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Lennart Poettering: Open Source Community "Quite a Sick Place To Be In"
An anonymous reader writes "Free software programmer Lennart Poettering has been part of his fair share of controversy in the open source community, and his latest essay may raise the most eyebrows yet. Poettering takes on the idea that the community is one big happy family and has some harsh words for the loudest and most obnoxious members. He says in part: "I don't usually talk about this too much, and hence I figure that people are really not aware of this, but yes, the Open Source community is full of a#@&oles, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets. I get hate mail for hacking on Open Source. People have started multiple 'petitions' on petition web sites, asking me to stop working (google for it). Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!). Just the other day, some idiot posted a 'song' on youtube, a creepy work, filled with expletives about me and suggestions of violence. People post websites about boycotting my projects, containing pretty personal attacks. On IRC, people /msg me sometimes, with nasty messages, and references to artwork in 4chan style. And there's more. A lot more."
Lennart is 110% correct, but the rampant, mostly unjustified hatred of systemd is going to discredit what he says.
What am I kidding? The "open source" community stopped caring about the effects of their actions years ago. Much easier to just insult Microsoft (with added dollar signs) than worry about your own problems.
This happens online a lot. It's bad, it's stupid, most of us oppose it, but as GamerGate shows, it can do real harm.
If you've done something to earn that much hate, maybe you ought to take a step back and re-evaluate your position.
He deserves to work for Microsoft.
The same abusive jerk has been after me too. Through some savvy detective work, I figured out his real first name: "Linus"
As soon as I determine his last name I'm going to lay down some serious vengeance upon his ass!
people /msg me sometimes, with nasty messages, and references to artwork in 4chan style. And there's more. A lot more.
I know how you feel, 4chan has destroyed much more than open source, it has destroyed my entire peaceful suburban neighborhood, now my neighbor has decorated his little car with a HUGE Pedo Bear decal all over the car, and no one so far - have reacted to this.
What this world is coming to - is for you and me to decide.
People don't like other people for a whole slew of mostly stupid reasons.
You internet presence causes a lot of those non-verbal cues to get left out. We often say a lot of things, but not all things are weighted equally.
If one would say they are for Gun Rights and Anti-Abortion you could think that they are a right wing nut-job. But if you get the non-verbal communications you may find out that the person is actually far more liberal on most issues except for say those too.
A lot of people have a hard time with gray zones anyways, so they can't really get how a person can have a complex relationship between topics and still be in a particular camp.
If something is so important that you feel the need to post it on the internet... It probably isn't that important.
I haven't like the changes he's caused in Linux, but none of those things are the way one should deal with it. If you don't like where Linux is going, fork things and make it the way you like. These types of actions you'd expect from people with no discernible skills to be able to contribute. If you have skill to contribute, put the work in, if you don't have skills, put some work in and gain them.
He's just butt-hurt that Gentoo won't make systemd it's default init manager.
Buck Feta. You know what to do.
Most of what he's complaining about is undeserved (hiring a hit on him, WTF?) but he's not exactly known to be very diplomatic in his communications. He is, with a heavy hand, changing the fundamental landscape of a lot of people's favorite OS. This is upsetting people, in a big way in some cases. Again, constructive criticism is the way to handle dislike of systemd and his other projects, not death threats or even simple, juvenile insults.
But he shares some of the blame when it comes to the vitriolic nature of systemd discussions. He can't just brush off a large percentage of the community and not expect people to get upset.
What blows my mind is that every single major distribution seems to be hopping on the systemd bandwagon. I'm looking squarely at Debian. The short time systemd (relatively speaking) has been around and has been worked on and debugged does not justify it's inclusion in a system that's known for stability and correctness over latest/greatest.
Oh well, for me it was the kick in the head I needed to finally getting around to 100% embracing *BSD as a server system and not as something to play around with in my free time.
Creationist Textbook Stickers Declared Unconstitutional by CowboyNeal
Well, as someone who seems to pride himself on being unconventional and breaking the status quo, you would think he would understand the position HE put HIMSELF in.
This happens everywhere, I architect'd some stuff for a company using SQL Server and SSRS that was almost free, others in the organization wanted to continue using DB2 and Cognos for millions more $$. Do you really think I had an easy time? I had subtle threats, and plenty of well connected people trying to get rid of me.
So what? If you can't take the heat, keep with convention!
The key difference between non-corporate open source projects and Microsoft or Apple is that companies have HR departments. Problem employees can be dealt with or even fired.
There isn't really an analog in your typical open source community. In fact, smaller open source projects tend to be so grateful for any help that asshole behavior is tolerated -- or even considered the norm. It's a sad state of affairs for the majority of us who want to contribute, but have no interest in dealing with a cesspool of assholes.
There's no -1 for "I don't get it."
This post has been a long time in the making, as Leonart is easily the most hated programmer in Free software, despite being one of the more competant and forward thinking of the bunch, he pulls a disproporiate amount of hate until he has become a running joke. Most of his haters are misguided luddites who are too obessed with the past, and cannot look towards the future.
I am supprised we haven't seen anything like this previous, and I don't know how the man deals with just being leonart poettering.
Yes we care, too bad the bitcoin address isn't in the summary.
Hey now! This is /., the only suckage you're allowed to discuss is /.beta
Dearest Lennart,
You can always go to work for those who adore your thinking - Microsoft and Google.
If it looks like the whole world is hurling itself against you? Maybe your headed the wrong direction into oncoming traffic.
I don't excuse boorishness or violence - but Linus and Alan Cox never got this level of treatment. Not even Hans Reiser for his obtuseness, nor Bruce Perens for his ability to scrap in an argument.
Look at the problem in the mirror. Before your friends need to call an intervention.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
He's defiling everything we hold dear.
Are you sure he doesn't work for Microsoft?
the preceding comment is my own and in no way reflects the opinion of the Joint Chiefs of Staff
UNIX, and Linux, were designed with the concept that the hardware configuration was static during operation. So "startup" and "configuration" occured at the same time. Now that many peripherals hot-plug, that model is obsolete. Many people find it painful to switch to an "everything is dynamic" model, especially since, for many server applications, there is no hot-plugging.
Hence the unhappiness with a redesign.
This is a more general problem with UNIX/Linux. Many programs are designed on the assumption that they read a static configuration file in text format, and will be restarted if the configuration changes. Various hacks have been added to some programs to allow dynamic reconfiguration (often involving sending a signal to the process to tell it to re-read a text file). Real dynamic configuration models usually involve storing the configuration in a database, which a lot of UNIX/Linux types don't like.
He's the developer of Avahi, Pulseaudio, and Systemd, most prominently. These components are standard middleware (userspace programs, usually that run in the background, which provide useful services to make a Linux distro more useful than just providing a terminal). The first two were accepted mostly uncontroversially; I mean, pulseaudio did have some pushback, but systemd has had orders of magnitude more pushback than pulseaudio. Now that the most popular distros ship systemd by default, people who don't like it are railing against both the program and its author(s).
People need to get a life.
calling for a boycot of some software that he wrote is a reasonable thing to do.
the 'song' posted on lkml is not.
I hope the FBI is all over the site trying to collect bitcoins to hire a hitman as that crosses over to outright illegal actions
But by putting it all in one list, LP is trying to make it so that anyone disagreeing with him is lumped in with the people attempting murder. That's also not an acceptable way to engage with those that you disagree with.
David Lang
Comment removed based on user account deletion
This happens online a lot. It's bad, it's stupid, most of us oppose it, but as GamerGate shows, it can do real harm.
This is nothing Like GamerGate which was as much about an educated woman calling a routinely demonised group a bunch of cunts...over and over again with a convoluted version of feminism for money championed by the verge...again.(There was some shit about that woman making a game about depression(Good for her) that got maybe more credit than it deserved, which I am really not sure about(Game about depression even if like a simple choice game is cool) and a sex scandal which I love...but nobody got and clearly by my description neither did I).
This is about making changes to the OS that are viewed as unpopular...ribbonbar, real names in youtube, removing reatures from nautilus. Gnome Shell, the list is endless.
Complain to your distributions!
When someone writes open source software, it is always take it or leave it. Systemd was taken up, because it was the better solution for distros.
Why on earth would you complain about someone adding another choice? Complain about the people not writing alternative packages!
NB: The message above might reflect my opinion right now, but not necessarily tomorrow or next year.
the Open Source community is full of a#@&oles, and I probably more than most others am one of their most favourite targets.
So he's a troll who specializes in trolling trolls. Why are we feeding him?
Do Not Feed The Trolls
Stop-Prism.org: Opt Out of Surveillance
"Lennart, I knew Hans Reiser. Hans Reiser was a friend of mine. Lennart Poettering, you're no Hans Reiser."
For those that don't get the above: ... Reiser was convicted of the first degree murder of his wife, Nina Reiser, who disappeared in September 2006. He subsequently pleaded guilty to a reduced charge of second-degree murder, as part of a settlement agreement that included disclosing the location of his wife's body, revealed to be in a shallow grave near the couple's home."
"Hans Thomas Reiser is an American computer programmer, entrepreneur, and convicted murderer. He is the creator and primary developer of the ReiserFS computer file system, which is contained within the Linux kernel
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/H...
Or, in car analogy terms:
If one guy tailgates you and then passes you on the right, he's an asshole.
If 50 people tailgate you and then pass you on the right, take a goddamn hint.
William of Ockham had no beard. The most likely explanation is that it was chewed off by squirrels every morning.
This guy's victim routine doesn't sound that much different than the anti-gamergate and atheism plus crowd. let's compare..(replying to his full google+ post)
1. Pretending to misunderstand hyperbole as legitimate threats. (the 'fandom' song he mentioned, and his statements about comments made by linus).
2. Labeling criticism of his effort as a systemwide cultural problem (implying all OSS devs are assholes, and he can't even bring himself to type out the word for fear of being 'offensive'). Then later he types out 'fuck'. Go figure..
3. Many appeals to political correctness; the main argument being that the OSS culture survived in spite of the targeted behavior as opposed to because of it.
4. He targets the gentoo community specifically. Of course, it's one of the only distributions that still gives users a choice in whether to use his software stack, so he labels them all as 'haters.' Again, par for the course in 'social justice' circles.
5. Attack on the internet community as a whole. Lots of groups like to do this now. I think the main reason for this is part of an increased trend against anonymous speech, mainly by people with poor arguments who feel first and (maybe) think later, and by those with something to gain or hypocrisy to hide. It's just more generalization, which is ironic considering that generalization is usually one of the behaviors they accuse people of.
6. Finally, he attacks straight white males, which he acknowledges he is, but then makes implicit and explicit appeals of "I'm not like the others, I'm a victim of them, so help me fight the evil horde!." His whole piece is evidence to the contrary.
Again these closely parallel the behavior of the social 'justice' warriors targeting the atheism and gaming communities. Like them, I suspect that poettering is trying to hide from criticism by calling himself a victim. Don't let him. Linus is correct in booting these people out (or at least putting them in their places) before they gain momentum. They are parasites who sap resources away from the original goal and refocus them towards building hugboxes and/or political platforms. Communities that cultivate the dynamics poettering takes issue with is what keeps these groupthink hugboxes from metastasizing into forces that block the objective (technical) truth for the sake of feelings, whether this groupthink spawns naturally or is fostered by people with agendas hungry for resources and control of the zeitgeist.
That's because the first two could be fixed with kill -9. The latter is being crammed down people's throats with what appears to be politically motivated promiscuous dependencies.
Big surprise, try to cram things down people's throats and they come to hate you.
I am not a big fan of systemd and I find Poettering pretty abrasive. But if what he wrote is correct: Recently, people started collecting Bitcoins to hire a hitman for me (this really happened!). Just the other day, some idiot posted a "song" on youtube, a creepy work, filled with expletives about me and suggestions of violence. then that's beyond the pale. IMO, threats of death and violence should be reported to the authorities and the culprits, if found, should be prosecuted to the fullest extent of the law.
The Open Source development community is not a friendly place. You do need a thick skin. But threats of violence or death go way beyond just "unfriendly".
Yes, and typically in companies like microsoft or apple, conflicts between groupthink hugboxes take precedent over what the customer wants because the few individuals who dare to stand up and say 'this is bad' get labeled as 'antisocial' by HR and fired. Windows 8 comes to mind right away.. The IOSification of OSX is another. An OSS equivalent is Gnome.
You don't recall any of the pulseaudio controversies? It's still a POS btw, but it's not quite as bad as it used to be. I have no need for it as ALSA now handles software mixing for today's simple DACs and has done so for years.
I mean, pulseaudio did have some pushback, but systemd has had orders of magnitude more pushback than pulseaudio.
If by "some pushback" you mean "was utterly unusable for at least 4 years", then that part is at least true. Of course systemd has more pushback: it's the same sort of badly written, badly designed garbage that's injecting itself into the bootup process rather than being just a user-facing mess that was trivial to remove.
People need to get a life.
Some of us have lives that include being paid to take care of Linux servers, which this crap makes significantly more difficult.
There isn't really an analog in your typical open source community. In fact, smaller open source projects tend to be so grateful for any help that asshole behavior is tolerated -- or even considered the norm. It's a sad state of affairs for the majority of us who want to contribute, but have no interest in dealing with a cesspool of assholes.
Sorry, but that sounds like an excuse.
Humans are thoroughly reprehensible creatures. There's a reason the living world is dying around us: that's because humans ARE assholes that generally destroy everything they touch. In some cases, that wicked Shiva energy is channeled in directions that benefit others ("open source", or what many profiteers say the "lunatic fringe" rightly calls "free software", is an example.) But in most cases, that energy is expended in (temporarily) fluffing the arrogant and greedy who, coincidentally or not, often seem to hover like vultures around those small eddying pools of curiosity and itch-scratching, eyeing their opportunity to profit from the collective labors. In other words, when something good happens, it's almost always an accident, and if that accident is profound enough, it needs righteous assholes to defend or protect it (like Linus does with Linux.)
So, that leaves you with a simple choice: create something for the whole with assholes that might benefit more than your local group, or not--and try on your own to profit from the assholes you manage to convince your wares are gold.
Of course, we're not addressing the concern of talent or competency here--that's a whole other layer that ALSO gets determined by assholes, the ones usually up or downstream of your project/work, either as user or developer or anything in between. And that is the area Poettering laments in his piece--which, lets be honest, has a whining tone--and seems unable to reconcile with how he sees his software (hi, Lennart!) and a great many others do (practically everyone on the "wrong" side of the systemd thing.) As many have noted, if there's significant pushback, maybe some re-thinking is involved, but that seems in short supply, particularly given the lofty position he finds himself in. With great power comes great responsibility, and one hopes humility, and that's where things seem to break down for him and the systemd posse.
In the end, he and you can just walk away if that isn't your cup of tea. There's no shame in saying "Enough! I'm outta here!" Just don't hide behind the idea the "open source" community is worse than working in a commercial firm because assholes are contained by culture--that's disingenuous bullshit. Ask anyone who's worked at a big firm and I'm sure they can name LOTS of assholes they've been forced to deal with during their time there. If you're lucky, you can do work that interests you and work around and with the assholes with the work driving you forward. Since most aren't, they just deal. Only a few play the victim card, thank the Dieties, but this gosh-darned Internet gives them a platform to vent their spleen.
Like I just did....
"The more corrupt the state, the more numerous the laws."--Tacitus, The Histories
Please RTFA, he is saying people even make life threats.
Yeah, that sucks. It's really juvenile and stupidly cruel.
It's not a thing of "I want to be married by church but they don't accept gay marriage", it's "The KKK burned down my house because I kissed my significant other in the park".
No, it's a case of, 'I piss on my neighbours lawn every day. Yeah, there's a little dead patch on the grass where I do it, but now he's trying to shoot me.'
The first step in remedying this situation is, 'Call the cops.' The second step in this process is 'Stop pissing on your neighbour's lawn.'
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
This!
Or my favorite version:
If you meet an a**hole in the morning. You met an a**hole.
If you meet a**holes all day, you're the a**hole.
And the reason for including libmicrohttpd is so that people can get http access to their log files.
I read that a few times and I still do do a Poe's Law double take at the end.
This is only used by the journald gateway deamon (so not by systemd at all)
But by 'not systemd at all' you mean, 'by one of the few core packages that cannot be removed from systemd?
and also only if you explicitly enable it with "systemctl enable systemd-journal-gatewayd.service".
Yes, because unsafe code lying available on the system has never been made part of a compromise originating from another source. Or are you okay with losing the crown jewels as long as someone else takes part of the blame?
I think you have to practice your Google-fu a bit there pal.
Google can't cure your brand of refusal to come to grips with reality, chum.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
"politically motivated"? It's a software component that starts daemons. You have to be pretty sad if you have political objections to that.
people who tailgate are complete dangerous wankers so thats a stupid analogy.
"The hands that help are better far than lips that pray." - Robert Ingersoll (1833-1899)
Believe it or not you can get a ticket for driving too slow, even if that speed is the posted limit.
I happen to know a bit - if not a fair amount - about the advantages and drawbacks of plain-text vs binary formats for I/O, and the brittleness of dependencies that are expressed through binary formats vs. parsing text.
The beauty and glory and travesty that are *NIX are living testimony to this. The trail of RSTS/E, MVS, VMS, DOS, MacOS, Windows.last and Android.next all demonstrate why POSIX-style systems, built on the "do one thing well" philosophy, with mostly human-readable text-based IO have longevity and are the leveragable core technology under most, more transient, graphical user shells.
SystemD is an abortion. It appeals to RedHat - who stacked the deck and manipulated the governing process to have it adopted by Debian. If they want an OS built like that? They can license the VMS sources and make their OWN copy of NT.
Hooks that fuckup a system, tying init to specific libraries and specific builds of individual device initialization and volume mapping schemes are a step back into darkness - and a cult of experts with necessary commercial funding. This is the breakdown of Open Source vs Free Software from a movement/philosophical POV.
The result of a Linux kernel tied to SystemD and PulseAudio approaches is similar to that of Android - where meaningful work is done by arcane parts of a system that relegates kernel function to the most undifferentiated commodity tasks, and source availability is almost irrelevant - because changes and fixes occur through closed processes, against a code base that is inaccessibly dense and full of binary dependency.
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
Unfortunately, yes they do. Unless you want to switch to BSD, or roll your own distribution
If so many distributions, including several major ones (openSUSE, Fedora, Debian, etc.) are ALL switching to systemd (and before that to network manager and pulseaudio), and some of them since quite some time (openSUSE has been using it for 4 iterations) without switching back, and some are even eager to jump in as start using future project from the same source (Google has expressed interests in KDBUS), there might be 2 explanations:
- either Lennart is an Evil-Über-Wizard-Super-Mutant who is mastering the art of mass mind-control, and it forcing every distro to switch using hypnosis.
- or maybe, perhaps systemd is actually USEFUL, solves real-world problems (to the point that most distribution have decided to use it), and isn't as problematic as the detractor want you to believe (don't base your opinion on what the first beta was years ago). Some of purported evils of systemd have no base in reality (detractors tend to forget that systemd is not only PID1, but a whole constellation of helper softwares and daemons).
Systemd might have enough objective qualities, so that even if a very vocal minority doesn't agree with it, a silent majority has considered interesting enough to give it a try.
Also, online I hear a lot of people complaining about systemd and calling for boycott, but I see very few actual useful work:
- Gentoo *DID* write their own init system (OpenRC).
- Uselessd is an attempt at an alternative using as few components as possible.
- SystemBSD is an attempt to offer the same API but rewritten from scratch for BSD (so Gnome and other software which relies on systemd can run there).
But outside of there 3 exceptions, it's basically only people complaining and whining, and not much effort to actually avoid systemd and propose another alternative.
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
Does Pulseaudio give anything that ALSA doesn't now?
Yes.
Non-deterministic latency.
That's the law in Illinois, too.
I see that, too, and I think in many cases it's drivers trying to stay out of the right lane that's been beat up by overweight trucks.
CUR ALLOC 20195.....5804M
Poettering thinks he is being singled out, but can you name another dev hated by a community? I can - Miguel de Icaza. Icaza advocated for broken closed OOXML, used Gnome to force MONO dependency (rings any bells?) and trolled whole community endorsing OSX over Linux desktop.
Poettering is the next Miguel de Icaza. He not only learned from Icaza how to fuck with people, he took it to the next level. Why settle with gnome dependency when you can take over vital subsystems and use your political power to make them the new default.
Mark my words - systemd-kernel is comming. Poettering dreams at night of being the next Linus, he is jealous and cant stand the fact people love Linus.
Who logs in to gdm? Not I, said the duck.
It's pretty simple. There's supposed to be a 2 second gap in good conditions. It's written into the handbook here in MA for driver's ed, although I believe it's been raised to 3-6-12 instead of 2-4-10.
We do better than that in MA. Our left lane law was actually apparently written before multilane highways and never adapted. It's technically even illegal to take a left exit here (never enforced) and to use the middle lane unless passing.
There's a common code that many states to defer that gets it about right, unlike the "passing only" states: you have to be going the average speed of traffic to use the left lane, should pull over if safe to let people pass, and generally shouldn't use the left lane unless there's too much congestion for everyone to drive in the right lane. with exceptions for left exits and preemptive passing positions when going by entrance ramps.
In Europe they put on their blinker towards the median side rather than obnoxiously flashing their high beams to remind people in front to vacate the fast lane. Very civilized. This also lets the driver behind you know you'd pass the guy if you could.
Someone had to do it.
That's not the case here though - we have a lot of older drivers that either just don't know better or aren't paying attention. Having had the opportunity to drive in a few countries in Europe, it's interesting to see how much easier it is there because people actually know the laws and follow them. Even driving on the Peripherique around Paris is a walk in the park compared to dealing with a lot of highways here in the U.S.
Please stand clear of the doors, por favor mantenganse alejado de las puertas
Come back with your rant when Poettering's crap is not being forced down the throats of users of most major distros, and when the company he works for ceases to wield great influence over what eventually becomes accepted standard in the community. Nobody is forcing me to use Windows either, but I use Linux over it for the freedom Linux offers. Yet it's starting to become more of a "You're only free to do these things if you want to use our more popular distro. Piss off if you don't like it". I know I could always try and gather some like minded people and start yet another distro, but when software vendors will only support the major distros and their offerings won't work on your incompatible OS, you have no choice but to fall at the feet of the those you disagree with. Significant alterations to basic software is not synonymous with "scratching an itch".
Maybe we're old enough by now to realise that "new + shiny" does not always equal "good".
Il n'y a pas de Planet B.
This!
Or my favorite version:
If you meet an a**hole in the morning. You met an a**hole.
If you meet a**holes all day, you're the a**hole.
I don't get it. Sometimes your "s" key works, sometimes it produces a "*". Maybe you'd better get your keyboard fixed.
Yes, keep driving the speed limit.....in the right lane you fucking dipshit. Get the fuck out of the left lane like the damn driver's manual you never read clearly states. If you aren't going fast enough to pass anyone you've got no business over there you sanctimonious Bastard.
Firstly, no driver ever anywhere has the slightest obligation to lift a finger to help you break the law. Second, the slow lane is often full, and sometimes so is the middle and fast lane and they all go at the same speed. There's often no room to move in. So, stop expecting people to live their life around aiding you as much as possible in breaking the law. It makes you seem like a very silly person.
SJW n. One who posts facts.
Having had the opportunity to drive in a few countries in Europe, it's interesting to see how much easier it is there because people actually know the laws and follow them.
Maybe because it's enforced here in Europe ?
To get a driver's license, one need not only to pass practical driving exams, but also to pass a theoretical exams about the laws. You are required to register to a few theory courses for it. (All paying, that's why some people consider that driver's licenses are trying to scam as much money out of people as possible).
While it's not as difficult as a real school's exam, that still involves at least grasping the basics of the law.
There *are* people failing it. In some countries: fail 3 times in a row, and the local department of transport will politely offer you to put you in contact with professional psychologists if you like (repeated failure might be stress-management related. But might be also an opportunity to catch learning disabilities in a few people, instead of having them repeat the exam 20x until they eventually pass it by random chance and then allow such people on the street).
In comparison, when I was visiting the states, I was baffled at how stupidly trivial it is to get a drivers license.
Which of course makes sense in a country that is so much over reliant on cars. When even "go get groceries at the block's corner's store" means a 15 minutes drive, because the "block" consist of a several mile long succession of 2-store houses, then NOT having a drivers license is basically being completely unable to function in society. Add to the fact that driver's licenses function as photo ID and thus basically anyone is required to have one, so you can't easily fail people. (Unlike here in European countries which all have proper ID Cards. Due to a VERY HIGH level of standardisation, a driver's license is acceptable and can be used as a substitute for ID Card when in a rush. But still, european countries have a photo ID card that is issued to everybody, without needing to pass an exam or to pass a bank's credit card financial history check).
But yeah, basically:
- in europe, to be allowed to drive, you need to positively prove that you aren't going to pose a significant danger to the other drivers.
- in US, to be allowed to drive, you need to approximately qualify as 'human being' (more or less). (Corporal Nobby Nobbs would probably qualify too).
Even driving on the Peripherique around Paris is a walk in the park compared to dealing with a lot of highways here in the U.S.
yet, north European (Germans) find that the French drive badly.
(and the opposite is true in the Balkan, probably US-ians will find driving there too much dangerous for them).
"Sufficiently advanced satire is indistinguishable from reality." - [Tips: 1DrYakQDKCQ6y52z6QbnkxHXAocMZJE61o ]
You do not acknowledge the abuse of the Debian Community process? Or the fact that Debian is Upstream of 5 or 7 principal distros?
Why not stuff yourself into PID 1 and execute yourself?
"Flyin' in just a sweet place,
Never been known to fail..."
It makes you seem like a dipshit to fail to understand that you aren't supposed to be in the far left lane unless you are passing the car in the left. That's the law. I don't know how many times I've been on I-75 behind a dipshit like you running a snail race against the car in the right. The car in the right lane speeds up, you speed up. The car in the right lane slows down, you slow down. Now you know why everyone flips your stupid ass off as they finally pass you on the right side you smug, self righteous bastard.