There's no wrong answer, and my point is that 99% of people would pick the answer he picked. If 99% of people are too stupid to use a computer then the fault is with the computer.
Of course there's a wrong answer. Look, all one can do is protect oneself by taking reasonable precautions. If you have multiple non-volatile backups in different locations, odds are your data will survive everything but a nuclear holocaust. This guy didn't take even the most basic precautions to protect his livelihood. Saying that's the computer's fault is ridiculous: all machines built by the hand of Man fail, and anyone who isn't capable of grasping that is far too trusting, and deserves whatever happens.
So yeah, he may not be too stupid to use a computer, but he's definitely too stupid to maintain one. It's really a funny artifact of human nature: people that will carefully make copies of important papers and store said copies safely offsite cheerfully expect their hard drive to last forever. Or never get stolen, or taken out by a line transient, or whatever.
And this is why I lease a dedicated box with clearly defined monthly transfer limits, overage charges, and uptime SLA. Yeah, it costs a tad more than $7.99/month, but it's always there and if I ever need to submit a support ticket, it's usually answered in less than a minute.
Hold on now. He contracted the storage of his data to professionals (the ISP) and retained a personal backup. What's stupid about thinking that would be sufficient? What's wrong with thinking that the people you contracted and paid to store and serve your data would actually do those things?
Any data not stored on equipment or media under your direct control should be considered expendable. Period. That means that the owner of that data should have maintained multiple backups (preferably incremental so he'd have a history of changes) with off-site copies. Unless that ISP specified that it would provide backup and loss indemnification services (some do, but I'm betting this one doesn't) he's responsible if that data gets lost.
In the meantime, assuming that this goofy ISP still has his site, he really should contact law enforcement, or a good lawyer at minimum. This is insane.
Yes, but being an ass implies that one is deliberately acting in an asinine manner (as in, "what an asshole.")
OK, I'll grant you that it's probably thus for Americans (since you've merged "arse" with "ass"), but, for me, a person who is an ass is someone who acts idiotically, as though they had no more brain than an ass (equus asinus, whence both the words "ass" and "asinine"). Someone who deliberately behaves in a stupidly objectionable way is an arsehole, bastard, prick, or any number of other obscenities.
Well, I'll admit that either way it's often very difficult to distinguish the two just by their behavior.
I doubt anybody can argue against the fact that currently Europe in general is far more democratic than US and most European countries (with one or two exceptions) has very strict control of weapons.
Which means, precisely... nothing. Okay, so some hundreds of millions of people have allowed themselves to be disarmed. And yes, for the moment it doesn't appear to have had any deleterious effects. I'm not arguing that gun control necessarily causes problems when everything is on an even keel. History would tell us, though, that that condition is probably temporary.
Yes, but being an ass implies that one is deliberately acting in an asinine manner (as in, "what an asshole.") On the other hand, being an idiot in this context just means you're too stupid to use a computer.
Neither are particularly positive attributes however.
And the whole point of the article, and the grandparent, is that OSS cheerleaders don't even try to perform that analysis.
Sure, and the reality is that performing such assessments is just as much of a specialty as kernel development. The military has people who nothing but assess risk and try to determine the best course of action. That's not something that an open source advocate or a programmer could or should be expected to do. Might as well ask them to write self-help books. They'd do just about as well.
Besides, this goes both ways. A solid risk/benefit analysis is an activity that a large corporation with vast resources could easily afford to take on. Many do (hence IBM's massive investment in Linux) but others don't. It's often easier to take the expensive dinners and lame "open source is too risky" excuses offered by well-paid salesmen from closed source outfits and forget about alternatives.
It's not tit-for-tat at all: it goes like this. We watch the UK's governments do all the bad stuff they want. Then we cherry-pick the worst of it to implement here, once they've shown that they can get an otherwise-civilized population to accept it. This has the advantage of allowing our leaders to point to the UK and say, "See? Nobody even noticed {insert missing civil liberty here} over there, and better yet, no bombs have gone off so it must be a good thing!" The logic of this escapes me, but it appears to be working well.
Off-topic but... you should read a little history. The only people that survive such attacks are the people with guns. It may only buy you a little time, but that can often be enough. More to the point, an armed population has been shown to be far less likely ever to end up in that position. Every dictator down the ages has made his first step one of disarming the citizenry. It happened in post-World War I Germany (the Weimar Republic had, by our standards, a very modern gun control law: Hitler merely exploited the laws that were already on the books)
In any event, don't dismiss the capabilities of soccer moms and business men with pistols. When the shit hits the fan, when the lives of your friends and families are on the line, people can do some amazing things. But, when you get right down to it, the reason the Right to Bear Arms is there is to (hopefully) prevent the need for such actions on the part of the population. So far it's worked pretty well.
Although clearly extreme and I don't agree with the opinion that no open source project can be trusted, I can't help feeling that we arrogantly dismiss the risk altogether at our peril.
It's like anything else... you have to make a risk/benefit analysis. Most people aren't very good at that, especially people that are part of a corporate hierarchy (they'll pick whatever the prevailing winds tell them will preserve their job.) Whether the technology under discussion is nuclear power, vaccinations, or open source software, the reality is that you have to accept some risk. That, or spend your life cowering in a cave. The problems come in when people believe that they can have the benefits of high technology with zero risk. That's just not possible, not at the current state-of-the-art, and will probably never be.
So, yes, there is a finite possibility that someone will, or already has, compromised a major open source application in some way. People have tried in the past, it's true. But it all comes down to that risk/benefit ratio again. So far as browsers are concerned, if you choose an Internet Explorer, you know that you're at a substantially higher risk of external compromise in spite of the closed source nature of the program. With a Firefox, you have to balance the risk of a possible built-in exploit with the fact that it's otherwise a much more solid product security-wise. Where does the greatest risk lie? Sure, there are other browsers, but as products of the human mind they are also imperfect, so the same rationale applies.
All you can do is take your pick and hope for the best.
Ah, but you see, they've changed the nomenclature on us. 'Beta code' no longer means 'computer code that is mostly usable, but still in testing', but rather means 'beta is code for never saying that you promised usability, uptime, or data retention'.
Yes, and we do have Google to thank for that redefinition.
Welcome to the exciting world of time zones, many people still think it's saturday, these are of course american idiots who wouldn't know what a GMT was if you told them and can't read a 24 hour clock to save their lives. It's not their fault that the US doesn't uses a single international standard, their country is screwed up.
Look, dude... you're posting in a public forum on an American web site, and all you're doing is reaffirming all the bad impressions we have about people from other countries. Don't you understand that it goes both ways? People go on and on and on about "Ugly Americans" and how uncouth and uncivilized we are, and then go and make crass comments that, really, just go to show unpleasant they are. You're a classic example of that behavior. Absolutely classic. I have news for you: every society on Earth is screwed up on more ways than one. That, my impolite friend, is human nature. If what you're really saying is that, despite our imperfections, we managed to achieve a degree of cultural influence, economic and military success that your nation never even dreamed of... well, that's just sour grapes on your part. Grow up.
Myself? Oh, you mean my made-up character. let's see. I'm a 15-year-old bi-sexual girl with a 38DD, I remember that, but um, what um, I can't find the picture, and I can't remember what activities I was supposed to be into, other than group orgies... sh***....
Oh well, guess I'll just create a new one.
Yes, it's true... if you always tell the truth you don't have to keep track of all your lies.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should
not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all
experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while
evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to
which they are accustomed.
I'm sure you can find the source for this quote yourself.
Yes, well, Thomas Jefferson had a very different take on that.
You mean that adventure that they were on the verge of losing until we gave them shoulder fired surface to air missles? (hardly small arms)
So what? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The American Revolution was won because France was England's enemy at that point, which was sufficient reason for France to help us out in much the same way as our offering Stingers to Afghanistan. If we weren't embroiled in that conflict with England, France would have had no reason to get involved. And yes, such missiles are small arms to any modern military. High-tech to be sure, but not particularly impressive otherwise.
If the Afghanis had just rolled over and played dead for the Russians, we wouldn't have bothered. Instead, they stood up to our enemy, and we supported them at the time.
Leveraging one group's enmity towards another has always been a legitimate tactic in warfare. Hell, Vietnam was a classic example of that. However, in order to do that you have to show that you are both willing and able to fight. Sure, the Russians outclassed that Afghanis from a military and technological perspective... but Afghanistan's willingness to put up a fight gave us the opportunity to stick it to the Russians. And, as you point out, we did exactly that.
It's funny that, when looking at Iraq, people often say, "We should have learned from Vietnam that you can win battles, but not wars against an entrenched local militia." What's funny about it is that we should have learned that from the American Revolution. What is being done to us in Iraq is exactly the founding act of our nation.
Well, now, I think you're playing fast and loose with the definition of "win". We lost Vietnam in the court of public opinion, not on the battlefield: we won every major battle in that war. Now, I know that the outcome of any conflict is not decided solely by kill ratio (unless you kill all of them) but if you look at the situation in Iraq it is comparable to Vietnam: something like 20 insurgents killed for every American death, and that's with us playing with one hand tied behind our back. It's most certainly possible to win any war: it just depends upon how far you're willing to go. We aren't willing to kill more civilians than we have to. If we were not so restricted, we could have won this particular war a long time ago.
But would have meant a lot more dead Iraqis. And you know what? The Bush Administration has already lost the War in Iraq... not in Iraq, but here in the United States.
Slashdot Mirror
"proof through consensus" I think the term you are looking for is religion.
No ... democracy.
On Wikipedia, truth is received truth: the consensus view of a subject.
Pretty similar to any true democratic process, when you get right down to it. In other words, the popular will is often an idiot.
Cool, other people's taxes really are working hard for you.
What does that mean? Com Ed invested heavily in nuclear with the intent to sell power to other States.
There's no wrong answer, and my point is that 99% of people would pick the answer he picked. If 99% of people are too stupid to use a computer then the fault is with the computer.
Of course there's a wrong answer. Look, all one can do is protect oneself by taking reasonable precautions. If you have multiple non-volatile backups in different locations, odds are your data will survive everything but a nuclear holocaust. This guy didn't take even the most basic precautions to protect his livelihood. Saying that's the computer's fault is ridiculous: all machines built by the hand of Man fail, and anyone who isn't capable of grasping that is far too trusting, and deserves whatever happens.
So yeah, he may not be too stupid to use a computer, but he's definitely too stupid to maintain one. It's really a funny artifact of human nature: people that will carefully make copies of important papers and store said copies safely offsite cheerfully expect their hard drive to last forever. Or never get stolen, or taken out by a line transient, or whatever.
Just out of curiosity, how much does that run you a month?
And I think I've found the perfect guy for them.
Huh ... looks like he sued himself in the foot.
And this is why I lease a dedicated box with clearly defined monthly transfer limits, overage charges, and uptime SLA. Yeah, it costs a tad more than $7.99/month, but it's always there and if I ever need to submit a support ticket, it's usually answered in less than a minute.
I take it that's where your HLDS is running.
Hold on now. He contracted the storage of his data to professionals (the ISP) and retained a personal backup. What's stupid about thinking that would be sufficient? What's wrong with thinking that the people you contracted and paid to store and serve your data would actually do those things?
Any data not stored on equipment or media under your direct control should be considered expendable. Period. That means that the owner of that data should have maintained multiple backups (preferably incremental so he'd have a history of changes) with off-site copies. Unless that ISP specified that it would provide backup and loss indemnification services (some do, but I'm betting this one doesn't) he's responsible if that data gets lost.
In the meantime, assuming that this goofy ISP still has his site, he really should contact law enforcement, or a good lawyer at minimum. This is insane.
The OP is correct: the guy screwed up.
Yes, but being an ass implies that one is deliberately acting in an asinine manner (as in, "what an asshole.")
OK, I'll grant you that it's probably thus for Americans (since you've merged "arse" with "ass"), but, for me, a person who is an ass is someone who acts idiotically, as though they had no more brain than an ass (equus asinus, whence both the words "ass" and "asinine"). Someone who deliberately behaves in a stupidly objectionable way is an arsehole, bastard, prick, or any number of other obscenities.
Well, I'll admit that either way it's often very difficult to distinguish the two just by their behavior.
I doubt anybody can argue against the fact that currently Europe in general is far more democratic than US and most European countries (with one or two exceptions) has very strict control of weapons.
Which means, precisely ... nothing. Okay, so some hundreds of millions of people have allowed themselves to be disarmed. And yes, for the moment it doesn't appear to have had any deleterious effects. I'm not arguing that gun control necessarily causes problems when everything is on an even keel. History would tell us, though, that that condition is probably temporary.
An ass = asinine = an idiot = idiotic.
Yes, but being an ass implies that one is deliberately acting in an asinine manner (as in, "what an asshole.") On the other hand, being an idiot in this context just means you're too stupid to use a computer.
Neither are particularly positive attributes however.
And the whole point of the article, and the grandparent, is that OSS cheerleaders don't even try to perform that analysis.
Sure, and the reality is that performing such assessments is just as much of a specialty as kernel development. The military has people who nothing but assess risk and try to determine the best course of action. That's not something that an open source advocate or a programmer could or should be expected to do. Might as well ask them to write self-help books. They'd do just about as well.
Besides, this goes both ways. A solid risk/benefit analysis is an activity that a large corporation with vast resources could easily afford to take on. Many do (hence IBM's massive investment in Linux) but others don't. It's often easier to take the expensive dinners and lame "open source is too risky" excuses offered by well-paid salesmen from closed source outfits and forget about alternatives.
From the same people who brought you the excellent "don't bring bottles of water on a plane" legislation.
Was that a UK innovation, or did the TSA come up with that all on its own?
It's not tit-for-tat at all: it goes like this. We watch the UK's governments do all the bad stuff they want. Then we cherry-pick the worst of it to implement here, once they've shown that they can get an otherwise-civilized population to accept it. This has the advantage of allowing our leaders to point to the UK and say, "See? Nobody even noticed {insert missing civil liberty here} over there, and better yet, no bombs have gone off so it must be a good thing!" The logic of this escapes me, but it appears to be working well.
Will soon be the safest country in the world to live, or the scariest.
Safety hasn't been a problem for the UK for quite some time now. I'm putting in my vote for scariest.
Off-topic but ... you should read a little history. The only people that survive such attacks are the people with guns. It may only buy you a little time, but that can often be enough. More to the point, an armed population has been shown to be far less likely ever to end up in that position. Every dictator down the ages has made his first step one of disarming the citizenry. It happened in post-World War I Germany (the Weimar Republic had, by our standards, a very modern gun control law: Hitler merely exploited the laws that were already on the books)
In any event, don't dismiss the capabilities of soccer moms and business men with pistols. When the shit hits the fan, when the lives of your friends and families are on the line, people can do some amazing things. But, when you get right down to it, the reason the Right to Bear Arms is there is to (hopefully) prevent the need for such actions on the part of the population. So far it's worked pretty well.
Although clearly extreme and I don't agree with the opinion that no open source project can be trusted, I can't help feeling that we arrogantly dismiss the risk altogether at our peril.
It's like anything else ... you have to make a risk/benefit analysis. Most people aren't very good at that, especially people that are part of a corporate hierarchy (they'll pick whatever the prevailing winds tell them will preserve their job.) Whether the technology under discussion is nuclear power, vaccinations, or open source software, the reality is that you have to accept some risk. That, or spend your life cowering in a cave. The problems come in when people believe that they can have the benefits of high technology with zero risk. That's just not possible, not at the current state-of-the-art, and will probably never be.
So, yes, there is a finite possibility that someone will, or already has, compromised a major open source application in some way. People have tried in the past, it's true. But it all comes down to that risk/benefit ratio again. So far as browsers are concerned, if you choose an Internet Explorer, you know that you're at a substantially higher risk of external compromise in spite of the closed source nature of the program. With a Firefox, you have to balance the risk of a possible built-in exploit with the fact that it's otherwise a much more solid product security-wise. Where does the greatest risk lie? Sure, there are other browsers, but as products of the human mind they are also imperfect, so the same rationale applies.
All you can do is take your pick and hope for the best.
Ah, but you see, they've changed the nomenclature on us. 'Beta code' no longer means 'computer code that is mostly usable, but still in testing', but rather means 'beta is code for never saying that you promised usability, uptime, or data retention'.
Yes, and we do have Google to thank for that redefinition.
I'm sure there are a few (ahem!) insurgents that could possibly be convinced to take the job.
Welcome to the exciting world of time zones, many people still think it's saturday, these are of course american idiots who wouldn't know what a GMT was if you told them and can't read a 24 hour clock to save their lives. It's not their fault that the US doesn't uses a single international standard, their country is screwed up.
Look, dude ... you're posting in a public forum on an American web site, and all you're doing is reaffirming all the bad impressions we have about people from other countries. Don't you understand that it goes both ways? People go on and on and on about "Ugly Americans" and how uncouth and uncivilized we are, and then go and make crass comments that, really, just go to show unpleasant they are. You're a classic example of that behavior. Absolutely classic. I have news for you: every society on Earth is screwed up on more ways than one. That, my impolite friend, is human nature. If what you're really saying is that, despite our imperfections, we managed to achieve a degree of cultural influence, economic and military success that your nation never even dreamed of ... well, that's just sour grapes on your part. Grow up.
Stupid git.
Myself? Oh, you mean my made-up character. let's see. I'm a 15-year-old bi-sexual girl with a 38DD, I remember that, but um, what um, I can't find the picture, and I can't remember what activities I was supposed to be into, other than group orgies... sh***....
Oh well, guess I'll just create a new one.
Yes, it's true ... if you always tell the truth you don't have to keep track of all your lies.
Prudence, indeed, will dictate that Governments long established should not be changed for light and transient causes; and accordingly all experience hath shown, that mankind are more disposed to suffer, while evils are sufferable, than to right themselves by abolishing the forms to which they are accustomed. I'm sure you can find the source for this quote yourself.
Yes, well, Thomas Jefferson had a very different take on that.
You mean that adventure that they were on the verge of losing until we gave them shoulder fired surface to air missles? (hardly small arms)
So what? The enemy of my enemy is my friend. The American Revolution was won because France was England's enemy at that point, which was sufficient reason for France to help us out in much the same way as our offering Stingers to Afghanistan. If we weren't embroiled in that conflict with England, France would have had no reason to get involved. And yes, such missiles are small arms to any modern military. High-tech to be sure, but not particularly impressive otherwise.
... but Afghanistan's willingness to put up a fight gave us the opportunity to stick it to the Russians. And, as you point out, we did exactly that.
If the Afghanis had just rolled over and played dead for the Russians, we wouldn't have bothered. Instead, they stood up to our enemy, and we supported them at the time.
Leveraging one group's enmity towards another has always been a legitimate tactic in warfare. Hell, Vietnam was a classic example of that. However, in order to do that you have to show that you are both willing and able to fight. Sure, the Russians outclassed that Afghanis from a military and technological perspective
It's funny that, when looking at Iraq, people often say, "We should have learned from Vietnam that you can win battles, but not wars against an entrenched local militia." What's funny about it is that we should have learned that from the American Revolution. What is being done to us in Iraq is exactly the founding act of our nation.
Well, now, I think you're playing fast and loose with the definition of "win". We lost Vietnam in the court of public opinion, not on the battlefield: we won every major battle in that war. Now, I know that the outcome of any conflict is not decided solely by kill ratio (unless you kill all of them) but if you look at the situation in Iraq it is comparable to Vietnam: something like 20 insurgents killed for every American death, and that's with us playing with one hand tied behind our back. It's most certainly possible to win any war: it just depends upon how far you're willing to go. We aren't willing to kill more civilians than we have to. If we were not so restricted, we could have won this particular war a long time ago.
... not in Iraq, but here in the United States.
But would have meant a lot more dead Iraqis. And you know what? The Bush Administration has already lost the War in Iraq
electricity can be made from fairy dust if we only just believe.
You're telling me it can't? Damn, glad I'm not a Democrat then.