This is known as Olber's paradox, and it is not valid for expanding universes where red shift reduces the wavelength of light from distant sources until it drops below visible wavelengths and there ends up being an observable horizon, even in an otherwise infinite space and unbounded lifetime.

Although your point about distance and volume is wrong for other mathematical reasons. The number of light sources expands as the square of radius, not volume. The *total* number of sources is proportional to the cube of radius, but that's double counting. The volume includes close sources previously counted, plus the new sources being added as radius increases. Olber's paradox doesn't rely on that error in math.

Its ironic that one of the potential benefits of geoengineering research is that it will force many climate change deniers to admit that its possible for human activity to have major deleterious effects on Earth's climate.

It is a true statement that net-metering customers are often using infrastructure that they are effectively not paying for, or not paying the true costs of, when their net-metering contracts allow them to directly offset generation and usage one for one. However, its also true that the statement "solar could reach price parity" can still be true while recognizing that fact for this reason: electric utilities overstate the costs of the infrastructure, and the costs of that infrastructure are affected by network defections.

In Hawaii where I live, the electric utility recently proposed a plan to deal with the high growth rate of residential solar, which they were delaying due to their assertion that the grid was unprepared for the volume (which I concede as likely a mostly true statement). Their plan proposed a cost structure that would have made a customer currently paying about $200/month (what their documents stated was the residential average) and who could with solar reduce that bill to close to $15/month, under the new system would be paying about $150/month. That's for someone who deployed a net-zero solar system. That was due to the proposed system charging a $55/month infrastructure fee and paying only about half the rate for customer generated power as they charged for customer used power.

Given those numbers, its entirely possible that the continued drop in costs for residential solar could bring down the cost of a completely off-grid system of batteries and emergency generator (for stretches of low sunlight) to a point where it becomes competitive with that $1800/yr of "infrastructure" costs. Moreover, even if the costs don't reach full parity, if they just get close its possible that enough customers could choose to defect off the grid so as to make the per-customer costs of maintaining the grid even higher - since the costs are largely fixed and don't go down when there are fewer customers.

The combination of lowering costs of completely off-grid solar systems combined with the rising costs of utility power per customer due to defections could still cause a meet-in-the-middle where solar reaches price parity even for systems that don't need utility connections. Maybe not by 2016, but I wouldn't bet a lot of money against it either.

The problem with the "solar customers are not paying their fair share of the grid" statement is not that it is not true: its that the best way to resolve that problem in the long run will be for solar customers to defect off the grid. If electric utilities continue to pursue the strategy of making solar customers "pay their fair share" eventually, and it may take time, the technology will reach the point where that fair share will be zero, because they will stop using the grid. Once the technology reaches that point, it will be too late for the electric utilities to do anything except watch customers leave. They should be working now to find a more suitable relationship between the utility and solar residential customers that isn't adversarial. Because in short run the utilities have a lot of power over the situation, but in the long run they have very little. They should use their power while they can to create something that ensures a future where their customers still need them. There are lots of ways to do that. Demanding solar customers pay huge amounts for the privilege of being utility customers is not one of them.

First, if you don't trust Cisco and Akamai to that extent, how do you intend to avoid transporting any of your data on networks that use any of their hardware or software?

Second, I think a lot of people really have no idea how SSL/TLS actually work. There's two forms of trust involved with SSL certificate authorities. The first involves the server operators. Server ops have to trust that CAs behave reasonably when it comes to protecting the process of acquiring certs in a domain name. But that trust has nothing to do with actually using the service. Whether you use a CA or not, you have to trust that *all* trusted CAs behave accordingly. If Let's Encrypt, or Godaddy, or Network Solutions, is compromised or acts maliciously they can generate domain certs that masquerade as you whether you use them or not. As a web server operator if you don't trust Let's Encrypt, not using their service does nothing to improve the situation, because they can issue certs on your behalf whether you use them or not - so can Mozilla, so can Microsoft, so can Godaddy.

The real trust is actually on the end user side: they, or rather their browsers, trust CAs based on which signing certs they have in their repositories. Its really end users that have to decide if they trust a server and server identity or not, and the SSL cert system is designed to assist them, not server operators, to make a reasonable decision. If you, as an end user decide not to trust Let's Encrypt, you can revoke their cert from your browser. Then your browser will no longer trust Let's Encrypt certs and generate browser warnings when communicating with any site using them, and you as the end user can then decide what to do next, including deciding not to connect to them.

Seeing as how the point of the service is to improve the adoption of TLS for sites that don't currently use it, refusing to trust a Let's Encrypt protected website that was going pure cleartext last week seems totally nonsensical to me, unless you also don't trust HTTP sites as well and refuse to connect to anything that doesn't support HTTPS.

Lastly, if you literally don't trust anybody, I don't know how you could even use the internet in any form in the first place. You have to place a certain level of trust in the equipment manufacturers, the software writers, the transport networks. If all of them acted maliciously, you can't trust anything you send or do.

I don't necessarily trust the Let's Encrypt people enough to believe they will operate the system perfectly, and I don't believe they are absolutely immune from compromise. But I do think the motives of people adding encryption to things currently not encrypted at all is likely to be reasonable, because no malicious actor would be trying to make it easier to encrypt sites that have lagged and would otherwise continue to lag behind adopting any protection at all. Even if they are capable of compromising the system, that is quixotic at best. Even in the best case scenario they would be making things a lot harder for themselves, and in the long run getting people accustomed to using encryption with a system like this can only accelerate the adoption of even stronger encryption down the road.

If you have no idea who Warren Ellis is and have no intention of actually doing any research, what possible benefit could listing any of his works be to having any appreciation or context to an interview?

In any case, three of his most well known works are actually *mentioned* in the interview; namely Planetary, Transmetropolian, and his run on Hellblazer. I'm also fond of his work on The Authority which is also very well known. I also know he scripted the animated Justice League Unlimited episode called "Dark Heart" that was about the nanotech weapon that landed on Earth.

And jeez, learn to use the rest of the internet, or unlearn the little random bits.

Its trivially easy to make server software that doesn't crash. Just send all exceptions into an infinite loop. I think not crashing is a common prrequisite, but far from sufficient requirement for a reliable server. In fact, for some software like filesystems and databases crashing is almost not relevant to reliability: crashing to prevent data corruption is what reliable systems do in some contexts.

"Reliability" is when the software does what it is designed to do. That can include protective crash dumping. "Availability" is when the software is always running. Well designed and implemented software is both reliable and available, which is another way of saying its always running, and always running correctly.

I have no idea why people keep saying this, as if the only valid reason to express pride is to express feelings of superiority or requesting acknowledgement of accomplishment. The way I use the word, and the way the dictionary defines it, allows for pride to express positive feelings of association, and to express self-esteem particularly to contrast with the expectation of the opposite. For example, during and immediately following World War II, many Japanese Americans expressed pride in being Japanese Americans. Some served the military during the war and were proud of their accomplishments, but others did not and were only expressing pride in being associated with a demographic that was often denigrated but did noteworthy things. I don't recall hearing people ask why a Japanese American would express pride in being Japanese when that was not their choice: the reason for making the statement was obvious at the time, as is the reasons for declaring pride in being gay today. Except for people being deliberately obtuse.

People assume the biggest source of SAN failures is a hardware failure, and believe hardware redundancy makes SANs less likely to fail. In my experience, that's false. The biggest source of SAN failures are (usually human-) induced problems from the outside. Plug the wrong FC card with the wrong firmware, knock out the switching layer. Upgrade controller incorrectly, bring down SAN. Perform maintenance incorrectly, wipe the array. SANs go down all the time, and often for very difficult to predict reasons. I saw a SAN that no one had made any hardware or software changes to in months just suddenly crap out when the network that connected it to its replication partner began to experience flapping which noticeably affected no one except the SAN, which decided a world without reliable replication was not worth living in and committed suicide by blowing away half its LUNs.

Keep in mind the last time I saw a hard drive die and take out a RAID array was so long ago I can't remember. However, the last time I saw a RAID *controller* take out a RAID array - and blow the data away on the array - was only a couple of years ago. Its important to understand where the failure points in a system are, particularly when it comes to storage. These days, they often are not where most people are trained to look. Unless you are experienced with larger scale storage, you're not trained to look where the problems tend to be.

Storage fails. Any vendor that tells you they sell one of something that doesn't fail is lying through his teeth. Anything you have one of you will one day have to deal with having zero of. It doesn't matter how "reliable" the parts in the one thing are. You should plan accordingly.

Something to look at which works for both Windows XP and Windows 7 are software restriction policies, which are a form of whitelisting build into Windows. With Windows 7 Enterprise or Ultimate editions, you can also use Applocker which is a more sophisticated version of software restriction policies. I'm not an expert on SRP or Applocker, but I believe both can be used to lock down a desktop and prevent users from running or somehow causing to run any executables except for the ones you whitelist. That won't prevent all possible malware from infecting the system, but between that and malwarebytes I think that would provide significant protection for this specific use case, and you wouldn't have to retrain the users to switch from Windows to a Linux desktop.

Lots of people want to touch production systems. In the case of the internet and BGP, however, evolution has weeded out the people who like to touch production systems, and the only people with administrative rights are still getting over having to support 32-bit AS numbers and wondering where their pet dinosaur went.

The word of someone who believes they can break their word if the people they are giving it to is not worthy of it is completely valueless at all times.

The problem you're describing is a problem that neither ZFS nor BTRFS is capable of handling either. Both checksum data on disk, but are vulnerable to errors that occur anywhere else in the write path starting from network clients through the OS. That's why ECC or fault tolerant memory is explicitly recommended for ZFS enterprise servers; a bit flip in memory is impossible for ZFS to correct for or detect in most cases.

That's a good thing/bad thing. Its what allows BTRFS to gain n+1 redundancy per data chunk on odd numbers of drives or in arrays where the number of drives changes, because mirroring isn't geometry-specific. But with disk mirrored vdevs you have the case where you can lose either half of the mirror for any vdev with no data loss. In other words, with four drives organized as two sets of mirrors, I can lose any two drives as long as they are not both members of the same mirror. With chunk-based mirroring once you lose a single drive you can't be certain the next drive failure anywhere won't fail the array without knowing exactly how the chunks are mirrored. That's not what people generally expect when they use "mirroring" and that mismatch can cause problems in maintaining arrays. Honestly, if ZFS could do that kind of mirroring with metaslabs, I would personally turn it off.

If I was going to look at more advanced device redundancy and management storage, I would probably jump past btrfs and go to Ceph. There I can not only add storage devices however I want, I can also scale up the number of storage servers any way I want. Its still a developing system, but then again so is btrfs.

Although people ask for it often, I'm unaware of that feature being on anyone's implementation roadmap. Part of the problem I think is that there's a difference between supporting a feature, and having that feature be problematic to use. Its unclear to me how useful btrfs rebalance is in RAID5/6 arrays with large drives. It could impact performance enough to make it annoying to use in the general case. That's one of the reasons why even hardware RAID5/6 is not used as much in servers with high performance requirements. The cost to rebuild makes it prohibitive to recover from a drive failure.

Even for a home array, I'm more inclined to use mirroring than RAIDX, and ZFS does allow you to add mirror pairs to pools composed of mirrored vdevs. In other words, you can make a pool with four drives set up as two pairs of mirrored vdevs, and then later add drives in pairs of mirrors and dynamically resize the entire array across the new drives. That's not what you're looking for, but its what ZFS users typically do instead, which is why there is less pressure to add dynamically adding disks to RAIDZ vdevs not as high as you might expect.

That's true in broad strokes, but you're overlooking key details. First, the automatic cooling systems were shut off. Second, when the power dropped to very low levels the operators instead of allowing the reactor to bring power up normally disabled the control rod systems designed to ensure the reactor couldn't "bounce critical" when they removed control rods to bring up power. And finally, when the test did not go as planned, and after several previous failures, the operators of the reactor went off-script and began overriding other safety features such as the coolant override systems in an attempt to drive the reactor to the desired test parameters.

You're not correct about the behavior of the control rods. The problem was a design issue of the control rods which caused them to displace coolant and neutron moderators as they are inserted, which means there's a short lag between when the control rods begin moderating the reaction and when they ironically increase the reaction due to reducing the effects of coolant moderation. This always happens, not just in "hot" reactors, but in a normally functioning reactor this is not a problem because the momentary increase in reaction is not significant. But all of the operators' previous actions caused the reactor to be placed into an extremely unstable situation. In particular, had they not disabled the automatic control rod safety systems the reactor would have automatically moderated them out of the unstable situation. But because they had essentially taken control away from the control rod systems for most of the control rods, the reactor could not effectively stop the problem the operators were introducing.

System logs show the operators did not simply try to lower the control rods back into the reactor to slow it down, they had attempted an emergency scram which drops all the control rods into the reactor at once. They would have only done that in response to an emergency condition. Which means when they did what you are pointing to as the cause of the accident, they were already in the middle of an accident. What they did not know was that they had already put the reactor into a condition beyond the ability of a scram to fix.