I am not the sys admin. I am an application developer / analyst who works closely with sys admin.

"expandability sucks"

Whoa... no way. It is by far the most flexible expansion I've ever seen. I have yet to make a request of any of the sys admins that wasn't instantly fulfilled on a zfs system. Other systems I'll often get a "well.. we can't do it that way, but I can move this mount point over here, and rename this, then add a disk, then name it back, etc....".

ZFS has pools. You can add anything that can present as a block device (file, hard disk, virtual disk from a storage device, usb keychain, etc..) to a pool. Then you can carve that pool in many different ways and attach it to zones (zfs virtual machines). And, of course, all this can be done live, in production. No reboots required. Space is added or removed from my live servers all the time.

I think one of the home NAS manufacturers uses ZFS. You can mix match drives, hot swap them, and the raid will rebuild itself on the fly.

ZFS
Snapshot of 500GB, instant.
Rollback when I mess something up, instant or like a minute.

VMWare
Snapshot of 500GB, 10 minutes.
Rollback when I mess something up, 30 minutes.

ZFS snapshot "myvolume" | zfs send "myvolume-snapshot" other zfs system. On other system, zfs boot "myvolume", log in, change the IP and system name, done. A second new server is up and running. Or a new backup system created from production, etc..

I was always curious how well it scaled down (like for home use). At work we have have multiple 100+ disk storage systems using ZFS, and notice zero performance hits using de-dupe features (mainly through mirroring).

You answered your own question quite well here:

And, if you look back at that history of people who claimed racial superiority for one race or another -- even promoting "scientific" opinions -- you'll find that they disproportionately have a racist agenda.

Scientific reasons aside, I think the general public is so interested in these sorts of studies, because of the ramifications if significantly true or false. //entering the mind of a racist
Why is Africa so poor? Well to a racist, it is because they are black. A study proving that blacks are less intelligent justifies their racism. We should continue to micro-manage them, international companies should continue to take advantage of corrupt leadership and suck the countries dry of natural resources, the international community can't every make that place better through law or actions.
Why are inner cities in the US in such bad shape? Well, because they are mostly minorities, mainly black. And blacks are less intelligent. There isn't anything we can do about it. Spending tax dollars trying to make things better for 'those people' is a waste of money. * //existing the mind of a racist(I hope).

*(I honestly think a sizable segment of our conservative politicians believe this.. though they would never say it)

Since any amount of genetic 'proof' that races have different success/intelligence rates, when controlling for other factors, is always almost instantly jumped on by bigoted/racist people, scientists are right to be cautious and clearly spell out the limits of their research.

Whenever any of this comes up, I always like to point out that modern humans (with fully modern anatomy, brain size, etc..) have been around 100,000+ years. Why did it take us 90,000 years before we decided to start farming? Or 95,000 years before we decided to use modern writing? Why was Egypt and the Middle East the cultural and knowledge centers of the world for thousands of years, and are now messed up and regressive? (Hint... their DNS didn't drastically change).

Yes, but how? Which genes? What factors? What percent is our cultural communal upbringing vs genes? How 'smart' would a child raised by wolves be? Or a child raised by apes?

Humans have had essentially the same DNA for probably 100,000 or so years. Why did it take us so long to build up cities and go to the moon? Some anthropology books have even pushed the 'modern man' figure back beyond 100,000 years. If our DNA were the major factor in our intelligence, why did it take us 80,000 years to start growing food instead of only hunting/gathering? Why did it take us 90,000 years to record the first clay tablet?

Why are stone tools extremely primitive and then gradually get more refined and skillfully crafted in the archaeological record? Shouldn't any caveman with a modern brain be able to produce top of the line stone tools? Why do we see a very clear evolution of stone tools? It is almost as if a changing environment, and shared cultural knowledge, were more important than DNA....

Sure, our DNA is part of it. But so is a long history of cultural, technological, and philosophical development, as well as a certain population density being reached that increased trade, knowledge transfers, and cooperative social strategies. Heck, one could make a strong argument that our nimble fingers alone are responsible for a huge chunk of our success. The ability to write and record our knowledge alone is huge advantage (why did writing take so long to develop.... another mystery).

I was curious so I read the wikipedia page. It doesn't sound nearly that simple. Alan Gross was distributing the equipment while working for a contractor that "won a US$6 million U.S. government contract for the program in which Gross was involved, a controversial "democracy-promotion program" that ballooned under the Bush administration, to provide communications equipment to break the Cuban government's 'information blockade'."

In addition from the wiki page:

So you travel to a communist country, funded by US tax dollars (through a contractor), which are part of a law 'calling for regime change' and 'democracy promotion' and don't expect the communist country to act?

I agree Cuba would be a lot better off if they opened up, moved to democracy, allowed free speech, etc.. but sending US civilians into Cuba to do work that will obviously be opposed by the current government, is bordering on stupidity. Unless your goal is to provoke Cuba into arresting US citizens in order to continue the embargo, in which case the plan worked perfectly.

The last 20-30 years has seen a large chunk of our political leaders (nearly all Republican) distance themselves from many mainstream scientific theories for political (or in many cases, actual disbelief) reasons. The main reason for this is the conservative religious right in the country taking over a lot of the Republican party. Lots of articles like this one: http://www.salon.com/2012/08/05/republicans_slouching_toward_theocracy/

I hope it is just a cycle and both parties can get back to more sane debates, instead of half our political system claiming (truly or just for politics) to not believe in something as mainstream as evolution.

So this current slump in scientific support does feel new to most people. There may have been an older cycle of religious right taking over the conservative party, but I'm not familiar with it.

I think that is a likely outcome when self-driving cars become reality. Car computers could even feed a grid computer destinations, and the grid computer could efficiently plot each cars best route, grouping cars with similar destinations together even. Like forming trains of cars.

Or we could just work on energy storage more aggressively....

http://phys.org/news/2011-11-battery-electrodes-grid-storage.html
http://www.technologyreview.com/news/512206/years-in-the-making-promising-rechargeable-metal-air-batteries-head-to-market/

Unfortunately, in the US, we are still debating whether the facts are real....

I'd love it if all the Republican congress folks trusted the scientific facts about AGW and were debating what to do about it. Weighing the risk vs reward of spending money to counter the possible range of effects, weighing that against the cost of doing nothing, etc...

But nope, half of congress flat out says the Earth isn't even warming. And don't believe in Evolution either...

Modern engineers have commented that even today, certain aspects of the pyramid would be hard to replicate.

The precision of the layout alone is extremely impressive.

But I think more than the engineering, the fascination over the pyramids has a lot more to do with the mystery of why they were built, for what purpose (there has never been a single King's body found in a pyramid... they were not tombs), etc..

I always assumed the Pyramids, and monuments like them, were early examples of rulers staying in power by making sure unemployment stayed low.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/New_Deal#Public_works

There may have been a few gold plated casing stones, but the majority were polished white limestone.

The clarion project is about as biased an organization as you can get:
http://rightweb.irc-online.org/profile/Clarion_Fund
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Clarion_Project#Criticism
http://www.richardsilverstein.com/2014/03/27/clarion-funds-new-islamophobic-film-honor-diaries/

"....a fifth have sympathy with the "feelings and motives" of the suicide bombers who attacked London last July 7, killing 52 people, although 99 per cent thought the bombers were wrong to carry out the atrocity.

I'll just assume at this point that the rest of your links are equally misleading.

I agree with a lot of what you said.

However, (not blaming the victims, I'm just surprised), I would think that celebrities would inherently try to be more secure than the average person. They have physical paparazzi chasing them all over town.... you think that would lead them to the conclusion that those same paparazzi (and hackers) are likely to be chasing them online as well.

So it just continually surprises me that A-List stars with tons of money don't hire IT security specialists just like they probably hire physical bodyguards.

The only difference being, most of us are not celebrities. We have some security through obscurity. If I were an A-List celebrity, I would probably be more cautious than the average person.