What a lot of people are concerned about is that this entirely new and largely untested (in the 'wild', as it were) and very very large, complex piece of software which runs at a very very privileged level in the operating system is going to become the main source of security vulnerabilities in Linux.

Linux has almost two orders of magnitude more code than systemd, and it changes all the time. Security vulnerabilities are far more likely to be in the monolithic kernel.

It's still limited by the FPGA's gate count, which is pretty low by CPU standards.

We cannot build a computer that can model a bug's brain activity

Actually, I believe IBM emulated a rabbit sometime in the past couple of years.

You can have yearly releases as long as you're willing to ruthlessly cut features that aren't sufficiently stable. If frequent updates are more important than features, then that's achievable.

The problem would be if marketing had a hand in both direction AND quality control. That's the recipe for disaster.

The demo site uses frames. FRAMES.

This is the researcher's website. A RESEARCHER. Who cares if he sucks at web design? Ur/Web can generate any HTML you want.

That gave me some hope for the world. At least some stood up and said "No" and likely ended their careers over it.

Yup, it's a grand, sickening Milgram experiment writ large.

I think that it's more protective of citizens to behave in a way that isn't morally reprehensible.

That's an excellent and underappreciated point. The only difference between a morally reprehensible government-sanctioned action against a terrorist, and an action against you is an easily manufactured excuse. If morally reprehensible actions were never permitted, then the citizens need never fear their own government, which was the whole point of the constitution to begin with.

you can separate them and ask them questions then torture them when their answers don't match.

Except that doesn't work, because people being tortured will say anything to make it stop. At no point when they change their stories can you be certain they're now telling the truth. Even if their stories suddenly match, it could be a complete fluke, or as a result of the interrogator asking leading questions. Torture is useless.

One curious corollary is that if the human brain is a Turing machine, then humans can never decide this issue either, a point that the authors deliberately steer well clear of.

It's not curious at all. The goal was to determine if a computer can decide with certainty whether another agent intends to do harm. This is obviously unsolvable, even for humans. Of course, we don't require humans to be absolutely certain in all cases before pulling the trigger, we just expect reasonable belief that oneself or others are in danger (for a self-defence argument). Reasonable belief is even easier to decide for computers, since the internal states resulting in that conclusion are fully available to us (unlike the human mind).

When Debian pushed Gnome3 and the community didn't like it [...] Now there is the systemd debacle. A large number of people have voiced their disapproval [...]

You seem to be speaking for "the community", but I don't see any hard numbers suggesting that the majority of said community actually shares your opinions. Just because many voices cry out and cry loudly, does not make those voices representative of anything meaningful.

scanning the whole address space multiple times and guessing

You don't understand how garbage collection works.

While they do have the necessary language support for functional programming, the fact that they are impure means that even when you're following the functional paradigm you can't count on the rest of the program playing by the same rules. Any call to external code may perform I/O or depend on or modify global mutable state.

Sure, but triggering side-effects during a fold can be perfectly sensible, and this doesn't make functional programming languages any less functional. Find me one person that considers this program to be non-functional, as your definition does:

let main = let list = [10; 2; 99; 30; 3] in
    map (fun x -> printf "%d\r\n" x);;

Oh, I also forgot to mention:

and that your resources are freed deterministically the instant you are done with them, rather than "at some time in the future, maybe".

Except this can lead to extremely high latency due to cascading deletions, which is another potential source of performance problems in C/C++. If you try to bound the amount of work to do to avoid this problem, you necessarily introduce reclamation latency. Reclamation latency isn't necessarily a bad thing.

If you use smart pointers to manage your dynamic allocations, you'll find that memory management in C++ isn't any harder than in a garbage-collected language.

Because smart pointers are degenerate garbage collection.

Having closures does not make a functional language, instead, what makes a functional language is referential transparency.

Scheme, Lisp, OCaml are all functional languages that are not referentially transparent. Pure functional languages require referential transparency, but impure functional languages do exist.

JavaScript is a functional language, but it's also procedural and object-oriented.