It's fast, reliable, caches intelligently, adaptable to a large variety of mirror/striping/RAID configurations, snapshots with incredible efficiency, and simply works as advertised.

Can I:

1) Add a disk to a RAID array (or whatever ZFS calls it) and reshape the array to take advantage of the space?

2) Run with less than 1 GB of RAM per TB of disk space?

3) Pull a disk that's suffered a transient failure, check it, plug it back in, and have the array write only the portions of the disk that changed, rather than doing a full rebuild?

The last time I looked at using ZFS for my storage server, #1 and #2 were deal-breakers. #3 was added when I expanded the server with a bunch of Seagate hard drives -- md's write-intent bitmaps reduced typical rebuild times from around a week to less than half an hour.

Ever seen a dam break? Look up the number of casualties due to dam breaks in the last 50 years vs the number of casualties due to nuclear meltdowns in the last 50 years. Then divide by watts.

Make sure you're counting the right dams, though. A large number of dam failures have been flood-control or irrigation dams rather than hydroelectric dams. For example, of the ten deadliest dam failures since 1964, all ten involved flood-control, irrigation, or tailings impoundment dams.

The problem isn't the lack of strong typing in JavaScript. The problem is the combination of dynamic typing and operator re-use.

In Perl, I can tell you at compile time what "5 + $val + 5" will return: a number 10 greater than the numeric value of $val (and there are clear rules for converting strings to numbers). In JavaScript, I can't tell if "5 + val + 5" will be a string value or a numeric value, except by carefully tracking the possible data flows for "val" and seeing if it comes from a string source or a numeric source (or worse, both string and numeric sources).

Are you sure the car won't spot the dog, mistake it for a child (remember, the quality of information from the front camera is reduced), and perform an emergency turn to the left? Are you sure the presence of the car won't mask the presence of the dog, or vice-versa?

It's easy to say "when in doubt, maintain heading and come to a halt". It's much harder to define "doubt" in a way that's useful to a computer.

The problem with simulator testing is that you can't test scenarios that you didn't think of. This is particularly important to find problems arising from multiple simultaneous situations. For example, you might test the scenarios "front camera obscured by rain", "car ahead of you performs emergency stop", and "dog runs into street", but that doesn't necessarily tell you how the car will respond to a combination of the three.

Real life is far more creative than any scenario designer.

The nice thing about Anker is that they're honest about being a third party. Entirely too many companies do their best to visually imitate OEM equipment.

Imagine that, just rolling up two trucks to a construction site: one carrying the printer, another with all the crushed rock, setting it up and letting it go. A week later, a finished home ready for a family to move into at half the cost.

Imagine that, just rolling up two trucks to a construction site: one carrying the left half of the home, and one carrying the right half. A bit of maneuvering to align them on the foundation pad, a little work connecting things up, and the family can start moving in that afternoon.

Or if you prefer a non-standard shape, how about two trucks: one carrying a collection of prefabricated floor, wall, and roof sections, and one carrying a crane and a construction crew. Takes a bit longer to assemble, but it can still be done in less than a day.

Rapid construction of houses is nothing new. I watched a neighbor's house go from foundation pad to final painting in less than a day back in the early 80s, and it was old tech even then.

I'm curious how you can get an IP address with a bit of js.

Perform an AJAX "get" on http://www.whatismyip.com/ or any other IP lookup site.

Roads could be improved incrementally. A railroad that only connects two cities still has value. Any large, flat field could handle an early airplane, as long as you moved the cows out first.

The problem with this "storage-less" renewable grid is that no partial implementation is adequate. It simply cannot function on anything less than continent scale, and may require a global-scale grid to average out the fluctuations enough.

Fortunately, a water heater is simple enough that you can rip out the "smart" electronics and replace them with the sort of thermostat-and-relay circuit that almost everything uses right now.

I don't think there's ever been a proper study of astronauts' natural sleeping patterns in space. There are always more things people want astronauts to do than there are hours to do them in, so everything (including sleep) is very tightly scheduled. Nobody's ever said "spend the next week doing nothing but keeping your spaceship running, and do it on your own schedule".

We don't know what effect, if any, the freefall environment has on sleep patterns. It may be that astronauts are so sleep-deprived because Mission Control has been scheduling things wrong.

Slashdot is male dominated, so it should have more colorblindness than a random population sample. If we know the sex ratio on /., maybe we could predict how the poll converges.

The problem with this is that many people with red-green colorblindness (especially with the milder forms) are unaware of it. There's a reason why colorblindness as a disorder wasn't recognized until 1798...

You know how they work their way up with drugs? By offering reduced charges/reduced sentences for providing evidence. For example, a drug user will be offered probation/dropped charges for ratting out his dealer, who in turn will have a "possession with intent to distribute" reduced to mere possession for saying who his supplier is, and so on up the line until they find someone big enough to go all-out against.

The police can't do that with CP. There are no lesser versions of possession, and dropping charges will get a prosecutor crucified by his opponent in the next election.

Requests to fix errors come in all the time -- and are forwarded to the community, who decide if the request is reasonable or not. In such cases, the Foundation merely acts as a conduit for the request, rather than granting or denying it.

The denied requests come about when someone demands (and it's almost always a demand) that the Foundation use their powers as operator of the website to make a change to an article.

They did it to all sites hosted by Freedom Hosting. Most notably, they did it to Tormail -- not a kiddie porn site, a webmail provider.