian today https://www.theguardian.com/sc... several letters cast expert light on this highly exaggerated report. For example, blind trials are difficult as anti-depressants have side effects which allow participants to guess whether they are getting the placebo or not. That the tablets considered(!) most effective happen to be those with the greatest side effects also casts doubt - why should that be?

Price is a function of supply & demand. Simples. There is always some pundit prepared to tell you why, like many here. But even in more regular markets, usually nobody knows why. Currencies fluctuate against one another in some seemingly random walk, and usually nobody really knows why. And it all depends on one's perspective. When gold crashes against the reference USD does not instead USD rise against gold? Given the puffed up amount of fiat currency is not the rise in the bitcoin price this last year merely a reflection of an inevitable price inflation the fear of which drives the wise into bitcoin? Well, I'm not sure I believe that myself, but my once modest holding of bitcoin was made because of despair of anywhere safe to park a little surplus wealth. And that collapse in bitcoin price of which we write here? Already recovered, almost. Bitcoin might be a bubble but the hot air bubble here, this topic, is something you cannot sell before it collapses.

Devuan is a fork of Debian which is systemd free. It just works for me. I've moved my servers to it. I am still vainly hoping that Ubuntu will announce it is abandoning systemd but I don't think that is going to happen so my desktop has already moved to Devuan & my laptop is going that way too. There are minor issues with the existing sysv init system which could have been improved a little, and improvements had arrived incrementally before systemd. The update-rc.d tool now takes notice of special comments in the init.d scripts so as to allow for parallel execution, and for dependencies, and the crafting of init.d scripts is not a black art: Nothing was broken. Having said that there is no need to have only one init system and various are available and Devuan supports them all except systemd. I warmly recommend Devuan. Stop complaining about systemd, leave it behind! https://devuan.org/

Ad hominem. Play the ball not the man. Feel free to make a substantive point any time you wish.