The number is artificially high. Two are from acquisitions (instagram and whatsapp) and one is because they split one app into two separate apps (Facebook and Facebook Messenger)

“Computer Science is no more about computers than astronomy is about telescopes.” - commonly attributed to Edsger Dijkstra, but disputed.

I have sometimes compared those who have studied computer science (as opposed to learning how to program) with those who have studied music. You can be a very successful programmer without any computer science just as you can be a very successful musician without music theory. Mastery of the advanced studies of your discipline will make you a better than merely someone who can just get the job done.

Oh for a mod-point right now.

When Sequestration 2013 was threatening a project, the head of the project was speculating about what would happen to the data from the project. He said, "If we get all this data classified then someone has to pay to protect it."

Passive AV software is about eliminating malware AFTER it has taken root on a system. Active AV injects itself into critical checkpoints. Microsoft, to their credit, has taken proactive steps to close the exploits that malware have used enter a system. Steps like including Flash player updates with Windows updates. Is it perfect? Of course not. But it's gone a long way to the point of making AV software the "low hanging fruit" of attack surfaces.
I'll also echo what many have said - WSE and SPI Firewalls (Stateful Packet Inspection is the prerequisite of NAT is what actually protects you) have been the only thing I've been using for years.

OpenSolaris and its decedents: OpenIndiana, OmniOS, SmartOS have been all been great for me. I measure the uptime in years. I'm currently looking at 387 days since the last reboot.

Exactly. I use gotos as part of exception handling. You need to bail out of a function, but you need to clean up first ... { goto cleanup; cleanup: free( whatever ); close( something ); }

The problem is that lab systems need to be specific to the academic domain being studied. Even in similar studies, the results can vary greatly.

The worry isn't the new processes. It's the systemd process itself. I'll grant that having systemd pre-reducing privileges is better than expecting the daemon process to reduce privileges on its own. At what point will running systemd without networking be essentially non-optional due to widespread community adoption? I feel many of the worries of the parent of your post are still valid.

Will no one think of the dying Dining Philosophers?

Let's not forget that the Snowden documents are now a year and a half old. A year and a half ago, everyone thought the ciphers and protocols were good enough. Fast forward to the eve of 2015 and we know better. We have a new sense of what is state of the art. We know not to use ciphers with static keys that could be subject to subpoena requests and so on a so forth. I'm not so naïeve to believe that new ciphers will stop them in their tracks. The still have incredible resources to draw upon. We just have new speed bumps.

I suspected it was last straw. She was looking for an excuse.

That said, however, lawyers in good standing enjoy a legal privilege of being able to discuss matters with clients in confidence and be able to withhold those discussion from the government. If you can't communicate privately the privilege is eviscerated.

Perhaps she wasn't so much worried about herself than the confidential sources she used?

And don't forget to ask what language was that high level language written in?
Ruby - written in C
Erlang - written in C
Node.js - written in C with a few x86 and ARM assembler bits
Perl - written in C
Python - written in C

And the truly mind-numbing one: GNU C compiler - written in C.

I add, ServerAliveInterval 60, to my $HOME/.ssh/config file just because of appliances that are too dumb to handle long TCP connections.

I have worked with IT professionals at a military installation. Their improvisational talent is amazing when it comes to figuring out a way to get something done within the crazy rules they have to follow.