Sounds like a good idea: Israel is in sore need of allies in the region, so maybe if they became allies of the Kurds it could work to their mutual benefit.

I see, this makes perfect sense now. IMO, it'd be better if all these break-away regions broke away and became new countries. That's why they're in the EU, after all: the union facilitates free trade and a strong shared currency (in theory at least), so things would be better if all these regions broke away and then joined the EU as new member states, instead of their people constantly being angry that they're in an involuntary union with some other country they don't like so much.

BTW, which regions in Italy want to break away? I hadn't heard about that, though I'm familiar with Catalan and the Basque region wanting to break away from Spain.

Of course China would be against any self-determination; they're all about forcing people into a single union under an authoritarian government which only benefits one group.

So what's the problem with that?

People who have never worked in a marine environment just don't understand this. Seawater is nasty, nasty stuff to anything. Plastic, metal, wood - it doesn't matter. Add a mechanical part and it just becomes a nightmare. The navy, for instance, is continuously painting their ships. As in, they never stop painting them. If you have an offshore wind farm, offshore wave farm, or whatever - you will spend far more on maintenance than you ever do on capital costs. And you have to restrict the technology to proven, overbuilt, and simple. Even titanium will fail in salt water (hydrogen embrittlement)... not a nice place to engineer for.

In addition to Crashplan, I typically run the built-in backup program as well - just to cover the case where the backup program itself was not working properly. For example, on Macs I use Time Machine and on Windows I use the Windows Backup running in parallel with Crashplan.

To me, it feels more like North Dakota splitting from South Dakota while staying within the US, which a lot of people would consider mostly a non-issue.

Huh? It's nothing like that at all. North Dakota and South Dakota are already split, and have been for a very long time. They're entirely separate states with no more relationship with each other than they have with Minnesota or Montana. They just happen to share part of their name.

Perhaps you meant "it feels more like Upstate New York splitting from NYC while staying within the US." (Which would actually be a great idea IMO.) We've actually done this before, sorta: during the Civil War, West Virginia broke away from Virginia and formed a new state so it could remain in the Union. We've also had many other states form by seceding from other states: Tennessee, for instance, used to be part of North Carolina, and Kentucky used to be part of Virginia. At one time early on, the 13 Colonies annexed everything to their west, all the way to the Mississippi River, drawing borders at the north and south mostly along latitude lines (or rivers, in the case of the Ohio river); later, these territories broke away and formed new states.

Yes, just remove "Scotland, " from the name.

Of course, Scotland can never secede from Great Britain, unless they dig a big canal on the border and turn their country into a separate island.

There's nothing silly about such debates.

I'd like to see the US and Canada both break apart and reform into new, smaller nations. I think, for the residents in many of the new nations, life would be better than the current state. I think perhaps 6 new nations would be a good number; one nation would include the pacific northwest areas of NorCal, Oregon, Washington, British Columbia, and maybe Yukon and Alaska. The American southeast would be a single nation, and maybe the southwest too. The US New England states plus the Canadian Maritime provinces would be a single nation. With these regions separated from each other, we wouldn't have all the infighting we have now between clashing cultures (e.g. highly religious values in the Bible Belt versus socially liberal values in the northeast and northwest).

Americans might look on with bemusement; I can understand that. I guess it's a bit like Florida choosing to break away from the US, having a pro-Florida political party endlessly demonizing "them" (the rest of the US) as causing pretty much every economic and political woe Florida has going for it.

As an American, I'd be happy to see Florida secede from the US. We'd be better off without them. Let them deal with their own problems.

Am I missing something? Why would an independent Scotland be spurned by the EU? I thought this issue was about them separating from the UK; they should be able to then join the EU as a full member, and switch to the Euro currency if they wish (since right now they're still on the GBP just like the rest of the UK). An independent Scotland should in theory be a good thing for the EU, as a confederation works better with its members smaller and more equal to each other, rather than having a mix of small and large/powerful members, as the powerful members will be seen as bullies by the smaller members. An independent Scotland will reduce the size/power of the UK in the EU and add a new member that's on par with countries like Denmark, and maybe get more people on board with the Euro.

Is arming locals really that bad an idea though? Our problem in the past was that we picked religious zealots as our allies and armed them, while ignoring the not-so-religious ones we could have supported. Here with ISIS, we could arm the Kurds and support them; the Kurds are not terribly religious (not too different from your typical Sunday Christians here in the US), and are willing to fight ISIS, but we don't want to support them too much because we don't want them demanding their own state, because that works against our interest in keeping the region destabilized. If we stopped working towards keeping the region unstable, and instead helped out groups like the Kurds who want independence, which would make the whole region far more stable, groups like ISIS would die out.

They won't destroy the population, they'll just subjugate it. That's what authoritarian regimes do. Stalin killed millions of people in his great purge during and after WWII, but it's not like the Soviet Union suddenly collapsed due to lack of people. And the Soviet Union lasted for many decades.

What works in dealing with these things is to wall them off and ignore them, and arming neighboring regions to create a buffer zone.

Your claim that I am a 'terrible human being' noted. So what does that make you given the fact that your claim is based on my comment, which states that no human should be forced to be a slave to another human by anybody, especially by the violent power of the state?

What does that make you, a 'better' human being, to want to use the violent power of the state to force people to give up portion of their live involuntarily for any supposed benefit of anybody at all or for any reason whatsoever for that matter?

At the very minimum it makes your position extremely inconsistent within itself, claiming that being what you are a 'better' comparing to what I am, while declaring that people need to be forced by violence (that is what state is - violence), subjugated to the will of the collective and not be allowed to decide how to control their own lives?

Then again, no socialist ideas are consistent within themselves. The so called 'green' socialists are of the opinion that people are destroying the planet. They want to use the violent power of the state to subjugate the individuals, to turn their productivity to the state, so that the state would decide what to do with it, supposedly for the benefit of the environment somehow (while the worst damage to the environment comes from the operation of the state, nuclear disasters, wars, pollution). They do not see the inconsistency of their ideas at all. They want the state to control the resources, but obviously for the state to do so, it needs to throw bones to the subjects, the bones being subsidies.

So tax those, who are productive, steal their productivity (lives, time on this planet, creativity) and allow the state to subsidise others? How is that consistent with the 'green' ideology, which is of the opinion that human activities cause ecological problems on this planet? They would be consistent if they in fact decided to completely remove subsidies, we get more of what we subsidise.

Providing subsidies causes an influx in births, those who live on subsidies do not have to care as much how to provide for the offspring, their birth rates are higher. It is an inconsistent position to provide for more subsidies from those, who already control their own birth rates to those, who will not if given subsidies.

But of-course socialist positions are never consistent.

As a side note, I have formed my opinions on this matter over 30 years ago, I only read Ayn Rand's novels out of curiosity maybe 2 or 3 years ago, I don't need anybody to form my opinions for me, which is, by the way, why I am an individual, not an ant in a colony.

I wouldn't get too cocky... In the "Linux" world you can indeed run zfs, but you have to roll your own since it uses an incompatible license - it came out of Sun and was released with a non-GPL compatible license. btrfs has many of these features, but it has only recently become "production" quality - and even then, not all of the features are stable. MS was slightly ahead of Linux in the filesystem department.