I know, it's shocking. And it's not the only case. Not too long ago we had this one:

The president of a major country
Thought he was on a mission from god
To use military force
To spread democracy in the middle east based on the conspiracy theory
That the president of Iraq was behind the 9/11 attacks

Of course he was immediately removed from office because he was

[sethmeisterg]: absolutely not compatible with being employed at such a sensitive post.

I mean, people could have gotten killed over this. Also, the press did a great job dismantling his conspiracy theory. All the journalists involved in this good work got promoted. The middle east is a political paradise now and the ex-president was sentenced to only exist in the past tense.

He was married with kids and had a comfortable house in a New Jersey suburb. According to those who know him, Gelinas was a pleasant guy who was into normal stuff: Game of Thrones, recreational soccer, and so on.

Really thought the guy died or something when I read this.

Bugs do happen, but what really shocked people was his reaction (https://github.com/systemd/systemd/issues/6237).

Let's look at Linux stake holders' view on systemd:

• Regular users shouldn't care too much, probably don't even notice.
• Advanced users (admins, geeks, e.g.) are divided on the issue, to put it mildly.
• Developers get a standardized user space system services interface, probably makes their lives easier.
• Distro maintainers get uniform system structure and service/machine management. Makes their job somewhat easier for now, much easier after competing init systems/system standards have been abandoned (which they largely will). And maybe makes their jobs obsolete once everything is so standardized that people ask why we need all these "distros" again.
• Corporations absolutely love it. The good old "rule the platform, rule everything" game Microsoft played with Windows and Google played with the browser.

Conclusion: the majority of stakeholders doesn't understand why they should have an opinion and those with influence get what they want. Linux is just part of the real world.

...or LAOD (not necessarily excluding myself), apart from other good reasons not to adopt new tech.

Rust's ownership model is very useful, but forces developers to

1. a) understand a new way of thinking about computation
2. b) change their coding habits the hard way, by "wrestling the compiler"

A considerable subset of them just won't, because LAOD. The rest would, but can't, because a) and b) cost time, which costs money. This wouldn't be a problem if the IT industry was a sane field of business, which it isn't. It has managed to not be bothered much by liability law and the general idea of good engineering for a while now: management doesn't understand why they should invest in a) and b) when they can get away with bullshit. This is changing, but the people and the culture are still in place, a mostly LAOD place.

If civil engineering worked like IT, newly built structures would come with a long EULA saying that the thing falling over is totally normal and not the architect's and engineer's fault, because calculating structural stability is hard. And then half of the things *would* fall over, and there would be no immediate financial consequences for construction companies.

one of the lesser human beings here. One of those who, according to you, shouldn't have the right to free speech that people in the US enjoy.

> If you really, really want to go to war against Germany again in 50-100 years from now and if you enjoyed the total destruction of Europe by the Nazis or the communist occupation of Eastern Europe, then please continue to insist that Germans should enjoy full freedom and speech, no matter how despicable, and to abolish constitutional safeguards against inner takeover by totalitarians.

Sure, just make bad words illegal and the underlying problems magically disappear. I wish it was that simple. No constitutional safeguard can stop a desperate and disenfranchised population. Like those people in Germany who lost their jobs due to the financial crisis of the late twenties and then had their unenployment benefits cancelled in the name of austerity.

If you really, really want to see the rise of the next Nazis and if you enjoyed the total destruction of Europe, then make sure the next financial crisis devastates people's lives and then hit them with "austerity" and don't forget to dump some more problems on them, like masses of refugees from a never-ending colonial war. Oh wait, you are already doing that. And then, when their jobs go away and the rent is going up, which apparently has started to happen in Germany and Sweden partly due to unplanned mass imigration, tell them that their real problem is their xenophobia. The Nazis are waiting for them with open arms and will be very happy when you censor them, because then they can paint themselves as prosecuted martyrs.

Ok, so Intel landed on the shady side of the performance/security tradeoff. That probably kept CPU prices artificially high for you for a while because it helped their market position. But don't worry, soon you will be allowed to give them more money for new processors which are less vulnerable. I'm sure this is the right incentive to never let something like this happen again.

Also, how should they know their CPUs have so many problems? NOBODY knew, apart from some geeks who write papers nobody understands. Especially this one CS professor (U.S. based, security focus) who tweeted a slide from a talk he gave years ago at an Intel event. Warned about all this out-of-order and speculative branching stuff, who was that again? I'm sure they are all just crazy conspiracy theorists. The government should really do something about them.

Lineage OS with minimal Gapps
FDroid app store
DuckDuckGo for searches
OsmAnd for navigation with OpenStreetMap
K9-Mail
...
Unless the Android system itself leaks data to Google (which the XDA dev crowd would probably have noticed), I don't see a problem. The setup is less comfortable than standard Android, but if that's not acceptable, there are apparently ways to install apps from the play store on it.

Wow, this is the second piece of clickbaity nonsense today. Not as bad as the Falcon rocket thing, but pretty annoying. In retrospect, the headlines kind of gave it away, but me-monkey clicked anyway. How about a service that lets people tag headlines as clickbait and learns from them, like a mail spam filter?

If the "breakthrough" ever happens, Linux will be ruled by the one great unifying system services interface that does everything I don't need or already have something else for, because that's what the "big names" think of as compatibility. I mean systemd of course, or "Central Services" for those who watched Brazil. The result would be a limitation in choices (of desktops e.g.) and an increase in well-hidden complexity, causing security problems. That would be ok for non-technical users, because they don't want choice that comes with effort and responsibility and they have surrendered to the dangers of uncontrollable complexity anyway. To play well with them, Linux would have to become a slightly less invasive Windows or a slightly more awkward pro-bono MacOS.
I don't want that. I want to control what my machine does and that means only installing what I need and keeping it simple. That's why I'm migrating to Void Linux now.

It helps to protect Intel's valuable intellectual property called ME from people like us. Don't listen to this barefoot Hippie Stallman from the FSF, he just wants the unwashed masses to have actual control over the machines they payed for.

The sun is a star, and the light-bending capacity of that thing has been demonstrated quite a while ago. Also, proving something to somebody dead is not possible. Are these headlines intentional bait for wisesh*ts?

Maybe my english isn't good enough, but if "dynamic" means "dynamically typed" here, then the sentence as a whole doesn't mean too much. WebAssembly (wasm) is clearly a target for mostly statically typed, compiled languages. And future plans point to direct access to the page DOM and other Web APIs. If this becomes real, I will happily forget about JavaScript for ever..

Nim compiles to C and then to wasm via emscripten. My favorite among the newcomers with automatic memory management, mainly because it's simple and offers pretty powerful metaprogramming and can do functional when necessary.

MS made a deal with Munich's mayors office to move its german headquarters to Munich. Wonder what the other side of that deal was...

The freedom to write programs that run pretty much everywhere via the web must not come with being forced to use one language, JavaScript, regardless of how "good" this language is. With asm.js and, hopefully very soon, WebAssembly, we have two compilation targets that should work for most programming languages. Implementing compilers will be quick once the WebAssembly-backend for LLVM really works with browsers. We can then use any langage we like to "script" our web apps:

code in your fav lang --> AST --> LLVM representation --> WASM src --> |(interwebs) --> |(browser) --> WASM binary

Diversity means freedom. And if we push it a little further, we could even end the "spaces vs tabs" and the "curlies vs. indentation blocks" and all the other endless AST representation discussions to rest:

code in your fav lang syntax flavor --> code in your fav lang --> AST ...

All it takes is Editors which support "syntax styles" to present the AST of a language, just like css presents HTML. Hell, in Atom you could probably even do this with an actual css. Oh, and it would take developers who understand that we actually code an AST, not spaces and tabs and curlies and stuff.

P.S.: plz do not reply if you don't know what AST means :-)