I have(had) been a user of Linux since 2004(Fedora 2 was the first distribution I tried). It sucked relearning everything I knew on Windows but with more experience I got adept at Linux, even worked as a part time sysadmin for a while and was much more productive on it than windows. But now Linux is incorporating the same things that I hated in Windows, yes I mean systemd. Not only the monolithic design but having to relearn everything I've known about managing it. I hardly use the GUI except for a browser(which is why I'm on fluxbox), it just baffled me how much effort it took to modify udevd to automount a USB stick(creating a simple udevd rule leads to a race condition because of systemd) and that is when I decided to move to FreeBSD, I know it is going to work the same way in 5 years. All the software I use is already available for FreeBSD with the exception of android-studio, but I can get used to eclipse for android work which is rare, vim suffices for most of my development needs(python, php, erlang). As long as Lennart Poettering is calling the shots I won't have anything to do with Linux, but I suspect by the time he leaves it will be too late.

As a Qt developer, I've used(and developed for) KDE extensively. Although my primary DE is fluxbox, I always recommend KDE for a beginner and IMO it is the best Linux DE. Sucks that it too is following Gnome wrt eye-candy something fluxbox can't and won't do.

It is indeed a sad day when a site has to declare their affiliation before posting a story.
What's next?
This election is being contested by the most unpopular candidates ever. Disclaimer: We are pro democracy
Current petroleum usage is leading us to a point of no return wrt climate change. Disclaimer: We do not condone pro nuclear groups.
Malware rampant across all major operating systems. Disclaimer: We do not condemn any particular operating system.
Black people are more likely to get killed in altercations with police. Disclaimer: We do not believe in race disparity.

The sad thing is I can continue this for thousands of lines. Slashdot after proving you had been sold out, you really need to say you will be "politically correct" according to your overlords?

The issue here is politics, Narendra Modi is sucking up to the US since he came into power . Sucking up to US corporations is a part of it. He tried really hard to get Facebook's 'Free Basics' in India until the Telecom Regulatory Authority(TRAI) shot it down favoring net neutrality. Now the focus is Android development. This will be played by the media 24/7, getting support from young voters in particular, Google will get benefits from the government(tax breaks for this 'training', maybe cheap land for their offices etc.). I've gone through Android development documentation, I doubt it can be made simpler, so this definitely is not about education.

All this while the country's faced drought for 2 straight years and the farmers are committing suicides in mass numbers, also the education budget has been cut in the face of fierce opposition. When asked his opinion on such initiatives, Amartya Sen(Nobel Prize winner, Economics) had this to say: "I doubt the efficacy of such initiatives when more than half of children in the country do not have a school to go to"

While there are so many things wrong with, I can't overstate how it would affect sites with user submitted content. Every website would have to be moderated and not like remove objectionable content but cannot post until moderated.
Wanna attack like a website, keep posting graphic content to it. If the site has has a moderation team, this provides a simple method for a DOS attack by oveloading the moderation system. Also since the moderation cannot be automated, all you need is a access to some IPs(depends on size of moderation team and assuming the site blocks an IP whenever it finds graphic content originating from this IP), bonus you also have generated complaints from users without static IPs who now cannot post anything. Running a blog with comments? Don't have a day job or sleep
And if you depend on removing content after submission, good luck on keeping your rating. Sites like Slashdot that don't usually remove content are fucked .

Google blocking torrent searches: using 'filetype:torrent ' gives me more search results than any other search engine, and the DMCA bullshit is not by google. If a search result is blocked you can see at the bottom of the page exactly why. As for politics, it depends on the number of search results based on a query. In your mind 'ted cruz lying' may be equivalent to 'hillary clinton crook' but the results say otherwise. Also Google did not bow down to China's demands for censorship, depriving themselves of one of the largest markets.
It's strange to see this article on /. where people generally understand how algorithms work, and the search results are generally independent of human manipulation. The article being accepted just goes to show how far slashdot has fallen. Is it still called news for nerds?

From bash.org:
<Tom> i put my username in as tom pocock, and when they sent me the confirmation email, my login name is Tom PoMrWinky

How deluded are you? I work as a system admin in India with a company that has most of it's clients in US/Europe/Australia and I can't use that excuse. Of course you were using a hyperbole but it isn't even close to reality. The reason the quality suffers when you are outsourcing is *not* because of the competence of the workers it's because they don't really have an incentive to perform. We outsourced some of work to US(To be clearer it was a US based company that we bought out) and guess what the 2 projects with them are 2 years overdue. And here's the kicker they used company funds for personnel benefit and now we are suing them (or trying to, I don't know the details since I'm not in management)

Now we need a spelling Nazi too.

Seconded.
The only time I didn't(couldn't) follow that was when I was working in Dell and got an email from the VP. The guy's name was Dick Hunter.

Working in Dell tech support I got some experience with such folks.
I got a call from a guy who wanted a replacement for his keyboard and mouse. I read his previous history. He owned a Dell dimension 8400(P4, 512 mb ram) which at the time he bought it was top of the line. After 4-5 years(no warranty) he called in and said there was smoke coming out of his PC. Now I have no idea how a PC that worked fine for 4 years would suddenly catch fire but it was replaced with an XPS 360(Quad core, 2 gigs RAM, 512M graphics card and other modern hardware). Now he tells me he needs his keyboard and mouse replaced too since his new computer didn't have a PS/2 port. And I had to send those.
I got a call from this guy who claimed his monitor wasn't working. Looking into the history I found it had been replaced 6 times in the past 2 weeks(I figured he had been getting the replacement monitors but never returned the old one). I told him I would need to send a technician to look at it as the problem seemed to be elsewhere that's when he hung up.
The best refund calls I got were people who bought computers loaded with Vista wanting to go back to XP which was not available. Dell had to create a special exchange policy just for these cases.
In my opinion 99% of people do not try to abuse the system. The question is whether it's worth inconveniencing them to keep a check on the free loaders.

Maybe once the internet is truly broken it will only be the geeks using it using encryption/tor/vpns etc just like when I first learnt what computers were(around 1995). And since the population of people using the internet will be so low it wouldn't be beneficial to come after them.

THIS. everyday I think about wth am I doing except writing some software for a rich bastard get richer. I wish I knew how to do something that actually may matter. But I am weak and cave into the belief of having a 'good' lifestyle. I wish I was doing something meaningful/

How is that a 'loophole'? GPL is only meant to prevent you from distributing someone else's work under a different license. Using it for your own purposes is fine.
As for closing that 'loophole' every company that uses a single piece of GPL'ed software would have to release all their code, that includes mine and I'm pretty sure I'd be out of a job if that were to happen. If we made GPL4 like what you imply, any software using that would die a quick death since nobody(by nobody I mean organizations which bring in the money) will be using it.

Maybe this would mean only the technically inclined would be able to communicate freely using some distributed DNS+encryption etc. I'm not saying if that is a good thing or bad but we definitely are making anti-progress.