Uhm... Have you actually LOOKED at FreeBSD? It's even more aggressive than systemd in pulling dependencies into the core tree!

You've just described BusyBox - it's been with us for about 15 years. Yet the sky hasn't fallen.

"Must be an ordinary text file" - is that a law of nature? Why should it be a text file?

Oh, and systemd does not delete bad log files. It simply rotates them, preserving corrupted files from any further corruption.

Nuclear weapon EMP is greatly exaggerated.

A rule of thumb is, if your devices are affected by an EMP of a nuclear explosion and you're not inside a bunker/tank/whatever then you shouldn't worry about it. Because you're dead.

Besides, even the largest solar flares won't produce much magnetic flux to affect anything less than grid-size. Remember, flares themselves do not produce magnetic field themselves, they affect the Earth's geomagnetic field instead.

Air conditioning is pretty efficient. A 3kW (electric) unit can provide about 6kW (thermal) of cooling power which should be enough for most houses in most of the US during the night. And during the day you can use the nice friendly Sun to power your air conditioner directly.

I just listed it for comparison purposes.

They were not reduced to ashes, but rather oxidized. And no, that was a one-off event and all the security measures have failed to prevent any similar attack.

What sort of confabulation are you living in? Deficit in Bush years: 2000 $325.17 Billion Surplus
2001 $170.19 Billion Surplus
2002 $207.63 Billion Deficit
2003 $485.97 Billion Deficit
2004 $517.54 Billion Deficit
2005 $385.45 Billion Deficit
2006 $291.42 Billion Deficit
2007 $183.79 Billion Deficit
2008 $504.95 Billion Deficit

Basically, 2007 was a blip on the radar - the economy was fueled by the skyrocketing home prices.

Nope. There's NO SHORTAGE OF LITHIUM AND NEVER WILL BE. It's pretty much unlimited - all you need is sea salt. Its purification is also straightforward and fairly clean, just as aluminum production. Have you lived near aluminum smelter? I did.

Eventual consistency in the console is bad, but in practice the inconsistency window is usually less than a couple of seconds. It can get up to several minutes in the worst case but never above that.

It's another story for Amazon S3...

Starcluster is a piece of garbage. It should not even work on t1.micros - they simply don't have enough RAM or storage to run anything decent.

The rest of your message also makes no sense - even if Starcluster nodes can't be shutdown using Starcluster's own management, then simply go to the Amazon console and shutdown them.

That's pretty much true. Amazon handles billing for millions of customers without any problems. It's overwhelmingly likely that the poster made an error somewhere in configuration or left a service running. We've had such an experience (somebody started a huge instance for a test and forgot to turn it off), Amazon's tech support was extremely considerate and refunded us most of the price.

And if you want to run large clusters on Amazon - feel free to try our software: https://clusterk.com/ We can utilize Amazon's spot market with the resulting computation prices only slightly more expensive than electricity needed to run them.

Yes, there are companies that do just that. They predict the shading events about 5-10 minutes in advance by literally watching the clouds.

Yes, that's EXACTLY what I want. If you are so concerned about your business then you should use your PERSONAL funds to support the other candidate.

Perhaps you don't understand how HUGE is the ocean. A typical storm evaporates more water (thus increasing the salt content of the surface water) than all desalination plants in California could ever hope to do. With zero effects on the wild life. Moreover, natural salt content varies quite a lot completely naturally.

Plus, there's a strong current along the Californian coast, so dispersing the little bit of brine which is going to be produced is extremely easy.