General Esm W900
The old saying about cleanliness being next to godliness has a certain resonance in the world I live in every day. What is so appealing about a clean computer system? Why does my Unix co-author Jason Miller seem so obsessed with his "clean" BSD systems? I can tell you that Jason is a pretty paranoid individual, and his desire for cleanliness and purity in his operating system has its roots in paranoia. An even more appropriate question might be, what is the connection between cleanliness and rootliness (considered godliness in a Unix system)?

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I choose to live in the real world, but strive for the ideal world. I would like to believe that software will improve over time, that slowly privilege escalation vulnerabilities will become rare as programmers learn to recognize the situations that create them.

Maybe I will die hoping for a computing paradise that will never arrive, but I delude myself into believing that there is some nobility in the struggle.

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