[SulphurSmell]

Love this analogy. As a Canadian...we have the same monarch, but our own Constitution / elected officials. So...we are ourselves in the sudoers file...but surely we are different under this analogy than our UK brethren? What are we a VM with sudo root?

[stormbrew]

Technically we have a different monarch that is occupied by the same person (she is “the queen of the uk and the queen of Canada”, not really “queen of the uk and Canada”) and has the same rules of succession (implemented in a Canadian bill that must be updated in sync with the British equivalent when it changes).

So it’s maybe more like a Kerberos auth server with local configuration.

[dsr_]

I suggest that in the next bill, rather than updating the Crown to rest in Charles's CNAME, you acknowledge that the Crown is perpetually Elizabeth II.

That way you never have to change Birthday celebrations, or anything else related.

[goosedragons]

We already solved the birthday celebration problem. The Queen's official birthday in Canada is May 24th. Charles' official birthday in Canada will be May 24th. We just decided at some point the best monarch's birthday to celebrate is Queen Victoria and have stuck with it.

[Ichthypresbyter]

The Dutch continued celebrating Queen Juliana's birthday (April 30th) as their national day when Queen Beatrix succeeded her, as they didn't want to move an event which is traditionally celebrated outdoors to January.

Beatrix was succeeded by King Willem-Alexander, who was born on April 27th- so the national day moved to his actual birthday. April 30th is now known mainly for confused tourists expecting a party that happened three days earlier.

[stormbrew]

We don't really update it for each new monarch, it's just a set of rules. They were last changed fairly recently, to remove male primogeniture in case Prince William had a daughter as his first child (though he didn't). Every single Commonwealth country had to pass its own individual bill amending the Act of Succession, and it finished in 2015[1]. It's pretty unlikely they'll change again any time soon, the only thing that's still up for much debate is the requirement that the person sitting on the throne isn't Catholic.

It'd be a hell of a scandal if these laws got out of sync, and yet it would be one of the stupidest scandals in history.

[1] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Perth_Agreement

[SulphurSmell]

Ah! Good ol' DNS. Nothing can go wrong now!

[shirro]

The AU/CA/NZ servers were based on the UK server image and the GECOS field of root still says "Queen Victoria, heirs or successors" but is otherwise disabled. The servers are all run by separate orgs in independent data centres and have diverged substantially from the original image. Possibly root may still have physical access to the UK server but the threat is considered minimal.

[gxt]

I'd see the governors has some kind kerberos authorized set of admin accounts. And we are the lowly users and sudoers.

[pmyteh]

Something like that. And with the Governor General as the VM root.