No, that is debt, and in many cases it is the biggest single source of debt, as Darinbob said. Failing to rewrite your kludge app is just failing to pay down your debt. Whether or not the moment you get a giant wad of funding is the right time to do that depends on the context.

and other services we need not expose to nor listen on

That's *nix (or any other) firewalling 101. The instructor was probably not addressing any individual known threat but the general idea that you don't let the outside world touch ports for internal use just in case something can get in some day.

The North Korea distraction was late in the game and idiotic, but it did have the benefit that the stupid lie could be used as an excuse to get extra funding due to "cyberwar" threats instead of the normal criminal activity it very clearly was.
If you fell for it and are not a source of funding for IT security then you are "collatoral damage".

Maybe they are evolving from being the Pimply Faced Youth (from BOFH) to a sysadmin. I know when I went from being an engineer to sysadin I read the crab book (TCP/IP) and armadillo book (Essential System Administration), as well as a lot of hands on stuff before I became anything close to a reasonable sysadmin. I've met a few people who have made newbie mistakes in production that could benefit from such a book even though they are already in the role.

It doesn't have to be a police state to not be able to have a printer or equivalent, we can fuck things up too even if the penalties are nowhere near as bad.
I was in a western nation in the 1980s The hoops that had be jumped through to import a digital audio tape recorder for a small radio station were ridiculous and were placed in fear of violations of music company copyright. It took well over a year, possibly even into a second, and by then CD burners were available without ridiculous legal restrictions.
The penalties for importing a DAT drive without a licence theoretically could go as far as jail time, utterly ridiculous, but I doubt any Judge handed that penalty out. The people who drafted the restrictions (music copyright industry) sound like they really wanted a police state for their special interests.

With current events one way you can spot a police state is the events in China where some women have been jailed for planning a protest against domestic violence. The Chinese government actually agrees with their views 100%, but those women were setting up a political structure that was not part of The Party, so off to jail with them.

I think the word you are looking for is "totalitarian" instead, where control is seen as far more important than whatever "ism" is in the propaganda that is being printed off.

No, I can confirm that alignment was an issue - not a show stopper but sometimes stuff had to be adjusted. It also used to happen on tape drives designed for computers and for high end audio as well.

That's just creepy and showing what an utter waste of taxpayers dollars the toy soldier spooks are. So you've got my name I've never mentioned in the comments out of Dice's user account information - congrats, but then you've used that information for the most trivial of reasons - epic fail. I suggest you resign and go and get a job that you can do without fucking up.

To add your claim that XNU does not follow any microkernel rules is simply false. XNU uses microkernel-style message passing.

Yep, XNU is a hybrid kernel. It has microkernel parts and monolithic kernel parts.

I've never gotten that impression from the one I work for, which is publicly traded. Then again the one I work for uses worker empowerment as a management technique (i.e customers typically don't need to navigate through a bureaucracy to get resolution) so our customers prefer us over competitors. The ones you deal with may not do that, so YMMV of course.

XNU contains thousands upon thousands of lines of assembly code for both x86 and ARM. Being a microkernel does not preclude the presence of assembly code

The only way to truly understand C code is to read the disassembly. Otherwise you are only assuming what the compiler is emitting.

>"How does helping the several states fund public education not "provide for the [...] general Welfare"?"

Using that logic, the Federal Government can do pretty much *anything* it wants. I don't think that is/was the intent.

Passphrases composed entirely of dirty words need to be much longer than a dozen entries. The dirty word space is low-entropy.