No, that's what you get for anyone on your network running windows.

Not a problem on my home network. Besides, that's only if you actually set your system up so that Windows has access to the NAS box.

My friend lived in a low budget rental with 4 random roommates (former roommate was the thief,

That sounds like a good lesson in choosing your roommates more carefully, or better yet not having any (and certainly not 4).

For $100 + a few minutes every weekend doing incremental backups, I'll go the external harddisk over a NAS anyday. Though realistically I went for both a NAS and an external offsite backup.

Personally I prefer the external HD and incremental backups strategy too, but the downside with this compared to the NAS strategy is that you don't get automatic, regular backups: you have to be diligent in actually doing the backups, and you're only going to do them so often (once per week in your case), whereas with a NAS you can schedule them to be far more frequent, daily or even hourly.

I believe the other poster even suggested having two NAS boxes: one in active use doing hourly backups, and the other in off-site storage. Swap them out every month or week so your off-site is never that far behind, and then if something happens to your on-site systems you still have a fairly recent backup set. This is somewhat pricey, but seems like a robust strategy to me.

Comparing the hits of any Linux distro to iOS/OSX or Windows is an apples-and-oranges comparison, and makes little sense. Everyone knows that desktop Linux has a tiny marketshare. It might make some sense to compare to OSX perhaps, but certainly not Windows, and definitely not a mobile OS like iOS.

What you should be comparing is how popular it is in relation to Ubuntu, Mint, Debian, Fedora, Arch, OpenSUSE, and Slackware.

3) Any user who chooses to blow a hardware "fuse" can install any software he wants to without permission from the auto-maker, BUT prior to driving the vehicle on the public road he must register his car as an "experimental vehicle"

This is idiotic. I'm quite sure that no cars actually tie the airbags (or engine ECU, or ABS, etc.) into the infotainment computer.

1) Programmers who do not require password to be changed,

Hey, don't blame the programmers. Most likely, someone did suggest requiring the password to be changed, and management said no for some dumb reason.

never mind having responsibility for a few hundred tons of freight/passengers barrelling down the lines upwards of 60 mph.

Not disagreeing, but the Amtrak train that wrecked goes up to 125mph on the DC-NYC route. I've been on it myself and clocked it with a GPS speedometer app. And that's the regular train; Amtrak's Acela Express goes faster than that (I think up to 150, I'm not sure). And trains don't surround you with airbags and lock you in your seat with seat belts the way cars do, and cars only go up to 75-80mph on normal highways.

Maybe an hour of each person gets viewed once a week or so

Why would it ever be viewed at all, unless something happened? Who wants to waste their time watching drivers pick their noses?

you can assume that a train isn't going to be jumping off the tracks 500 feet into a field to the left so that does make the job a little easier.

Too bad Google Maps doesn't make that kind of assumption.

The USPS *is* a government entity. It's wholly owned by the US Government, therefore it's a government entity. It's largely run like a private company, but not entirely; Congress actually has a lot of say in its operations. The USPS isn't allowed to change the days they deliver mail, for instance, without Congressional approval. (They tried to eliminate delivery for one day a week not long ago and Congress refused.)

I'd like to know why no one ever talks about the other, fairly cheap and easy method of preventing train-driver error: hiring a second driver.

Every single passenger-carrying airplane in the US has two pilots, a pilot and a co-pilot. If the pilot screws up badly, or becomes incapacitated (people do have seizures and blackouts sometimes, you never know), or just needs to go to the bathroom badly because of some shitty Mexican food he ate earlier, then the co-pilot is there to take over.

Why do trains not have co-engineers? These aren't taxis with a handful of passengers, or even buses with up to ~50 passengers, these are trains with hundreds of passengers, just like large airliners.

We can talk about PTC (I think that's the acronym, positive train control) systems, and how effective they are, but a simple fix to this problem is to simply put a second engineer in the cabin.

No, cameras are never a bad idea for public-service employees. A good example of this is bus drivers. All the public buses I've taken in recent years had cameras on board, showing both the drivers and the passengers, along with signs warning that assaulting a bus driver carries a stiff prison sentence. The cameras are ostensibly to protect the drivers from bad passengers, but they obviously can also be used to see what the driver was doing in case of a crash, which is a good thing.

There isn't much difference between a train driver and a bus driver, except that the train driver doesn't have to interact with the public/passengers. There's no good reason at all to not have their activities recorded on camera while they're working.

He's obviously not talking about freight, he's talking about passenger transportation. Since the US spans a continent, and has large ports on both coasts, and also because it produces a lot of raw materials for export (such as coal), it's no surprise it does a lot of freight hauling on railroads. But that doesn't help people who need to get somewhere. The days of hobos are long past.

Hmm... so maybe eliminating a bunch of these parasites would actually help out a lot of other animals populations, including various endangered species (ones which we actually care about, like various mammals and birds)?

I wonder if there'd be any problems if fleas went away too.

OK, how about tapeworms? Is there any value to those?

You and your friend are extremely unlikely. Most people never get hit by lightning, ever. Most people also never get burgled. (Your friend was not robbed, BTW, unless he was in the house at the time.)

As for ransomware affecting NAS, that's what you get for running Windows.