Where "huge" is 3 degrees... :)

> in all my classes, students from Asian and African education systems beat my native born Americans. This has been the case ALL the time.

That might be (selection) bias. Asians and Africans that go the US, have received proper education, better than average. They're probably from relatively wealthy parents. The other Asians and Africans did not get such a good education. The Americans (although probably not natives!), on the other hand, are in your classes after receiving common education, and --unless you teach at an Ivy League university-- are not the best of their generation. So you might be comparing apples and oranges.

The eye is bigger than the stomach. That is certainly part of the MOOC "failure". However, I don't consider it a failure. They have hundreds of thousands of students that finished a course. Is that failure? In comparison to the 8 million enrollments perhaps, but in comparison to the zero that would have done the course without MOOC, it isn't. I did a course. Followed all classes, didn't bother to get a grade or certificate, because (a) I couldn't put in the effort in the single week there was to do the project, (b) I didn't care about the certificate. It was just to learn something new. And I'm grateful to coursera that they offered this possibility.

> The obvious poor quality elementary and post elementary pupils western countries produce compared to kids from the Asian subcontinent

I think you might be ever so slightly mistaken there. If you're referring to the PISA or OESO scores, they are heavily biased. And many Western countries have quite decent elementary education, thank you very much. I agree the effort could be improved, but you can't call it poor.

zfs also keeps more data (a lot more) in memory than a "regular" filesystem, so you are more likely to encounter flaky memory in the first place. If I weren't going to use ECC RAM, I would probably forgo these fancy hashing filesystems and instead run something more mundane and then do a separate data integrity check with my backup. I use Unison for my data that is impractical to keep on ZFS. It is slow but has saved my butt on data that is important to me (family photos with some corruption on the master).

Sea water is more abundant than fresh water. There is nothing exact about the point at which "fresh" water freezes. And pure water won't freeze until you give it a nucleation site. Try it in the freezer with deionized or distilled water sometime, it's actually really "cool". :p

So you agree reclaimed land is valid. Now that we've established that, we can worry about the minutia of this case.

A calorie is not SI. That would be the Joule.

I think you are mistaken. The equation converting F to C is linear. F = C * 1.8 + 32.0. Both units are completely arbitrary. F used the freezing point of brine while C used the freezing point of pure water as a zero reference. F used the human body temperature and C used the boiling point of pure water as the 100 reference. Arbitrary.

0 degrees F is the triple point of seawater, which is a lot more common than pure water.

100 degrees F is the human body temperature.

Still having trouble?

Per the European Edgar DB, Figure 2.4, American per capita in 2012, was 16.4. In Germany, it was just under 10. That is a factor of 1.5, and no where NEAR 3x.

in 2012, China's per capita was at ~7.2, while Europe's was at ~7.3. That was two years ago.
Since that time, Chinas CO2 emissions have risen more than 20%. China now accounts for more than 1/3 of the global emissions, with less than 1/6 of the world population.
And all of that is based on numbers that Chinese gov. has given up. OCO2 is about to shock the world and liars like yourself.

Per edgar, EU27 was at 4.12 in 1992. In 2012, you were at 3.74. That is a 10% drop.
Now, in the same time span, we increased heavily due to W (from 5->5.91), and then due to our cheap nat gas, we dropped BELOW 5, though, edgar shows America at 5.19 in 2012. However, other groups show that 2013 was a major drop for America, pretty much a fixed level for Europe (esp. due to Germany's killing of their nukes and their massive build-out of coal plants), and a REAL MASSIVE increase for China's emissions.

Several things wrong with that BS.
1) China has NEVER been transparent with their budget.
2) much of what is considered military in America and the west, goes under civilian budget, but military control, in china.
3) China is not a TRUE capitalism. As such, all those that work on the military side, are paid a fraction of what they are paid elsewhere. As such, building an AK-47 in China is a REAL fraction of what it would costs to build in America.

Far more important, is the speed with which China is growing their military, combined with the large number of military secrets that China has stolen from the west (esp. America).

btrfs sounds very interesting. It was not ready for prime time when I setup my current box, which is why I chose zfs instead. I'll have to try to murder it in a VM :)

Can you set btrfs to use arbitrary block devices or files? One of the things that made it easy to screw with zfs was it's ability to do so. I was able to set up a VM and do random writes to the "drives" it was using to see how it would respond. Anyway, to my surprise btrfs seems production-ready at this time so I'll have to play with it.

I teach physics. The most depressing part of my job is teaching a general-education class where I have to explain global warming.

Scientists don't have a private agenda. We would LOVE to be wrong about this, but:
- Temperatures are going up worldwide
- Global temperatures are historically very well correlated to CO2 concentrations
- CO2 concentrations have a straightforward and well-understood effect on infrared light produced by
earth's blackbody radiation
- Even small changes to global temperature will create big changes to local climates
- We can stop this, but only if radical action is taken right now
so
- We're all fucked.

This is not the time for the debate about whether the effect is real. This is the time for debate about just how MUCH we should be panicking. We're in the deep shit here. We're talking about large proportions of humanity not having enough food to eat. The resulting warfare and hardship will be devastating.

Yes, you can do this with zfs as well, but you need to be very, very careful or you won't have the redundancy that you think you do. There are crazy partition schemes that can let you do Drobo-ish things - but they get so complicated that you need to keep track of them in something like an Excel spreadsheet. :)

Besides, zfs seems to like having the entire drive.