Not reacting immediately to advanced, targeted intruders is standard tactics, and recommended by most experts in the field. This is news to Slashdot because folks here usually only deal with mass criminal attacks, which are a different beast entirely.

This isn't a DHS conspiracy, not even one for new funding. It's just the government advocating reasonable measure even though I'm sure they knew they'd get pilloried for it. I rarely respect the DHS, but in this case I may make an exception.

Nonsense.

An architecture is superior for a given purpose, or judged by a particular standard. There isn't some magic score card which can declare an architecture to be plainly superior.

HURD will be clean. Plan9 was clean (and I have a fondness for it). I also prototype some logic in Haskell but know full well why most production code isn't written in it.

Linux is a bit of a mess. So is BSD. So is every general purpose operating system that has ever been fielded for a significant period. The warts come from being adapted to serve many different purposes, and working around many real world problems that clean-room architecture gets to just ignore. And getting some of it wrong and only fixing some of it halfway because it turns out that in real deployments (not just "the market"), clean isn't the most important thing people need from an OS.

Building a fresh OS, even over two decades, is impressive. Most Slashdotters couldn't do it. But, seriously, many research OS's have been written and shelved since HURD was started, and none of them have run around insisting they were the second coming. HURD has some neat ideas. But it's getting mocked because it's been presented with the kind of pretension and arrogance you only get away with if you deliver perfectly and on time.

This is an old problem in high assurance systems. As other posters have pointed out, as some point you have to trust someone. But you can still "trust but verify".

The standard solution is "division of privilege". Over time folks have learned that the key is a system which audits everything the admin does, and the one thing the admin can't do is modify or delete the audit trail. A separate person or team has the role of auditor.

This is one of the requirements of a B2 level system in the old Orange Book model, and you'll see if it as a requirement if you need to provide systems for most countries' military or intelligence organizations. It's rarely used elsewhere because more or less noone else is willing to pay the staffing costs. The solution there is trust someone, and be ready to fire, sue, and/or prosecute if they violate that trust.

If she had broken and entered, destroyed some property, changed locks, sabotaged, say, manufacturing systems so they would need repair before normal business operations could continue, and falsified documents (fraud), you think she would have gotten a _smaller_ sentence?

I'm at a very different moment in life than you are, but several years ago I had a severe panic attack "out of the blue" while managing a large project. Once I'd understood what was going on, I responded like a good little geek and checked out the research on panic attacks.

While you should definitely seek the help of a professional, as you can dangerously misdiagnose yourself, the most likely cause is a high level of stress that you haven't been managing. Anxiety disorders in general become progressively harder to treat the longer you live with them, so don't try to just tough this out.

If you need it, a psychiatrist may be able to prescribe medication which can provide short term relief. Far more effective over the long term will be to engage in some cognitive therapy and learn to recognize the early symptoms that you are not managing stress and respond to them before your stress results in anxiety.

I would recommend the site www.anxieties.com as a good place to start. It's run by a respected clinician in the field, and while the site advertises plenty of materials you could pay for, it has a fair amount of information and advice available for free.

The good news is that if you take this seriously, respond quickly, and learn to comprehensively manage your stress, then your odds of avoiding a chronic anxiety disorder are quite good.