Chez Chesler

A (the?) loyal reader asked me if I'd moved this blog or left Comcast. It turns out that I was over quota on my Comcast web site (where this blog is hosted.) Neither Comcast nor Blogger returned any kind of error message :-(. I cleared out some old images and all is well for now. Although Comcast has regularly increased bandwidth and mail storage, total web site space has remained at 25 Meg. I was going to write about this because over on The Volokh Conspiracy Eugene has written on the "Suicide Bombers as Cowards" trope. (He updates the post to note "Chris Lansdown puts it well in the comments: '[T]argeting a group that's less able to defend itself to increase the likelihood of success rather than to decrease the likelihood of personal peril isn't cowardly, it's dastardly (which is worse, though a different sort of malfeasance).'") I'd commented on this some time back on Usenet. For a while, when World.std.com was my ISP (or more accurately public-access Unix) I was using an "X-No-Archive: No" header. Deja (formerly DejaNews, and now with older archives Google Groups) and other archivers (are there any other archivers?) are supposed to follow the convention that Usenet messages with an "X-No-Archive: Yes" header, or as the first line in a message, will not be archived. Therefore "X-No-Archive: No" should me "No, I do not ask that you not archive this." To make it unambiguous, I also used the even less conventional non-standard header (all headers that start with X- are non-standard, just like the alt.* Usenet hierarchy) "X-Yes-Archive: Yes", meaning "Yes, please archive this" and also "X-Maybe-Archive: Maybe" just for completeness. None of those message are in the Google archive. Google should fix this. Meanwhile, my local PC crashed after I'd written this the first time and was just tracking down URLs :-(