I actually did this once. Our school's CS cluster was maintained partly by students, one of whom was me. I was, of course, very inexperienced in actual Unix administration, though I had read Slashdot, Usenet, etc., quite a bit. There was a directory in someone's home directory that no one could delete, even as root (probably due to some bizarre NFS issue, never figured it out). I had heard the phrase "send flames to/dev/null" and others in that vein. Plus I knew... er, "knew"... that/dev/null would always delete what you sent to it. Putting 1 and 1 together to make 3, I typed sudo mv undeletable_dir/dev/null.
In the terminal room, there was suddenly a cacophany of beeping. The phone started ringing. This was bad. And no one knew how to fix it.
Someone suggested rebooting the machine. Of course, the machine promptly refused to boot. Much panic was in abundance, the phrase "complete restore from backup" was ominously spoken. Finally, someone with a Clue (TM) showed up and pointed out that we only needed to remake the symlink from/dev/null to the actual device in/devices/pseudo/ (this is a Solaris system). Crisis averted.
Moral? Several. man(4) null. Don't do things as root if you aren't sure what will happen. When you fsck shit up, try to find someone who actually knows what they're doing, and get them to fix it. And, above all, don't believe what you read on the Internet.
Karma be damned! Unless they've been eating a sandwitch for the past few years, they're not literally out to lunch! The word "literally" means that they have actually been doing what you said. It is not a synonymn for "very".
My most egregious example, from last years (American) football playoffs: "The quarterback is literally tearing the defence to shreds." No! If he were doing that, there'd be blood everywhere! He's figuratively doing that --- the exact opposite of literally.
Well, my work cleaning up the grammar of the Internet is complete. Mission accomplished. *Shakes dust off hands and walks into the sunset.*
It was the Super Bowl in 1984, but since the rest of the season was played in 1983, it could be called the 1983 Super Bowl.
The simplest solution is the use the full thing -- like next week's would be the 2003-2004 Super Bowl (or Super Bowl XXXVIII).
It's not just that they're blinded by greed -- they're looking at precedent.
From their point of view: in the past, people were perfectly happy to trade their copyrighted material via P2P programs. And this was after they had to take the effort of ripping it to disk. It seems like there's nothing that would convince them to let more people have access to content, because (1) if these people wanted to share it over P2P (and, of course, they would -- all music listeners are just common thieves), they wouldn't even have to bother ripping & encoding a CD, and (2) by definition, all of those people will be able to immediately share said content with anyone they choose, in as much as they are hooked up to the internet. As far as the RIAA is concerned, this would be like shooting themselves in the foot -- letting users have both more content, and making that content more easy to share.
Granted, I agree with you, but think of it from the RIAA's viewpoint -- it just doesn't make sense.
Slashdot Mirror
I actually did this once. Our school's CS cluster was maintained partly by students, one of whom was me. I was, of course, very inexperienced in actual Unix administration, though I had read Slashdot, Usenet, etc., quite a bit. There was a directory in someone's home directory that no one could delete, even as root (probably due to some bizarre NFS issue, never figured it out). I had heard the phrase "send flames to /dev/null" and others in that vein. Plus I knew... er, "knew"... that /dev/null would always delete what you sent to it. Putting 1 and 1 together to make 3, I typed sudo mv undeletable_dir /dev/null.
/dev/null to the actual device in /devices/pseudo/ (this is a Solaris system). Crisis averted.
In the terminal room, there was suddenly a cacophany of beeping. The phone started ringing. This was bad. And no one knew how to fix it.
Someone suggested rebooting the machine. Of course, the machine promptly refused to boot. Much panic was in abundance, the phrase "complete restore from backup" was ominously spoken. Finally, someone with a Clue (TM) showed up and pointed out that we only needed to remake the symlink from
Moral? Several. man(4) null. Don't do things as root if you aren't sure what will happen. When you fsck shit up, try to find someone who actually knows what they're doing, and get them to fix it. And, above all, don't believe what you read on the Internet.
> literally out to lunch on this
Karma be damned! Unless they've been eating a sandwitch for the past few years, they're not literally out to lunch! The word "literally" means that they have actually been doing what you said. It is not a synonymn for "very".
My most egregious example, from last years (American) football playoffs: "The quarterback is literally tearing the defence to shreds." No! If he were doing that, there'd be blood everywhere! He's figuratively doing that --- the exact opposite of literally.
Well, my work cleaning up the grammar of the Internet is complete. Mission accomplished. *Shakes dust off hands and walks into the sunset.*
It was the Super Bowl in 1984, but since the rest of the season was played in 1983, it could be called the 1983 Super Bowl. The simplest solution is the use the full thing -- like next week's would be the 2003-2004 Super Bowl (or Super Bowl XXXVIII).
It's not just that they're blinded by greed -- they're looking at precedent.
From their point of view: in the past, people were perfectly happy to trade their copyrighted material via P2P programs. And this was after they had to take the effort of ripping it to disk. It seems like there's nothing that would convince them to let more people have access to content, because (1) if these people wanted to share it over P2P (and, of course, they would -- all music listeners are just common thieves), they wouldn't even have to bother ripping & encoding a CD, and (2) by definition, all of those people will be able to immediately share said content with anyone they choose, in as much as they are hooked up to the internet. As far as the RIAA is concerned, this would be like shooting themselves in the foot -- letting users have both more content, and making that content more easy to share.
Granted, I agree with you, but think of it from the RIAA's viewpoint -- it just doesn't make sense.
Actually, at the time the monument was capped (around 1880, IIRC), aluminum cost more per ounce to produce and refine than gold.