first things first: have you tried uninstalling systemd?

As someone who double-majored in biochemistry and economics and now works as an attorney, I can say that math and science training encourages logical thinking. I am not saying, of course, that all STEM majors are logical dudes, but it definitely encourages consideration of evidence, logical reasoning, and critical thinking.

While this does sound rather incompetent, A) it was probably written by a big private company, since our government uses contractors far more than it uses actual employees for most projects like this*, and B) there are insufficient data points to show that big private companies are any more or less secure, when dealing with similar data. Anecdotally, I'd guess private companies are just as bad or worse, or at least would be without regulations like HIPAA to force them to improve.

* I didn't RTFA and if it states this system was developed wholly by in-house staff I stand corrected. And also we should probably raise taxes so we can afford to hire competent in-house staff for our government.

Exactly. I've posted this before, but it's worth hammering in until more people understand it.

What used to be called fraud, perpetuated against a business by tricking them into selling something on false pretenses, has instead become "identity theft", perpetuated against an innocent third-party who has nothing to do with the transaction. It's so so very clever how the business community managed to turn that around and put the fault (until proven otherwise) and responsibility to clean up the mess on a third party, instead of on themselves and/or the actual crooks.

Nobody is saying that nuclear reactors are perfectly safe, but as the BP leak showed, nothing is perfectly safe. The Chernobyl and Fukushima reactors were designed back in the sixties with a horrific lack of fail safes. A modern plant would be much safer given the superior understanding of previous failure modes, advances in material sciences, and computer aid in simulating operations and design.

Hell, Chernobyl was a graphite moderated light water reactor. These reactors were designed so that they could be refueled while the plant was running. This was useful because if you left the nuclear fuel rods in there for too long, then the fissile P-239 that could be used for bombs would become P-240, which was a poison to bombs. In short, Chernobyl was designed to make fuel, not to be safe.

Fukushima was flawed in that it would require active cooling for three days after full shut down in order to be safe. Reactor 1 had a passive cooling system that relied on convection to keep the fuel at a safe temperature. An operator turned off the passive cooling system before the tsunami hit, and wasn't able to turn it on after the tsunami strike knocked out the backup generators. Newer designs provide passive cooling for up for 72 hours after a shut down.

There is no safe way to make energy. Coal mining kills many people. BP leaked tons of oil while drilling. You cannot judge nuclear power by the failure of old technologies whose flaws have been addressed in newer designs.

What people need to realize is that rolling your own data storage solution increases the risk of being hacked, losing data due to disasters, or losing remote access to files due to stupid crap like a router dying. If you're just using a NAS to store your porn, then that's fine. You'll just torrent the files back again. BUT if you are talking about pictures from your childhood, business files, or other critical documents, you seriously need to consider if you have a sufficient backup policy with off-site storage, and if you're going to be disciplined enough to update your disaster recovery plans.

I used to believe in rolling your own solution, until Synolocker came out. It became clear to me that Synology had no idea what it was doing with regard to security. I finally gave up and move my data over to Google Drive for Work. Sure, I'm giving data over to evil Google. BUT, I have access to my files anywhere with Internet access; I have two-factor authentication with the FIDO U2F app; I have a copy of the files on my computer as well as a backup in the Google cloud, which is pretty much a million times better than anything I can cook up.

I also don't have to worry about hard drive failure, updating firmwares, etc., etc.

Your personal email is the most important account you have for the reason you set forth: you can use it to reset passwords to all of your other accounts! That's why I use Google Mail along with the FIDO U2F dongle. This makes my email really secure.

Simulations are inspired by the way the universe behaves.
If you discover that the universe can be implemented in the same ways a simulation is, you have simply done a kind of circular reasoning. Reality looks like a simulation that looks like reality.

Not to detract from studies (captcha: proceed), It is very interesting to model how the universe MIGHT be implemented, but the ultimate implementation, or whether the concept of implementation has any meaning applied to the universe as an object, are theoretically and practically beyond our reach.

> Emulators DON'T have the quirks and timing issues of real hardware

In fact the comparison was among the host hw, not the emulated hw vs. bare metal. The code correctly implementing a full VM must run with the same results on all hardware where it has correctly been ported. I know it's theoretical because VM code gets advantage of bare metal (hw clock, RNG) but then the simulation is not perfect and it's a problem of the sim, not of the example.

To cut it shorter, in the domain of tic tac toe games defined as the sequence of X and O placements, one game is exactly the same no matter if it was vs. man or vs. machine, or on a blackboard, or on a piece of paper, as all of such variables are metadata, not data.

as the AC also said in his words, the timing inside the simulation is the simulated cpu time, the simulated hw clock cannot link to a real clock else the insulation is not there.

The universe does not need to stop us, because from the inside of it you can never prove you have the faintest idea of the way it is implemented, even if you got to model and understand every single particle and every single interaction. Does an insulated VM run on intel or on powerpc or on a commodore 64 with a hell of a RAM expansion? no way to know from the inside of it.

So the most rational reason becomes: they tried using systemd to speed things up but some not well documented glitch made the thing shut down. The short circuit is a scapegoat.

I'm pretty certain that's redundant, as all "renewable" sources have "unpredictable" problems, except tidal.
  - Hydro - dry spell, loss of snow pack
  - Solar (PV & other) - oops clouds
  - Wind - still day

"unpredictable" is the nature of renewable sources, which is why other baseline or backup sources (such as safer nuclear) remain vital as we figure out how to move away from fossils

Yeah but he needs a bunch of hard drives, right? That's going to be big, electricity heavy, and require cooling.

I agree 100% that manufacturers should spend the extra ten cents to make things "writeable/flashable". Users will probably freak out that their flashes are flashing but the upgrade in security would be worth it. Dell would probably have to put a special button in the back that you have to hold down in order to get a flash through. The NSA, would, of course, intercept and flash the crap out of any computers going to "bad places" but they wouldn't flash everyone's computer. Right? Right? Right?