Wow, I think less of RationalWiki after reading that.
There's a big difference between tolerating intolerant actions and tolerating intolerant words and ideas. If you want to say, "All the Jews deserve to die," that's just your opinion. It's not a very nice opinion. Most people don't share it. But, in a free society, you should be free to express it, because that's what it means to have a free society.
If you start killing or planning to kill specific people, Jews or otherwise, well, then, we have a problem. That's murder, or attempted murder, or conspiracy to commit murder, or whatever, and it's against the law, and we need to lock you up so that you don't kill people.
But unless you're actually DOING anything illegal, in a free society, anyone should be free to hold and express any opinions whatsoever. Otherwise, those people are being repressed, because it's wrong to deny anyone the right to hold and express their own opinions.
This isn't definitional trickery. People have rights. Among those rights is freedom of thought and freedom of expression. The fact that some people do not believe in those rights, or seek to deny others those rights, doesn't mean those people LOSE THEIR RIGHTS. It just means they're wrong. Being wrong doesn't make you less human, and those preaching "tolerance" who would treat the intolerant as less worthy than themselves ARE BEING HYPOCRITES and ARE BEING INTOLERANT.
And the argument you quote is a false dichotomy. We don't have to tolerate people bullying others. Our choice is not between tolerating murder, bullying, and other crimes, and being completely intolerant with those whose ideas we believe are wrong and locking people up in jail or concentration camps or mental institutions because they dare express their (admittedly wrong -- that's NOT the POINT!) views about how women or the Irish or whatever are inferior. It's their right to have those views, and to express them. Not to act on them in an illegal way. And we can certainly have a working and prosperous society while tolerating the SPEECH and IDEAS of intolerant people. The US is one.
The single act which makes me admire the ACLU most is their 1978 defense of Nazis who wanted to march in Chicago. THAT is a commitment to an open society.
Not shunning, or discriminating against, or firing, or locking people up because they dare disagree with you.
Not disagreeing with you, but it's a little misleading to say "a processor needs some electricity and that's it". A processor needs a very precise voltage level of DC current supplied continuously. To get that precise voltage level, you need regulators, AC/DC converters, etc. Moreover, you need to burn coal, oil, natural gas, or sustain a nuclear reaction in order to provide this electricity. Finding carbohydrates is comparatively easy compared to maintaining an entire electrical grid. After all, they quite literally grow on trees.
It was a federal preemption case where Arizona wanted to be more aggressive asserting federal law than the federal government wanted to be, and passed laws to that effect. Part of the law was struck down due to preemption, part was upheld. It was a divided Supreme Court decision also.
iirc the struck-down part was making "illegal presence" a crime when it wasn't a federal crime (so, making something illegal that was legal under federal law). The part that was upheld was making it a requirement that all Arizona law enforcement personnel check with the federal government whenever they think they might have come across an illegal immigrant in the course of their duties.
I can see where it comes from. It was born of good intentions. But see my other comment http://slashdot.org/comments.p... for why I think it (along with the effectively sadist-run deletion policy) needs to go.
Re the deletion BS: I wouldn't even care about that so much now that we have DeletionPedia if they would just TURN OVER ALL THE DELETED PAGES TO DELETIONPEDIA so they can be preserved THERE if Wikipedia doesn't want them. No excuse for not doing this unless they actually want to CENSOR the pages instead of just disassociating from them.
I sometimes wonder (not often, because I have better things to wonder about...) what would have happened if Wikipedia had been started by a much less close-knit and mission-focused community and we ended up with some sort of cross between wikia.com and individual blogs linking to each other. I'm not convinced it would be a worse world.
In theory, yes, that might be a good thing. Still of dubious value in my opinion -- information is information; I don't care whether it's been officially published or is on arXiv as long as it's correct -- but maybe.
In practice, this happens: Editor: "The dataflow machine concept [1] suffered from several fatal flaws [2][3], including an inability to efficiently broadcast parallel tokens [4]. MIT continued researching dataflow machines [5][6][7] long after most other researchers had stopped." Asshole (probably an MIT fanboy): "DELETING the last sentence because it's ORIGINAL RESEARCH!!111one." Editor: "WTF it's a widely known fact that this is true and you can look at the published research and see that the last publications on classical dataflow machines to verify it." Asshole: "But it's ORIGINAL RESEARCH(!!11ONE!) because YOU HAD TO LOOK IT UP IT WASN'T WRITTEN DOWN SOMEWHERE ELSE." Editor: "But that's idiotic. It's true; that's all that matters. And it's important to note this, because it could have implications for researchers studying potentially unhealthy research cultures--" Asshole: "Okay so now you HATE MIT too you're BIASED and should stop editing any articles about MIT!" Asshole Administrator: "Reverting page to last revision by Asshole. No original research, Editor. Take some time to cool off."
Who's right here? As a society, it's good to know and document that MIT had gotten so inbred in the 90s that it couldn't see that dataflow machines were a fool's errand even after other researchers could see it. And it's completely verifiable that MIT did, in fact, continue researching dataflow machines years after everyone else had realized they were a dead end and stopped. The article shouldn't say MIT had an inbred culture without a source for that -- that's close to an unverifiable opinion. But, MIT DID have an inbred culture in the late 80s, early 90s, and it's good to preserve the evidence of that. And Wikipedia's as good a place to survey dataflow machine literature as anywhere else. We need more well-written literature surveys. My vote is for the Editor. He didn't say anything biased, just stated the facts as they were and could easily be verified by anyone willing to look. He contributed to the article. And Asshole, aided by Asshole Administrator and Wikipedia's asshole NOR policy, scored a political victory to whitewash a rather sorry chapter in MIT's history.
This is a completely hypothetical example, btw. But stuff pretty much EXACTLY LIKE THAT happens on Wikipedia all the time. And it's a damn shame.
The thing I hate most is the "consensus" obsession. It leads to -- and I've seen this even though I rarely contribute -- people just making shit up about Wikipedia policies to support their positions and claiming it's "consensus". A lot of it comes down to who has groupthink on their side and, even more troublingly, who can bluff and bluster the best.
Wikipedia's community is toxic. I'm amazed the results are as good as they are, and it saddens me that the site could probably be so much better if it were better managed.
Perhaps -- federal preemption is tricky; there has to be an intent to preempt and some other conditions must be met -- but doing so would be counterproductive. If they do manage to get the laws overturned, they are replaced with nothing. So, marijuana would be fully decriminalized instead of partially decriminalized with a regulatory scheme in place. Not what the federal government would want.
I don't think it would be preempted in the first place, though. To be preempted, the law must "interfere" with the federal government. So, taxing the Federal Reserve is out, passing truly conflicting (as in, you can't obey both laws simultaneously) is out, and other such things. There has to be interference. A regulatory scheme for marijuana arguably would not interfere, because you can easily obey both sets of laws simply by not having or producing marijuana. The Federal government clearly doesn't see itself as "occupying the field" in drug regulation since local ordinances about drugs have a long history of coexisting with the federal scheme unchallenged.
The Obama administration could sue and have all the legalization laws, recreational or otherwise stricken from the books.
False. Federal law preempts state, but all that means is that if you get hauled into federal court, "it's legal under state law!" isn't a defense. The state government has no obligation to make its own laws mirror federal laws or to expend any energy whatsoever enforcing federal law. State-level marijuana legalization have a very real practical effect: you get pulled over by a STATE trooper, rather than the DEA, and you're fine, because he's not being paid to enforce federal law, and, under state law, you're good.
The Federal government can still lock you up if they catch you. But, with state law no longer on their side, THEY have to spend THEIR OWN limited resources sending out DEA agents to catch you. Your state won't help them, and the federal government can't make them. And DEA agents have better things to do than play highway patrol.
Oh you silly, short-sighted partisans. The Republicans can still barely take the Senate in a midterm election with a highly favorable map and 38% voter turnout. I'm so impressed. How do you think they'll do in 2016 with a much less favorable map and massively higher turnout, meaning massively higher young/female/minority turnout?
For my part? I'd like the Republicans to get enough control to build a wall with Mexico before demographics kill them, they collapse entirely, and we move into the next party system (because Democrats won't "win" when that happens, they'll fracture: there will always be exactly two parties in the long run). It does no one any good to have desperate people dying in the middle of the desert trying to get into the US and, while we need immigration law reform, that doesn't mean we should legitimize the actions of people who didn't follow the laws as they existed when they came here. It's not fair to those who did. So the Republicans are right on enforcing immigration law, and the best way to make a permanent mark in that arena is to get a wall built. Once the wall is there, it would take a lot more political clout to get it destroyed than it would be to mess with border patrol deployments, amnesty, etc.
But yeah good job. You have a temporary, non-veto-proof majority in the Senate. Good luck in 2016. You'll need it.
Congratulations on piquing my curiosity about something completely ungoogleable. That looks more like a Perl or shell thing than a Javascript thing. What is it, and what does it do?
No conspiracy necessary. Do you think anti-abortion activists all got together one day in a dark room and said, "let's call abortion 'killing babies!'". No, one small group, or even one individual, started referring to it like that, and everyone else with similar goals decided, "hey, that's a good plan!" Same with Republicans and voter fraud. They didn't all have to talk to each other, just look around and see what tactics their allies have come up with and are using in public to good effect.
Claiming that Democrats are the only party using soft money in elections is so idiotic it doesn't deserve a response.
Because I should believe "Ungrounded Lightning"'s facially implausible anecdote about an "illegal immigrant" bragging with hostile neighbors about his crimes that could get him 30 years in prison over Justin Levitt's professional, multi-year research project studying the issue.
I used to that. Might again. But, now that I have a job where I have to deal with other people regularly, I decided that the risk of missing a meeting (which happened to me on more than one occasion during the 5 years or so I did this) was not worth it.
Since voter fraud is a nonexistent non-issue created so Republicans have political cover to put up roadblocks to disenfranchise certain Democrat-leaning voter groups, I seriously doubt this tactic will "backfire" in the way you suggest.
I don't like the part that overwrites resolv.conf to use 127.0.0.1 as the nameserver if it thinks the network is down, but I'm not going to play shell script bug hunt with you. SystemD also has bugs. Almost all software has bugs. The software on Apollo 11 had bugs. And Debian's init scripts are, indeed, messy and imo overkill and inferior to the rc.d method used by Slackware and the BSDs.
Well, the problem in your example wasn't a race condition. It's that they never did kill -9.
The comparison with the SystemD version of the file is invalid because the complexity has just been shifted elsewhere. In the init version, the complexity is in the script. In the SystemD version, it's in a monolithic binary running as PID 1. Which is better is not clear just from looking at the files.
However, and I've said this before -- even if Debian's init scripts suck, that just proves/Debian's/ init scripts suck. Slackware's init scripts are much, much cleaner than Debian's or Red Hat's.
You might want to look into some sort of "(sleep 600; reboot -f ) &" inside of your shutdown script if you're going to be working with machines you can't easily get to to power cycle. That would potentially solve all sorts of obscure corner cases in shutdown. You'd have to put that in after it did its final "I KILL YOU ALL MWA HA HA" signaling to shut down the user processes so the sleeping shell doesn't just die with the rest of userspace. Still, might want to look into it.
The one I see is if you try to stop and start it simultaneously (or, "within a racy amount of time"), there could be a race with the PID file. Theoretically I guess you should have a consistent state if you start and stop the daemon simultaneously (either it should end up stopped or started), but it seems like it would be bad practice to attempt to do something like that. Slackware's rc.bind script has this comment, which is hilarious:
# Start BIND. As many times as you like.;-) # Seriously, don't run "rc.bind start" if BIND is already # running or you'll get more than one copy running.
Sound logic. I learned not to blindly run "rc.whatever start" long ago.
You want people to test code on weird clusters that apparently are tightly integrated somehow and not using a standard batch submission mechanism. I used to want people to test code on Linux/SPARC. Neither of us is going to get what we want, because expecting other people to test such marginal use cases is expecting other people to do our work for us.
And why would you have to manually power cycle a machine because named didn't start? And why would you have to fix a failure on a single node of a huge cluster overnight? If that was the nameserver for all the machines, well, you should have had at least two nameservers. It's not like they take much CPU. Single points of failure are bad.
Dude I call bullshit on you. You're talking about theoretical problems that no one ever really runs into ever. There are 2^15 PIDs available. You're not going to iterate over all of them and actually run into a PID race in an init script. That is not a thing. It's just something you might learn in an OS class or something because, well, it/COULD/ be a thing in that theoretically there is a race there, so it's good for learning about races (I guess...). But it's not a race you're ever going to run into in a million years unless you have a fork bomb in your startup scripts. And if you have a fork bomb in your startup scripts, you have bigger problems. And if your entire cluster is freezing because of that one node, maybe you should work on that single point of failure since computers _DO_ have hardware failures occasionally and you _ARE_ likely to get bitten by having a single point of failure like that.
But not because of sysvinit. Stop making shit up.
And you have a slightly lower UID than I do. Which means you should have grown out of your "disparage people who have more experience than I do because I'm so cool" adolescent phase by now. Stop talking about people who "can't see past their bash manual". That's not a thing, either. Having experience is a good thing. Unless you changed careers, you should have enough of it by now to see that. Look in the mirror and think about why your personal growth might maybe be going a little slower than it should.
Oh, SystemD? Well, I think those programmers should probably have spent their time solving real problems, and I'm suspicious of it, because it seems like it's reinventing the wheel, because of its questionable design decisions thus far (such as binary log files), and because Poettering's other brainchildren like PulseAudio are best avoided. But, given that there seem to be enough people who dislike it to support at least one mainstream distribution, I'm pretty sure I won't be stuck with it, so, if someone else likes it, good for them.
Slashdot Mirror
I didn't say he didn't have a right to hold his opinion. I didn't throw him in jail or get him fired for it. I just said he's wrong.
Wow, I think less of RationalWiki after reading that.
There's a big difference between tolerating intolerant actions and tolerating intolerant words and ideas. If you want to say, "All the Jews deserve to die," that's just your opinion. It's not a very nice opinion. Most people don't share it. But, in a free society, you should be free to express it, because that's what it means to have a free society.
If you start killing or planning to kill specific people, Jews or otherwise, well, then, we have a problem. That's murder, or attempted murder, or conspiracy to commit murder, or whatever, and it's against the law, and we need to lock you up so that you don't kill people.
But unless you're actually DOING anything illegal, in a free society, anyone should be free to hold and express any opinions whatsoever. Otherwise, those people are being repressed, because it's wrong to deny anyone the right to hold and express their own opinions.
This isn't definitional trickery. People have rights. Among those rights is freedom of thought and freedom of expression. The fact that some people do not believe in those rights, or seek to deny others those rights, doesn't mean those people LOSE THEIR RIGHTS. It just means they're wrong. Being wrong doesn't make you less human, and those preaching "tolerance" who would treat the intolerant as less worthy than themselves ARE BEING HYPOCRITES and ARE BEING INTOLERANT.
And the argument you quote is a false dichotomy. We don't have to tolerate people bullying others. Our choice is not between tolerating murder, bullying, and other crimes, and being completely intolerant with those whose ideas we believe are wrong and locking people up in jail or concentration camps or mental institutions because they dare express their (admittedly wrong -- that's NOT the POINT!) views about how women or the Irish or whatever are inferior. It's their right to have those views, and to express them. Not to act on them in an illegal way. And we can certainly have a working and prosperous society while tolerating the SPEECH and IDEAS of intolerant people. The US is one.
The single act which makes me admire the ACLU most is their 1978 defense of Nazis who wanted to march in Chicago. THAT is a commitment to an open society.
Not shunning, or discriminating against, or firing, or locking people up because they dare disagree with you.
Android makes their simulator (slow as it is) available for free, and it works on everything. iPhone wants you to buy a Mac so you can run XCode.
I'm not going to spend money to improve another company's ecosystem. I'll code to standards and test with WebKit. Beyond that, Apple can suck it.
That is a very cool idea, and is explored in this research project: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/T...
Not disagreeing with you, but it's a little misleading to say "a processor needs some electricity and that's it". A processor needs a very precise voltage level of DC current supplied continuously. To get that precise voltage level, you need regulators, AC/DC converters, etc. Moreover, you need to burn coal, oil, natural gas, or sustain a nuclear reaction in order to provide this electricity. Finding carbohydrates is comparatively easy compared to maintaining an entire electrical grid. After all, they quite literally grow on trees.
It was a federal preemption case where Arizona wanted to be more aggressive asserting federal law than the federal government wanted to be, and passed laws to that effect. Part of the law was struck down due to preemption, part was upheld. It was a divided Supreme Court decision also.
iirc the struck-down part was making "illegal presence" a crime when it wasn't a federal crime (so, making something illegal that was legal under federal law). The part that was upheld was making it a requirement that all Arizona law enforcement personnel check with the federal government whenever they think they might have come across an illegal immigrant in the course of their duties.
I can see where it comes from. It was born of good intentions. But see my other comment http://slashdot.org/comments.p... for why I think it (along with the effectively sadist-run deletion policy) needs to go.
Re the deletion BS: I wouldn't even care about that so much now that we have DeletionPedia if they would just TURN OVER ALL THE DELETED PAGES TO DELETIONPEDIA so they can be preserved THERE if Wikipedia doesn't want them. No excuse for not doing this unless they actually want to CENSOR the pages instead of just disassociating from them.
I sometimes wonder (not often, because I have better things to wonder about...) what would have happened if Wikipedia had been started by a much less close-knit and mission-focused community and we ended up with some sort of cross between wikia.com and individual blogs linking to each other. I'm not convinced it would be a worse world.
In theory, yes, that might be a good thing. Still of dubious value in my opinion -- information is information; I don't care whether it's been officially published or is on arXiv as long as it's correct -- but maybe.
In practice, this happens:
Editor: "The dataflow machine concept [1] suffered from several fatal flaws [2][3], including an inability to efficiently broadcast parallel tokens [4]. MIT continued researching dataflow machines [5][6][7] long after most other researchers had stopped."
Asshole (probably an MIT fanboy): "DELETING the last sentence because it's ORIGINAL RESEARCH!!111one."
Editor: "WTF it's a widely known fact that this is true and you can look at the published research and see that the last publications on classical dataflow machines to verify it."
Asshole: "But it's ORIGINAL RESEARCH(!!11ONE!) because YOU HAD TO LOOK IT UP IT WASN'T WRITTEN DOWN SOMEWHERE ELSE."
Editor: "But that's idiotic. It's true; that's all that matters. And it's important to note this, because it could have implications for researchers studying potentially unhealthy research cultures--"
Asshole: "Okay so now you HATE MIT too you're BIASED and should stop editing any articles about MIT!"
Asshole Administrator: "Reverting page to last revision by Asshole. No original research, Editor. Take some time to cool off."
Who's right here? As a society, it's good to know and document that MIT had gotten so inbred in the 90s that it couldn't see that dataflow machines were a fool's errand even after other researchers could see it. And it's completely verifiable that MIT did, in fact, continue researching dataflow machines years after everyone else had realized they were a dead end and stopped. The article shouldn't say MIT had an inbred culture without a source for that -- that's close to an unverifiable opinion. But, MIT DID have an inbred culture in the late 80s, early 90s, and it's good to preserve the evidence of that. And Wikipedia's as good a place to survey dataflow machine literature as anywhere else. We need more well-written literature surveys. My vote is for the Editor. He didn't say anything biased, just stated the facts as they were and could easily be verified by anyone willing to look. He contributed to the article. And Asshole, aided by Asshole Administrator and Wikipedia's asshole NOR policy, scored a political victory to whitewash a rather sorry chapter in MIT's history.
This is a completely hypothetical example, btw. But stuff pretty much EXACTLY LIKE THAT happens on Wikipedia all the time. And it's a damn shame.
---linuxrocks123
The thing I hate most is the "consensus" obsession. It leads to -- and I've seen this even though I rarely contribute -- people just making shit up about Wikipedia policies to support their positions and claiming it's "consensus". A lot of it comes down to who has groupthink on their side and, even more troublingly, who can bluff and bluster the best.
Wikipedia's community is toxic. I'm amazed the results are as good as they are, and it saddens me that the site could probably be so much better if it were better managed.
Wikipedia's "No original research" policy is second in asininity only to its "let's delete articles because we can" policy.
Perhaps -- federal preemption is tricky; there has to be an intent to preempt and some other conditions must be met -- but doing so would be counterproductive. If they do manage to get the laws overturned, they are replaced with nothing. So, marijuana would be fully decriminalized instead of partially decriminalized with a regulatory scheme in place. Not what the federal government would want.
I don't think it would be preempted in the first place, though. To be preempted, the law must "interfere" with the federal government. So, taxing the Federal Reserve is out, passing truly conflicting (as in, you can't obey both laws simultaneously) is out, and other such things. There has to be interference. A regulatory scheme for marijuana arguably would not interfere, because you can easily obey both sets of laws simply by not having or producing marijuana. The Federal government clearly doesn't see itself as "occupying the field" in drug regulation since local ordinances about drugs have a long history of coexisting with the federal scheme unchallenged.
The Obama administration could sue and have all the legalization laws, recreational or otherwise stricken from the books.
False. Federal law preempts state, but all that means is that if you get hauled into federal court, "it's legal under state law!" isn't a defense. The state government has no obligation to make its own laws mirror federal laws or to expend any energy whatsoever enforcing federal law. State-level marijuana legalization have a very real practical effect: you get pulled over by a STATE trooper, rather than the DEA, and you're fine, because he's not being paid to enforce federal law, and, under state law, you're good.
The Federal government can still lock you up if they catch you. But, with state law no longer on their side, THEY have to spend THEIR OWN limited resources sending out DEA agents to catch you. Your state won't help them, and the federal government can't make them. And DEA agents have better things to do than play highway patrol.
Oh you silly, short-sighted partisans. The Republicans can still barely take the Senate in a midterm election with a highly favorable map and 38% voter turnout. I'm so impressed. How do you think they'll do in 2016 with a much less favorable map and massively higher turnout, meaning massively higher young/female/minority turnout?
For my part? I'd like the Republicans to get enough control to build a wall with Mexico before demographics kill them, they collapse entirely, and we move into the next party system (because Democrats won't "win" when that happens, they'll fracture: there will always be exactly two parties in the long run). It does no one any good to have desperate people dying in the middle of the desert trying to get into the US and, while we need immigration law reform, that doesn't mean we should legitimize the actions of people who didn't follow the laws as they existed when they came here. It's not fair to those who did. So the Republicans are right on enforcing immigration law, and the best way to make a permanent mark in that arena is to get a wall built. Once the wall is there, it would take a lot more political clout to get it destroyed than it would be to mess with border patrol deployments, amnesty, etc.
But yeah good job. You have a temporary, non-veto-proof majority in the Senate. Good luck in 2016. You'll need it.
when we stop using computers to count votes.
$()
Congratulations on piquing my curiosity about something completely ungoogleable. That looks more like a Perl or shell thing than a Javascript thing. What is it, and what does it do?
No conspiracy necessary. Do you think anti-abortion activists all got together one day in a dark room and said, "let's call abortion 'killing babies!'". No, one small group, or even one individual, started referring to it like that, and everyone else with similar goals decided, "hey, that's a good plan!" Same with Republicans and voter fraud. They didn't all have to talk to each other, just look around and see what tactics their allies have come up with and are using in public to good effect.
Claiming that Democrats are the only party using soft money in elections is so idiotic it doesn't deserve a response.
Because I should believe "Ungrounded Lightning"'s facially implausible anecdote about an "illegal immigrant" bragging with hostile neighbors about his crimes that could get him 30 years in prison over Justin Levitt's professional, multi-year research project studying the issue.
Critical thinking indeed.
I used to that. Might again. But, now that I have a job where I have to deal with other people regularly, I decided that the risk of missing a meeting (which happened to me on more than one occasion during the 5 years or so I did this) was not worth it.
It's still stupid, though.
Stop making shit up.
http://www.washingtonpost.com/...
Since voter fraud is a nonexistent non-issue created so Republicans have political cover to put up roadblocks to disenfranchise certain Democrat-leaning voter groups, I seriously doubt this tactic will "backfire" in the way you suggest.
I don't like the part that overwrites resolv.conf to use 127.0.0.1 as the nameserver if it thinks the network is down, but I'm not going to play shell script bug hunt with you. SystemD also has bugs. Almost all software has bugs. The software on Apollo 11 had bugs. And Debian's init scripts are, indeed, messy and imo overkill and inferior to the rc.d method used by Slackware and the BSDs.
I'll just leave you with this: https://plus.google.com/112984...
Yes, yes, "it's just an interface to journald!" So it's more like syslogd embedding a web server and QR encoder than init itself. Much better.
Well, the problem in your example wasn't a race condition. It's that they never did kill -9.
The comparison with the SystemD version of the file is invalid because the complexity has just been shifted elsewhere. In the init version, the complexity is in the script. In the SystemD version, it's in a monolithic binary running as PID 1. Which is better is not clear just from looking at the files.
However, and I've said this before -- even if Debian's init scripts suck, that just proves /Debian's/ init scripts suck. Slackware's init scripts are much, much cleaner than Debian's or Red Hat's.
You might want to look into some sort of "(sleep 600; reboot -f ) &" inside of your shutdown script if you're going to be working with machines you can't easily get to to power cycle. That would potentially solve all sorts of obscure corner cases in shutdown. You'd have to put that in after it did its final "I KILL YOU ALL MWA HA HA" signaling to shut down the user processes so the sleeping shell doesn't just die with the rest of userspace. Still, might want to look into it.
The one I see is if you try to stop and start it simultaneously (or, "within a racy amount of time"), there could be a race with the PID file. Theoretically I guess you should have a consistent state if you start and stop the daemon simultaneously (either it should end up stopped or started), but it seems like it would be bad practice to attempt to do something like that. Slackware's rc.bind script has this comment, which is hilarious:
# Start BIND. As many times as you like. ;-)
# Seriously, don't run "rc.bind start" if BIND is already
# running or you'll get more than one copy running.
Sound logic. I learned not to blindly run "rc.whatever start" long ago.
You want people to test code on weird clusters that apparently are tightly integrated somehow and not using a standard batch submission mechanism. I used to want people to test code on Linux/SPARC. Neither of us is going to get what we want, because expecting other people to test such marginal use cases is expecting other people to do our work for us.
And why would you have to manually power cycle a machine because named didn't start? And why would you have to fix a failure on a single node of a huge cluster overnight? If that was the nameserver for all the machines, well, you should have had at least two nameservers. It's not like they take much CPU. Single points of failure are bad.
Dude I call bullshit on you. You're talking about theoretical problems that no one ever really runs into ever. There are 2^15 PIDs available. You're not going to iterate over all of them and actually run into a PID race in an init script. That is not a thing. It's just something you might learn in an OS class or something because, well, it /COULD/ be a thing in that theoretically there is a race there, so it's good for learning about races (I guess...). But it's not a race you're ever going to run into in a million years unless you have a fork bomb in your startup scripts. And if you have a fork bomb in your startup scripts, you have bigger problems. And if your entire cluster is freezing because of that one node, maybe you should work on that single point of failure since computers _DO_ have hardware failures occasionally and you _ARE_ likely to get bitten by having a single point of failure like that.
But not because of sysvinit. Stop making shit up.
And you have a slightly lower UID than I do. Which means you should have grown out of your "disparage people who have more experience than I do because I'm so cool" adolescent phase by now. Stop talking about people who "can't see past their bash manual". That's not a thing, either. Having experience is a good thing. Unless you changed careers, you should have enough of it by now to see that. Look in the mirror and think about why your personal growth might maybe be going a little slower than it should.
Oh, SystemD? Well, I think those programmers should probably have spent their time solving real problems, and I'm suspicious of it, because it seems like it's reinventing the wheel, because of its questionable design decisions thus far (such as binary log files), and because Poettering's other brainchildren like PulseAudio are best avoided. But, given that there seem to be enough people who dislike it to support at least one mainstream distribution, I'm pretty sure I won't be stuck with it, so, if someone else likes it, good for them.
Oopsy, minor mistake:
Correct auto-restart command follows: /etc/rc.d/rc.sendmail start; fi; done
while true; do if ps aux | grep -v grep | grep -q sendmail; then