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I have an aesthetic fondness for these as anti-patterns, but then there is reality:

My 85-year-old mother allowed some random caller to talk her into giving them administrative access to her Windows XP system. I have convinced her to accept replacement of her system with a chromebook, but now I want to retrieve the photos she had on the always-attached backup media. Zero-tolerance for vulnerabilities would mean destroying all media that touched her compromised system, but I'm going to accept the imperfect assurance of malware scanning and then copy the photo files somewhere she can click to them.

"Less and less is done, until non-action is achieved; when nothing is done, nothing remains to be done." (Tao Te Ching 48; translated by Gia-fu Feng and Jane English).

I ask: is that a state of perfection or of death?



Unless there is something madly wrong going on, images etc are "sterile".


"Madly going wrong" is historically the case: https://technet.microsoft.com/en-us/library/security/ms04-02...


Makes one wonder if one should just unplug anything electronic and stick to books...




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