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Let's make an app that posts your poo to Apple HQ

Plus: It's open warfare in the Linux greybeard world

CoTW Can we build an app that automatically delivers large quantities of human excrement to Apple's doorstep? That is the question frothing on fanbois' lips as we enter another Comment of the Week.

On last week's exclusive announcement of the new “bump to dump” app Ploppr, silver-badged reader Pen-y-gors opened the batting with an excellent suggestion for additional Ploppr functionality:

Does the iOS version automatically post 30% of the deposit to Apple via iTunes? I'm tempted to start coding now ...

Few of you seemed to see this, but by Odin's beard did it tickle the cockles of this writer's heart.

On the news that Apple's Pay app was live this week, Stretch – who revels in a bronze badge – kept it short and sweet when dissing the fruity firm:

Fuck off Apple. Just. Fuck. Off.

More than 30 downvotes should put to rest the notion that everyone on/at/in El Reg hates Apple. We like to think informed and reasoned comments, rather than mindless abuse, tend to get the upvotes. (OK Apple, will you start talking to us again now? Pretty please?)

A close runner-up for this week's Comment of the Week award was Alfred, who said what we're all thinking when it comes to politicians invoking paedophiles as justification for new attacks on civil liberties:

They truly think we're all idiots "Alongside the blessings ... there are the plotters, the proliferators, and the paedophiles.” Every fucking time, they throw about the word "paedophile" and expect us to react like Pavlovian half-wits raised on a diet of the Daily Mail and the Daily Express. Just say "paedophile" and the stupid fucking public will let us do whatever we like to them. I cannot be the only person now who automatically discounts anything said by "authority" that uses the term. Even when I don't want to or they might have a sensible point to make, I can't help it; if you say "paedophile", your credibility vanishes.

Stick it to the man, Alfred. And all power to the elbows of the 72 who upvoted you for that as well. Smash the machine!

Meanwhile, in the news that greybeards are in a war over a possible fork over Debian, Ole Juul said...

Go for it “If systemd will be substituting sysvinit in Debian, we will fork the project and create a new distro. We hope this won't be necessary, but we are well prepared for it,” I hope they do it. I look forward to Debian being turned around and getting back on track.

And that scored more than 60 upvotes at the time of writing. Reasoned, straightforward – and evidently popular.

The Wooden Twig of Fail goes to ...

The least popular comment of this week on The Register comes from silver-badger Andy Prough, whose rather reasonable observation on Apple, Henry Ford and Linus Torvalds seems to have attracted the wrath of Android haters and fanbois alike:

"Similar to what Henry Ford did with the Model T, Steve Wozniak and Steve Jobs put technology directly in the hands of the people". That quote applies far more to the work of Torvalds than anything the two Steves ever did. Without cheap LAMP servers, broadband internet would be too expensive to afford, and there would be no services like iTunes, Google, etc to connect to. Without cheap as chips Android phones, half the world still wouldn't be connected with any kind of computing device. The vast majority of everything that we have in terms of interconnectedness of billions of people rests on one fundamental decision - Torvalds' initial decision to license the Linux kernel under the GPL. Compared to the work of Torvalds, Apple is practically just a savvy marketer of high priced luxury goods for the ultra-wealthy.

When we said reasonable, we mean he didn't resort to shouting naughty words or calling everyone else shills. Which does make the slew of downvotes all the more confusing. Ah well, ours not to reason why, etc etc.

This week's winner of the Golden Vulture Dropping of Excellence

In all the bun-fighting over the news that UNIX greybeards are threatening to fork Debian after accusing GNOME devs of dumbing it down, Raumkraut pinged in an absolute blinder.

“Personally I have never liked sysv init much with its huge pile of little shell scripts sequenced by a funny naming rule. The systemd can hardly be worse. Haven't used it much yet, but it appears to be well-documented, and brings up my personal OpenSuse spin snappily.” Ah, you've fallen into the same trap as Debian did. You've mistaken systemd for a sysvinit replacement. It's not. It's a replacement for just about the entire operating system stack (the clue is in the name). Where currently the argument is about "GNU/Linux", it may soon be better phrased "systemd/Linux". The fear is that once you adopt systemd, it will be unreasonably difficult to replace it with anything better in the future, thanks to its all-encompassing nature, and the encouragement of *explicit* dependencies by user-facing software. There's no reason why the Gnome DE should strictly require one particular init system, but it does.

84 upvotes and rising at the time of writing. Well said, Raumkraut!

And, er, that's it. Goodbye, print safely. ®

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