Possibly, but if you read about the rest of his life it seems like he just really enjoyed adventure, and, in common with many others, saw war as a thrilling, life-or-death, adventure.

That reminds my of the quote by “Mad” Jack Churchill on the end of the Second World War: “If it wasn’t for those damn Yanks, we could have kept the war going another 10 years!”

He was apparently a good leader, being promoted to Colonel, and clearly enjoyed his war. He’s credited with the only confirmed kill with a long bow in the war, wore and used a Claybeg style sword and, on more than one occasion lead the charge in to battle whilst playing his bagpipes and hurling grenades.

In short, he well and truly earned his moniker.

Word for word what I was about to post.

Sit by the bedside of a loved one as they die in agony that can only be even partially controlled by keeping them comatose. You’ll likely soon come to the conclusion that we shouldn’t be trying to just live ‘as long as we can’, but as long as we can well.

There often comes a time when the rest of a person’s life will consist only of barely managed pain, suffering, indignity and imminent death. It should be up to the person living that to decide if it is worth it, and and up to the medical profession to deliver a peaceful end if that is what they want.

There are plenty of issues that need to be worked through before it is possible, particularly around coercion, deliberate or accidental, and how it is delivered, but they must be worked through if we are to consider ourselves humane. When an animal we care about is suffering, with no hope of relief, we can make the choice to end their lives to alleviate the suffering, we should be able to do the same for ourselves.

It’s uncanny isn’t it, he’s such a copycat that he even copied the original shooter’s face!

The ‘killer’ died in prison, therefore and new incident must be a copycat by someone who happens to look a lot like him. That’s a brand new case. /s

I suspect that, for exactly that reason, they’ll just lock him up and try to forget about him.

Clearly what you need to do to avoid the recoil is mount the guns on a solid metal hoop like structure around your chest, and have a matching set in the back to balance the forces. One pull of the trigger and you ruin everybody’s day.

As I said, it’s an interesting question! I think I’ve found a paper describing something like the scenario you mentioned (Dhar, A. (1993). Nonuniqueness in the solutions of Newton’s equation of motion. American Journal of Physics, 61(1), 58–61. doi:10.1119/1.17411). It’s a apparently shows that for certain conditions (such as the balanced knife you mentioned, or a particle in a field that would accelerate it away from the origin proportionally to it’s distance) Newton’s equations of motion have non-unique solutions, although I confess that the author rather lost me during some of his leaps in mathematics. The discussion section is interesting, a couple of key conclusions stood out to me: ‘In this sense we may say that Newton’s equation has a unique solution even for singular forces like x^1/3 but x(0)=0 and derivative(x(0))=0 in such cases do not uniquely specify the initial state.’ and ‘Infinitesimal disturbance in position or velocity will change the state and one of the other solutions will become effective.’

From what I have understood from the paper, the author seems to be mostly pointing out that there are certain conditions under which Newton’s equations do not have a unique solution, but that in reality a deterministic, but chaotic, outcome will occur due to infinitesimal disturbances. Ultimately, no matter how carefully you balance the knife, it’s going to fall over, and the direction it falls will be determined by a multitude of forces rather than pure chance.

@[email protected] has also made a thoughtful reply regarding quantum field theory and it’s implications on determinism, and I need to respond to that too as it’s a fascinating, if baffling, topic.

Your question about predicting your own future is interesting; you’re making the assumption that a prediction must continue to be true after the point at which it is made, but I would suggest that you can resolve the apparent contradiction by considering that any prediction of the future is only true at the instant it is made. After all, if someone else predicted your future, wrote it down, but did not tell you, you would eat the avocado, however seen as you changed the conditions of your future by gaining additional information the result changed. If you predicted your future a second time, directly after having resolved to not eat the avocado, the prediction would have you not eating it.

If we assume the universe is deterministic, and that we have the ability to perfectly replicate it and run that replica forward in time without time passing in our universe it would seem that we could accurately predict the future of our universe just be seeing what happened in the replica. However, that would involve the replica creating it’s own replica as it would evolve in exactly the same way as our universe. That replica would create it’s own replica, and so on. I’m not quite sure of what the implications of that are, and it’s late here, so I’m going to have to call it a night, but if if could be done it would be a clear way to distinguish between a random or non-deterministic universe and a chaotic one. If the predictions sometimes proved incorrect it would suggest true randomness rather than just a chaotic system.

A dinosaur skeleton in a spacesuit.

It’s a really interesting question actually. In my previous answer I was alluding to the fact that computers typically use pseudorandom number generators, whose output appears random but is actually entirely deterministic.

In real life I think a similar situation holds. First we have to make a distinction between a system having randomness; a completely unpredictable outcome and being chaotic; where the outcome is theoretically predictable but varies significantly with even tiny changes in input.

For instance, most people would say a dice roll is random, but physics would suggest it is chaotic instead. If you could role the dice twice in exactly the same way, you’d get the same result both times as there is nothing that could change the outcome.

For there to be true randomness, something would have to change the energy level of the dice, and we’ve controlled for that by requiring both throws to be exactly the same.

However, you cannot role the dice exactly the same way twice as exactly means having the entire universe the same, which is obviously impossible.

Applying this reasoning to everything leads to the conclusions that a) there is no randomness, just chaotic results, and b) that this is indistinguishable from true randomness as we cannot determine the starting condition of any chaotic system accurately enough to predict its outcome.

I know that quantum physics has something to say about this, but I’m not sufficiently knowledgeable to fully grasp what it is saying.

So, ultimately I don’t believe in ‘true randomness’, but in a chaotic universe instead.

You’ve probably just got a really long period pseudorandom number generator. No need to flaunt it, not all of us are so blessed! ;)

Are we truly not all just meat robots, controlled by meat computers? Why must our silicon brethren judge us so harshly?

It’s an old phrase, “lions lead by donkeys”, originally used to describe British soldiers being lead by incompetent generals, possibly during the Crimean war. The concept goes way further back though; apparently an Athenian general in the 4th century said (translated) “an army of deer commanded by a lion is more to be feared than an army of lions commanded by a deer”.

Vim is running as you, rather than root, so you wont be able to edit other files as root, and any rogue plugins wont be able to either, which is good.

Sudoedit has various guards around what it’ll let you edit, in particular, you can’t edit a file in a directory you already have write permission on as doing so allows the user to bypass restrictions in the sudoers setup (there’s more detail in their issue tracker. If the directory is already writable though, you don’t need sudoedit anyway.

Be cautious of doing this with security sensitive files. When it copies the file and gives you ownership, any sensitive data in it is exposed to any process running as your user id, and and temporary fil£s the editor creates may also contain the sensitive content and be owned by you.

Ideally it doesn’t. It just wastes a lot of enforcement time and energy chasing incorrect leads, and give those who voted for it a taste of what being on the receiving end is like.

Don’t spam it with nonsense, just report your local republican voters for having a migrant housekeeper/gardener/nanny/lodger or similar. They wont believe it if you report the owner is a migrant and they have republican signs in-front of their house, but they’d have to investigate whether they employed a migrant.

Be careful, that much antihol in one go won’t just get you sober, it’ll send you right out the other side. Few can deal with that clear a view of reality.

This is fundamentally true. However it is possible to limit the bandwidth of data the employee can exfiltrate.

That’s fair, but the OP was talking about having the sensitive data directly on the laptop, which rather limits your ability to control access to it, and why I was suggesting keeping the data on a server and providing access that way, so limits can be put in place.

Assuming a privileged employee suddenly becomes a bad actor.

Your threat model probably isn’t the employee who suddenly goes rogue and tries to grab everything, but the one who spends and extended period of time, carefully, extracting key data. As you, the former can be be mitigated against, but the latter is very much harder to thwart.

But I couldn’t for example download our entire customer database, I could get a specific record, I could maybe social engineer access to all the records of a specific customer, but there is no way I’d be able to extract all of our customers via an analog loophole or any standard way. The data set is too big.

That’s well set up, but, whilst your competitor would love the whole database, what they’re really interested in is the contact details and contract information for maybe your largest three customers. When the dataset to extract is small enough, even quite advanced rate limiting can’t really help much. Making sure no one person has access to all of the most valuable data is a good start, but can present practical problems.

And this is what you are trying to limit. If you trust your employees (some you have to), you can’t stop them from copying the keys to the kingdom, but you can limit the damage that they can do, and also ensure they can’t copy ALL the crown jewels.

I think we’re basically saying the same thing. The OP talked about putting all the sensitive information on the employee’s laptop, and that’s what I was trying to steer them away from.

In the past I’ve been asked if we can provide our developers access to pull the full source tree, but not copy it anywhere, and, to quote Charles Babbage, “I am not able rightly to apprehend the kind of confusion of ideas that could provoke such a question.”

I enjoy the security side of sysadmin work, but I find it rather depressing, as all you can hope to do is lose slowly enough that it’s not worth attacking you.