Bay 12 Games Forum

So the Colorado Supreme Court (just about) makes an interesting decision...

I'm minded of The Sum Of All Fears (the original book, not the extensively revamped film[1]) from Tom Clancy. The initial/interstitial bit about solving the Middle East problem by getting the neutral Swiss Guard to police Jerusalem/etc on behalf of a tri-faith coalition and... ah, well. It's perhaps not exactly a fully baked plan that'd work right now. (And, of course, the book also contains the whole thing about nuclear terrorism happening, so... not exactly an "I'd like the events of this book to come to pass" thing, I suppose.)



[1] Which had the involvement of resources from Ukraine, so also sort of topical, but not in the way I mean above.

If you can (without overly stretching your data capabilities) arrange for NAS systems in two different locations (opposite ends of the house or at different addresses) to synch up/mirror, then that's a further point-of-failure tied up (obviously straight mirroring requires double the provided space, or half the available storage[1]). Should there be a little bit of a fire/flood/meteorite-strike upon one of the locations. Or it gets nicked by an 'unauthorised visitor' (at which point, you also want encapsulating in-encryption with in-memory key holding so that it's effectively bricked if it goes wandering away).

...but this all is according to how paranoid you are about various threats to your data, and what you find worthwhile to mitigate against and what you perhaps do not think it worth the trouble for. In the opposite direction you could just stick with your original singular USB-portable-drive plugged into <whatever machine> and either manually copy over or automatically update it across the local network. At least until it is no longer there/usable. Ideally nderstand the limits to your setup, and the capabilities.


[1] "Remote RAID5"-it? Like enforce striped A-Data, B-Data and AxorB-Data distributed between 3(+) sub-NASes, which also ensures that a full third of your data is additionally encrypted? But that only requires 50% extra space (or recuction to 2/3rds the base physical capacity, from the total 'shared minimum' volume of data).

Perhaps "messenger" position could do a double duty as a postman, while in the fort and for communication with outside world when sent to different places? I agree that socialization needs to be improved.

You've set me to consider a "Messenger" role who is basically an "Information haulier".  No physical items involved, their job (when fulfilling the generated tasks) is to travel between those wishing to communicate and those that they wish to communicate with (which might be a mutual thing, or not, but probably involves many such client-pairs). Either they have "spooky knowledge about who wants to chat" or they just try to visit everyone and modify their potential follow-up visit priorities according to who they now know has asked to be reminded to who.

Personality (pyschological qualities) might be useful for both being accepted as messenger and not minding carrying a bit of the 'mood' of a message (relaying a complaint to an administrator, echoing messages of affection to lovers). In addition to the various problems that messengers might have in reaching (or crossing the gap between) their disparate 'clientelle', they also need to potentially deal with reporting unfavourable opinions (as intermediary), evoking the times when the old classic phrase of "don't [shoot/crossbow/hammer/grapple/bite] the messenger" might be considered aposite.

And, under the "Villainy" aspect of hidden ulterior motives, it is quite conceivable that a secretly provocative messenger can deliberately misconvey messages, I'm thinking, stirring up trouble/fomenting bad feelings. So there's a risk to a fort, as well as(/instead of) the one who is keeping everyone informed.


But it can keep even tightly-controlled workers (held in place either physically/stuck-in-a-hole/wrong-side-of-fortifications or by burrowing/logistics) from getting upset thanks to zero social interactions, so long as they can be approached within conversational distance (if it needs to be shouted, the message counts for less).


(...and then that got me onto thinking also about Dabbawallas. Personal 'food hauliers' (Dwarferoo/UberRoasts?!?), to deal with those who are hungry (and reachable!) whose job-poriority (or other need to be somewhere) is still slightly higher than their famishedness and tendecy to find the nearest actual food stockpike(+dining room). But that's probably a little less medieval than... you know... actual Messenger Dorfs.)

(Heaven Sent, natch...)

I've lost a lot of personal data that has been an only copy on USB[1], also other external HDD, CDR(W), floppy discs (5¼ as well as 3½), internal HDDs[2], DAT cassette or even C90. You name it..., hardcopy printouts even. Some 'important', a further amount not nice to have lost[3] and much more that probably isn't worth a hill of beans but leaves regret for not knowing.

That time when the spinning disc no longer spins (or audibly spins but appears to think it doesn't) or the thumbdrive suddenly goes "device not recognised"... Or clearly fell out of my pocket/got left behind somewhere. Occasionally moved data wrongly or failed in some way whilst shuffling. Or the paper got too wet to read[4]... This is the situation the Cloud is meant to help with. A regime of industrial-strength backups (backup of data, backup of hardware, backup of backup-site, ...backup of access method?) to mitigate all kinds of failure-modes.

At least, of course, until something unforseeably unforseen happens ("I'm sorry, customer, everything you uploaded between March and August seems to have been... misplaced?") or equally forseeable but still your responsibility (your main synched device fails out of the blue, you can no longer remember your saved cloud-login details to and you forgot to update your backup email address when you changed ISPs two years ago). The removal of so many other single points of failure is still subject to failures, and it of course won't take the complete failure of civilisation to highly inconvenience many people who take the Cloud as a guaranteed element of data security[5] merely through faith.

Not that I actually practice what I preach, sufficiently. But duplicate your backups ("Grandfather-Father-Son") and distribute across different 'locations' (physical or online), which of course you must attend to updating regularly (or, preferably, frequently). Pre-encrypt that data yourself, whatever apparent protection[6] is already inhetent; choose your own chosen level of precaution, in this regard, even if it means keeping a PGP t-shirt somewhere and learning how to follow the algorithm through with pencil and paper. And, finally, accept that things get lost/stolen anyway. GoogleDrive, 23AndMe, etc...


Oh yes, I've lost much data. With valuable lessons learnt, or unwisely ignored. (Professionally, too, but those are stories for another day/elsewhere. And thankfully that quantity is dwarfed by the amount I've been actually involved in keeping safe.) I wouldn't consider the Cloud as a panacea. Though perhaps it can be wisely made use of, as it happens to nebulously (NPI!) exist as an option.


((But wasn't the original reference to the Cloud more to do with Cloud Computing? That's a significantly different animal, with further arguments for and against.))


[1] Not yet SD, as I haven t really used distinct SD storage.

[2] Or equivalents, which may indeed be functionally similar to SDs.

[3] e.g. painstakingly recorded/saved information that means little except for the gathering, which cannot be repeated, merely resumed with a gap.

[4] The one fate I can't currently recall ever finally killing electronic data, though of course it is a viable one, as would be loss in housefire and other 'physical' disaster.

[5] Which, as I tend to say more often than I think is decent, is two-part: a) Not to lose access to your data, b) Not to lose control of your data. Whether the entirety of your 'private' records end up in the hands of criminals(/rogue AI) is something now far beyond your control, compared to making your own individual arrangements with your own rather limited risks.

[6] Active encryption (encapsulated) or obscurity (hidden behind a keycode). Painstakingly carved into a remote antarctic cave wall using meaningful glyphs of your own design or pervading all the world's major pop-songs  as a subcarrier-wave only comprehensible by one who understands the steganographic method sneaked into every major recording studio. Above all, don't just do what everyone defaults to (or only that). Use your own wits, insofar as you have confidence in them, to make yourself at least slightly higher than all the other low-hanging fruit that may at some point become ripe to be feasted upon.

Right now you need that someone who speaks quietly and wields a big stick. We know Biden can be quiet, but I think his stick is a little bit too unused/left in the desk-drawer to complete that phrase. Maybe he's just too good at subtle, of course.

The past-President couldn't/can't ever speak quietly, and small-handed as he was... well, whatever he waved about was more good for poking random eyes out (mostly amongst those who surround him, doing "big boy" work in national and international terms) than actually being the looming threat/properly administered punishment necessary.

On a future occasion, though, it's just as likely to be like those times when someone has grabbed some nunchucks, waves them around around in what looks quite impressive until they end up swinging them so badly that they pretty much either garrote or castrate themselves. (If things even survive the promised "Day 1 Dictator" phase where the country is gutted like a pufferfish...)