When I was in public school, I'd have agreed with this. Even separating students into "honors" classes and so forth wasn't generally enough for the high achievers.

Here's the problem, though: intelligence is neither determined nor static. Your brain does not even stop growing until well into college. In the big picture, most of us personally know very high achievers in adulthood who were mediocre achievers in grade school, and most of us also know high achievers in grade school who never got any smarter. Your proposal would reward these folks while kicking the former to the curb.

It's honestly quite sad to see an exceptional 12th grader grow up to become... an exceptional 12th grader.

The best schools understand this. Instead of spuriously selecting the "best" and weeding out the "worst," there are institutions that spend their time carefully improving every student. Done correctly, this produces more high achievers without limiting those who started out ahead. A corroborating observation: some colleges that admit mediocre students nevertheless produce better graduates than prestigious, highly selective colleges (via some objective measure such as admission rates to medical/law schools). So much, then, for social darwinism. Turns out we can do better than that.

It has a 3-way RAID 1 (linux software raid), so it will take 3 disk failures for the storage to die. In fact, one of the disks have failed already, but since it still have 2-way RAID it I see no reason to do anything about it :).

Here are two reasons. If you wait for the next disk to die, then:

1. You have no protection against the final disk failing during the rebuild.
2. You have no protection against bad sectors discovered during the rebuild.

BTW, both of those reasons are why our customers have been demanding RAID6.