That is a fairly naive viewpoint. No business approaches loans in this way. A loan is a contract, with terms that apply in the event of default, and terms governing repayment. Defaulting on a loan has consequences, but most businesses do not view it as a moral issue. If it ever becomes advantageous to default on a loan, they will do so. If it is advantageous to take measures to hinder attempts at collection, they will do this as well. As far as they're concerned, it isn't theft - it is just the terms of the agreement the lender agreed to. Most nations have bankruptcy laws, and sovereign nations have, well, sovereignty. Lenders who agree to make loans do so with full knowledge of these laws.

So, if a person declares bankruptcy I do not believe they are committing theft - the lender understood the bankruptcy laws when they freely made the loan, and they did so at an interest rate that they considered profitable even in light of this risk. Likewise, when a bank lends to a sovereign nation, they do so knowing that they have very little recourse if the nation chooses to default on the loan.

To the extent that anybody was forced to loan money against their will, they might be able to claim that whoever forced them to lend money was a thief.

Well, the solution is simple then - they should just default. As long as they are internally self-sufficient as you assert, it won't be a problem for them. They won't be able to borrow money for a long time, but they shouldn't have to.

However, I'm not convinced their cash flow is nearly as rosy as you suggest. And of course they need to be able to defend their own borders/etc if they don't want somebody ticked off about their debts to come looking to collect.

And this is a general problem with federated governments. When it comes to socialism/etc they tend to be a race to the bottom, because companies can effectively pay the lowest tax rate anywhere in the federation. It happens in the US as well - if a US state wanted to raise state income taxes to 60% and pay basic income to all their residents, their employment would go to zero because companies would flee the state, since they could do so while still being able to sell their wares in the state's market, since US states cannot interfere with interstate commerce. This is why US states are only "laboratories of democracy" to a limited extent.

If you want to have different tax rates and social policies, then you need to have tariffs at the border. That is obviously a two-edged sword, but it is still the reality of the economics.

Somehow I doubt that is going to work on my $70 Seagate 7200RPM hard drive plugged into my $50 motherboard or $20 SATA controller card. However, by all means let me know if it will.

Plus, COW filesystems offer a lot more than just data checksumming.

Agree, as the other reply pointed out as well. And you can do the same with mdadm raid too (though obviously with none of the benefits btrfs/zfs bring for data integrity like checksumming and copy-on-write). Mdadm will also let you reshape an array in place (that is change raid levels or number of disks), though with mdadm that will often result in messing up your stripe alignment and of course it is more likely to eat your data if something goes wrong since if it finds a parity mismatch it has no way to know which copy is bad.

I was just commenting that btrfs tends to have a lot of features that appeal to small system users that you'll actually find missing on zfs, even if it is far less mature overall, and lacking in many enterprise-scale features. It just reflects the emphasis of the developers behind it.

I really can't complain about zfs - it is a great filesystem. However, things like not being able to reshape an array or mix disk sizes in an array are some of the things that hold me back from adopting it. Heck, btrfs will let you switch from raid1 to raid5 without touching any of the data already written - newly-allocated chunks will use raid5 and existing chunks will continue to use raid1 - it doesn't manage arrays at the whole-device level. In practice though you're likely to tell it to rebalance your data of course.

Sure, but with btrfs you can just add one drive and sometimes get its entire capacity added to your array - it works fine with mixed-size disks.

Of course, it might just decide not to boot the next day, and that is the downside to btrfs. It does tend to be a bit more friendly in scenarios where you have a small number of disks, though, which was my main point.

Perhaps, but my point was more that if you want to grow ZFS this is the ONLY way to actually do it, as far as I'm aware. You can't add individual drives to individual "vdevs."

The problem is that the feature-list for ZFS is very enterprise-oriented.

Why would you want to add just one drive to a server with 5x 6-drive RAID6 arrays? Just add another 6 drives at a time.

On the other hand, if you have a PC with 3 drives in RAID5, you could easily want to turn that into a 4-drive RAID5 or a 5-drive RAID6 in-place.

Btrfs has a lot of features that are useful for smaller deployments, like being able to modify the equivalent of a vdev in-place. ZFS on the other hand has a lot of features like ZIL that are very useful for larger deployments.

Agree. RTGs aren't actually all that efficient - they're a very primitive form of nuclear power. Their advantage is in their simplicity and longevity, which makes them great for things like spacecraft that need low power for VERY long duration, and where repairs are impossible.

You'd need a pretty big aircraft before nuclear turns into a viable option.

I'm interested in whether this is limited to ONLY proprietary research.

I could actually see an argument for banning export of such research. Do we really want companies finding flaws in widely-used software, keeping those flaws secret from the software vendors and the general public, but then selling details on those flaws to others who could potentially turn around and exploit them? In a sense, this does sound like a munition.

I don't see the same concern with public research. If you disclose a vulnerability publicly, then everybody can fix it, and that strengthens the ecosystem instead of weakening it.

If the ban were limited to proprietary research, I don't see it as a bad thing. Of course, it does nothing to keep companies from selling their findings to NSA contractors and such, but I don't expect the US to lift a finger to ban practices like these.

In my experience the problem isn't getting everybody to not scribble on the board. The problem is that everybody has a 14" monitor and it is just really hard to do anything freehand on such a display. Maybe with graphics tablets and better software it might work.

Even diagramming something solo is a mess in my experience. I tend to end up doing mindmaps or outlines in Word or visio, but the last tends to be pretty painful to do quickly.

The powerpoint is shared over webex, which is how everybody is connected to the meeting? :)

Sure, but you can ONLY use it while it is under your control if the embedded keys cannot be extracted.

If they can, then you can duplicate the key and return the original, perhaps undetected. That gives you the ability to retain access to whatever was secured.

There is definitely value in tamper-resistant key vaults.

There is a really simple solution to this. Allow users to set their own QoS rules, and the ISPs respect them, and can charge a different rate for different levels of service.

So, if you just want your SYNs prioritized it isn't a problem, and it probably won't cost you much. If you want your bittorrent traffic prioritized, that also isn't a problem, and it will cost you a fortune.

If everybody tried to ship all their mail/etc FedEx priority overnight FedEx would grind to a halt for months until they scaled up. It isn't a problem, and there are no limitations on what can be sent priority overnight, but people regulate themselves because most will not pay $70 to ship something when the $7 service that takes 2 days longer is good enough.

No argument there. However, project management and diagramming on a whiteboard remotely are really two different problems.