Leigh Lewis, superintendent of the Triad district, told me that if a student refuses to cooperate, the district could presumably press criminal charges.
I'm hard pressed to see how the *school district* could press charges as they are not a party to, or harmed by, the alleged accusations.
Citation seriously needed - from a reputable source. On balance, if you investigate this honestly, I suspect you'll find that the ACA has helped more than it has hurt. Sure, some people have had to pay higher premiums, but it is almost always for better coverage, and many people complaining didn't have any insurance, but now have coverage - especially people needing Medicaid. Ironically, people in Red states have benefited more than those in Blue states.
This sounds a little insensitive, but, don't be disposable. You're a Windows admin. Great. So are a million other people. If you're a Windows admin who also knows some programming, there are maybe 250,000 people with your skill set. If you add in that you know some Linux, maybe 100,000 people.
What I'm saying is, if you want to be safer than the average employee, don't be average. Enhance your skill set.
Everyone is disposable. All companies care about is $$$.
Here's my experience, working for a *large* corporation... I have 25+ years (14 at my current company) as a Unix system programmer and system administrator with commensurate Linux and Windows experience - I've worked on just about every type of system from PCs to Cray super-computers. I am currently the lead developer of a three-person team on a cross-platform utility (Solaris,RedHat,Ubuntu,Windows) of about 300k lines of code in about 10 programming languages - 75% of which is my code - that is heavily used by our customers.
I was almost laid off last summer, simply because I was one of the most expensive people in my category of people on the contract. Even pleadings from my two managers to the higher ups that laying me off was inappropriate had no effect. The *only* thing that changed their minds was the realization that I also worked on *another* contract onto which some of my work could be (properly) charged.
They're deciding that it's faster and cheaper to chuck people overboard and find new ones than it is to retrain them. The economics of cutting rather than training may seem simple, but it's a more complex calculation than most people believe.
I would tend to agree that the calculation is more complex, but err on the side of retraining current employees. Learning a new skill, especially within your field of study, isn't often that difficult, but, for a new employee, learning the company's policies, procedures and well as documentation, development, build and delivery (etc) processes and the company culture is much more complex and, I would argue, more important. A wiz-bang employee that's not well integrated into the environment is a bigger problem than someone simply needing to learn another programming language. All that assumes, of course, that companies actually care, which, in my experience, large companies don't. "Employees are our most valuable asset" - my ass.
indicating Windows would be software that users subscribe to, rather than buy outright
No thanks. Just like with Adobe CS, it looks like it's time to buy up some licenses before they disappear. I have no interest in renting my software.
Renting software, especially non-essential software, is one thing, but renting the OS, without which the system won't even function, is more akin to renting ransom-ware. (good move M$, he said sarcastically)
If, on the other hand, the system will still function - at full capacity - but just w/o further updates, then I predict many, many out-of-date systems (because people are fugal) - that is, until, more complete uses of "trusted computing" take hold and routers and/or network services deny access to systems that are not fully-patched. (off in the distance, he hears RMS giggling and muttering "wait for it...")
Also, how is this subscription service suppose to work? Am I suppose to give M$ my credit card number for recurring charges? I don't think so - although I imagine that's what many Apple consumers do (I don't know).
"So we could deliver an update for a Heartbleed or Shellshock vulnerability, completely independently of the lawnmower control app that would come from the lawnmower company" Shuttleworth said.
... then I can have one system with both a patched container and an un-patched container. "Is your system up-to-date?"... "Sort of." Now I can look forward to downloading the same patches N times, once for each container - thanks Mark, that's snappy!
Poor controls mean that antibiotics are leaking out and getting into drinking water. They are in the fish and cattle that we eat, and global travel and exports mean bacteria are traveling.
And those fish, cattle and even people are getting those antibiotics for *free* - seriously impacting our bottom line and tight-fisted control over drugs that, in reality, don't really cost as much as we say they do to research and manufacture, but we sell for a metric fuck-ton of cash.
In both of these announcements, a significant amount of the costs to develop the drugs were opportunity, or time, costs. They are the returns that might be expected, but that investors went without, while a drug was in development. When a drug company invests in research and development, it is tying up money that could otherwise be invested elsewhere. In this announcement, the Tufts Center says that $1.2 billion of the $2.6 billion is time costs.
The end of the article notes:
In 2010, a systematic review of studies that looked at the cost of drug development was published in Health Policy. The review found 13 articles, with estimates ranging from $161 million to $1.8 billion (in 2009 dollars). Obviously, methodology matters.
Movie isn't out yet. If 200 security experts said that it's fairly accurate, can you at least *wait* to judge it?
And yes, it makes sense there would be physical fighting.Virtual altercations often become physical.
I seriously doubt *any* of those 200 security experts have flown off to Hong Kong with a glock and hot Asian chick strapped to their sides and ninja'd their way through a bunch of bad guys - though I'm sure they've dreamed about doing that.
Furthermore, only Hollywood would have the must-have elite hacker be Chris Hemsworth. Don't get me wrong, I like Chris, in roles where speaking and the ability to convincingly portray highly technical knowledge isn't important, but if one is going the action-movie route, it would be much more interesting to have the character be a "regular guy" - actually like Kevin Poulsen - thrown into an exceptional situation like this, rather than watch Thor run around saving the day yet again.
I stand by my preemptive review (and the 31% review on Rotten Tomatoes).
It appeared that it was not "diversity" (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team's intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at "mindreading" than men.
Perhaps the women felt more comfortable and/or were allowed to speak more w/o interruption when there were more women on the team. From the NY Times article Speaking While Female (Why Women Stay Quiet at Work):
Almost every time they started to speak, they were interrupted or shot down before finishing their pitch. When one had a good idea, a male writer would jump in and run with it before she could complete her thought.
Sadly, their experience is not unusual.
Suspecting that powerful women stayed quiet because they feared a backlash, Professor Brescoll looked deeper. She asked professional men and women to evaluate the competence of chief executives who voiced their opinions more or less frequently. Male executives who spoke more often than their peers were rewarded with 10 percent higher ratings of competence. When female executives spoke more than their peers, both men and women punished them with 14 percent lower ratings. As this and other research shows, women who worry that talking “too much” will cause them to be disliked are not paranoid; they are often right.
A bill can also become law if the president does nothing and leave it sit for ten days or longer if congress is in session. It will automatically become law then. If congress is not in session, then it sort of disappears and does not become law.
"Unlike others, this is a film about a real person, not a stereotype—a real guy with real problems thrust into a real situation," says Mark Abene. "The technology—and the disasters—in the film were real, or at least plausible.
Where have I head this before? Oh right - Blackhat is the Interstellar of info-sec terrorism films - sigh
And the "bad guy" is able to reach "anyone" , "anywhere" , "anytime" - wow, how does he bridge the air-gap for all those disconnected networks? He must have one of those four-dimensional "tesseract" library thingys.
Director Michael Mann worked closely with Kevin Poulsen in researching, writing, and shooting the film. Like Hemsworth's character, Poulsen spent time in prison for his hacking exploits, and Mann says his input was invaluable.
Checking out the photo of Kevin Poulsen on Wikipedia, he must be thrilled to have Chris Hemsworth playing him and "us" - seriously how many hackers (elite or otherwise) look like Chris, are firearms experts and, apparently, ninjas? I didn't realize, until just this moment, how physical hacking could be.
Well as long as the security geeks in Silicon Valley (and their egos) liked it, the critics at Rotten Tomatoes that gave it a 31% *must* be wrong. I'll wait to see this on Amazon Prime or Netflix...
there is actually *no* prohibition [of blasphemy] in the Quran...
the Quran decrees no earthly punishment for blasphemy — or for apostasy (abandonment or renunciation of the faith), a related concept.
Koran (4:89) - "They wish that you should disbelieve as they disbelieve, and then you would be equal; therefore take not to yourselves friends of them, until they emigrate in the way of God; then, if they turn their backs, take them, and slay them wherever you find them; take not to yourselves any one of them as friend or helper."
Is there some problem with the translation? Seems fairly clear to me.
Take it up with the guy (who I presume is a Muslim) who wrote the NYT article, I was simply quoting and conceding that he probably knows more about this than I (and most/.'ers) do. However, according to this Qur’an 4:89 Commentary, the quote you listed is (commonly) taken out of context (the link has the full verse) and in context really means:
... this verse also only commands Muslims to fight those who practice oppression or persecution, or attack the Muslims.
... These verses were revealed by God to Prophet Muhammad (peace and blessings be upon him), at the time when Muslims were attacked by the non-Muslims of Makkah on a regular basis.
I am not even remotely knowledgeable, but it seems like something open to a bit of interpretation. Wouldn't it be nice if those people doing the interpretation and passing that on to their followers, focused on interpretations that involved killing fewer people?
... there's this issue with blasphemy and/or images of the Prophet. According to this NY Times article Islam’s Problem With Blasphemy by Mustafa Akyol, there is actually *no* prohibition in the Quran and such things were only added later as part of Shariah Law, by people wanting control:
The only source in Islamic law that all Muslims accept indisputably is the Quran. And, conspicuously, the Quran decrees no earthly punishment for blasphemy — or for apostasy (abandonment or renunciation of the faith), a related concept. Nor, for that matter, does the Quran command stoning, female circumcision or a ban on fine arts.
Tellingly, severe punishments for blasphemy and apostasy appeared when increasingly despotic Muslim empires needed to find a religious justification to eliminate political opponents.
In addition, Muslim extremists seem selective in their outrage:
The Quran praises other prophets — such as Abraham, Moses and Jesus — and even tells Muslims to “make no distinction” between these messengers of God. Yet for some reason, Islamist extremists seem to obsess only about the Prophet Muhammad.
Even more curiously, mockery of God — what one would expect to see as the most outrageous blasphemy — seems to have escaped their attention as well.
Finally, the action *actually* recommended by the Quran is simply: Do not sit with them...
Before all that politically motivated expansion and toughening of Shariah, though, the Quran told early Muslims, who routinely faced the mockery of their faith by pagans: “God has told you in the Book that when you hear God’s revelations disbelieved in and mocked at, do not sit with them until they enter into some other discourse; surely then you would be like them.”
Just “do not sit with them” — that is the response the Quran suggests for mockery. Not violence. Not even censorship.
I think the following exchange from TFA says it all about Lennart's attitude and, ultimately, the problem people seem to have with him and his work. Basically, if you agree with him and his way of thinking, you're young, quick and progressive otherwise, you're old, slow and conservative.
LV: Why do you think some distributions managed to adopt Systemd without any major fights, and then others like Debian had very intense debates and resignations? Is it just because it’s a distro with more political processes?
LP: Arch Linux probably did it the quickest way. You know, distributions attract different kinds of people, of course. If you looked at Arch Linux, it attracted very progressive kinds of people – like power users. They’re progressive and want to make the best out of their computers. So it was easy for them to adopt.
Then if you look at Gentoo, for example, they still haven’t done Systemd as default. They used to be like Arch Linux is now – they used to be the young people who adopted things quickly. But the Gentoo people aged, and they became more conservative.
And Debian is probably an even more conservative bunch. Debian is a really old project, and many people from back in the old days are still active on it. So they have longer release cycles. And Fedora always defined itself as being on the bleeding edge, of course, so it was easier. Well, not that easy – some people don’t realize that inside of Fedora and inside of Red Hat, there were lots of fights. So it’s to do with the culture around the various distributions. And Slackware are the ultra conservatives!
It's sad that Lennart is, obviously, so very smart, yet, apparently, so very stupid. Perhaps that will change as he gets older and stops to actually think about things for a bit before speaking - or coding...
I think that Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers have this quiet fantasy running through the back of their minds that they too will one day be revered and spoken of in hushed tones, like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Linus Torvalds, etc when, based on things like the general poor quality and popular dislike of things like PulseAudio and Systemd and their general quality of work attitude (Google why Linus banned Kay from submitting kernel patches) they will, instead, be reviled. (Of course, I could be wrong and their code/projects will be the best things since sliced bread.)
If five years from now, as you suggest, Systemd is an integral part of every mainstream distribution, and you wont use any mainstream distribution because of that, then I would suggest the common point of failure is obvious...
So, Lennart is confusing the traditional Unix vs. Linux development/release models (together vs. separately) with the Unix *and* Linux programming/operational models (small independent programs, mostly doing one thing right, working together). It seem that it is Lennart doesn't really know what Unix *or* Linux is really like. Just another youngster who doesn't know, understand, or care about the history of the field in which he works and thinks he knows everything best - sigh.
One doesn't have to understand *exactly* how TOR works to understand the concept and the legal case should not be based on detailed technical workings any of the technology involved - unless that's the primary issue, which I don't think it is here.
TOR could be explained (even demonstrated) as randomly passing notes among blindfolded people in a room, until someone hands the note to someone standing just outside the door.
Slashdot Mirror
delivering drugs to the stomach
aka, a pill
Beats the alternative delivery method (see the image AltText)
I'm hard pressed to see how the *school district* could press charges as they are not a party to, or harmed by, the alleged accusations.
benefited enough people
It has hurt enough people that it is not suicide.
Citation seriously needed - from a reputable source. On balance, if you investigate this honestly, I suspect you'll find that the ACA has helped more than it has hurt. Sure, some people have had to pay higher premiums, but it is almost always for better coverage, and many people complaining didn't have any insurance, but now have coverage - especially people needing Medicaid. Ironically, people in Red states have benefited more than those in Blue states.
Here's a citation: Is the Affordable Care Act Working?, from 10/2014, quoting:
Answer: Yes, the number of uninsured has fallen significantly.
Answer: For many, yes, but not for all.
Answer: Data remains sparse except for one group, the young.
Answer: Most experts expect they will, but they will be tested by new challenges.
Answer: The law mostly helped, by providing new paying patients and insurance customers.
Answer: Twenty-three states have opposed expansion, though several of them are reconsidering.
Answer: Perhaps, but mainly around the edges.
This sounds a little insensitive, but, don't be disposable. You're a Windows admin. Great. So are a million other people. If you're a Windows admin who also knows some programming, there are maybe 250,000 people with your skill set. If you add in that you know some Linux, maybe 100,000 people.
What I'm saying is, if you want to be safer than the average employee, don't be average. Enhance your skill set.
Everyone is disposable. All companies care about is $$$.
Here's my experience, working for a *large* corporation... I have 25+ years (14 at my current company) as a Unix system programmer and system administrator with commensurate Linux and Windows experience - I've worked on just about every type of system from PCs to Cray super-computers. I am currently the lead developer of a three-person team on a cross-platform utility (Solaris,RedHat,Ubuntu,Windows) of about 300k lines of code in about 10 programming languages - 75% of which is my code - that is heavily used by our customers.
I was almost laid off last summer, simply because I was one of the most expensive people in my category of people on the contract. Even pleadings from my two managers to the higher ups that laying me off was inappropriate had no effect. The *only* thing that changed their minds was the realization that I also worked on *another* contract onto which some of my work could be (properly) charged.
They're deciding that it's faster and cheaper to chuck people overboard and find new ones than it is to retrain them. The economics of cutting rather than training may seem simple, but it's a more complex calculation than most people believe.
I would tend to agree that the calculation is more complex, but err on the side of retraining current employees. Learning a new skill, especially within your field of study, isn't often that difficult, but, for a new employee, learning the company's policies, procedures and well as documentation, development, build and delivery (etc) processes and the company culture is much more complex and, I would argue, more important. A wiz-bang employee that's not well integrated into the environment is a bigger problem than someone simply needing to learn another programming language. All that assumes, of course, that companies actually care, which, in my experience, large companies don't. "Employees are our most valuable asset" - my ass.
indicating Windows would be software that users subscribe to, rather than buy outright
No thanks. Just like with Adobe CS, it looks like it's time to buy up some licenses before they disappear. I have no interest in renting my software.
Renting software, especially non-essential software, is one thing, but renting the OS, without which the system won't even function, is more akin to renting ransom-ware. (good move M$, he said sarcastically)
If, on the other hand, the system will still function - at full capacity - but just w/o further updates, then I predict many, many out-of-date systems (because people are fugal) - that is, until, more complete uses of "trusted computing" take hold and routers and/or network services deny access to systems that are not fully-patched. (off in the distance, he hears RMS giggling and muttering "wait for it...")
Also, how is this subscription service suppose to work? Am I suppose to give M$ my credit card number for recurring charges? I don't think so - although I imagine that's what many Apple consumers do (I don't know).
"So we could deliver an update for a Heartbleed or Shellshock vulnerability, completely independently of the lawnmower control app that would come from the lawnmower company" Shuttleworth said.
And, in related news, as I've mentioned before, breathing cause death.
Fact: 100% of all dead people were habitual breathers.
Technically, so is yours (and this) ... :-)
Poor controls mean that antibiotics are leaking out and getting into drinking water. They are in the fish and cattle that we eat, and global travel and exports mean bacteria are traveling.
And those fish, cattle and even people are getting those antibiotics for *free* - seriously impacting our bottom line and tight-fisted control over drugs that, in reality, don't really cost as much as we say they do to research and manufacture, but we sell for a metric fuck-ton of cash.
According to this NY Times article, $2.6 Billion to Develop a Drug? New Estimate Makes Questionable Assumptions are an "estimate that drug companies could have made more money if they used their research investment for things other than drug development."
In both of these announcements, a significant amount of the costs to develop the drugs were opportunity, or time, costs. They are the returns that might be expected, but that investors went without, while a drug was in development. When a drug company invests in research and development, it is tying up money that could otherwise be invested elsewhere. In this announcement, the Tufts Center says that $1.2 billion of the $2.6 billion is time costs.
The end of the article notes:
In 2010, a systematic review of studies that looked at the cost of drug development was published in Health Policy. The review found 13 articles, with estimates ranging from $161 million to $1.8 billion (in 2009 dollars). Obviously, methodology matters.
That's a far cry from $2.6 Billion.
Movie isn't out yet. If 200 security experts said that it's fairly accurate, can you at least *wait* to judge it?
And yes, it makes sense there would be physical fighting.Virtual altercations often become physical.
I seriously doubt *any* of those 200 security experts have flown off to Hong Kong with a glock and hot Asian chick strapped to their sides and ninja'd their way through a bunch of bad guys - though I'm sure they've dreamed about doing that.
Furthermore, only Hollywood would have the must-have elite hacker be Chris Hemsworth. Don't get me wrong, I like Chris, in roles where speaking and the ability to convincingly portray highly technical knowledge isn't important, but if one is going the action-movie route, it would be much more interesting to have the character be a "regular guy" - actually like Kevin Poulsen - thrown into an exceptional situation like this, rather than watch Thor run around saving the day yet again.
I stand by my preemptive review (and the 31% review on Rotten Tomatoes).
It appeared that it was not "diversity" (having equal numbers of men and women) that mattered for a team's intelligence, but simply having more women. This last effect, however, was partly explained by the fact that women, on average, were better at "mindreading" than men.
Perhaps the women felt more comfortable and/or were allowed to speak more w/o interruption when there were more women on the team. From the NY Times article Speaking While Female (Why Women Stay Quiet at Work):
Almost every time they started to speak, they were interrupted or shot down before finishing their pitch. When one had a good idea, a male writer would jump in and run with it before she could complete her thought.
Sadly, their experience is not unusual.
Suspecting that powerful women stayed quiet because they feared a backlash, Professor Brescoll looked deeper. She asked professional men and women to evaluate the competence of chief executives who voiced their opinions more or less frequently. Male executives who spoke more often than their peers were rewarded with 10 percent higher ratings of competence. When female executives spoke more than their peers, both men and women punished them with 14 percent lower ratings. As this and other research shows, women who worry that talking “too much” will cause them to be disliked are not paranoid; they are often right.
So if they had instead asked, 'Will Microsoft get it wrong this time?' the answer would still be no?
That question would presume that MS has, at least once, gotten it right. So it would never be asked...
Only three commissioners may be members of the same political party. None of them may have a current financial interest in any FCC-related business.
FTFY - judging from the revolving door at the FCC (and other agencies).
A bill can also become law if the president does nothing and leave it sit for ten days or longer if congress is in session. It will automatically become law then. If congress is not in session, then it sort of disappears and does not become law.
Pocket Veto (for those interested)
There are often very good reasons to not be nice. The adage "Nice guys finish last" proves itself much more often than not.
Being civil = far less results.
As Psychiatrist Cate Milton (Mira Sorvino) said in the House episode, Frozen - one of my favorites:
Indiscriminate niceness is overrated.
"Unlike others, this is a film about a real person, not a stereotype—a real guy with real problems thrust into a real situation," says Mark Abene. "The technology—and the disasters—in the film were real, or at least plausible.
Where have I head this before? Oh right - Blackhat is the Interstellar of info-sec terrorism films - sigh
And the "bad guy" is able to reach "anyone" , "anywhere" , "anytime" - wow, how does he bridge the air-gap for all those disconnected networks? He must have one of those four-dimensional "tesseract" library thingys.
Director Michael Mann worked closely with Kevin Poulsen in researching, writing, and shooting the film. Like Hemsworth's character, Poulsen spent time in prison for his hacking exploits, and Mann says his input was invaluable.
Checking out the photo of Kevin Poulsen on Wikipedia, he must be thrilled to have Chris Hemsworth playing him and "us" - seriously how many hackers (elite or otherwise) look like Chris, are firearms experts and, apparently, ninjas? I didn't realize, until just this moment, how physical hacking could be.
Well as long as the security geeks in Silicon Valley (and their egos) liked it, the critics at Rotten Tomatoes that gave it a 31% *must* be wrong. I'll wait to see this on Amazon Prime or Netflix ...
Koran (4:89) - "They wish that you should disbelieve as they disbelieve, and then you would be equal; therefore take not to yourselves friends of them, until they emigrate in the way of God; then, if they turn their backs, take them, and slay them wherever you find them; take not to yourselves any one of them as friend or helper."
Is there some problem with the translation? Seems fairly clear to me.
Take it up with the guy (who I presume is a Muslim) who wrote the NYT article, I was simply quoting and conceding that he probably knows more about this than I (and most /.'ers) do. However, according to this Qur’an 4:89 Commentary, the quote you listed is (commonly) taken out of context (the link has the full verse) and in context really means:
... this verse also only commands Muslims to fight those who practice oppression or persecution, or attack the Muslims.
I am not even remotely knowledgeable, but it seems like something open to a bit of interpretation. Wouldn't it be nice if those people doing the interpretation and passing that on to their followers, focused on interpretations that involved killing fewer people?
The only source in Islamic law that all Muslims accept indisputably is the Quran. And, conspicuously, the Quran decrees no earthly punishment for blasphemy — or for apostasy (abandonment or renunciation of the faith), a related concept. Nor, for that matter, does the Quran command stoning, female circumcision or a ban on fine arts.
Tellingly, severe punishments for blasphemy and apostasy appeared when increasingly despotic Muslim empires needed to find a religious justification to eliminate political opponents.
In addition, Muslim extremists seem selective in their outrage:
The Quran praises other prophets — such as Abraham, Moses and Jesus — and even tells Muslims to “make no distinction” between these messengers of God. Yet for some reason, Islamist extremists seem to obsess only about the Prophet Muhammad.
Even more curiously, mockery of God — what one would expect to see as the most outrageous blasphemy — seems to have escaped their attention as well.
Finally, the action *actually* recommended by the Quran is simply: Do not sit with them ...
Before all that politically motivated expansion and toughening of Shariah, though, the Quran told early Muslims, who routinely faced the mockery of their faith by pagans: “God has told you in the Book that when you hear God’s revelations disbelieved in and mocked at, do not sit with them until they enter into some other discourse; surely then you would be like them.”
Just “do not sit with them” — that is the response the Quran suggests for mockery. Not violence. Not even censorship.
I think the following exchange from TFA says it all about Lennart's attitude and, ultimately, the problem people seem to have with him and his work. Basically, if you agree with him and his way of thinking, you're young, quick and progressive otherwise, you're old, slow and conservative.
LV: Why do you think some distributions managed to adopt Systemd without any major fights, and then others like Debian had very intense debates and resignations? Is it just because it’s a distro with more political processes?
LP: Arch Linux probably did it the quickest way. You know, distributions attract different kinds of people, of course. If you looked at Arch Linux, it attracted very progressive kinds of people – like power users. They’re progressive and want to make the best out of their computers. So it was easy for them to adopt.
Then if you look at Gentoo, for example, they still haven’t done Systemd as default. They used to be like Arch Linux is now – they used to be the young people who adopted things quickly. But the Gentoo people aged, and they became more conservative.
And Debian is probably an even more conservative bunch. Debian is a really old project, and many people from back in the old days are still active on it. So they have longer release cycles. And Fedora always defined itself as being on the bleeding edge, of course, so it was easier. Well, not that easy – some people don’t realize that inside of Fedora and inside of Red Hat, there were lots of fights. So it’s to do with the culture around the various distributions. And Slackware are the ultra conservatives!
It's sad that Lennart is, obviously, so very smart, yet, apparently, so very stupid. Perhaps that will change as he gets older and stops to actually think about things for a bit before speaking - or coding...
I think that Lennart Poettering and Kay Sievers have this quiet fantasy running through the back of their minds that they too will one day be revered and spoken of in hushed tones, like Ken Thompson, Dennis Ritchie, Linus Torvalds, etc when, based on things like the general poor quality and popular dislike of things like PulseAudio and Systemd and their general quality of work attitude (Google why Linus banned Kay from submitting kernel patches) they will, instead, be reviled. (Of course, I could be wrong and their code/projects will be the best things since sliced bread.)
If five years from now, as you suggest, Systemd is an integral part of every mainstream distribution, and you wont use any mainstream distribution because of that, then I would suggest the common point of failure is obvious...
So, Lennart is confusing the traditional Unix vs. Linux development/release models (together vs. separately) with the Unix *and* Linux programming/operational models (small independent programs, mostly doing one thing right, working together). It seem that it is Lennart doesn't really know what Unix *or* Linux is really like. Just another youngster who doesn't know, understand, or care about the history of the field in which he works and thinks he knows everything best - sigh.
Pfsense is listed on these as well. If you don't want a turn-key like solution, but want something secure, use OpenBSD.
A lot of people in IT have no clue how tor works.
One doesn't have to understand *exactly* how TOR works to understand the concept and the legal case should not be based on detailed technical workings any of the technology involved - unless that's the primary issue, which I don't think it is here.
TOR could be explained (even demonstrated) as randomly passing notes among blindfolded people in a room, until someone hands the note to someone standing just outside the door.