Okay, so who is going to be the first person to post a scannable image of the DeCSS code in barcode?
(Didn't DDJ or one of the other early computer magazines try running a few issues with progam source (or was it binary?) printed in some sort of barcode, many years back?)
"Can technology be used to promote democracy?" is the wrong question. Of course it can, and has, probably since before the printing press.
The right question is how should technology be used to promote democracy? To which I'd answer "very carefully".
Most Americans seem to have accepted the common fallacy that "we live in a democracy". We don't, (it's a democratic republic), and one of the Founding Fathers' concerns was that it not become a democracy -- since historically democracies have proved to have rather short lifetimes -- about how long it takes for the populace to realize they can vote themselves bread and circuses. Alas, America has been going down this road for a while -- arguably changing the constitution to provide for popular election of senators, rather than appointment of them by the States, was a major step down the slippery slope. (For simple proof of this, consider how the Clinton impeachment conviction vote would have turned out if Senators were appointed rather than having to worry about reelection.)
Many commentators have decried the "government by poll" that in some cases has become a hallmark of modern government. If you think that's bad, consider the situation if the polls were instant (electronic) and binding.
Joan Vinge had some interesting insights into the weakness of a society organized around electronic democracy in her story "The Outcasts of Heaven Belt". I'm all for electing a representative government, especially where there might be some good candidates to choose from (alas not always the case). But do we really want government by the lowest common denominator that a pure democracy gives? Consider why even employee-owned companies choose a CEO rather than deciding everything by vote.
Certainly technology has a place for keeping the public informed of what their elected employees are up to. (And from this POV it's interesting to see what public files are now being closed by governments as access by the net, vs manually searching a paper file, becomes more prevalent.) But it shouldn't be too easy to vote -- heck, even the current trend to massive mail-in voting, let alone web-based voting, is disturbing.
Politics, like good governance and good management, requires people skills (I know, geeks don't want to hear that). Robert Heinlein wrote an excellent book, "Take Back Your Government" (republished by Baen Books a few years ago) explaining how this all works at various levels from local to national. Anyone who wants to understand this, let alone participate in it, should RTFM.
Lets take this little bit of humor into meatspace.. You open the biggest door to your house to get in, and leave it open. You settle in for a day, and then go out to party... but you leave the door open still. You are robbed blind and silly, and theres not even a broken window, because *you* left the door open.
Nope, more like you have a lock installed on your door made by a manufacturer who ships all locks keyed to the same key, and expects you to re-key the lock when you install it. You do lock the door behind you (but haven't rekeyed the lock) and somebody else using his copy of the key breaks into your house.
This puts 3, the company that made the lock, at least partly in the wrong, although it's probably still your fault for choosing that lock company in the first place.
Seriously, this latest announcement does look like the last nail in the coffin. As far as "when did anything new and exciting happen with either one?" there was the Open Motif deal a couple of months ago, opening the source and making it mostly free (except on non-free OS's), and OpenMotif now has (mostly) the ability to use GTK+ themes. But it seems like too little too late, I'm afraid. Oh, Motif will be around for a long time yet, it has a lot going for it both as a toolkit and in terms of infrastructure (ie related tools) and installed base, but CDE is certainly on its way out, even if this move prompts the CDE copyright holders to loosen that up too.
Having to actually write out each letter of a command is too much of a PIA to do anything useful with it.
Perhaps, but the good news is that the original developers of Unix figured that typing on a teletype was a PIA too, so most Unix/Linux commands are just a few letters.
NeXT certainly didn't fail. Oh, the NeXT Cube and the other hardware offerings were never hugely successful -- the lesson there isn't new, any largely closed, difficult to upgrade and expensive hardware has faltered and ultimately failed without a redesign. That's the other lesson Jobs should have learned at Apple (other than the one about retaining 51% ownership).
But the NeXT company and software, now, that succeeded very well. Microsoft ripped off some of the NeXT GUI's elements for Win95. The GUI itself has been cloned for other Unices. Their NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and WebObjects software has been very successful.
And finally, Jobs and NeXT very successfully convinced Apple to give them money to take over the company. (Sure, on paper Apple acquired NeXT -- but look whose management is now in charge at Apple.)
Hardware comes and goes, but the NeXT design concepts live on.
Native -- Linux can run on the entire machine, with no other operating system.[Emphasis added]
In a logical partition (LPAR) -- The S/390 hardware can be logically partitioned into a maximum of 15 separate LPARs. A single S/390, for example, can host OS/390 applications in one partition, VM and VSE applications in others, and Linux applications in additional partitions.
VM/ESA Guest Support -- A customer can also run Linux as a virtual machine using VM/ESA. VM provides virtualization of CPU processors, I/O subsystems and memory. A customer running VM can have hundreds of Linux systems running on a single S/390. With VM, for instance, a customer can offer a complete Linux server environment to each of their application developers and host production systems all on the same S/390.
Probably not. It'd be in the noise level anyway. My guess is that they're looking at numbers reported by the major shrink-wrapped distros, and big hardware manufacturer pre-loads. (How else to separate out client vs server for Linux?)
There's probably also some double-counting -- hardware that came with Windows preloaded that is promptly scrubbed and reinstalled with Linux. (I find the reverse very hard to imagine.) On the other hand a shop that does that with multiple machines may only have paid for one Linux shrink-wrap box. It'll show up in these stats as a multiple Windows order. (Fortunately the "mandatory Windows preload" is becoming a thing of the past as more manufacturers are making Linux preloads or no-OS systems available.)
That's the real joke. I and many others have been calling Windows, and it's underlying DOS, a "toy OS" for years. Think of all the things Windows can't do that a real OS can -- like protect itself from a renegade app, or permit multiple, different simultaneous users, or just manage to stay up for a few months without a reboot.
Now, I'll grant that NT, being based on VMS, was more of a real OS -- but even VMS was never the Unix killer that DEC had hoped. And that's was... more and more application level stuff (the GUI? come on!) has been crammed into the NT 'kernel', to its detriment.
No serious observer of operating systems considers Linux to be anything less than a real OS, nor Windows (9x) any more than a toy. A few will grudgingly grant NT 'real' status, with caveats.
On the contrary, if a cop isn't allowed to stop and question somebody who is dressed in combat gear (even if the pockets are filled with candy bars instead of grenades) and headed for the scene of a potential riot, and then detain that person if he is uncooperative, then something has gone seriously wrong.
Sure, if it were just for wearing something like a "Fuck cops" T-shirt in a public park, that'd be something to worry about too. Context matters.
And I see some moderators have taken it upon themselves to decide that my original questioning of whether the subject was worthy of Slashdot was itself offtopic. Pity we can't moderate original posts. (Yeah, yeah, I know we don't have to read them. But moderating them might provide some useful feedback as to how better to select submissions to post.)
Not to take away from your main point, but [scrabbles around in desk drawer, pulls out a disc, checks the date] the Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms" CD was released in 1985 -- fifteen years ago. And that wasn't the first CD by a long shot, although it is one that convinced a lot of people (including me) that it was time to get a CD player. (It was one of the first 'DDD' discs, digital recording, digital mixing, digital playback, vs some of the 'AAD' discs made from analog masters. It also had more music on it than the vinyl LP version.)
Panspermia theories don't have to be true for aliens to have similar biochemistries. (At least similar to some Earthly life form, not necessarily humans.)
It's not unreasonable to assume that the rules of chemistry are pretty much universal, and within those bounds, carbon/hydrogen/oxygen/nitrogen based biochemistries are the most probable (variations on those, eg subbing silicon for carbon, or fluorine for oxygen, tend to produce insufficiently interesting variety of compounds, at least in the sort of environment we'd be interested in occupying.) And from that it's a safe bet that the biochemistry that evolved on Earth is the most probable (if not the only) one that can evolve under those conditions.
But even within the bounds of DNA/RNA and recognizable amino acids, there's a heck of a lot of room for variation in proteins and relative amounts of the other elements that lifeforms depend on. So your answer to (1) is probably correct, ditto your answer to (5). (After all, how many people get infected by, say, tobacco mosaic virus or Dutch elm disease?)
Anyone ever brought a yoyo aboard a space shuttle trip?
Yep, one of the original "Toys in Space" experiments. Back in the 1980s they did a mission that included bringing up a bunch of toys that demonstrated different physical principals, and filming them for use in classrooms. In the 90s they did a similar mission with some different toys.
Other toys (than the yoyo) on the Toys in Space experiment included magnetic marbles, a ball and jacks, a motorized 'Hot Wheels' car in a loop of track, a 'Wheelo' disk held to a wire frame track with a magnetic axle, a paddle ball (or whatever it's called -- wooden paddle with a rubber ball held by an elastic cord), and a couple of others.
Some (including the yoyo) worked just fine in zero-gee (yoyo's don't really rely on gravity, you have to throw them to give them enough energy to overcome drag on the string), others didn't (the ball and jacks were problematic).
The video is available from NASA, I've seen it a couple of times.
Mostly I avoid the problem by using a filtering proxy (eg Internet Junkbuster), but just for kicks sometimes I'll skip that, collect a few cookies then go and edit my cookies.txt file.
Interesting things to do with entries in the cookies file:
- randomly change some of the ID numbers -- let them think you're somebody else (or nobody)
- if there's a timestamp, change the date to something bogus -- 1956, or 1842, or 2003. Maybe somebody's database will break.
- insert really really long strings of random characters (or numbers if numeric) into the cookie values -- maybe it'll overflow a buffer somewhere.
- add a few hundred or thousand bogus cookie entries for some domains, maybe the cookie eater will choke.
How much of this actually adversely affects the cookie server I don't know -- not my area of expertise -- but it at least screws up their tracking somewhat. You want cookies? Here, I'll give you cookies....
It was me. Clumsy of me not to encrypt the password string. After you figured that out I changed it to a challenge/response system that required the user to do a mathematical operation on a randomly generated number and enter the result.
What this subgenius is whining about is, apparently, the fact that my home page (link above), doesn't serve up to MSIE users. Although in his ignorance he assumed it was some HTML coding, it's actually a directive in the Apache config file to rewrite the URL for any request coming from an MSIE browser.
Initially I put this in after getting pissed off at a couple of sites that rejected anything but MSIE browsers, but since it occasionally reduces MSIE users to gibbering, apopletic flamage, I kept it. (As I have said elsewhere, these folks are apparently under the delusion that I care what an MSIE luser thinks.)
It's also kept the hits from MSIE robots and a certain large Redmond investment and software (look at how they make their money) company down, which is also a good thing.
Anyone who really wants access to the info on my site can get it. I even offer links for downloading better browsers on the no-MSIE page. If you're too lazy or don't care, that's okay too.
The above cowardly rant from someone who prefers to remain nameless shows that the URL rewrite served its purpose. I laugh in his general direction.
smiles like one imagines the wizard in the old Collosal Cave adventure game might smile when granting you another life
Heh, if this is the Rene Hollan I think it is, he's very familiar with that game. He used to play it a lot on the campus Cyber mainframe at Concordia when he was a student. I was on staff there and had adopted responsibility for "maintaining" Collosal Cave (AKA Adventure). I deliberately made a few changes and introduced some bogus objects for Rene's, uh, benefit (evil grin). All in good fun.
Hey Rene, remember the sack of stuffed voles?
(Not that this has much to do with the topic at hand, although Adventure might have qualified as Free Software (but pre-GPL))
IT IS THE DUTY OF THE GOVERNMENT TO PROTECT ME AND MY FAMILY.
Where did you ever get that lunatic idea?
Sure, it is one of the (few legitimate) duties of government to provide for the common defense, but that means protection of the governed as a whole, not the individual or family. (Not that they're necessarily doing a wonderful job of the former, either.) The only person or entity whose duty it is to protect you and your family is YOU.
See Ruby Ridge as an example of how well the government protected Randy Weaver (who was doing nothing illegal) and his family.
Or for that matter, any number of crime victims who suffered while waiting for the cops to show up and "protect" them rather than taking responsiblity for their own protection.
Frankly, I find it hard to believe your sincerity in such sentiments since you posted them as an Anonymous Coward. Are you afraid of something? Perhaps by posting anonymously you're expressing that you probably are doing something, if not illegal or extralegal, at least that would reflect negatively upon you if your identity were known.
The folks expressing concern about Carnivore reading their mail are no more paranoid than you are being by posting anonymously.
Where 100% uptime is critical, you get two mainframes and put them in different locations, obviously.
I've seen mainframe datacenters supplied with power from two different transformer substations, and with a roomful of battery backups and a standby generator, just in case of potential power outages.
I've worked one place where a key corporate system was hosted on a Sun Enterprise 1000 system, or rather two of them, one in Denver, one in Dallas, with the database replicated between the two via a dedicated OC3 line.
When you get a situation like that described at Hotmail where you've got admins employed full-time just assembling new boxes and adding them to the clusters to keep up with growth (to say nothing of running around rebooting/repairing failed boxes), you're in a situation where the savings on admin costs alone will pay for another mainframe.
Mainframe is not THAT powerful! It's just got very fast I/O subsystem.
Yes, and just what do you suppose the machines in a web/email site like Hotmail spend most of their time doing? Fast Fourier transforms? I don't think so.
Slashdot Mirror
Adds a whole new meaning to the term "CAT scan".
A mouse and a cat on my desk? What's next, a dog? (Oh, that's Windoze. Never mind.)
(I'm in a strange mood this morning...)
Okay, so who is going to be the first person to post a scannable image of the DeCSS code in barcode?
(Didn't DDJ or one of the other early computer magazines try running a few issues with progam source (or was it binary?) printed in some sort of barcode, many years back?)
"producing an altered isotope of the metalloporphyrin"
BZZT! Unless you've discovered something new in nuclear chemistry, don't try that on your PhD orals. Perhaps you meant allotrope?
"Can technology be used to promote democracy?" is the wrong question. Of course it can, and has, probably since before the printing press.
The right question is how should technology be used to promote democracy? To which I'd answer "very carefully".
Most Americans seem to have accepted the common fallacy that "we live in a democracy". We don't, (it's a democratic republic), and one of the Founding Fathers' concerns was that it not become a democracy -- since historically democracies have proved to have rather short lifetimes -- about how long it takes for the populace to realize they can vote themselves bread and circuses. Alas, America has been going down this road for a while -- arguably changing the constitution to provide for popular election of senators, rather than appointment of them by the States, was a major step down the slippery slope. (For simple proof of this, consider how the Clinton impeachment conviction vote would have turned out if Senators were appointed rather than having to worry about reelection.)
Many commentators have decried the "government by poll" that in some cases has become a hallmark of modern government. If you think that's bad, consider the situation if the polls were instant (electronic) and binding.
Joan Vinge had some interesting insights into the weakness of a society organized around electronic democracy in her story "The Outcasts of Heaven Belt". I'm all for electing a representative government, especially where there might be some good candidates to choose from (alas not always the case). But do we really want government by the lowest common denominator that a pure democracy gives? Consider why even employee-owned companies choose a CEO rather than deciding everything by vote.
Certainly technology has a place for keeping the public informed of what their elected employees are up to. (And from this POV it's interesting to see what public files are now being closed by governments as access by the net, vs manually searching a paper file, becomes more prevalent.) But it shouldn't be too easy to vote -- heck, even the current trend to massive mail-in voting, let alone web-based voting, is disturbing.
Politics, like good governance and good management, requires people skills (I know, geeks don't want to hear that). Robert Heinlein wrote an excellent book, "Take Back Your Government" (republished by Baen Books a few years ago) explaining how this all works at various levels from local to national. Anyone who wants to understand this, let alone participate in it, should RTFM.
Lets take this little bit of humor into meatspace.. You open the biggest door to your house to get in, and leave it open. You settle in for a day, and then go out to party... but you leave the door open still. You are robbed blind and silly, and theres not even a broken window, because *you* left the door open.
Nope, more like you have a lock installed on your door made by a manufacturer who ships all locks keyed to the same key, and expects you to re-key the lock when you install it. You do lock the door behind you (but haven't rekeyed the lock) and somebody else using his copy of the key breaks into your house.
This puts 3, the company that made the lock, at least partly in the wrong, although it's probably still your fault for choosing that lock company in the first place.
"I'm not dead yet! I'm gettin' better."
"Shuddup, yer not foolin' anybody."
Seriously, this latest announcement does look like the last nail in the coffin. As far as "when did anything new and exciting happen with either one?" there was the Open Motif deal a couple of months ago, opening the source and making it mostly free (except on non-free OS's), and OpenMotif now has (mostly) the ability to use GTK+ themes. But it seems like too little too late, I'm afraid. Oh, Motif will be around for a long time yet, it has a lot going for it both as a toolkit and in terms of infrastructure (ie related tools) and installed base, but CDE is certainly on its way out, even if this move prompts the CDE copyright holders to loosen that up too.
Having to actually write out each letter of a command is too much of a PIA to do anything useful with it.
:-)
Perhaps, but the good news is that the original developers of Unix figured that typing on a teletype was a PIA too, so most Unix/Linux commands are just a few letters.
Cryptic? Not at all, just PDA-friendly.
Yeah, Suns had (have?) Display PostScript too. More than once I previewed a .ps file by 'cat'ing it to the screen device.
NeXT certainly didn't fail. Oh, the NeXT Cube and the other hardware offerings were never hugely successful -- the lesson there isn't new, any largely closed, difficult to upgrade and expensive hardware has faltered and ultimately failed without a redesign. That's the other lesson Jobs should have learned at Apple (other than the one about retaining 51% ownership).
But the NeXT company and software, now, that succeeded very well. Microsoft ripped off some of the NeXT GUI's elements for Win95. The GUI itself has been cloned for other Unices. Their NeXTSTEP/OPENSTEP and WebObjects software has been very successful.
And finally, Jobs and NeXT very successfully convinced Apple to give them money to take over the company. (Sure, on paper Apple acquired NeXT -- but look whose management is now in charge at Apple.)
Hardware comes and goes, but the NeXT design concepts live on.
Linux won't run an IBM S/390.
Yes it will. The IBM port will run both under VM and natively, as well as in a partition.(*)
can be plugged in as a process.
If you think this is how VM works, you clearly don't have a clue about VM, either.
(*) quoted from IBM's web site (http://www.s390.ibm.com/linux/facts.html ):
Do those [$2 cds] count?
Probably not. It'd be in the noise level anyway. My guess is that they're looking at numbers reported by the major shrink-wrapped distros, and big hardware manufacturer pre-loads. (How else to separate out client vs server for Linux?)
There's probably also some double-counting -- hardware that came with Windows preloaded that is promptly scrubbed and reinstalled with Linux. (I find the reverse very hard to imagine.) On the other hand a shop that does that with multiple machines may only have paid for one Linux shrink-wrap box. It'll show up in these stats as a multiple Windows order. (Fortunately the "mandatory Windows preload" is becoming a thing of the past as more manufacturers are making Linux preloads or no-OS systems available.)
I know I shouldn't feed the troll, but...
... more and more application level stuff (the GUI? come on!) has been crammed into the NT 'kernel', to its detriment.
why your toy OS is better than Windows.
That's the real joke. I and many others have been calling Windows, and it's underlying DOS, a "toy OS" for years. Think of all the things Windows can't do that a real OS can -- like protect itself from a renegade app, or permit multiple, different simultaneous users, or just manage to stay up for a few months without a reboot.
Now, I'll grant that NT, being based on VMS, was more of a real OS -- but even VMS was never the Unix killer that DEC had hoped. And that's was
No serious observer of operating systems considers Linux to be anything less than a real OS, nor Windows (9x) any more than a toy. A few will grudgingly grant NT 'real' status, with caveats.
On second thoughts...
The above troll question can simply be answered:
Because it will run an IBM S/390. Some "toy".
On the contrary, if a cop isn't allowed to stop and question somebody who is dressed in combat gear (even if the pockets are filled with candy bars instead of grenades) and headed for the scene of a potential riot, and then detain that person if he is uncooperative, then something has gone seriously wrong.
Sure, if it were just for wearing something like a "Fuck cops" T-shirt in a public park, that'd be something to worry about too. Context matters.
And I see some moderators have taken it upon themselves to decide that my original questioning of whether the subject was worthy of Slashdot was itself offtopic. Pity we can't moderate original posts. (Yeah, yeah, I know we don't have to read them. But moderating them might provide some useful feedback as to how better to select submissions to post.)
CD's haven't been around for 15 years
Not to take away from your main point, but [scrabbles around in desk drawer, pulls out a disc, checks the date] the Dire Straits "Brothers in Arms" CD was released in 1985 -- fifteen years ago. And that wasn't the first CD by a long shot, although it is one that convinced a lot of people (including me) that it was time to get a CD player. (It was one of the first 'DDD' discs, digital recording, digital mixing, digital playback, vs some of the 'AAD' discs made from analog masters. It also had more music on it than the vinyl LP version.)
If Vince Foster had had a gun he'd be alive today...
Panspermia theories don't have to be true for aliens to have similar biochemistries. (At least similar to some Earthly life form, not necessarily humans.)
It's not unreasonable to assume that the rules of chemistry are pretty much universal, and within those bounds, carbon/hydrogen/oxygen/nitrogen based biochemistries are the most probable (variations on those, eg subbing silicon for carbon, or fluorine for oxygen, tend to produce insufficiently interesting variety of compounds, at least in the sort of environment we'd be interested in occupying.) And from that it's a safe bet that the biochemistry that evolved on Earth is the most probable (if not the only) one that can evolve under those conditions.
But even within the bounds of DNA/RNA and recognizable amino acids, there's a heck of a lot of room for variation in proteins and relative amounts of the other elements that lifeforms depend on. So your answer to (1) is probably correct, ditto your answer to (5). (After all, how many people get infected by, say, tobacco mosaic virus or Dutch elm disease?)
Anyone ever brought a yoyo aboard a space shuttle trip?
Yep, one of the original "Toys in Space" experiments. Back in the 1980s they did a mission that included bringing up a bunch of toys that demonstrated different physical principals, and filming them for use in classrooms. In the 90s they did a similar mission with some different toys.
Other toys (than the yoyo) on the Toys in Space experiment included magnetic marbles, a ball and jacks, a motorized 'Hot Wheels' car in a loop of track, a 'Wheelo' disk held to a wire frame track with a magnetic axle, a paddle ball (or whatever it's called -- wooden paddle with a rubber ball held by an elastic cord), and a couple of others.
Some (including the yoyo) worked just fine in zero-gee (yoyo's don't really rely on gravity, you have to throw them to give them enough energy to overcome drag on the string), others didn't (the ball and jacks were problematic).
The video is available from NASA, I've seen it a couple of times.
Mostly I avoid the problem by using a filtering proxy (eg Internet Junkbuster), but just for kicks sometimes I'll skip that, collect a few cookies then go and edit my cookies.txt file.
Interesting things to do with entries in the cookies file:
- randomly change some of the ID numbers -- let them think you're somebody else (or nobody)
- if there's a timestamp, change the date to something bogus -- 1956, or 1842, or 2003. Maybe somebody's database will break.
- insert really really long strings of random characters (or numbers if numeric) into the cookie values -- maybe it'll overflow a buffer somewhere.
- add a few hundred or thousand bogus cookie entries for some domains, maybe the cookie eater will choke.
How much of this actually adversely affects the cookie server I don't know -- not my area of expertise -- but it at least screws up their tracking somewhat. You want cookies? Here, I'll give you cookies....
figuring out the prime-time wizard password
It was me. Clumsy of me not to encrypt the password string. After you figured that out I changed it to a challenge/response system that required the user to do a mathematical operation on a randomly generated number and enter the result.
And the article was actually pretty good.
What this subgenius is whining about is, apparently, the fact that my home page (link above), doesn't serve up to MSIE users. Although in his ignorance he assumed it was some HTML coding, it's actually a directive in the Apache config file to rewrite the URL for any request coming from an MSIE browser.
Initially I put this in after getting pissed off at a couple of sites that rejected anything but MSIE browsers, but since it occasionally reduces MSIE users to gibbering, apopletic flamage, I kept it. (As I have said elsewhere, these folks are apparently under the delusion that I care what an MSIE luser thinks.)
It's also kept the hits from MSIE robots and a certain large Redmond investment and software (look at how they make their money) company down, which is also a good thing.
Anyone who really wants access to the info on my site can get it. I even offer links for downloading better browsers on the no-MSIE page. If you're too lazy or don't care, that's okay too.
The above cowardly rant from someone who prefers to remain nameless shows that the URL rewrite served its purpose. I laugh in his general direction.
smiles like one imagines the wizard in the old Collosal Cave adventure game might smile when granting you another life
Heh, if this is the Rene Hollan I think it is, he's very familiar with that game. He used to play it a lot on the campus Cyber mainframe at Concordia when he was a student. I was on staff there and had adopted responsibility for "maintaining" Collosal Cave (AKA Adventure). I deliberately made a few changes and introduced some bogus objects for Rene's, uh, benefit (evil grin). All in good fun.
Hey Rene, remember the sack of stuffed voles?
(Not that this has much to do with the topic at hand, although Adventure might have qualified as Free Software (but pre-GPL))
IT IS THE DUTY OF THE GOVERNMENT TO PROTECT ME AND MY FAMILY.
Where did you ever get that lunatic idea?
Sure, it is one of the (few legitimate) duties of government to provide for the common defense, but that means protection of the governed as a whole, not the individual or family. (Not that they're necessarily doing a wonderful job of the former, either.) The only person or entity whose duty it is to protect you and your family is YOU.
See Ruby Ridge as an example of how well the government protected Randy Weaver (who was doing nothing illegal) and his family.
Or for that matter, any number of crime victims who suffered while waiting for the cops to show up and "protect" them rather than taking responsiblity for their own protection.
Frankly, I find it hard to believe your sincerity in such sentiments since you posted them as an Anonymous Coward. Are you afraid of something? Perhaps by posting anonymously you're expressing that you probably are doing something, if not illegal or extralegal, at least that would reflect negatively upon you if your identity were known.
The folks expressing concern about Carnivore reading their mail are no more paranoid than you are being by posting anonymously.
Where 100% uptime is critical, you get two mainframes and put them in different locations, obviously.
I've seen mainframe datacenters supplied with power from two different transformer substations, and with a roomful of battery backups and a standby generator, just in case of potential power outages.
I've worked one place where a key corporate system was hosted on a Sun Enterprise 1000 system, or rather two of them, one in Denver, one in Dallas, with the database replicated between the two via a dedicated OC3 line.
When you get a situation like that described at Hotmail where you've got admins employed full-time just assembling new boxes and adding them to the clusters to keep up with growth (to say nothing of running around rebooting/repairing failed boxes), you're in a situation where the savings on admin costs alone will pay for another mainframe.
Mainframe is not THAT powerful! It's just got very fast I/O subsystem.
Yes, and just what do you suppose the machines in a web/email site like Hotmail spend most of their time doing? Fast Fourier transforms? I don't think so.