The root account was written when it was fashionable to be object-oriented, so its resource allocation is all due to inheritance.

Scotland in particular is upset because of certain issues due to multiple inheritance.

LOL. Great comment.

But it's not just Scotland. The War of the Roses had some multiple inheritance problems, too.

> The War of the Roses had some multiple inheritance problems, too.

They defined a custom method combinator that squashed the diamond problem. Implementing it was literally painful for many of the people involved. Truly a killer problem.

And then in 16.8.8 they imported a completely new package from the Netherlands called 'Orange' (but they rebranded it), and marked a bunch of things as 'protected' to lock down inheritance.

Even when there is an ISA relationship the subsequent objects are never quite the same as the root object for which the system was designed.

Been there, done that already. The British have tried that before.

We called it the Interregnum[1]. It turned out nobody liked a system without a superuser so the fix was a restoration plus tweaks to limit powers.

You’ll note this all happening well before others decided to repeat the experiment.

The system has been ticking along at some definition of “fine”[2] ever since.

1. https://en.m.wikipedia.org/wiki/British_Interregnum

2. Personally I’m less concerned about who the ceremonial head of state is than I am about having a police force that refuses to investigate the Prime Minister for breaking the law[3].

Whilst at the same time retrospectively investigating women for breaking the very same law by attending a protest about the murder of a woman by a serving officer of that very same police force.

Now that is fucked up.

3. See private ABBA party.

The monarchy would love for you to believe they're only a ceremonial head of state. It makes their sinister and self-serving wielding of power much easier. In fact the Queen routinely gets laws changed in her favor, and the details of the process by which this happens are not widely known. The monarchy is a vast and private rent-seeking apparatus that exists to perpetuate the interests of its family members and their business holdings, and is inexplicably afforded vast political power and reverence. It is a rotten leftover that has no place in the 21st century.

As for "some definition of fine", I think it is increasingly clear that the UK is not fine and has in fact never been fine, or even much of a democracy, and has been essentially run by a corrupt aristocracy for centuries. It's not a secret that the whole lot of them all went to Eton - that should raise eyebrows among anyone not inured to the whole sordid business.

(Well, I should say that it's only really England with this issue. But England is the imperial core of the UK. Its satellite states are more sane, but thoroughly subjugated.)

As an American, we don’t have anything like you corrupt aristocracy and class system. But we do have a corrupt billionaire class and systemic racism, so actually it’s the same thing after all. Instead of Eton, Harvard and Yale are the schools of the upper crust; it’s virtually impossible to be on the Supreme Court unless you attended one of those universities.

And instead of a queen, we have Kardashians and Elon (blessings and peace be upon him), who also seem to attract worship for things other people do. It’s almost like human nature tends to reproduce the same problems no matter the system of government.

>In fact routinely gets laws changed in her favor.

"Routinely" is a pretty substantial claim - certainly there have been occasions where the crown has been involved in negotiations over their own tax affairs.

Other than that, what 'routine' changes in legislation would you point to?

Well, that's the thing. No one can really say, because - get this - it's a secret.

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2021/feb/08/queen-lobbie...

> significant amounts of legislation regulating otherwise quite ordinary activities have required consent. The Queen pays tax, so (for example) finance laws require consent. The Queen is an employer, so (for example) child support and pensions laws require consent. And so on... All correspondence containing requests for consent, replies and the documentation of any related discussions have always been shrouded in absolute privacy.

But hey, I'm sure it's fine, no need to look any closer, right? The Queen is such a nice old lady, surely -

> The documents uncovered by the Guardian provide remarkable evidence that this process accords the Queen’s advisers a genuine opportunity to negotiate with the government over changes in proposed laws, that they do sometimes secure such changes before giving consent, and that they are even prepared to threaten to withhold consent to secure their policy preferences.

Ah. Oh dear.

>It turned out nobody liked a system without a superuser //

Somehow the guy who managed to take over was an even bigger shit of a person than most of the past monarchs and so the people agreed to have a monarch again under a 'better the devil you know [and can limit with magna carta]' sort of deal.

It's like how we got screwed out of PR by being offered AV.

If I were a Brit, I'd be more concerned that the Parliament can do literally anything with a simple majority vote.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Parliamentary_sovereignty_in_t...

> It turned out nobody liked a system without a superuser

I thinks it’s more the case that the commons at the time couldn’t get their shit together.

Can you do that without rebooting? Rebooting nations tends to be a messy affair. Just ask France.

"Every operating system then, and every threat model, naturally expires at the end of 19 years. If it be deployed longer, it is legacy tech, and should be deprecated." - Thomas Jefferson

Move fast and break things

- Napoleon Bonaparte

There is a story, often told, that upon exiting the Constitutional Convention Benjamin Franklin was approached by a group of citizens asking what sort of government the delegates had created. His answer was: "A republic, if you can keep it past 19 years. At that time the sudoers will change the repositories used for OS updates." [1]

"What country before ever existed a century and half without a rebellion? And what country can preserve it’s liberties if their rulers are not warned from time to time that their people preserve the contents of sudoers? Let them take arms. The remedy is to set them right as to facts, pardon and pacify them. What signify a few lives lost in a century or two? The tree of liberty must be refreshed from time to time with the blood of sysadmins and backdoors. It is it’s natural manure." [2] Thomas Jefferson

[1] https://constitutioncenter.org/learn/educational-resources/h...

[2] https://www.monticello.org/site/research-and-collections/tre...

Arguably every election that brings in a new government is a reboot. A revolution is more like wiping the drive and installing a new OS.

> Arguably every election that brings in a new government is a reboot. A revolution is more like wiping the drive and installing a new OS.

In the UK, Governments change but Parliament persists. The basics mechanism of state are unchanged until a new Govt defines and votes through new policies. Unlike the US, the UK's civil service doesn't substantially change as a result of an election.

The last really significant change to Parliament was perhaps the 1832 reform act which got of rotten boroughs - constituencies with few if any voters that still returned MPs. Since then the House of Commons has gained primary over the House of Lords, whose main role now is delaying/modifying Govt proposals. The last big reboot was the Restoration.

I'd say it's more like an upgrade. The release notes promise all sorts of improvements, but they often bring new bugs.

A revolution is more like wiping the drive and installing a new OS - from a backup that still contains malware from the previous revolution.

Rebooting is old school. People are like, look we rebooted our Windows in 1777 why are you still using that outdated Constitutional Monarchy stuff? Don't you realise we gave up monarchs hundreds of years ago? Meanwhile we have been live patching and running pacman daily and have installed packages for metric, proportional voting(not everywhere), gun control, universal healthcare and plastic bank notes.

Or Italy. Especially Italy.

As an Australian we solved this by having root's resources swapped out and hosted on storage paid for and hosted in the UK.

We have another privileged account called gg which inherits all of root's privileges. Given that the root account may be transferred in the not too distant future there is increasing interest in making gg the new root. As to why we need such a privileged account in the first place to host garden parties and cut ribbons, gg provides a supervisor process that can kill deadlocked governments and respawn them.

It seems a bit silly but at least our government isn't based on VMS.

> Sounds like the system would be simpler if we removed root and gave capabilities to the sudoers instead.

A good portion of the top ten democracies are 'disabled root' (constitutional monarchy):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Democracy_Index#By_country

As a Canadian I'm not so much "against" switching away for constitutional monarchy, but rather any proposal needs to ensure we stay high in rankings. See also (2021> Pts: higher is better):

* https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Freedom_in_the_World#Country_r...

(I have no comment/idea on 'useful' these metric actually are.)

Nope nope nope nope. Requiring privileged access is a code smell. Capability based government now!

President Boris. Sounds fantastic. Perhaps not though, yeah?

In a lot of countries, it would be much better than "prime minister Boris". Look at the president roles in Italy and Germany, for example. Not all countries in the world are the US.

We already have a non political head of state. I’m not sure I see any benefit in us switch to a system like Italy or Germany.

I am not British, so I have no skin in the game. But the issue in general is not the fact that there is a head of state with a mostly-ceremonial role, it’s all the baggage that comes with the monarchy (detailed by others in this thread).

I find the general feeling here is that the system isn't perfect, but none are really and what we have has worked for a long time and there isn't much desire to change it.

We'd just be switching for the baggage of an elected head of state and I'm not sure there is any stomach here for another issue that divides so deeply after going through the Brexit campaign/process.

Because investing both sovereignty and power in a single institution inexorably leads to tyranny. Examples abound.

You could allocate only "software update" capability to one group, "execution" to another, and have a permission system for deciding who can do what.

But what if the execution program took on a conscience of its own and decided to appropriate software update permissions for itself?