Well, not just one young arrogant engineer, also most of the maintainers of the major Linux distros in the world.

If it's really a bad idea, the blame doesn't really fall on Poettering. Many young, arrogant engineers have built things that were stupid, and their things got ignored by the world. Some smaller number of young, arrogant engineers have built things that were stupid but were able to convince their PHBs that they weren't stupid and they got deployed. I don't think that's how I'd characterize the leadership at Red Hat (I never worked there, but I have good friends who did), but let's suppose that they were clueless and that's why they deployed Poettering's stupid idea.

But then how do you explain why so many others looked at it, experimented with it for a few years, and then decided to adopt it, and even extend it?

The systemd opponents are loud and forceful on social media. The people who actually build the systems, however, disagree. And It's not just one or two groups who are somehow beholden to Poettering, nor is it people who don't know anything or have no technical stake in the decision.

You might want to consider whether you're living up to your nick here.

I don't personally care that much. I find it mildly annoying that the old scripts my finger muscle memory still wants to type by default don't always work... but honestly I rarely need them any more, because my systems Just Work. And I have to consider the possibility that systemd is part of the reason Linux requires so much less maintenance than it used to. There are multiple contributors here. A lot of it is that drivers have gotten a lot better and other aspects of the system have matured (like the audio subsystem :^)).

But given its broad adoption by nearly all open source and commercial Linux distros, Occam's razor says that it's probably better than sysvinit. Or BSD init. Or Upstart. Or OpenRC, or... <insert favorite system manager here>.

If you think software never breaks, I have a bunch of 5.25" disks somewhere that want to have an argument with you.

It's a complete strawman to argue that physical things break. If I buy music, digitally, that won't break and yet nobody sane would expect that the band can at some random time in the future say "we revoke all our music". I can also think of a number of physical things that unless I mistreat them will easily survive me and three generations down the line.

This is not about replacements, it's about taking the product sold away but keeping the money.

Yes, train your drivers better and have laws that take the bad ones off the road.

That's why the US has a road fatality rate of 14 per 100,000 pop and the UK has 2.6 per 100,000 pop. Your western countries average around 5 per 100,000 pop (Canada is 4.7, Australia 4.5, France 4.9, Germany 3.3) and we're only really beaten by the Nordic nations who are insanely safe. Before you whine, the per mile statistics aren't any better and the only reason the US drives more is because you won't walk to the shops.

So this means not only having standards for getting a license, also a standard for keeping one. This means punishing DUI, distracted driving (read: morons on the phone), et al.

Automated cars won't fix the problem with the US because the problem isn't technological, it's social. Americans feel entitled to drive the way they do, which is dangerously. In Europe, they aren't any better than human drivers, in many cases they're worse.

The big problem is it's easy to make a device that looks for open WIFI networks in order to connect to the mothership. This is made even easier by the fact that a lot of modern WiFi routers allow for WPS, which often lets you connect without having to enter a password. Sure you can disable it on your side... but what about your neighbours.

Short term solution is not to buy devices that have Wifi built in (I'm looking for a new washing machine and it looks like I'm limited to the cheap models), long term solution requires legislation by a large number of countries (erm... this pretty much means it has to be started by the EU, then adopted by everyone else) but much like GDPR they'll fight it every step of the way.

So that means Tiktok is 150% AI slop... Yes the maths was done by AI on that one.

And what stops you from making a seperate license to play on the servers provided by the company that is based on good behaviour and/or monthly subscription fees?

This is what the Stop Killing Games movement is also about: Sure, we understand that eventually you wind down the online servers, no problem. But if I paid for a game, why should you have the right to disable it? With no other things I buy can you at any time later come to my house and take them back or disable them. Not with my microwave, not with my shower, not with my lights.

Appropriateness of the response to the emergency is part of the legal considerations. Congress granted the power for a reason. Taking that and assuming it means arbitrary power is not operating within the law, not for Trump, not for Biden.

In what way? Please correct me.

Bah. If a human driver increased their safety and reliability by avoiding certain situations, would you call them a worse driver for it?

They provide full access to the regulators, and they've allowed academic researchers full access. Putting it all online would be more transparent, but they're a business and they have up and coming competitors.

Do you honestly believe that mass debt forgiveness -- after COVID was already over! -- was a necessary emergency response to the pandemic? Suspending payments (and interest) during the pandemic made perfect sense, and that was not struck down. I don't recall that it was even challenged.

No, the debt forgiveness clearly had nothing to do with the (already-ended) emergency, it was just an attempt to skirt the law, and the courts were quite correct to strike it down as executive overreach. If Biden wanted to do that, he should have lobbied Congress to change the law. He didn't do that, of course, because he knew Congress would refuse -- even though his party held both houses.

Your comment mischaracterizes what has happened. The Supreme Court has absolutely bent over backwards to let Trump do what he wants in temporary rulings, including jumping in to to stay lower-court orders that no previous court would even have responded to. But their on-the-merits rulings, when they have to issue a full opinion, have been much less friendly to Trump. There have been some incredibly bad ones (e.g. immunity) but Trump has lost more than he has won in SCOTUS final judgements.

So, "People With Disabilities Don't Exist" then?

My father was recently paralyzed by Guillain-Barré, so I'll let him know, thanks.

What, the best you can do is bring up a show that went off the air fifty year ago?

And even then, when Robert Young did TV commercials for coffee, he was identified as "Robert Young," not as Doctor Marcus Welby, and they didn't pretend it was real. (In fact, the line from a series of advertisement of around that era, "I'm not a doctor but I play one on TV," is still a meme today.)

Buy indie games.

It's only the big players who have these delusions.

I'm not saying the right answer is to get a refund. The right answer is to not make the license revokable.

For the theater comparison: If the theatre would invalidate my ticket and throw me out mid-movie, you can be sure that I'd ask for a refund. And in any sane jurisdiction, I'd get it.

Just don't buy these crappy licenses. Retro-gaming is booming for a very good reason.

And, if you're looking for another reason not to buy -- the way hardware prices are going, retro emulators are probably all we'll be able to play soon because nobody will be able to afford the GPUs and RAM needed to play the next wave of new release games anyway.