What is there to debate? In a society with plenty of wealth the wealthy can brainwash the population, so democracy would be completely toothless. Then the wealthy "bring democracy" there.
It's never unnecessary to attack Microsoft fanboys.
, and your sarcasm betrays your obvious ignorance about the Windows Home Server platform and show all of us that you are not qualified for this debate.
Windows Home Server three days ago started to works better than Microsoft's own craptacular "enterprise" products?
Move along; you cannot be taken seriously.
If I can't be taken seriously, then why do you care what I post?
because it's worlds ahead of anything seen on any open *nix and has been for nearly ten years.
It's "worlds ahead" because it deals with system where the only database that anyone would dare to run, is written by Microsoft itself, and for all other applications it's considered perfectly acceptable to lose data if it was being written at the moment when snapshot was being made.
Hell, my one and only Windows server maintains in incremental backup of its self on a remote iSCSI volume, including many point-in-time snapshots, that I can just unplug from the iSCSI storage host and boot if I need to for disaster recovery. It's impressive, and VSS is the core of what makes it possible.
You can do it with any journaling filesystem by just placing it into data+metadata journaling mode instead of metadata-only that is usually used with, among other things, ext3. However on any system you still risk creating inconsistency at the level of applications that have their own idea of transactions that they don't expose to the filesystem. Ex: "tar cz/some_directory > some_file.tar.gz" -- having its output redirected, tar has no means of ensuring that some_file.tar.gz will not be "snapshotted" in incomplete form. While no one uses tar in this mode directly, things like redirecting output of the same tar over ssh, are very common, useful, and completely impossible to combine with such "transactions". Windows users aren't supposed to do it in the first place so it's easier to impose jackbooted transaction system on everything, however this is hardly an advantage.
Regarding your other point, when you use parameterized queries you have a guarantee from the driver to escape anything that's put into the position/binding, I don't care how random your string is, there is simply no way you will inject anything into my database.
Actually it's better. Parameters are never seen by SQL interpreter because they are applied to already interpreted queries -- they are not escaped because they don't go through the mechanism that escapes and un-escapes anything. Obviously, if someone is stupid enough to take data from a database and concatenate it with something else to construct an interpreted query statement, he will face exactly the same problem if he taken that data directly from the user -- parametrized queries are only useful if ALL queries are parametrized.
Why the good people at the DPRK, they surely do. Which is what the conversation is about, "does the US treat citizens like the DPRK does?"
DPRK treats most foreign countries as enemies -- and for a good reason, as US behavior with this whole "axis of evil" proclamation had shown. It's very reasonable to expect that North Korean that traveled abroad was targeted by enemies of North Korean government for some purpose -- be it propaganda, recruitment for some hostile action, espionage, etc. American who interacted with organizations currently at war with US, is usually treated far worse than that -- unless he is sent by US government or media, he is automatically treated as an enemy or "terrorist, trained by al-Qaeda".
However Americans who travel abroad, either go to countries that US considers to be its friends or colonies, or are surrounded by red-white-and-blue bubble of American-friendly handlers or military, or otherwise they would be killed for being American, thus making the whole issue moot. In either case, it is obvious that his trip presents no threat to the American government.
You make no distinction between government oppression toward people it suspect of being opposed to its policy, suspicion toward people who demonstrated direct support of organizations that have the goal of overthrowing the same government, and meaningless bureaucratic inconvenience. That makes you a typical American who can't tell government policy from a hole in the ground.
As far as I know, all quantum mechanics-related theories operate with the assumption that classical mechanics sufficiently correctly describes behavior of the particles involved (so all relativistic effects are swept under the carpet), and all applications of general relativity assume lack of quantum nature of anything involved (so quantum mechanics is swept under the carpet). Obviously, a theoretician operating in one of those fields can easily "discover" something that contradicts a theory from the other area when he wanders out of the area where those assumptions are applicable. In fact, this is inevitable because such boundaries exist for foreheads to be bumped at them.
If one made such "discovery" after he developed a consistent way to describe matter based on both quantum mechanics and general relativity (or suitable replacements of either if necessary), or after confirming such result in an experiment, this would make sense. Otherwise it's at most something that provides a direction toward experimental verification, or an idea where to look for a way to develop such theory. But treating such mental construct as a valid reflection of reality? -- No.
My Windows Home Server disagrees with you completely. I only wish something similar to WHS with Volume Shadow Copy Provider could possibly exist for Linux. I'm tired of waiting. You really should open your eyes and see that what you're describing is not only outdated but dangerously untrue.
Yesss, we all want to have reliability and performance that Windows is so famous for.
Are you stupid? Linux already has snapshots. And backups that don't interfere with system while they are running. My point is, that to make this work with databases, one has to sacrifice performance or availability, or greatly increase complexity of databases -- something that Microsoft, obviously, has no qualms with, but this is why its products are unreliable. Everyone else just accepted that databases are special, and stopped shoehorning them into filesystems' transaction model.
Why would anyone asks idiotic questions to your own citizen just because he just returned from abroad? As for "keeping tabs on", I can assure you, visiting an "enemy" country such as Cuba or interacting with foreign intelligence agencies will earn you some very special status, but it won't be at the immigration desk.
On the other hand, when a foreigner comes to US, especially from any place with less than friendly relationship with US, there is no end to harassment and idiocy. Multiply that by a hundred if he tries to actually immigrate.
You would find that American sources implied heavily that protests were against communism, in support of democracy, in support of capitalism, or against some kind of horrible conditions imposed on the population, however it is never said directly because American journalists knew that it would be an easily verifiable lie.
In reality, protests were against Deng Xiaoping and in support of Hu Yaobang's positions, who died a day before. While both politicians are known to promote reforms, Hu Yaobang's ideas were obviously Communist, and directed toward preserving Communist nature of the system while fighting against abuses and corruption, and other oppressive policies instituted by Mao. The closest figure from USSR history would be Khruschev, though Hu Yaobang was far more popular. Den Xiaoping, on the other hand, was focused on adopting Capitalism-like or Capitalist direction of development, what ended up "integrating" abuses and corruption into the system. Yeltsin would be the closest equivalent in USSR/Russian history.
One has to perform an act of massive mental contortionism to describe this as "pro-democracy" protest -- if there was any democracy involved, it was to express support for a popular Communist leader who promoted Communist understanding of "democracy" that has very little to do with American/Western idea of the same name. It was most definitely directed against Capitalist reforms of Deng Xiaoping, and for return to "true Communist" ideology of reforms proposed by deceased Hu Yaobang. US was, obviously, on the side of Deng Xiaoping and not the protesters, so revealing the content of the protests would discredit the whole idea of "democratization" of other countries by force and economical pressure, as US greatest ally in China just shot hundreds, possibly thousands of protesters against those very policies.
Ironically, Capitalist direction of development of China ended up hurting more Americans than it helped, and relationship between US and China that resulted, can be best described as mutually abusive. US media in 90's could have a good reason to side with actual protesters in retrospect, however since that would involve admitting that they were pro-Communist, it could never fly.
On real server operating systems snapshot support is integrated into applications, which receive a "snapshot about to occur event" so they can quiesce their writes for a short period to make the snapshot clean.
First of all, that excludes all Unix-based systems from "real operating systems" set because none of them have this as a standard system-wide feature, and no applications actually process such requests in more than rudimentary manner. There were multiple attempts to make such notifications work, all resulted in guidelines to application developers to never rely on such system, and instead use transaction-safe file-update sequences for all non-database applications.
Second, databases usually can't process such requests due to extensive amount of data caching -- they are usually specifically designed to store as much data in memory as possible and write it to disk asynchronously, so in this scenario "make a snapshot" would cause the database to stop processing requests or slow down to a crawl due to literally tens of gigabytes of data rushing to be written to the disks. This is why such databases rely on application-level snapshots and transaction logs instead of momentary snapshots -- they produce predictable rate of write requests, and can be physically separated from the main storage media. Once database is restarted, it combines transaction log with stored data to recover its state to the last committed transaction.
For example, on a Windows server, a VSS snapshot is a complete restorable backup of everything, including your databases, event logs, the registry, etc... It's the standard mechanism that practically all Windows backup tools use. They take a snapshot, back it up, and then release it. The point in time that the snapshot was taken turns up in the "last backed up on" date field in SQL Server!
VSS is famous for being unreliable, and is not something that others would want to emulate. Bonus point to you for implying that Windows Server is a "real server operating system".
I've traveled between the US, Middle East, Europe, Mexico and Canada numerous times and never have been asked if I was a Nazi/Communist/where I'm going/who I'm meeting when I come back to the US.
You didn't "travel between", you were American, returning to US. Of course, immigration officials wouldn't try to kick you out from your own country, you moron.
Always remember that, in Russian, 'black hole' does not refer to a collapsed star.
It means exactly the same in Russian that it does in English (what formally is not a "collapsed star" but "an object capable of capturing light by its gravity").
People expect a snapshot to be immediately usable and reliable, however in practice a state of device, even if synchronized with filesystem through its transaction is not a state of all data -- some data may be in buffers, prepared to be written, and rebooting into a restored filesystem may require some cleanup of such state. In particular, SQL databases are completely unsuitable for this kind of backup (this is why they have their own backup and transaction log handling procedures), and database-like applications such as mail servers, may require reindexing.
However for purposes other than those applications, file-level backup is entirely adequate, so utilities like rdiff-backup end up providing more functionality than complicated snapshot-handling procedures -- incremental backups for subtrees, readable trees in backup media, etc.
It also should be noted that backups should not be used as a replacement of package management -- on Linux anything installed through a package manager can be uninstalled through it.
You keep confusing companies and government -- companies make things, government doesn't.
People make things. Companies and governments are both power structures, and lack of direct government participation in production is merely an incidental property of capitalist society.
Government is the one that oppresses through violence
I fail to see anything fundamentally wrong in oppression as a general idea (remember, I don't value "freedom" as a slogan).
-- just look at all of human history (capitalism offered freedom as opposed to feudalism, and now we are turning it back into feudalism).
Companies used violence every time government did not bother doing it for them. Whole rent-a-cop services were created initially for this purpose, and were used in union-busting, fights against protesters, etc. Now the companies don't need to do that by themselves, however if right-wing politicians will succeed in making government toothless or left-wing politicians will make government less obedient to the businesses, you will see private police forces or even armies rising again.
Companies are the scapegoats in most situations, as they are nothing but people
People who are often led by powerful groups interested in oppressing the rest of society. I am not talking about small and usually benign companies that act as passive players in this whole system, I focus on active players because they actually shape the system everyone ends up living in.
joining together to create or sell things. When there is no judicial/policing agent (does not have to be State-sanctioned), then companies use violence -- see the drug war + its domination by gangs.
I don't understand what kind of argument are you trying to make. If companies act exactly like entities that appear without the "help" of the government, and if either kind of entities would use violence if government doesn't provide it for them, then government is not really an important part of oppression of population. Strip government of its power, and instead of police you will have rent-a-cops who aren't supposed to implement any kind of law, or gangs who define themselves by disregarding a law. I fail to see an improvement, no matter how stupid the law is, and it's pure madness if there is a chance to fix the law and keep enforcement in the hands of government.
Ex: Prohibition. Until the law was fixed, "grassroots movement" that acted as companies against the will of the government, caused more violence and oppression than the government fighting it. This ended when the government returned laws to a sane state, but can you imagine how US economy would look like if organized crime grew fast enough to take over or marginalize the government? And they "fought against" one of the stupidest laws that ever existed in US. Current war on drugs has exactly the same nature, though being more diluted in the society can drag for decades without any kind of resolution. But can you imagine what kind of society you would have if drug cartels somehow managed to "win"? Scratch that, look at the countries where they actually did win -- you will see corporation-like structures throwing more oppression and violence around than any government in the same region in the same timeframe. The only chance to stop war on drugs is to force the government to end it just like it ended Prohibition, everything else is utterly pointless, never worked and unlikely to ever work.
A huge difference between a government and a company is that a government cannot go insolvent without epic losses (because of its central bank),
Government isn't supposed to make money, it's purpose is to serve the population. Federal Reserve's abuses and rising debt is mostly a result of government bowing to corporate interests by supporting military-industrial complex and de-industrialization of the country's econom
I don't disagree, but I'm still opposed to firearms registration of any kind. One of the reasons we have a 2nd amendment is as a final check against oppressive government.
No, you don't. Armed uprising against a government is (and should be) always illegal according to that government's law. If people see such uprising as the best solution for their problems, they should have a goal of actually overthrowing the government, and ready to fight for this regardless of the government's opinions on their actions. Anything less would be a ridiculous hypocrisy (and, by the way, this is what "terrorism" actually means -- such a group wants to use government's power to further their goals, yet they are trying to coerce the government or population through violence into doing their bidding).
In any case, all weapons that would be useful for fighting against your government -- tanks, bombers, missiles, etc. -- are, and always were illegal to own. Apparently some stupid rednecks have a fantasy of shooting IRS officials from shotguns to keep evil gubmint from getting their sweet muh-nay, but this is why everyone else calls them stupid rednecks.
That check doesn't do us any good if government knows where all the weapons are and can confiscate them.
If you are ready to kill government officials, and are afraid of same officials knocking on your door and asking you to surrender the weapons, you have no business fighting against them in the first place.
Historically gun registration has led to gun confiscation. I don't even need to Godwin to make this example either -- it's happened right here in the US in California and New York City. They passed gun registration laws and later passed laws outlawing certain types of guns. Guess how they knew who owned those guns?
Guess what? I am not an American, and don't share this whole gun fetish. If it was impossible to get weapons sufficient for self-defense in those places (and this matters only because your police sucks ass and offers no real protection to law-abiding people), you would have a point, otherwise cry me a river over someone's arsenal in a barn.
In the case of something like Somalia, it's better off than it was with government and conditions have been improving.
Even if it was the case, it has nothing to do with my point -- without government you still have entities that act exactly like corporations, therefore your whole line of reasoning based on government supposedly enabling corporations is invalid.
The government is implicitly supported by its people, no matter what the government is. The trouble is that in creating a coercive rather than voluntary government, you are also creating a political class with its own intentions and an absolutely arbitrary power (arbitrary because it is not founded in merit, but rather in some human manipulation).
And the public still have more control over that "political class" than it ever would over companies and wealthy people in control of them. If public can't control politicians enough to make them [occasionally and somewhat] positive force in society, it means that it has no hope to become anything but slaves to the corporations.
All the government can do is pass laws to either artificially manipulate prices or make things illegal and then try to enforce them.
Yes, government does stupid and destructive things. Especially when it's taken over by people who tell you how evil the government is supposed to be. Nevertheless large companies' abuse of population dwarfs anything any government ever did -- each and every their step is based on complete disregard for well-being of the public while politicians are at least sometimes are well-intentioned.
Any government law is ultimately arbitrary, because it is the instant creation of a new absolutist rule. You cannot make greed illegal.
Please re-read what you just wrote. Those claims are incompatible -- if government can arbitrarily create rules, it definitely can make rules against greed. Either government is only capable of creating rules that are limited by society's willingness to follow, or government "can" proclaim any rule, including one that makes greed illegal.
In reality, of course, government has the power to create laws, however for a law to be applicable it muse reflect population's demands (or at least willingness to accept such a law). While I don't remember any attempt to outlaw actual greed, I can point out that laws against homosexuals were directed against relatively common natural inclination of a person, and government certainly had them on books and enforced them -- what now is recognized as wrong and pointless. In modern European countries people in general believe that some egregious manifestation of greed should be prevented and punished -- and their laws reflect that, so greedy people certainly suffer from such "oppression", but society recognizes it as acceptable.
You completely ignore the fact that government derives its power from people delegating that power, and the only way to keep such power is by imposing rules on itself and acting in the interests of people. Businesses, on the other hand, derive their power from owning property -- as long as society as a whole does not somehow declare such ownership illegitimate (happened once in the whole history of US -- again, with slavery, and only through government fighting a war with state governments that disagreed), there is no recourse. The only entity that can limit and override such power is the government, so of all realistic choices the best course of action for the population is to make government powerful and accountable to the people, not weak and subjugated by businesses. This is precisely what "free market" propaganda is trying to prevent from happening.
There are *always* long run unintended consequences. Bastiat answered the "broken window" fallacy (broken windows help the economy because they give glassiers work) by highlighting that there are seen and unseen consequences of any action. When you
Slashdot Mirror
True, however this is what the author of this "low-cost radar" did not do, and apparently didn't even consider doing.
What is there to debate? In a society with plenty of wealth the wealthy can brainwash the population, so democracy would be completely toothless. Then the wealthy "bring democracy" there.
Apparently American politicians learned this from Microsoft astroturfing campaigns. Or the other way around.
Someone in a university usually can just get a radar from the university. That doesn't mean, he can proclaim that he invented a zero-cost radar.
Not counting computer, Windows, Labview and Matlab.
If anything, someone concerned with the cost would try to exclude the last two, as they alone make it more expensive than "high-cost" radars.
You're over three days late.
How so?
Your unnecessary ad hominem attack
It's never unnecessary to attack Microsoft fanboys.
, and your sarcasm betrays your obvious ignorance about the Windows Home Server platform and show all of us that you are not qualified for this debate.
Windows Home Server three days ago started to works better than Microsoft's own craptacular "enterprise" products?
Move along; you cannot be taken seriously.
If I can't be taken seriously, then why do you care what I post?
because it's worlds ahead of anything seen on any open *nix and has been for nearly ten years.
It's "worlds ahead" because it deals with system where the only database that anyone would dare to run, is written by Microsoft itself, and for all other applications it's considered perfectly acceptable to lose data if it was being written at the moment when snapshot was being made.
Hell, my one and only Windows server maintains in incremental backup of its self on a remote iSCSI volume, including many point-in-time snapshots, that I can just unplug from the iSCSI storage host and boot if I need to for disaster recovery. It's impressive, and VSS is the core of what makes it possible.
You can do it with any journaling filesystem by just placing it into data+metadata journaling mode instead of metadata-only that is usually used with, among other things, ext3. However on any system you still risk creating inconsistency at the level of applications that have their own idea of transactions that they don't expose to the filesystem. Ex: "tar cz /some_directory > some_file.tar.gz" -- having its output redirected, tar has no means of ensuring that some_file.tar.gz will not be "snapshotted" in incomplete form. While no one uses tar in this mode directly, things like redirecting output of the same tar over ssh, are very common, useful, and completely impossible to combine with such "transactions". Windows users aren't supposed to do it in the first place so it's easier to impose jackbooted transaction system on everything, however this is hardly an advantage.
Regarding your other point, when you use parameterized queries you have a guarantee from the driver to escape anything that's put into the position/binding, I don't care how random your string is, there is simply no way you will inject anything into my database.
Actually it's better. Parameters are never seen by SQL interpreter because they are applied to already interpreted queries -- they are not escaped because they don't go through the mechanism that escapes and un-escapes anything. Obviously, if someone is stupid enough to take data from a database and concatenate it with something else to construct an interpreted query statement, he will face exactly the same problem if he taken that data directly from the user -- parametrized queries are only useful if ALL queries are parametrized.
Why the good people at the DPRK, they surely do. Which is what the conversation is about, "does the US treat citizens like the DPRK does?"
DPRK treats most foreign countries as enemies -- and for a good reason, as US behavior with this whole "axis of evil" proclamation had shown. It's very reasonable to expect that North Korean that traveled abroad was targeted by enemies of North Korean government for some purpose -- be it propaganda, recruitment for some hostile action, espionage, etc. American who interacted with organizations currently at war with US, is usually treated far worse than that -- unless he is sent by US government or media, he is automatically treated as an enemy or "terrorist, trained by al-Qaeda".
However Americans who travel abroad, either go to countries that US considers to be its friends or colonies, or are surrounded by red-white-and-blue bubble of American-friendly handlers or military, or otherwise they would be killed for being American, thus making the whole issue moot. In either case, it is obvious that his trip presents no threat to the American government.
You make no distinction between government oppression toward people it suspect of being opposed to its policy, suspicion toward people who demonstrated direct support of organizations that have the goal of overthrowing the same government, and meaningless bureaucratic inconvenience. That makes you a typical American who can't tell government policy from a hole in the ground.
BWAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHAHA!
no.
Bwahahahahahahahahahahahahahaha!!!
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!
BWA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA HA!!!!!
(I am Russian, if anyone didn't notice yet.)
As far as I know, all quantum mechanics-related theories operate with the assumption that classical mechanics sufficiently correctly describes behavior of the particles involved (so all relativistic effects are swept under the carpet), and all applications of general relativity assume lack of quantum nature of anything involved (so quantum mechanics is swept under the carpet). Obviously, a theoretician operating in one of those fields can easily "discover" something that contradicts a theory from the other area when he wanders out of the area where those assumptions are applicable. In fact, this is inevitable because such boundaries exist for foreheads to be bumped at them.
If one made such "discovery" after he developed a consistent way to describe matter based on both quantum mechanics and general relativity (or suitable replacements of either if necessary), or after confirming such result in an experiment, this would make sense. Otherwise it's at most something that provides a direction toward experimental verification, or an idea where to look for a way to develop such theory. But treating such mental construct as a valid reflection of reality? -- No.
My Windows Home Server disagrees with you completely.
I only wish something similar to WHS with Volume Shadow Copy Provider could possibly exist for Linux. I'm tired of waiting.
You really should open your eyes and see that what you're describing is not only outdated but dangerously untrue.
Yesss, we all want to have reliability and performance that Windows is so famous for.
Are you stupid? Linux already has snapshots. And backups that don't interfere with system while they are running. My point is, that to make this work with databases, one has to sacrifice performance or availability, or greatly increase complexity of databases -- something that Microsoft, obviously, has no qualms with, but this is why its products are unreliable. Everyone else just accepted that databases are special, and stopped shoehorning them into filesystems' transaction model.
Congratulations -- you are an idiot, too.
Are you a lawyer, or just dense?
Why would anyone asks idiotic questions to your own citizen just because he just returned from abroad? As for "keeping tabs on", I can assure you, visiting an "enemy" country such as Cuba or interacting with foreign intelligence agencies will earn you some very special status, but it won't be at the immigration desk.
On the other hand, when a foreigner comes to US, especially from any place with less than friendly relationship with US, there is no end to harassment and idiocy. Multiply that by a hundred if he tries to actually immigrate.
You would find that American sources implied heavily that protests were against communism, in support of democracy, in support of capitalism, or against some kind of horrible conditions imposed on the population, however it is never said directly because American journalists knew that it would be an easily verifiable lie.
In reality, protests were against Deng Xiaoping and in support of Hu Yaobang's positions, who died a day before. While both politicians are known to promote reforms, Hu Yaobang's ideas were obviously Communist, and directed toward preserving Communist nature of the system while fighting against abuses and corruption, and other oppressive policies instituted by Mao. The closest figure from USSR history would be Khruschev, though Hu Yaobang was far more popular. Den Xiaoping, on the other hand, was focused on adopting Capitalism-like or Capitalist direction of development, what ended up "integrating" abuses and corruption into the system. Yeltsin would be the closest equivalent in USSR/Russian history.
One has to perform an act of massive mental contortionism to describe this as "pro-democracy" protest -- if there was any democracy involved, it was to express support for a popular Communist leader who promoted Communist understanding of "democracy" that has very little to do with American/Western idea of the same name. It was most definitely directed against Capitalist reforms of Deng Xiaoping, and for return to "true Communist" ideology of reforms proposed by deceased Hu Yaobang. US was, obviously, on the side of Deng Xiaoping and not the protesters, so revealing the content of the protests would discredit the whole idea of "democratization" of other countries by force and economical pressure, as US greatest ally in China just shot hundreds, possibly thousands of protesters against those very policies.
Ironically, Capitalist direction of development of China ended up hurting more Americans than it helped, and relationship between US and China that resulted, can be best described as mutually abusive. US media in 90's could have a good reason to side with actual protesters in retrospect, however since that would involve admitting that they were pro-Communist, it could never fly.
"Some real server operating systems"... I'm detecting just a tad bit of elitism there.
No, just Microsoft pride. It would be elitism if it came from Oracle/Solaris fan, but Oracle on Solaris does nothing of the kind he described.
On real server operating systems snapshot support is integrated into applications, which receive a "snapshot about to occur event" so they can quiesce their writes for a short period to make the snapshot clean.
First of all, that excludes all Unix-based systems from "real operating systems" set because none of them have this as a standard system-wide feature, and no applications actually process such requests in more than rudimentary manner. There were multiple attempts to make such notifications work, all resulted in guidelines to application developers to never rely on such system, and instead use transaction-safe file-update sequences for all non-database applications.
Second, databases usually can't process such requests due to extensive amount of data caching -- they are usually specifically designed to store as much data in memory as possible and write it to disk asynchronously, so in this scenario "make a snapshot" would cause the database to stop processing requests or slow down to a crawl due to literally tens of gigabytes of data rushing to be written to the disks. This is why such databases rely on application-level snapshots and transaction logs instead of momentary snapshots -- they produce predictable rate of write requests, and can be physically separated from the main storage media. Once database is restarted, it combines transaction log with stored data to recover its state to the last committed transaction.
For example, on a Windows server, a VSS snapshot is a complete restorable backup of everything, including your databases, event logs, the registry, etc... It's the standard mechanism that practically all Windows backup tools use. They take a snapshot, back it up, and then release it. The point in time that the snapshot was taken turns up in the "last backed up on" date field in SQL Server!
VSS is famous for being unreliable, and is not something that others would want to emulate. Bonus point to you for implying that Windows Server is a "real server operating system".
Bzzt, wrong.
I've traveled between the US, Middle East, Europe, Mexico and Canada numerous times and never have been asked if I was a Nazi/Communist/where I'm going/who I'm meeting when I come back to the US.
You didn't "travel between", you were American, returning to US. Of course, immigration officials wouldn't try to kick you out from your own country, you moron.
Sure, it does. Try to find out in American sources, WHAT those Chinese were protesting against.
Always remember that, in Russian, 'black hole' does not refer to a collapsed star.
It means exactly the same in Russian that it does in English (what formally is not a "collapsed star" but "an object capable of capturing light by its gravity").
(In Soviet Russia humor fails you).
People expect a snapshot to be immediately usable and reliable, however in practice a state of device, even if synchronized with filesystem through its transaction is not a state of all data -- some data may be in buffers, prepared to be written, and rebooting into a restored filesystem may require some cleanup of such state. In particular, SQL databases are completely unsuitable for this kind of backup (this is why they have their own backup and transaction log handling procedures), and database-like applications such as mail servers, may require reindexing.
However for purposes other than those applications, file-level backup is entirely adequate, so utilities like rdiff-backup end up providing more functionality than complicated snapshot-handling procedures -- incremental backups for subtrees, readable trees in backup media, etc.
It also should be noted that backups should not be used as a replacement of package management -- on Linux anything installed through a package manager can be uninstalled through it.
You keep confusing companies and government -- companies make things, government doesn't.
People make things. Companies and governments are both power structures, and lack of direct government participation in production is merely an incidental property of capitalist society.
Government is the one that oppresses through violence
I fail to see anything fundamentally wrong in oppression as a general idea (remember, I don't value "freedom" as a slogan).
-- just look at all of human history (capitalism offered freedom as opposed to feudalism, and now we are turning it back into feudalism).
Companies used violence every time government did not bother doing it for them. Whole rent-a-cop services were created initially for this purpose, and were used in union-busting, fights against protesters, etc. Now the companies don't need to do that by themselves, however if right-wing politicians will succeed in making government toothless or left-wing politicians will make government less obedient to the businesses, you will see private police forces or even armies rising again.
Companies are the scapegoats in most situations, as they are nothing but people
People who are often led by powerful groups interested in oppressing the rest of society. I am not talking about small and usually benign companies that act as passive players in this whole system, I focus on active players because they actually shape the system everyone ends up living in.
joining together to create or sell things. When there is no judicial/policing agent (does not have to be State-sanctioned), then companies use violence -- see the drug war + its domination by gangs.
I don't understand what kind of argument are you trying to make. If companies act exactly like entities that appear without the "help" of the government, and if either kind of entities would use violence if government doesn't provide it for them, then government is not really an important part of oppression of population. Strip government of its power, and instead of police you will have rent-a-cops who aren't supposed to implement any kind of law, or gangs who define themselves by disregarding a law. I fail to see an improvement, no matter how stupid the law is, and it's pure madness if there is a chance to fix the law and keep enforcement in the hands of government.
Ex: Prohibition. Until the law was fixed, "grassroots movement" that acted as companies against the will of the government, caused more violence and oppression than the government fighting it. This ended when the government returned laws to a sane state, but can you imagine how US economy would look like if organized crime grew fast enough to take over or marginalize the government? And they "fought against" one of the stupidest laws that ever existed in US. Current war on drugs has exactly the same nature, though being more diluted in the society can drag for decades without any kind of resolution. But can you imagine what kind of society you would have if drug cartels somehow managed to "win"? Scratch that, look at the countries where they actually did win -- you will see corporation-like structures throwing more oppression and violence around than any government in the same region in the same timeframe. The only chance to stop war on drugs is to force the government to end it just like it ended Prohibition, everything else is utterly pointless, never worked and unlikely to ever work.
A huge difference between a government and a company is that a government cannot go insolvent without epic losses (because of its central bank),
Government isn't supposed to make money, it's purpose is to serve the population. Federal Reserve's abuses and rising debt is mostly a result of government bowing to corporate interests by supporting military-industrial complex and de-industrialization of the country's econom
I don't disagree, but I'm still opposed to firearms registration of any kind. One of the reasons we have a 2nd amendment is as a final check against oppressive government.
No, you don't. Armed uprising against a government is (and should be) always illegal according to that government's law. If people see such uprising as the best solution for their problems, they should have a goal of actually overthrowing the government, and ready to fight for this regardless of the government's opinions on their actions. Anything less would be a ridiculous hypocrisy (and, by the way, this is what "terrorism" actually means -- such a group wants to use government's power to further their goals, yet they are trying to coerce the government or population through violence into doing their bidding).
In any case, all weapons that would be useful for fighting against your government -- tanks, bombers, missiles, etc. -- are, and always were illegal to own. Apparently some stupid rednecks have a fantasy of shooting IRS officials from shotguns to keep evil gubmint from getting their sweet muh-nay, but this is why everyone else calls them stupid rednecks.
That check doesn't do us any good if government knows where all the weapons are and can confiscate them.
If you are ready to kill government officials, and are afraid of same officials knocking on your door and asking you to surrender the weapons, you have no business fighting against them in the first place.
Historically gun registration has led to gun confiscation. I don't even need to Godwin to make this example either -- it's happened right here in the US in California and New York City. They passed gun registration laws and later passed laws outlawing certain types of guns. Guess how they knew who owned those guns?
Guess what? I am not an American, and don't share this whole gun fetish. If it was impossible to get weapons sufficient for self-defense in those places (and this matters only because your police sucks ass and offers no real protection to law-abiding people), you would have a point, otherwise cry me a river over someone's arsenal in a barn.
In the case of something like Somalia, it's better off than it was with government and conditions have been improving.
Even if it was the case, it has nothing to do with my point -- without government you still have entities that act exactly like corporations, therefore your whole line of reasoning based on government supposedly enabling corporations is invalid.
The government is implicitly supported by its people, no matter what the government is. The trouble is that in creating a coercive rather than voluntary government, you are also creating a political class with its own intentions and an absolutely arbitrary power (arbitrary because it is not founded in merit, but rather in some human manipulation).
And the public still have more control over that "political class" than it ever would over companies and wealthy people in control of them. If public can't control politicians enough to make them [occasionally and somewhat] positive force in society, it means that it has no hope to become anything but slaves to the corporations.
All the government can do is pass laws to either artificially manipulate prices or make things illegal and then try to enforce them.
Yes, government does stupid and destructive things. Especially when it's taken over by people who tell you how evil the government is supposed to be. Nevertheless large companies' abuse of population dwarfs anything any government ever did -- each and every their step is based on complete disregard for well-being of the public while politicians are at least sometimes are well-intentioned.
Any government law is ultimately arbitrary, because it is the instant creation of a new absolutist rule. You cannot make greed illegal.
Please re-read what you just wrote. Those claims are incompatible -- if government can arbitrarily create rules, it definitely can make rules against greed. Either government is only capable of creating rules that are limited by society's willingness to follow, or government "can" proclaim any rule, including one that makes greed illegal.
In reality, of course, government has the power to create laws, however for a law to be applicable it muse reflect population's demands (or at least willingness to accept such a law). While I don't remember any attempt to outlaw actual greed, I can point out that laws against homosexuals were directed against relatively common natural inclination of a person, and government certainly had them on books and enforced them -- what now is recognized as wrong and pointless. In modern European countries people in general believe that some egregious manifestation of greed should be prevented and punished -- and their laws reflect that, so greedy people certainly suffer from such "oppression", but society recognizes it as acceptable.
You completely ignore the fact that government derives its power from people delegating that power, and the only way to keep such power is by imposing rules on itself and acting in the interests of people. Businesses, on the other hand, derive their power from owning property -- as long as society as a whole does not somehow declare such ownership illegitimate (happened once in the whole history of US -- again, with slavery, and only through government fighting a war with state governments that disagreed), there is no recourse. The only entity that can limit and override such power is the government, so of all realistic choices the best course of action for the population is to make government powerful and accountable to the people, not weak and subjugated by businesses. This is precisely what "free market" propaganda is trying to prevent from happening.
There are *always* long run unintended consequences. Bastiat answered the "broken window" fallacy (broken windows help the economy because they give glassiers work) by highlighting that there are seen and unseen consequences of any action. When you