Libertarian propagandists and their useful idiots manage to twist any fact and every event so that everything is always the government's fault. Government can do no good, ever, and has no purpose other than to steal your property.

a conman rips off hundreds of millions? re-frame it as the "government wants their cut", so they're the ones to blame. then you can get on with that vile american habit of *admiring* successful con-men rather than hating and despising them.

do you american morons even realise that the rich, the 1%, the billionares and corporate CEOs are the modern day equivalents (and in many cases the descendants and heirs) of the aristocrats and kings that your revolutionary war was fought against? It wasn't "government" that they fought - your government is the thing your revolutionaries set up to protect themselves from a return of the kings and aristocrats, to limit and regulate their power.

(which is, of course, why you've had decades of well-funded anti-government and anti-regulation propaganda. the wealthy don't want to be limited or regulated)

and who is it that's calling for a return to monarchy, to aristocracy? why, it's the latest fad in libertarian thought.
American Libertarianism has always been about promoting the interests of the extremely wealthy over those of everyone else, and now they're pushing to have themselves raised to a new version of "nobility", but (in perfect accord with the libertarian principle - the libertarian prime directive, really - of "fuck everyone else") without even a hint of any "nobless oblige" baggage.

> I root for the team that provides sustainable wealth creation and jobs.

oh, so you're a socialist then? nice to hear.

but you can't deny that government infrastructure would have had death panels to decide who was allowed to live and use the internet and who would have to be dragged out into the street and shot for watching porn.

that's what governments are for.

remember tha mantra: gubmint bad, bizness good.

part of the problem is that the labour government were hyper-sensitive to some analog issues.

in particular, they didn't want to be accused of being anti-old people by forcing horribly distressing new-fangled technology on them. worse, some of the oidies could die if their phone lines were ever out and because digital shit is new, that would be the fault of the NBN whereas an old analog phone being out would be just normal shit happening without anyone to blame.

as Hackett has said, that analog hole would have been better filled with cheap or subsidised mobile services for medical monitors, alarm systems, and so on. but the opposition and the press, specifically Murchoch's press, would never have let them get away with it, and they would have been blamed for every old person who died (whether they were hooked up to the new NBN or not).

some things are completely irrational and just make no sense, and you can't fight back against headlines like "Labour kills grandma", same as you can't fight back against 3 years of Murdoch newspaper headlines referring to the PM as "witch" and "liar".

yeah, and thanks to Tony Abbott and the Liberal govt, we're paying over $40 Billion to keep the same crappy monopoly with the same crappy and unmaintained copper infrastructure. Telstra and Murdoch are the only winners here. hooray for common sense! something for the australian voters to be proud of.

think of the children!

they're the ones who'll be forced to watch the slideshows.

and eventually suffer the indignity of having "cute" baby photos of them brought out to embarass them if they're ever dumb enough to bring a gf or bf home.

that photo archive isn't an innocent collection of memories, it's malicious forward-planning by parents.

good post, except for three details:

1. if you're using ZFS on both systems, you're *much* better off using 'zfs send' and 'zfs recv' than rsync.

do the initial full copy, and from then you can just send the incremental snapshot differences from then on.

one advantage of zfs send over rsync is that rsync has to check each file for changes (either file timestamp or block checksum or both) every time you rsync a filesystem or directory tree. With and incremental 'zfs send', it only sends the incremental difference between the last snapshot sent and the current snapshot.

you've also got the full zfs snapshot history on the remote copy as well as on the local copy.

(and, like rsync, you can still run the copy over ssh so that the transfer is encrypted over the network)

2. your price estimates seem very expensive. with just a little smart shopping, it wouldn't be hard to do what you're suggesting for less than half your estimate.

3. if you've got a choice between hardware raid and ZFS then choose ZFS. Even if you've already spent the money on an expensive hardware raid controller, just use it as JBOD and let ZFS handle the raid function.

> Just don't let ZFS know that there's more than 1 drive.

That is *precisely* the wrong thing to do. As in, the exact opposite of how you should do it.

Instead, configure the RAID card to be JBOD and let ZFS handle the multiple-drive redundancy (raidz and/or mirroring), as well as the error detection and correction.

Otherwise, there is little or no benefit in using ZFS. ZFS can't correct many problems if it doesn't have direct control over the individual disks, and RAID simply can't do the things that ZFS can do.

Of course, this means that you're actually better off with a cheap dumb non-raid HBA card (or even just the SATA ports on your motherboard if there's enough of them) than an expensive HW RAID card. This is another advantage of ZFS.

(a good option is to use an LSI SAS2008 card or similar, and make sure it's re-flashed to "IT" mode firmware if you're using consumer-grade SATA drives with it to avoid TLER issues. readily available brand new for under $100 for 8 SAS/SATA ports)

> You can't have them both trying to manage the redundant storage.

yes. and it's ZFS that should be managing it, not the raid card.

> ZFS certainly isn't necessary though, if you've got hardware raid.

wrong. RAID does not provide error detection or correction. RAID protects against drive failures only, not silent corruption.

true, but you do need multiple disks (mirrored or raidz) to protect against drive failure.

two or more copies of your data on the one disk won't help at all if that disk dies.

fortunately, zfs can give you both raid-like multiple disk storage (mirroring and/or raidz) as well as errror detection and correction.

That ZFS_data_integrity link in the post you were replying to gives a pretty good summary of how it works.

The paragraphs immediately above that (titled 'Data integrity', 'Error rates in hard disks', and 'Silent data corruption') also give a good summary of why error-correcting filesystems like ZFS (and btrfs) are necessary, especially with the huge sizes of modern drives.

In fact, anyone interested should read the entire wikipedia article.

ps: neither raid nor ZFS is a substitute for backups. you still need backups of your data (preferably with off-site copies) to protect against accidental deletion or overwrite (snapshots can help with this if used intelligently prior to the event) or burglary or catastrophic damage like fire or flood.

expect to see a lot more of these "See, privacy invasion is good for you" articles. Their purpose is to "prove" that all this spying and data collection helps catch some very naughty people in icky foreign countries. some of them with really bad accents or even terrible mustaches (aka "proof of evil").

of course.

and the MBA mind thinks of GPL software like so: "we got it for free, so we should be able to mark it up and sell it for a squillion dollars...and lock it up so we've got a monopoly".

that's why they love the BSD license, and why there's so much corporate propaganda promoting BSD.

(there's nothing wrong with the BSD license. it's just easily exploitable - by design - by MBA arsehole types)

The BSD license is perfect for MBA types who think that externalising expenses (like software developer salaries) is a great thing...the goal is to, as ever, privatise the profit, while socialising expenses.

In civilised countries (including most European countries, the UK, Australia, and even places like Cuba), the government always picks up the bill for hospital and other medical care anyway. Hospice or palliative care is no different.

Because that's what governments are for. looking after the welfare of the people is the *only* thing that justifies their existence, the only thing that makes government tolerable or acceptable to the people.

if your government won't do that, then what the fuck do you put up with it for? you happily accept it paying trillions in corporate welfare but not billions for health care for citizens? you people are just fucked in the head.

You, too can be an owner of capital, of course. Right now, you can own one share of Amazon for just $375.91,

and at the US minimum wage of $7.25/hour, you'd only have to work 51.84 hours in order to own that one share (not including brokerage fees, or any survival requirements like food, shelter, transport to/from work, paying bills etc. also ignoring the fact that you likely couldn't buy a single share of amazon or anything else).

see, *anyone* can benefit from capitalism!!!! yay! the system works!!!

you too can own an insignificantly tiny chunk of a mega-corporation and start identifying with the capitalist owner classes. don't forget to vote for pollies promising to lower taxes and eliminate regulation (as if there's any other choice on offer, haha) while slashing social programs that might help you survive.

woops! last quarter's profits were less than expected, so your $375 share is now worth only $350. And Amazon's management have decided to earn their multi-million dollar bonuses by artificially boosting the next quarter's figures by sacking you and thousands of other peons. But look on the bright side, you have a a whole share of amazon all to yourself, that's now worth only slightly less than you paid for it, and it'll probably recover to $370 or even more soon. hooray!

or maybe their protests and hand-wringing and emphatically blogged thoughts are just business as usual - corporations routinely pay spin doctors to advise them on what to do and how to manipulate opinion whenever they get caught doing stuff they're not supposed to.

to their way of thinking reality is nothing, perception is everything.

too bad the site doesn't work properly - for example, click on an article, you'll get the article page and a dozen or so comments plus a "load more comments" button. clicking that button returns you to the index page.

the current slashdot site works just fine with noscript. beta.slashdot does not. fuck that shit, slashdot's stories and comments just aren't worth the risk of letting them and their corportate parents and their advertisers and whoever else run arbitrary code on my computer.

if slashdot becomes just another site that requires javascript for basic functionality then it'll be just another site that I ignore.