I had a similar problem with FreeBSD at a previous job. While still new to the OS, I tried to rsync changes to the/etc/passwd and/etc/group files to multiple servers (they were a farm of mail servers running ClamAV, spamassassin and some custom scripts as a front end to an ISP mail server). After syncing the directories from the server where I actually made the changes, I didn't understand why the changes weren't taking on the other servers, and consequently ended up ssh'ing to each server in the farm and duplicating the commands on each one. I later discovered that unlike Linux, FreeBSD uses the/etc/passwd,/etc/group and/etc/shadow files as the source for a Berkeley DB, rather than reading the plain-text files for account information...sigh.
Okay, I did once have a PC where the battery was actually embedded in a plastic brick that had to be soldered to the motherboard, but that was one of the original Pentiums, and of all the computers I have worked on, it was the only one I ever saw with a battery like that. So, on the likely assumption that your server is not a freak like that PC I had...wouldn't it be better,safer and easier to just replace the battery than hope your server doesn't go off the air at an inopportune time?!?!
I've noticed a few article lately about how 'real men' login as root at all times, but I've worked in Unix/Linux since the 90's, and this seems to be a recent phenomena.
Yeah, I've seen that, too. I cut my sys admin teeth in a shop where we used sudo extensively. After four years, I did not have the root password to any of the *Nix servers we had (nor did I want them), but I did have "sudo all" permissions. After I left that job, I came to my present environment where the senior admin didn't want to bother setting up sudoers (to be fair, there were only two of us in the sys admin role, so if he didn't run a command as root, he knew who did...), and the fact that I sign in as root on our servers *still* makes me cringe.
IMHO, and perhaps veering slightly off-topic, "real men" are secure enough in their own virility that they don't have to resort to acts of reckless bravado to prove how "manly" they are <shrug>
As for "ALL(ALL) ALL" entries in sudoers, Ubuntu, I hate you for ruining an entire generation of linux users by aping Windows privacy escalations by abusing sudo.
Yeah, I agree with you in principle, although to be fair, there really isn't a way that Ubuntu could know what user account you are going to set up before you actually set it up, and therefore, there isn't really a way for Ubuntu to create an appropriate sudoers entry to give admin privileges to the server admin.
Learn to use groups, setfattr...properly...
Okay, agreed...
Learn to use...setuid/setgid properly...
Ugh...setuid and setgid, IMHO, should be used as little as possible. If there's a security hole in your app, then having it setuid/setgid allows a sufficiently skilled user the ability to gain elevated privileges. I'd much prefer to use sudoers to give access to specific apps to people I trust than give any user access to an app I "trust" through setuid/setgid.
...leave admin commands to administrators, and you won't need sudo.
Maybe I'm just missing something, but that sounds really stupid to me. While I'm a reasonably skilled Linux admin, I don't pretend to know everything, and maybe you can teach me something I've missed in my experience so far. If so, cool. But from my perspective, sudo is an ideal tool for granting appropriate permissions as required to trusted individuals. Sudo logs the user name and command in the log files, so if someone is abusing sudo, you know. Sudo can e-mail failures to admin staff, so if someone is habitually trying to exceed their permissions, you know. Sudo allows pretty fine-grained access to users based upon group or user name, so you can easily allocate permissions as required (well, relatively easily, anyway) -- much more fine-grained than Unix User/Group/Other permissions would allow. For example, with sudo you could allow senior admins (group: admin) and web developers (group: www-dev) read/write permissions to CGI script directories, junior admins (group: jadmin) read-only permissions and all other users (group: users) no access. Uh-oh...we've got four groups here: admins, jadmins, www-dev and users, so doing that with standard Unix permissions is going to be kind of difficult (admins could be members of the www-dev group I suppose, but I can imagine cases where group A might need permissions to a subset of files that group B owns, but shouldn't have access to another subset, which would really complicate things). Sudo is a powerful tool, and just like all the other tools you mentioned, should be used appropriately as a component of overall system security.
find/home/* -user 0 -print
If this returns ANY files, you've almost certainly abused sudo and run root commands in the context of a user - a serious security blunder in itself.
Maybe. I see what you are saying, but as a counter-example, I sometimes run tcpdump from within my home directory when troubleshooting problems. tcpdump has to run as superuser, and I have a lot more faith in giving myself and other admins permission to run "sudo tcpdump" than running tcpdump setuid 0. Again, maybe I'm just missing something, but I really don't have a huge problem with tcpdump (or other admin tools) writing UID 0 data to an admin user's home directory.
I'm sure your employer would be thrilled at the money you're wasting just to make a number higher.
I suspect you aren't completely serious (there's a subtle whiff of tongue-in-cheek humour in your post), but on the off chance that you really were being serious, I didn't get the impression that the original poster was talking about using his router in a professional environment. I rather suspect that if I was trying to use an old 486 running Slackware as a corporate router, my boss would be far less concerned that I had removed a chair leg to preserve uptime on the aforementioned router than the fact that I was using obsolete and unreliable hardware as part of the network infrastructure.
Doesn't matter. Once consumers get hit by this they will freak out and the studios will find out how much of a bad idea this is.
No, they won't.
Consumers (or at least, consumers in the U.S., in my experience) have shown again and again that they will take whatever crap and whatever restrictions are shoved at them as long as they can continue to get their entertainment fix. "Showing the studios...how much of a bad idea this is" requires patience and discipline -- two virtues that one would be hard pressed to find in this country anymore.
(Sorry -- I'm in an uncharacteristically pessimistic mood today).
That sounds like a great idea -- easily kept current, any pub you need available for download, etc. -- but it immediately brought back an old, not altogether wonderful, memory.
I was flying a small, single-engine Cessna through Canada one evening above an overcast layer of clouds (yes, I was on an Instrument flight plan). As the sun went down, I realized that the batteries were dying in my flashlight, the cockpit lights weren't working, and in the dark, I couldn't find the spare flashlight in my flight bag. This made it rather difficult to see my charts or my flight log, both of which were kind of important for navigating above the clouds, at night, in the mountains of Canada. For that matter, it wasn't terribly easy to see some of the instruments either, but most of them were mostly readable. Right about now, you are probably thinking, "See -- that's why a tablet is better. It's self-illuminating," which is true...until the batteries die.
If you are bouncing around in turbulence in the clouds trying to track a VOR or GPS course, you really can't afford to be mucking around in your flight bag looking for an extra set of batteries or a power cord to plug in to the airplane's electrical system. This would be less of an issue in aircraft with a two or more person crew, but for many fighters, it would definitely be an issue.
Also, I've never had a BSoD with any of my paper charts or airport facility directories...
Yeah, I don't buy it. In Southern Manitoba - an area with half West Virginia's population, and four times the land area...
...and from what Google Maps shows me, essentially none of the mountains. I don't know if that's a factor or not, but I'd think at least it could be.
Montana and Alaska are sparsely populated.
According to the map, broadband penetration in Alaska is pretty sparse, too. FWIW, I live in Alaska and work for one of the companies that provides broadband up here (and I used to work for a different one). What you will find in AK is relatively good service in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau, with progressively crappier service the farther you get from these hubs. Keep in mind that roughly half the population of the entire state lives within Anchorage alone; by including the other two cities (as such...even Anchorage is only the size of a suburb compared to Chicago or L.A.), you've added a significant fraction of the rest of the population of the state. That means by serving these three locales, you've pretty much provided broadband penetration to the majority of the population of the state -- even if the vast majority of land area in the state is completely uncovered.
If you are in the other secondary hubs in Alaska (Bethel, for example) or the outlying villages, forget it. The service there is a fraction of what you get in the three "urban" (using the term very loosely) environments. And, even if you can get a 256K or 512K line (does that even count as broadband?!?!) in some of these secondary areas doesn't mean your provider has enough bandwidth on the uplink back to the rest of the world to even provide that much speed.
Why does everybody act surprised when there is a news story telling us that using a communication as ubiquitous and publicly accessible as the Internet allows people to find us? That's kind of the point, isn't it? My tin foil hat is every bit as shiny as anyone else's here on/., but seriously, this kind of seems like a "Meh..." story to me. If you don't already realize that using the same user name on multiple web sites will allow someone to correlate your on-line activity, then you probably shouldn't be allowed outside alone. Just sayin'
You forgot two things:
1) Glide ratio applies to the distance forward traveled compared to the distance downward traveled in a column of still air. The jet stream can reach well over a hundred miles an hour, which really kicks your glide ratio up a couple of notches;
2) Glide ratio does not take weather-related sources of lift into effect. If the air around you is rising faster than you are descending through it, you will gain altitude, even though your flight path relative to the AIR around you (as opposed to the ground underneath you) is downwards.
If you think about it for a couple of minutes, this is intuitively obvious. How far can a suitably proficient pilot, in favorable conditions, fly a glider? How long can it remain aloft? What is it's glide ratio?
Meh...high-performance gliders have a glideslope of something like 40:1 (don't quote me on that, but IIRC it's in the ballpark), yet they can fly hundreds of miles if conditions are right (at a 10,000 foot launch altitude -- which is absurdly high -- a 40:1 glideslope would give a range of only 40,000 feet or roughly eight miles).
This notion of pretending like those who are competent at basic skills have some kind of unfair advantage over the rest of us, or special dispensation, or have done anything the rest of us couldn't also do... it's pathological and seriously needs to be eliminated. It's the very best way to sell yourself short that I can name. It appears to be contagious, too.
If that is what it sounded like I was saying, either I didn't express my point clearly or for some reason, you completely misunderstood what I was trying to say. I certainly wasn't saying that some people are just "born with it" and the rest of us are just S.O.L. -- quite the opposite, in fact. My point was that to learn something, you just have to go do it, and sometimes learning involves an element of risk. The first time I went sea kayaking, I rented a boat, threw it in the ocean, and started paddling. I had been a lake canoer for years and I went with a more-or-less experienced friend on a relatively sheltered bay (so it wasn't entirely unreasonable) but without knowing anything about ocean kayaking, I was taking a risk that I wouldn't get myself in over my head (literally) while learning what I needed to learn to become a competent kayaker.
Unfortunately, "common sense" isn't really common. That's not a snarky judgment about the overall stupidity of people -- it's an observation that what we call "common sense" really is an awareness of the dangers of particular situations, and it's acquired knowledge. There's a saying in aviation:
New Pilot: How do you get good judgment?
Old Pilot: Experience.
New Pilot: How do you get experience?
Old Pilot: Bad judgment.
The trick is to get experience without getting yourself killed in the process.
Nor do I understand why anyone believes they can perform a task at which they are incompetent and expect good results, to the point where they are willing to bet their life on it.
"...to the point where they are willing to bet their life on it." -- probably true. However, it begs the question: how does one get good at a task at which they are incompetent without performing the task over and over until they get it right?
I'm not saying that everyone should go download the latest iPhone navigation app and head for Death Valley, but still...you've got to fall off the bike once or twice if you're going to learn to ride.
Hint for her: if you can't see the road markings because the road is buried in snow, you probably shouldn't take that road.
I hope your ex is hot because she doesn't sound too bright.
Sigh...neither are you, if you think that being unable to see road markings means you can't drive on that road. I've spent the last 21 years driving on roads like that all winter long. The alternative is to lock myself in my house from November through March. Perhaps that would be fine for you, but I actually like to leave the basement once in a while.
Is she your ex-girlfriend because you realized that someone who doesn't notice snow on the road ahead isn't the sharpest pencil in the drawer?
I love the arrogance of arm-chair quarterbacks </sarc>
Newsflash to people living in the south: snow doesn't mean the road is impassable. It means you might need to exercise a little more caution. Where I live, the roads are pretty much covered in snow from October or November through March or April. Are you suggesting that anyone who ventures out on the roads between those months is a moron?
Newsflash #2: Even smart people sometimes get stuck in the snow, because it can sometimes be difficult or impossible to tell the difference between a perfectly good road with a little snow on it and a treacherous road until it's too late. It happens. It can even happen to YOU. So maybe tone down the condescension a little, because next time, you might be the one who needs a little help.
Meh...it perpetuates the myth that there is actually a force that acts to pull an object outwards, when in reality it is simply inertia. I prefer the way my high school physics teacher described orbits: if you throw something into the air, it will eventually fall back to earth. The harder you throw the object, the farther across the earth it travels before it falls back again. If you throw it hard enough, it will reach a point where it falls around the earth, rather than back to it. At that point, it is in orbit.
The "Cloud" isn't necessarily a stupid thing to use. It's just a stupid thing to use if you assume any data on your hosts in the cloud are as private and secure as they would be on your own servers in your own data center. Consequently, the cloud MIGHT be fine, so long as you understand that any data you put there could potentially be used against you and that you therefore MUST take appropriate actions to mitigate that threat. "Appropriate actions" could be anything from encryption* to only using cloud services for the most banal of data. What constitutes "sufficiently harmless" is left as an exercise for the reader and his or her corporate lawyers, as is what constitutes "secure (enough) encryption". As I heard one time, if you have something you don't want someone else to know, make sure it isn't written down anywhere, to which I would add, "...and especially not on someone else's servers."
*And be aware that if your data is encrypted, you may be required to provide the encryption keys. There have been stories here on/. about that happening in England; I don't know what the status is here in the U.S., but if it hasn't happened yet, I imagine it will eventually.
Slashdot Mirror
Heretic! :)
+1
/etc/passwd and /etc/group files to multiple servers (they were a farm of mail servers running ClamAV, spamassassin and some custom scripts as a front end to an ISP mail server). After syncing the directories from the server where I actually made the changes, I didn't understand why the changes weren't taking on the other servers, and consequently ended up ssh'ing to each server in the farm and duplicating the commands on each one. I later discovered that unlike Linux, FreeBSD uses the /etc/passwd, /etc/group and /etc/shadow files as the source for a Berkeley DB, rather than reading the plain-text files for account information...sigh.
I had a similar problem with FreeBSD at a previous job. While still new to the OS, I tried to rsync changes to the
Okay, I did once have a PC where the battery was actually embedded in a plastic brick that had to be soldered to the motherboard, but that was one of the original Pentiums, and of all the computers I have worked on, it was the only one I ever saw with a battery like that. So, on the likely assumption that your server is not a freak like that PC I had...wouldn't it be better,safer and easier to just replace the battery than hope your server doesn't go off the air at an inopportune time?!?!
I've noticed a few article lately about how 'real men' login as root at all times, but I've worked in Unix/Linux since the 90's, and this seems to be a recent phenomena.
Yeah, I've seen that, too. I cut my sys admin teeth in a shop where we used sudo extensively. After four years, I did not have the root password to any of the *Nix servers we had (nor did I want them), but I did have "sudo all" permissions. After I left that job, I came to my present environment where the senior admin didn't want to bother setting up sudoers (to be fair, there were only two of us in the sys admin role, so if he didn't run a command as root, he knew who did...), and the fact that I sign in as root on our servers *still* makes me cringe.
IMHO, and perhaps veering slightly off-topic, "real men" are secure enough in their own virility that they don't have to resort to acts of reckless bravado to prove how "manly" they are <shrug>
As for "ALL(ALL) ALL" entries in sudoers, Ubuntu, I hate you for ruining an entire generation of linux users by aping Windows privacy escalations by abusing sudo.
Yeah, I agree with you in principle, although to be fair, there really isn't a way that Ubuntu could know what user account you are going to set up before you actually set it up, and therefore, there isn't really a way for Ubuntu to create an appropriate sudoers entry to give admin privileges to the server admin.
Learn to use groups, setfattr...properly...
Okay, agreed...
Learn to use...setuid/setgid properly...
Ugh...setuid and setgid, IMHO, should be used as little as possible. If there's a security hole in your app, then having it setuid/setgid allows a sufficiently skilled user the ability to gain elevated privileges. I'd much prefer to use sudoers to give access to specific apps to people I trust than give any user access to an app I "trust" through setuid/setgid.
...leave admin commands to administrators, and you won't need sudo.
Maybe I'm just missing something, but that sounds really stupid to me. While I'm a reasonably skilled Linux admin, I don't pretend to know everything, and maybe you can teach me something I've missed in my experience so far. If so, cool. But from my perspective, sudo is an ideal tool for granting appropriate permissions as required to trusted individuals. Sudo logs the user name and command in the log files, so if someone is abusing sudo, you know. Sudo can e-mail failures to admin staff, so if someone is habitually trying to exceed their permissions, you know. Sudo allows pretty fine-grained access to users based upon group or user name, so you can easily allocate permissions as required (well, relatively easily, anyway) -- much more fine-grained than Unix User/Group/Other permissions would allow. For example, with sudo you could allow senior admins (group: admin) and web developers (group: www-dev) read/write permissions to CGI script directories, junior admins (group: jadmin) read-only permissions and all other users (group: users) no access. Uh-oh...we've got four groups here: admins, jadmins, www-dev and users, so doing that with standard Unix permissions is going to be kind of difficult (admins could be members of the www-dev group I suppose, but I can imagine cases where group A might need permissions to a subset of files that group B owns, but shouldn't have access to another subset, which would really complicate things). Sudo is a powerful tool, and just like all the other tools you mentioned, should be used appropriately as a component of overall system security.
find /home/* -user 0 -print
If this returns ANY files, you've almost certainly abused sudo and run root commands in the context of a user - a serious security blunder in itself.
Maybe. I see what you are saying, but as a counter-example, I sometimes run tcpdump from within my home directory when troubleshooting problems. tcpdump has to run as superuser, and I have a lot more faith in giving myself and other admins permission to run "sudo tcpdump" than running tcpdump setuid 0. Again, maybe I'm just missing something, but I really don't have a huge problem with tcpdump (or other admin tools) writing UID 0 data to an admin user's home directory.
I'm sure your employer would be thrilled at the money you're wasting just to make a number higher.
I suspect you aren't completely serious (there's a subtle whiff of tongue-in-cheek humour in your post), but on the off chance that you really were being serious, I didn't get the impression that the original poster was talking about using his router in a professional environment. I rather suspect that if I was trying to use an old 486 running Slackware as a corporate router, my boss would be far less concerned that I had removed a chair leg to preserve uptime on the aforementioned router than the fact that I was using obsolete and unreliable hardware as part of the network infrastructure.
Doesn't matter. Once consumers get hit by this they will freak out and the studios will find out how much of a bad idea this is.
No, they won't.
Consumers (or at least, consumers in the U.S., in my experience) have shown again and again that they will take whatever crap and whatever restrictions are shoved at them as long as they can continue to get their entertainment fix. "Showing the studios...how much of a bad idea this is" requires patience and discipline -- two virtues that one would be hard pressed to find in this country anymore.
(Sorry -- I'm in an uncharacteristically pessimistic mood today).
That sounds like a great idea -- easily kept current, any pub you need available for download, etc. -- but it immediately brought back an old, not altogether wonderful, memory.
I was flying a small, single-engine Cessna through Canada one evening above an overcast layer of clouds (yes, I was on an Instrument flight plan). As the sun went down, I realized that the batteries were dying in my flashlight, the cockpit lights weren't working, and in the dark, I couldn't find the spare flashlight in my flight bag. This made it rather difficult to see my charts or my flight log, both of which were kind of important for navigating above the clouds, at night, in the mountains of Canada. For that matter, it wasn't terribly easy to see some of the instruments either, but most of them were mostly readable. Right about now, you are probably thinking, "See -- that's why a tablet is better. It's self-illuminating," which is true...until the batteries die.
If you are bouncing around in turbulence in the clouds trying to track a VOR or GPS course, you really can't afford to be mucking around in your flight bag looking for an extra set of batteries or a power cord to plug in to the airplane's electrical system. This would be less of an issue in aircraft with a two or more person crew, but for many fighters, it would definitely be an issue.
Also, I've never had a BSoD with any of my paper charts or airport facility directories...
Yeah, I don't buy it. In Southern Manitoba - an area with half West Virginia's population, and four times the land area...
...and from what Google Maps shows me, essentially none of the mountains. I don't know if that's a factor or not, but I'd think at least it could be.
Montana and Alaska are sparsely populated.
According to the map, broadband penetration in Alaska is pretty sparse, too. FWIW, I live in Alaska and work for one of the companies that provides broadband up here (and I used to work for a different one). What you will find in AK is relatively good service in Anchorage, Fairbanks and Juneau, with progressively crappier service the farther you get from these hubs. Keep in mind that roughly half the population of the entire state lives within Anchorage alone; by including the other two cities (as such...even Anchorage is only the size of a suburb compared to Chicago or L.A.), you've added a significant fraction of the rest of the population of the state. That means by serving these three locales, you've pretty much provided broadband penetration to the majority of the population of the state -- even if the vast majority of land area in the state is completely uncovered.
If you are in the other secondary hubs in Alaska (Bethel, for example) or the outlying villages, forget it. The service there is a fraction of what you get in the three "urban" (using the term very loosely) environments. And, even if you can get a 256K or 512K line (does that even count as broadband?!?!) in some of these secondary areas doesn't mean your provider has enough bandwidth on the uplink back to the rest of the world to even provide that much speed.
Why does everybody act surprised when there is a news story telling us that using a communication as ubiquitous and publicly accessible as the Internet allows people to find us? That's kind of the point, isn't it? My tin foil hat is every bit as shiny as anyone else's here on /., but seriously, this kind of seems like a "Meh..." story to me. If you don't already realize that using the same user name on multiple web sites will allow someone to correlate your on-line activity, then you probably shouldn't be allowed outside alone. Just sayin'
You forgot two things:
1) Glide ratio applies to the distance forward traveled compared to the distance downward traveled in a column of still air. The jet stream can reach well over a hundred miles an hour, which really kicks your glide ratio up a couple of notches;
2) Glide ratio does not take weather-related sources of lift into effect. If the air around you is rising faster than you are descending through it, you will gain altitude, even though your flight path relative to the AIR around you (as opposed to the ground underneath you) is downwards.
If you think about it for a couple of minutes, this is intuitively obvious. How far can a suitably proficient pilot, in favorable conditions, fly a glider? How long can it remain aloft? What is it's glide ratio?
Dangit...400,000 feet or 80 miles. Still, far short of the range skilled pilots can fly in a suitable glider.
Meh...high-performance gliders have a glideslope of something like 40:1 (don't quote me on that, but IIRC it's in the ballpark), yet they can fly hundreds of miles if conditions are right (at a 10,000 foot launch altitude -- which is absurdly high -- a 40:1 glideslope would give a range of only 40,000 feet or roughly eight miles).
...because it's completely overshadowed by fantasy crap that people make up and pretend is real...
I know I will be modded into geek hell for this one, but...
You mean like Star Trek?
If you hadn't posted AC, I would have modded you up for that. Well played :)
This notion of pretending like those who are competent at basic skills have some kind of unfair advantage over the rest of us, or special dispensation, or have done anything the rest of us couldn't also do ... it's pathological and seriously needs to be eliminated. It's the very best way to sell yourself short that I can name. It appears to be contagious, too.
If that is what it sounded like I was saying, either I didn't express my point clearly or for some reason, you completely misunderstood what I was trying to say. I certainly wasn't saying that some people are just "born with it" and the rest of us are just S.O.L. -- quite the opposite, in fact. My point was that to learn something, you just have to go do it, and sometimes learning involves an element of risk. The first time I went sea kayaking, I rented a boat, threw it in the ocean, and started paddling. I had been a lake canoer for years and I went with a more-or-less experienced friend on a relatively sheltered bay (so it wasn't entirely unreasonable) but without knowing anything about ocean kayaking, I was taking a risk that I wouldn't get myself in over my head (literally) while learning what I needed to learn to become a competent kayaker.
Unfortunately, "common sense" isn't really common. That's not a snarky judgment about the overall stupidity of people -- it's an observation that what we call "common sense" really is an awareness of the dangers of particular situations, and it's acquired knowledge. There's a saying in aviation:
New Pilot: How do you get good judgment?
Old Pilot: Experience.
New Pilot: How do you get experience?
Old Pilot: Bad judgment.
The trick is to get experience without getting yourself killed in the process.
Nor do I understand why anyone believes they can perform a task at which they are incompetent and expect good results, to the point where they are willing to bet their life on it.
"...to the point where they are willing to bet their life on it." -- probably true. However, it begs the question: how does one get good at a task at which they are incompetent without performing the task over and over until they get it right?
I'm not saying that everyone should go download the latest iPhone navigation app and head for Death Valley, but still...you've got to fall off the bike once or twice if you're going to learn to ride.
Hint for her: if you can't see the road markings because the road is buried in snow, you probably shouldn't take that road. I hope your ex is hot because she doesn't sound too bright.
Sigh...neither are you, if you think that being unable to see road markings means you can't drive on that road. I've spent the last 21 years driving on roads like that all winter long. The alternative is to lock myself in my house from November through March. Perhaps that would be fine for you, but I actually like to leave the basement once in a while.
Is she your ex-girlfriend because you realized that someone who doesn't notice snow on the road ahead isn't the sharpest pencil in the drawer?
I love the arrogance of arm-chair quarterbacks </sarc>
Newsflash to people living in the south: snow doesn't mean the road is impassable. It means you might need to exercise a little more caution. Where I live, the roads are pretty much covered in snow from October or November through March or April. Are you suggesting that anyone who ventures out on the roads between those months is a moron?
Newsflash #2: Even smart people sometimes get stuck in the snow, because it can sometimes be difficult or impossible to tell the difference between a perfectly good road with a little snow on it and a treacherous road until it's too late. It happens. It can even happen to YOU. So maybe tone down the condescension a little, because next time, you might be the one who needs a little help.
Meh...it perpetuates the myth that there is actually a force that acts to pull an object outwards, when in reality it is simply inertia. I prefer the way my high school physics teacher described orbits: if you throw something into the air, it will eventually fall back to earth. The harder you throw the object, the farther across the earth it travels before it falls back again. If you throw it hard enough, it will reach a point where it falls around the earth, rather than back to it. At that point, it is in orbit.
Only if you can make the Kessel run in under eleven parsecs.
Always tell the truth. That way it's easier to remember what you told everyone else :)
The "Cloud" isn't necessarily a stupid thing to use. It's just a stupid thing to use if you assume any data on your hosts in the cloud are as private and secure as they would be on your own servers in your own data center. Consequently, the cloud MIGHT be fine, so long as you understand that any data you put there could potentially be used against you and that you therefore MUST take appropriate actions to mitigate that threat. "Appropriate actions" could be anything from encryption* to only using cloud services for the most banal of data. What constitutes "sufficiently harmless" is left as an exercise for the reader and his or her corporate lawyers, as is what constitutes "secure (enough) encryption". As I heard one time, if you have something you don't want someone else to know, make sure it isn't written down anywhere, to which I would add, "...and especially not on someone else's servers."
/. about that happening in England; I don't know what the status is here in the U.S., but if it hasn't happened yet, I imagine it will eventually.
*And be aware that if your data is encrypted, you may be required to provide the encryption keys. There have been stories here on
If you don't have the money, there's not much point in suing you either, is there?
have we gave up anything more than one syllable?
Yes, apparently: