"I live on the ocean floor. We call it a polder, but it's pretty much seabed. We've built earthen walls around this section and continuously pump out the water, and we have a lot of experience doing this and are quite good at it now, with triple-redundant pumping stations and seven nines of uptime, but nonetheless flooding is not so much a _potential_ disaster as it is our inevitable, inescapable, pre-ordained fate, i.e., it's really a question of when (not whether) we'll be flooded."
Actually, I have a friend who has since the age of thirty done janitorial work on a couple of occasions (albeit, one of those times it was as a second job). Work can be hard to find in some parts of the country, especially if you're in a screaming hurry to find it, and janitorial pays better than things like fast food and register clerking. My friend doesn't handle money well, so any time he gets laid off or anything he has to have income NOW, because he's never got much savings and sometimes has credit card bills (though he's trying hard to avoid the latter now).
I would possibly do janitorial work if I needed a job in a real hurry. I mean, I'd be spending a lot of my off hours looking for something better, but I would try to hold down *some* kind of job meanwhile. I *did* work fast food for a while, before I got my current job, and use of a mop was definitely involved there. (I wasn't yet 30 at the time, but still.) And it actually wasn't all that unpleasant. Unpredictable schedule was the worst thing about it, and a lot of IT guys have to put up with that, too (though I currently don't much, happily).
I didn't really notice the parenthetical comment, though. I mean, yeah, I read it, but it didn't really get to me or strike me as being a major part of the comment. I guess I have a thicker skin than average, or something. The poster's main point, that access to the server room should be restricted, was right on.
> Fortunately the guys working in the data center weren't as narrow-minded as you
Umm, being narrow-minded is a significant part of the system administrator's job description. Narrow-minded about what network traffic to allow (everything not expressly approved is verboten by default and dropped by the firewalls), narrow-minded about what software runs on the system, narrow-minded about who should have the root passwords, narrow-minded about who is authorized touch the servers,...
With that said, it is conceivable I would allow a student to clean a server room. I would not, however, want any random new janitor to be let into the server room without having a member of the IT staff speak with him first and evaluate whether he's A) smarter than a goldfish and B) careful. Because there are plenty of people out there who *aren't*.
> Today I use people's attitude toward janitorial or maintenance staff as a litmus test > of their personal character
It's not just janitorial staff. I wouldn't want *anyone* in the server room unobserved who isn't a member of the IT staff, or at least carefully screened by the IT staff. Not a janitor, nor a manager, nor a member of the board of directors, nor an auditor, nor a consultant. Janitors came up because they are frequently given keys to every room in the building and come in at night, so they frequently are in the server room unobserved. They shouldn't be.
I'm not even *entirely* comfortable with a member of the IT staff being alone in the server room. In smaller organizations it's often unavoidable, because there are not enough IT people to have them work in pairs. (Where I work, I'm the entire IT department, so there is simply no choice.) But if it *is* possible, it is preferable, IMO, because the extra accountability of having another person present who can understand what you're doing is a Good Thing(TM).
I mean, it's inconvenient to have to carry keys all the time, but the other alternative is to leave your house and care unlocked and, in the latter case, hotwired, so that anyone who walks up to it could just get in and drive off. (Yes, you could go with a different form of authentication besides a traditional key, but my point stands: authentication is inconvenient, but it improves security.)
NAT and firewalling create a certain amount of inconvenience, but they are well worth it for their security properties. They're not *nearly* as inconvenient as some of the other things you could do to compensate for not having them. Let's say, for instance, that you administer a network of fifty Windows desktops. You could put them all behind NAT and firewall, or you could hook them directly to the internet and individually manage all the incoming ports on each and every one of them individually. Which is more inconvenient? Or if you do neither, how much time would you have to spend recovering them from the security problems that would result? When you look at the alternatives, the firewall actually starts to sound *very* convenient.
> Is there going to be a time when humans just don't do this kind of thing?
Perhaps surprisingly, such a time is indeed spoken of in the Bible, in the book of Revelation, a time in the future when the Christ returns, takes over, and rules for a thousand years. However, apparently nobody really likes it very much, because after a thousand years of it when Satan is let loose, the bulk of the population immediately rallies behind him to rebel against God in the battle of God and Magog. So apparently people will only put up with peace and good behavior if you force it upon them, and as soon as they see a chance they rise up against it.
I have often wondered how long it took Adam and Eve to rebel. Genesis does not say how long they were in the garden before the little incident with the fruit. If I had to guess, based on my observations of modern humans, I give them about a week and a half, tops.
Oh, you meant a _computer_ game? In that case, probably Scorched Earth, or maybe Descent II, if I can have all the level editing tools and so forth to create fresh content.
> The fact that Firefox is open-source in and of itself actually has very little to do with why Microsoft > is (rightfully) freaking out. Firefox is free (as in beer. normal people have been proven not to care > about the other kind), and is available for many platforms.
IE is gratis also, if you have the platform requirements. So was Netscape. So was Mosiac. It's considered normal for web browsers to be a free download, financially supported in other ways (e.g., by advertising, or by complementing a company's other products). Firefox is no cheaper, in terms of dollars, than any other browser.
And while it's true that normal users don't care about source code, it is nonetheless also true that Microsoft *is* concerned about the open source movement, and view it as their most dangerous competitor.
Still, I don't mean to overplay the open-source aspect. Certainly the *most* frightening thing about Firefox, to Microsoft, was that all of a sudden a whole lot of ordinary end users were using it and talking about it, *not* just web geeks and power users. Within six months after its release, people who can't quite keep straight the difference between email and the web were asking their friends, "Do you have Foxfire yet?" The fact that this scary new competition is open-source makes it even more worrisome to them, but they would have been concerned anyway.
> I'm glad to see Microsoft is pushing forward with IE8 so soon after IE7, personally.
Oh, definitely. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. As a creator of web content, I certainly want to see Microsoft release improved versions of IE. I was ecstatic when the news came out that IE7 was going to go out as an automatic update. That trimmed *years* off the time before we can reasonably stop supporting IE6. I hope they do the same thing with IE8.
> If Hans Reiser is guilty, that means Nina Reiser went from dating one killer to another killer... > What are the odds of someone just happening to date two murderers?
Which do you mean, the odds that if you arbitrarily choose one person out of the whole population they will just happen to have dated two murderers, or the odds of there *being* someone who just happened to date two murders? The odds of the former are approximately zero, but the odds of the latter are rather a lot higher.
> I would assume that hiding from a spouse could be "easier" than hiding from the police. > Police have the ability to check bank records electoral registers criminal databases and hospital records.
Hiding from the police would not be very hard, provided you're willing to put a few hundred miles between yourself and anyplace you've previously lived. Just start a new life under an assumed name and don't do anything that identifies you. The hardest part, technically, is finding a way to collect a paycheck without proper identification, but there are assorted ways you can do that. Illegal immigrants, for instance, find ways to manage it. (That is, of course, only the hardest *technical* issue. Some people would have a harder time with their own emotions, keeping themselves from making contact with people or places out of their former life.)
I'm not saying Nina Reiser is alive. I don't know the particulars of the case. I'm just saying that if someone wanted to disappear, it's not really all that hard, especially if you have a few weeks to secretly plan it out ahead of time and the discretion to not inadvertently let anything slip and clue people in.
> Look up Windows 2003 Server, WindowsXP, Vista...
Wait, NTFS has filesystem versioning? Really?
[Looks it up.]
Huh. Volume Shadow Copy Service does sound rather similar, on the face of it (except that some of the information about it on the web seems to indicate that it only versions the whole filesystem (rather than individual files) which would be a bit of a pain, but possibly not a deal killer, depending how well it's implemented).
Microsoft sure has not done a very thorough job of *advertising* such an important and useful feature, though. This is the first I've heard of it.
That's almost enough to make me want a Windows-based CIFS fileserver on my home network. I could use rdesktop to administer it, and apart from that I'd hardly have to deal with the Windows UI at all... Hmmm. The hardware requirements and the license fee are the real killers on that for me right now, given my budget constraints. Still, it's an interesting possibility to ponder.
The other possibility would be to get a used Alpha system on eBay, a hobbyist license from Encompass or whatever they're calling it these days, and set up Samba for VMS. That would probably be a bit of a learning experience, getting it set up, but the automatic versioning implementation and interface in VMS are really slick. But this option would probably cost rather more, as used AXP systems go for a bit more money than used PCs. Plus, I have to admit, I would be less confident in my ability to set it up.
On the gripping hand, the Windows system would need more regular maintenance. VMS is old as the hills and stable as bedrock -- once you manage to get it set up (which, admittedly, takes more work than with more modern systems), you never have to touch anything. (If you train a monkey to change the backup tapes, a VMS system can go for years without even *having* a system administrator. It's a whole different universe from the Windows world of needing to log in as administrator a couple times a week just to check on things.)
Eh, it's all moot. I can't afford a fileserver right now, so which technology I'd use is immaterial. With ext3cow drawing attention to this issue finally, maybe by the time I get my budget whacked into shape there'll be versioned filesystems included in all the major BSD and Linux distros, and I'll be Bob's nephew.
> After reading one of the papers, it looks like you need to actually take a snapshot, though. I was hoping > for an more automatic version system, as with the VMS versioning stuff.
Oh, bummer. I, too, was wanting it to be a bit more automatic, like what's in VMS. I wouldn't mind if I had to expressly turn it on once for any given directory, but once I turn it on I'd like it to automatically version those files whenever they change in perpetuity.
The equivalent offense in the real world would be a more serious crime, obviously. And not everything that's a crime in the real world is a crime (in the real world) if you do it in a game world. If it were, everyone who's ever played Zork would be a thief, and clearly that makes no sense. Shooting your opponents in a Doom deathmatch is perhaps an even more obvious example; I'm not a big fan of FPS games, but I certainly do not consider playing them to be the same as murder.
So you can't take real-world laws and prosecute game-world actions under them directly.
I don't think that implies, though, that nothing anyone could ever do in a game world could ever be real-world criminal. Virtual rape could possibly be considered a form of harrassment (of the other player, not the character they are playing; game characters have no legal personhood) or some similar crime that, while not _rape_, might nonetheless be prosecutable. If the victim is (in the real world) a minor, then virtual rape would, I would think, be at least as serious as luring them into sex talk in a chatroom, which is criminal in many jurisdictions and _may_ even be considered statutory rape.
That's all you have to say. If they say, "Do it anyway", all you say is, "I can't do that, it's illegal" or perhaps "You can't legally ask me to do that." (This covers *any* illegal action an employer may ask you to take. I went through this once when I was asked to falsify records, for instance.)
I'm assuming here that you haven't _already_ compromised yourself by committing illegal actions. If you have already done so, then the moral and legal high ground are probably lost to you and you probably need to seek other employment. But if your own nose is clean, you have the legal right (indeed, obligation) to keep it that way.
What they will probably then do is get somebody else to do it instead. Theoretically they might fire you, but it's unlikely and would put them on shaky ground with such bodies as the Department of Labor (assuming you live in the US), to say nothing of the bad press they would stand to sustain if you went to the newspapers. Much more likely they'll get somebody else to do it and ask you to just look the other way.
Then you have to figure out whether you can look the other way. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
> The reason in Linux you use Bash for scripting is because it's convient.
The thing is, I mostly *don't* use bash for scripting, certainly not for anything over five or six lines. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the long and short of it is that it's more convenient to use Perl.
I use bash daily, but almost exclusively as an interactive shell, i.e., to run one command at a time and see the results. That's really what shells are good for. A shell doesn't need to be a good programming language. If I want a programming language, I'll use one that was designed for that purpose.
> Opera is nice and all, but it's not used by nearly enough people to be a real threat... yet.
I don't know that it ever will be, but I also don't know that it needs to be. Opera has never been aimed at the "everybody and their mother" market segment. I don't think that was even a goal for them.
Opera has consistently been, since the mid nineties, on the dividing line between the major browsers and the minor browsers -- always having a smaller market share than second place, but always rather larger than any of the obscure players. Every webmaster who can name more than three browsers knows about Opera, and everyone who's at all serious about supporting "all the major browsers" tests in Opera at least a little. I don't see any reason to expect any of that to change.
Is it going to take over the world and force IE and Gecko into second and third place? No. But it's not going away, either. It's an _alternative_ browser for a minority of users. It occupies that role by design, and always has.
The reason they're not comparing rumors about upcoming IE features to information about upcoming Opera features is because IE8 isn't aiming to compete with Opera. Microsoft is not bothered by Opera. Opera is a very benign competitor for them, and fairly predictable. They understand its place in things, and it doesn't scare them.
Firefox is another thing. It came, from Microsoft's perspective, out of nowhere. Mozilla was doing what it had always done, occupying the role it had occupied for several years, and then whammo, over the course of a few months there was this Firefox thing, and ordinary users, not just web geeks, had heard about it, tried it out, and were using it. In droves. Its market share broke (by some measures anyway) into double digits and threatened to continue climbing. The release of IE7 was a direct response to that threat.
Further, the really scary thing about Firefox, from Microsoft's perspective, is not just that it breaks up their monopoly on the web, but more importantly that it's open source, and if too many users -- ordinary end users, not IT geeks -- start using and liking open source software, that could have implications beyond just the web browser market. I mean, if an open source web browser became the cool thing everyone had to use, then another open source application (an office suite, for example) could potentially do the same, and *that* outcome could directly cost Microsoft a lot of money. This isn't so much of an issue with Opera.
That is why IE8 rumors get compared to Firefox development information, and not Opera. It isn't because Firefox is better than Opera (though I do personally prefer it), but rather because Firefox is, in Microsoft's view, the primary competition IE must beat.
Actually, filesystem versioning is older than Apple as a company, much less OS X. ITS had it in the sixties, and VMS has had it since the late seventies. Nonetheless, it's an undeniably useful feature, and I'm glad it's finally making its way into the major OSes.
Funny you should bring that up. Up to now I still keep nearly all of my data (both text and media) on FAT32 filesystems. Among other things, this makes it easier to switch operating systems. I'm currently using FreeBSD, but if something goes wrong with my OS, I can pop in a Knoppix CD and access my data no problem, or take the drive upstairs and stick it in the Windows 98 computer that my family uses and access my data, or... whatever.
Automatic versioning, however, is enough of a killer feature (one I've been wanting for a long time, ever since I saw it in VMS) that if it's decently well implemented I would be willing to give up the extra portability and lock myself in to a single operating system. I will certainly be looking forward to trying it out, once the distributions start picking it up and including it.
Actually, I rather liked VMS. Besides the filesystem versioning, which was extremely cool, one of the other things I liked about it was the help system, which was browseable in a way that made it possible to find commands when you didn't know what they were called. The Unix man page system just can't deliver that. These days, of course, you just do a web search and find the information you need, so it's less important, but still, the design of the VMS help system was interesting and, IMO, good.
I didn't like everything about VMS, of course. You'll note that I'm not currently using it, or anything. Still, there were definitely some good things about it, and the filesystem versioning was one of the best. I am more than a little pleased to see other systems finally catch on and get this feature.
Undelete isn't what makes this really cool, IMO. I don't generally delete stuff I still want, so that isn't really a big issue.
What I want, that a versioning filesystem can deliver, is the ability to revert a file back to an earlier version, after I've saved changes that turn out to be undesirable. This is a mistake I *do* make from time to time, often enough that I have been really hoping for a versioning filesystem in modern operating systems. This, to me, is a killer feature. I'm currently using FreeBSD, but this feature would by itself be enough to bring me back to using a Linux distribution, once it gets to the point of being included. Without it, once you save your changes and exit the application you can't go back. The past is lost. With a versioning filesystem, that's no longer true. I consider this to be *THE* feature for filesystems, far more important than things like journaling, much less performance tweaks. I have been wanting it ever since I saw the automatic versioning on OpenVMS, and I've been waiting, waiting, hoping, wondering why we don't have it in modern operating systems. I *want* this.
> From the article, apparently you need to drink about 3 litres of fortified milk to get enough vitamin D.
I probably drink more than half that much per day, and milk is only my single largest dietary source, not the only one. I'm more likely to have a deficiency in D than any other major vitamin (being as I eat a lot of vegetables, which are loaded with most of the others), but I'm probably alright. Granted, I'm in no danger of overdosing on vitamin D (which, incidentally, *is* possible, albeit unlikely unless you take too many vitamin pills).
> So...you're gunning for cancer? Ah well, each to their own. I'm hoping for something a little less painful like a > stroke or a heart attack, myself.
Whatever. Cancer, stroke, heart attack, diabetes, thyroid disorder, abcess tooth leading to a cerebral infection, grill of a truck,... there are a lot of ways to go. I used to joke that I wanted to die in such a way that everyone who heard about it would wince in pain, but I was never serious about that. (In fact, that actually sounds rather unpleasant, and I think I'd prefer to take a pass on it.) If I could choose, I guess I'd want to die quietly in my sleep, but you can't always have everything you want, and there are more important things, to my way of thinking, than the details of exactly how you die. And bear in mind that it's not a question of whether you're going to die: that much is pretty well a foregone conclusion. Only when and how are really up for speculation.
When all is said and done, I'm not going anywhere until I have finished everything God wants me to do on this earth, and once I have, then I've got no further need to stick around. This is not to say that I don't try to take care of my health as best I can, within reason, but I don't fret over it. Worrying about how much longer I've got wouldn't extend my life, even if that were a desirable outcome. As you point out, spending a lot of time out in the sun would be a dubious measure, as likely to kill me with skin cancer as to save me from soft bones. My eyes are sensitive to light, and I don't like the bright sun, plus I like to be alone a lot, so I spend a lot of time indoors. Sure, spending a lot of time inside could potentially injure my health -- though more likely in terms of circulatory-system issues than bones -- but there are plenty of ways to die outside too. If God wants me dead, he'll find a way to make an end of me, indoors or out.
Dante's Ninth Ring is a mixed drink, made from 3 ounces of vodka, 10 ounces of prune juice, 3 ounces of Dave's Insanity Sauce. Stir well, serve cold, and don't let it touch your lips when you drink it. Three hours later you find out why it's called Dante's Ninth Ring.
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> I live in the Netherlands.
Here, let me translate that into English for you:
"I live on the ocean floor. We call it a polder, but it's pretty much seabed. We've built earthen walls around this section and continuously pump out the water, and we have a lot of experience doing this and are quite good at it now, with triple-redundant pumping stations and seven nines of uptime, but nonetheless flooding is not so much a _potential_ disaster as it is our inevitable, inescapable, pre-ordained fate, i.e., it's really a question of when (not whether) we'll be flooded."
HTH.HAND.
Actually, I have a friend who has since the age of thirty done janitorial work on a couple of occasions (albeit, one of those times it was as a second job). Work can be hard to find in some parts of the country, especially if you're in a screaming hurry to find it, and janitorial pays better than things like fast food and register clerking. My friend doesn't handle money well, so any time he gets laid off or anything he has to have income NOW, because he's never got much savings and sometimes has credit card bills (though he's trying hard to avoid the latter now).
I would possibly do janitorial work if I needed a job in a real hurry. I mean, I'd be spending a lot of my off hours looking for something better, but I would try to hold down *some* kind of job meanwhile. I *did* work fast food for a while, before I got my current job, and use of a mop was definitely involved there. (I wasn't yet 30 at the time, but still.) And it actually wasn't all that unpleasant. Unpredictable schedule was the worst thing about it, and a lot of IT guys have to put up with that, too (though I currently don't much, happily).
I didn't really notice the parenthetical comment, though. I mean, yeah, I read it, but it didn't really get to me or strike me as being a major part of the comment. I guess I have a thicker skin than average, or something. The poster's main point, that access to the server room should be restricted, was right on.
> Fortunately the guys working in the data center weren't as narrow-minded as you
...
Umm, being narrow-minded is a significant part of the system administrator's job description. Narrow-minded about what network traffic to allow (everything not expressly approved is verboten by default and dropped by the firewalls), narrow-minded about what software runs on the system, narrow-minded about who should have the root passwords, narrow-minded about who is authorized touch the servers,
With that said, it is conceivable I would allow a student to clean a server room. I would not, however, want any random new janitor to be let into the server room without having a member of the IT staff speak with him first and evaluate whether he's A) smarter than a goldfish and B) careful. Because there are plenty of people out there who *aren't*.
> Today I use people's attitude toward janitorial or maintenance staff as a litmus test
> of their personal character
It's not just janitorial staff. I wouldn't want *anyone* in the server room unobserved who isn't a member of the IT staff, or at least carefully screened by the IT staff. Not a janitor, nor a manager, nor a member of the board of directors, nor an auditor, nor a consultant. Janitors came up because they are frequently given keys to every room in the building and come in at night, so they frequently are in the server room unobserved. They shouldn't be.
I'm not even *entirely* comfortable with a member of the IT staff being alone in the server room. In smaller organizations it's often unavoidable, because there are not enough IT people to have them work in pairs. (Where I work, I'm the entire IT department, so there is simply no choice.) But if it *is* possible, it is preferable, IMO, because the extra accountability of having another person present who can understand what you're doing is a Good Thing(TM).
But your other choice is to be insecure.
I mean, it's inconvenient to have to carry keys all the time, but the other alternative is to leave your house and care unlocked and, in the latter case, hotwired, so that anyone who walks up to it could just get in and drive off. (Yes, you could go with a different form of authentication besides a traditional key, but my point stands: authentication is inconvenient, but it improves security.)
NAT and firewalling create a certain amount of inconvenience, but they are well worth it for their security properties. They're not *nearly* as inconvenient as some of the other things you could do to compensate for not having them. Let's say, for instance, that you administer a network of fifty Windows desktops. You could put them all behind NAT and firewall, or you could hook them directly to the internet and individually manage all the incoming ports on each and every one of them individually. Which is more inconvenient? Or if you do neither, how much time would you have to spend recovering them from the security problems that would result? When you look at the alternatives, the firewall actually starts to sound *very* convenient.
> Is there going to be a time when humans just don't do this kind of thing?
Perhaps surprisingly, such a time is indeed spoken of in the Bible, in the book of Revelation, a time in the future when the Christ returns, takes over, and rules for a thousand years. However, apparently nobody really likes it very much, because after a thousand years of it when Satan is let loose, the bulk of the population immediately rallies behind him to rebel against God in the battle of God and Magog. So apparently people will only put up with peace and good behavior if you force it upon them, and as soon as they see a chance they rise up against it.
I have often wondered how long it took Adam and Eve to rebel. Genesis does not say how long they were in the garden before the little incident with the fruit. If I had to guess, based on my observations of modern humans, I give them about a week and a half, tops.
Chess never gets old, really.
Oh, you meant a _computer_ game? In that case, probably Scorched Earth, or maybe Descent II, if I can have all the level editing tools and so forth to create fresh content.
> The fact that Firefox is open-source in and of itself actually has very little to do with why Microsoft
> is (rightfully) freaking out. Firefox is free (as in beer. normal people have been proven not to care
> about the other kind), and is available for many platforms.
IE is gratis also, if you have the platform requirements. So was Netscape. So was Mosiac. It's considered normal for web browsers to be a free download, financially supported in other ways (e.g., by advertising, or by complementing a company's other products). Firefox is no cheaper, in terms of dollars, than any other browser.
And while it's true that normal users don't care about source code, it is nonetheless also true that Microsoft *is* concerned about the open source movement, and view it as their most dangerous competitor.
Still, I don't mean to overplay the open-source aspect. Certainly the *most* frightening thing about Firefox, to Microsoft, was that all of a sudden a whole lot of ordinary end users were using it and talking about it, *not* just web geeks and power users. Within six months after its release, people who can't quite keep straight the difference between email and the web were asking their friends, "Do you have Foxfire yet?" The fact that this scary new competition is open-source makes it even more worrisome to them, but they would have been concerned anyway.
> I'm glad to see Microsoft is pushing forward with IE8 so soon after IE7, personally.
Oh, definitely. I didn't mean to imply otherwise. As a creator of web content, I certainly want to see Microsoft release improved versions of IE. I was ecstatic when the news came out that IE7 was going to go out as an automatic update. That trimmed *years* off the time before we can reasonably stop supporting IE6. I hope they do the same thing with IE8.
> If Hans Reiser is guilty, that means Nina Reiser went from dating one killer to another killer...
> What are the odds of someone just happening to date two murderers?
Which do you mean, the odds that if you arbitrarily choose one person out of the whole population they will just happen to have dated two murderers, or the odds of there *being* someone who just happened to date two murders? The odds of the former are approximately zero, but the odds of the latter are rather a lot higher.
> Sounds like they're all a bunch of real whackos!
Yeah, you can kind of tell that just by looking at Reiser's site (namesys.com). Being a wacko, however, is not a crime, last I checked.
> doesn't a murder case require a body (or parts of it)?
Not necessarily. It helps, of course, but a pair of witnesses is even better (all else being equal).
> I would assume that hiding from a spouse could be "easier" than hiding from the police.
> Police have the ability to check bank records electoral registers criminal databases and hospital records.
Hiding from the police would not be very hard, provided you're willing to put a few hundred miles between yourself and anyplace you've previously lived. Just start a new life under an assumed name and don't do anything that identifies you. The hardest part, technically, is finding a way to collect a paycheck without proper identification, but there are assorted ways you can do that. Illegal immigrants, for instance, find ways to manage it. (That is, of course, only the hardest *technical* issue. Some people would have a harder time with their own emotions, keeping themselves from making contact with people or places out of their former life.)
I'm not saying Nina Reiser is alive. I don't know the particulars of the case. I'm just saying that if someone wanted to disappear, it's not really all that hard, especially if you have a few weeks to secretly plan it out ahead of time and the discretion to not inadvertently let anything slip and clue people in.
> Look up Windows 2003 Server, WindowsXP, Vista...
Wait, NTFS has filesystem versioning? Really?
[Looks it up.]
Huh. Volume Shadow Copy Service does sound rather similar, on the face of it (except that some of the information about it on the web seems to indicate that it only versions the whole filesystem (rather than individual files) which would be a bit of a pain, but possibly not a deal killer, depending how well it's implemented).
Microsoft sure has not done a very thorough job of *advertising* such an important and useful feature, though. This is the first I've heard of it.
That's almost enough to make me want a Windows-based CIFS fileserver on my home network. I could use rdesktop to administer it, and apart from that I'd hardly have to deal with the Windows UI at all... Hmmm. The hardware requirements and the license fee are the real killers on that for me right now, given my budget constraints. Still, it's an interesting possibility to ponder.
The other possibility would be to get a used Alpha system on eBay, a hobbyist license from Encompass or whatever they're calling it these days, and set up Samba for VMS. That would probably be a bit of a learning experience, getting it set up, but the automatic versioning implementation and interface in VMS are really slick. But this option would probably cost rather more, as used AXP systems go for a bit more money than used PCs. Plus, I have to admit, I would be less confident in my ability to set it up.
On the gripping hand, the Windows system would need more regular maintenance. VMS is old as the hills and stable as bedrock -- once you manage to get it set up (which, admittedly, takes more work than with more modern systems), you never have to touch anything. (If you train a monkey to change the backup tapes, a VMS system can go for years without even *having* a system administrator. It's a whole different universe from the Windows world of needing to log in as administrator a couple times a week just to check on things.)
Eh, it's all moot. I can't afford a fileserver right now, so which technology I'd use is immaterial. With ext3cow drawing attention to this issue finally, maybe by the time I get my budget whacked into shape there'll be versioned filesystems included in all the major BSD and Linux distros, and I'll be Bob's nephew.
> After reading one of the papers, it looks like you need to actually take a snapshot, though. I was hoping
> for an more automatic version system, as with the VMS versioning stuff.
Oh, bummer. I, too, was wanting it to be a bit more automatic, like what's in VMS. I wouldn't mind if I had to expressly turn it on once for any given directory, but once I turn it on I'd like it to automatically version those files whenever they change in perpetuity.
The equivalent offense in the real world would be a more serious crime, obviously. And not everything that's a crime in the real world is a crime (in the real world) if you do it in a game world. If it were, everyone who's ever played Zork would be a thief, and clearly that makes no sense. Shooting your opponents in a Doom deathmatch is perhaps an even more obvious example; I'm not a big fan of FPS games, but I certainly do not consider playing them to be the same as murder.
So you can't take real-world laws and prosecute game-world actions under them directly.
I don't think that implies, though, that nothing anyone could ever do in a game world could ever be real-world criminal. Virtual rape could possibly be considered a form of harrassment (of the other player, not the character they are playing; game characters have no legal personhood) or some similar crime that, while not _rape_, might nonetheless be prosecutable. If the victim is (in the real world) a minor, then virtual rape would, I would think, be at least as serious as luring them into sex talk in a chatroom, which is criminal in many jurisdictions and _may_ even be considered statutory rape.
"I can't do that. It's illegal."
That's all you have to say. If they say, "Do it anyway", all you say is, "I can't do that, it's illegal" or perhaps "You can't legally ask me to do that." (This covers *any* illegal action an employer may ask you to take. I went through this once when I was asked to falsify records, for instance.)
I'm assuming here that you haven't _already_ compromised yourself by committing illegal actions. If you have already done so, then the moral and legal high ground are probably lost to you and you probably need to seek other employment. But if your own nose is clean, you have the legal right (indeed, obligation) to keep it that way.
What they will probably then do is get somebody else to do it instead. Theoretically they might fire you, but it's unlikely and would put them on shaky ground with such bodies as the Department of Labor (assuming you live in the US), to say nothing of the bad press they would stand to sustain if you went to the newspapers. Much more likely they'll get somebody else to do it and ask you to just look the other way.
Then you have to figure out whether you can look the other way. I'll leave that as an exercise to the reader.
> remember, there are *still* copy/paste problems between some toolkits..
That's mainly because the stubborn GUI writers refuse to support the Emacs kill ring.
Ahem.
> The reason in Linux you use Bash for scripting is because it's convient.
The thing is, I mostly *don't* use bash for scripting, certainly not for anything over five or six lines. There are a variety of reasons for this, but the long and short of it is that it's more convenient to use Perl.
I use bash daily, but almost exclusively as an interactive shell, i.e., to run one command at a time and see the results. That's really what shells are good for. A shell doesn't need to be a good programming language. If I want a programming language, I'll use one that was designed for that purpose.
> Opera is nice and all, but it's not used by nearly enough people to be a real threat... yet.
I don't know that it ever will be, but I also don't know that it needs to be. Opera has never been aimed at the "everybody and their mother" market segment. I don't think that was even a goal for them.
Opera has consistently been, since the mid nineties, on the dividing line between the major browsers and the minor browsers -- always having a smaller market share than second place, but always rather larger than any of the obscure players. Every webmaster who can name more than three browsers knows about Opera, and everyone who's at all serious about supporting "all the major browsers" tests in Opera at least a little. I don't see any reason to expect any of that to change.
Is it going to take over the world and force IE and Gecko into second and third place? No. But it's not going away, either. It's an _alternative_ browser for a minority of users. It occupies that role by design, and always has.
The reason they're not comparing rumors about upcoming IE features to information about upcoming Opera features is because IE8 isn't aiming to compete with Opera. Microsoft is not bothered by Opera. Opera is a very benign competitor for them, and fairly predictable. They understand its place in things, and it doesn't scare them.
Firefox is another thing. It came, from Microsoft's perspective, out of nowhere. Mozilla was doing what it had always done, occupying the role it had occupied for several years, and then whammo, over the course of a few months there was this Firefox thing, and ordinary users, not just web geeks, had heard about it, tried it out, and were using it. In droves. Its market share broke (by some measures anyway) into double digits and threatened to continue climbing. The release of IE7 was a direct response to that threat.
Further, the really scary thing about Firefox, from Microsoft's perspective, is not just that it breaks up their monopoly on the web, but more importantly that it's open source, and if too many users -- ordinary end users, not IT geeks -- start using and liking open source software, that could have implications beyond just the web browser market. I mean, if an open source web browser became the cool thing everyone had to use, then another open source application (an office suite, for example) could potentially do the same, and *that* outcome could directly cost Microsoft a lot of money. This isn't so much of an issue with Opera.
That is why IE8 rumors get compared to Firefox development information, and not Opera. It isn't because Firefox is better than Opera (though I do personally prefer it), but rather because Firefox is, in Microsoft's view, the primary competition IE must beat.
Actually, filesystem versioning is older than Apple as a company, much less OS X. ITS had it in the sixties, and VMS has had it since the late seventies. Nonetheless, it's an undeniably useful feature, and I'm glad it's finally making its way into the major OSes.
Funny you should bring that up. Up to now I still keep nearly all of my data (both text and media) on FAT32 filesystems. Among other things, this makes it easier to switch operating systems. I'm currently using FreeBSD, but if something goes wrong with my OS, I can pop in a Knoppix CD and access my data no problem, or take the drive upstairs and stick it in the Windows 98 computer that my family uses and access my data, or... whatever.
Automatic versioning, however, is enough of a killer feature (one I've been wanting for a long time, ever since I saw it in VMS) that if it's decently well implemented I would be willing to give up the extra portability and lock myself in to a single operating system. I will certainly be looking forward to trying it out, once the distributions start picking it up and including it.
Actually, I rather liked VMS. Besides the filesystem versioning, which was extremely cool, one of the other things I liked about it was the help system, which was browseable in a way that made it possible to find commands when you didn't know what they were called. The Unix man page system just can't deliver that. These days, of course, you just do a web search and find the information you need, so it's less important, but still, the design of the VMS help system was interesting and, IMO, good.
I didn't like everything about VMS, of course. You'll note that I'm not currently using it, or anything. Still, there were definitely some good things about it, and the filesystem versioning was one of the best. I am more than a little pleased to see other systems finally catch on and get this feature.
Undelete isn't what makes this really cool, IMO. I don't generally delete stuff I still want, so that isn't really a big issue.
What I want, that a versioning filesystem can deliver, is the ability to revert a file back to an earlier version, after I've saved changes that turn out to be undesirable. This is a mistake I *do* make from time to time, often enough that I have been really hoping for a versioning filesystem in modern operating systems. This, to me, is a killer feature. I'm currently using FreeBSD, but this feature would by itself be enough to bring me back to using a Linux distribution, once it gets to the point of being included. Without it, once you save your changes and exit the application you can't go back. The past is lost. With a versioning filesystem, that's no longer true. I consider this to be *THE* feature for filesystems, far more important than things like journaling, much less performance tweaks. I have been wanting it ever since I saw the automatic versioning on OpenVMS, and I've been waiting, waiting, hoping, wondering why we don't have it in modern operating systems. I *want* this.
> From the article, apparently you need to drink about 3 litres of fortified milk to get enough vitamin D.
... there are a lot of ways to go. I used to joke that I wanted to die in such a way that everyone who heard about it would wince in pain, but I was never serious about that. (In fact, that actually sounds rather unpleasant, and I think I'd prefer to take a pass on it.) If I could choose, I guess I'd want to die quietly in my sleep, but you can't always have everything you want, and there are more important things, to my way of thinking, than the details of exactly how you die. And bear in mind that it's not a question of whether you're going to die: that much is pretty well a foregone conclusion. Only when and how are really up for speculation.
I probably drink more than half that much per day, and milk is only my single largest dietary source, not the only one. I'm more likely to have a deficiency in D than any other major vitamin (being as I eat a lot of vegetables, which are loaded with most of the others), but I'm probably alright. Granted, I'm in no danger of overdosing on vitamin D (which, incidentally, *is* possible, albeit unlikely unless you take too many vitamin pills).
> So...you're gunning for cancer? Ah well, each to their own. I'm hoping for something a little less painful like a
> stroke or a heart attack, myself.
Whatever. Cancer, stroke, heart attack, diabetes, thyroid disorder, abcess tooth leading to a cerebral infection, grill of a truck,
When all is said and done, I'm not going anywhere until I have finished everything God wants me to do on this earth, and once I have, then I've got no further need to stick around. This is not to say that I don't try to take care of my health as best I can, within reason, but I don't fret over it. Worrying about how much longer I've got wouldn't extend my life, even if that were a desirable outcome. As you point out, spending a lot of time out in the sun would be a dubious measure, as likely to kill me with skin cancer as to save me from soft bones. My eyes are sensitive to light, and I don't like the bright sun, plus I like to be alone a lot, so I spend a lot of time indoors. Sure, spending a lot of time inside could potentially injure my health -- though more likely in terms of circulatory-system issues than bones -- but there are plenty of ways to die outside too. If God wants me dead, he'll find a way to make an end of me, indoors or out.
> I suppose this is Dante's 9th ring.
Dante's Ninth Ring is a mixed drink, made from 3 ounces of vodka, 10 ounces of prune juice, 3 ounces of Dave's Insanity Sauce. Stir well, serve cold, and don't let it touch your lips when you drink it. Three hours later you find out why it's called Dante's Ninth Ring.