DNS engineer here.

It's always DNS because no one wants to hire us. We're prima donnas that don't work much and demand large salaries. Companies think they can get away with having some random network guy "learn a bit of DNS" and it works!!... For a while... Then it fails catestrophically and the DNS engineer that was let go to "save costs" smugly watches them crash and burn. The job is super easy and simple until you're 48 hours into troubleshooting and the CTO is lighting money on fire trying to get the network back online. A big company can easily burn a DNS engineers 10 years salary in costs if they have a single large DNS failure (security or downtime).

Well it's because it makes your morale bar drop really fast which makes you move slower (unless someone shouts uuh-raa! nearby)

Anyway if you have any more questions, I'm a gold rank player so that's roughly 7 years of military service equivalent.

That's labial velar approximate. We don't say "bwatermelon" just because the letter is pronounced with a B

That's wrong! There are only three bilabial letters! P, M, and B. F and V are labiodental

Steve Harvey: "We asked 100 people, what is the male reproductive organ?"

Contestant: "The penis"

SH: "A WUH... HUH??" audience erupts into laughter Steve Harvey grabs onto podium to support himself laughter gets even louder

SH: O lordy... one man goes into cardiac arrest and many others begin vomiting profusely from laughing too hard

SH: YOU PEOPLE NEED HELP the Earth shatters and Satan rises from the underworld to claim unworthy souls the universe begins rapidly closing in on itself

SH: (putting on a weary voice) Survey says... the board shows 100 for "penis" Harvey is able to get off one more shocked look before existence as we know it comes to an end

I couldn't roll my eyes hard enough. It instantly reminded me of r/atheism titles going "dae religion bad ?😤" 80,000 up votes

SEO is what is killing Google. Companies designing shit websites designed to highjack search results is a huge issue.

Kind of surprised that you see that as weird. I served myself and would never dream of wearing the uniform improperly. Especially around stars and bars. HQs got nothing better to do than dress and appearance.

My old man used to say (in a sing-song voice):

Hay is for horses

Sometimes cows

Chickens would eat it

But they don't know how

Security through obscurity is not security

An alternative DNS root is where someone other than IANA sets up a root zone. At the end of the day, root zone authority is technically not "hard coded". It's a terrible idea to set up an alt root or to use one for these reasons:

1. Security. This is the biggest one. DNSSEC works via setting up Trust Anchors with the root zone and chaining down the tree all the way to the recursive DNS server. DNSSEC doesn't work if anyone in there doesn't have a trust anchor for the root zone. Additionally, if that root zone is untrustworthy, you can effectively have DNS poisoning happen at the root level. Imagine having two google.com's based on which root zone (and therefore walking two separate trees) you ask.
2. It encourages dividing the internet. The two largest Alt zones are Russia's (RNDNS) and China's (.chn). RNDNS exists as a continuity plan in case the rest of the world decides to cut them off of the internet. China's is part of a hare-brained plan to "reinvent the internet under IPv9" (an idiotic plan that sounds even more crazy than Iran's supposed "quantum computer")
3. Pointing to a different root zone can cause a lot of headaches for diagnosing DNS issues when they aren't coming down from the same root zone. It can cause different answers (and a parallel tree).

To answer your second question, they are not good for acting as a way to mitigate DNS failures. No domain servers are going to be asking them in the first place, meaning no one can get there even if it does have the "correct" answer. If all 13 root servers went down simultaneously, the results would be catastrophic. But that's also why they're physically located around the world in many different countries in heavily secure facilities with many High-Availability servers (clone servers that instantly take over if there's a failure, the ultimate "hot" server)

You wouldn't want to have a DNS server ask two root zones anyway. If it can't reach the root zones, then that needs to be addressed. You can't just ask a "less secure" server in case the primary doesn't work. That's just begging for a security breach via cutting off access to the primary root zones so that they "fail over" to the less secure ones.

Hi, professional DNS engineer here! if anyone has any questions about the inner workings of DNS or top level domains, ask away! (THIS IS MY MOMENT)