Because there is a space calorie limit or something? Go beyond 2000 calorie a day requirement and the whole universe does a divide by zero function and disappears?

Fist off, the caloric requirements are likely to be quite diverse between flight and time on Mars. If physical exertion is needed, even tiny women can burn a lot of calories. Which beings up the second issue.

On a trip where failure of food sources means starving to death between here and Mars, there had better be a lot of redundancy. And each step of redundancy dilutes that 1000 calorie a day difference.

The psychological aspects are interesting also. The most competent females I know, my wife and a some co-workers, are wildly hated by their female co-workers. These are all professional, job first, females, who are the equal of any man in the office doing the same work.

But the other women in the offices hate them with a passion. "Who'd she screw to get that job?" "She's such a bitch!" My wife was tall and slender, and battled years of bulimia/anorixic comments, and one of the others was into lifinting weights, and the other a very outdoorsy person, so they were called "dykes". All are physically attractive, which just made things worse for them. All were completely accepted by the men they work with, and ostracised by the other females. And each one is a very nice person to boot.

Now I won't be so bold as to declare that the problem is a normal state, but imagine if that situation erupted on board a female-only Mars mission.

The unfortunate thing is that since such a mission if undertaken, would have to select for women who were hated by many other women.

Who might then complain regardless, as the psychological requirements kept them out of the job.

Soldered. From the Apple Store page for the 'mini: "Memory This Mac mini comes standard with 8GB of 1600MHz LPDDR3 memory. Please note that the memory is built into the computer, so if you think you may need more memory in the future, it is important to upgrade at the time of purchase."

IIRC, there has never been a quad in the 'mini. Heat dissipation issues.

You speak wisdom AC. I know it isn't fashionable, but my experience in the workplace is that a mix of the sexes would work much better than an all female crew.

Over 30+ years, we had a lot of differnet ratios of gender mix. When we got too many females, it could get very interesting, as there would be a lot of fighting. We had three separate women at three separate times that bitched up the department big time.

When near equal, the men would tend to clean up their act, the women would bring a different perspective, and everything was a lot more harmonious.

We have to remember that while it is fashionable to blame every inter-gender problem on the male of the species, it would be unrealistic that assume that the female of the species has no faults. Put them together, and you can get synergy. And one thing you really really need, millions of miles away from home, is synergy.

Think of the children godamn it!!

The problem with these scenarios lies in the following:

Some years back, AOL had a feature to allow people to click on messages as spam. Say a post is spam, and boom, whoever you called the spammer couldn't post to anyone on AOL again.

And you know what some people considered spam and checked on? Simple disagreement. Simple things like my reply to you. Some people in groups became spam police, and you didn't even have to be conversing with them.

Hell, even today, there are some religiuos folks in some groups who will turn you in for TOS violations based on disagreement.

So while it sounds all very well to talk about all the threats of violence or bomb threats (which should be simple terroristic threats not as trolling), the idea of criminalizing trolling leads to a nasty world where you can be the subject of a police investigation for simple disagreement.

And I don't know how it is in Great Britain, but here in America, a DA trying to prove he is tough on crime will be happy to send your sorry patoot to prison to prove he doesn't put up with any crap.

It would be a slippery slope if there weren't examples of it already happening.

I raped a woman.

What did you do?

I murderd my little sister

Hey new guy! What did you do?

I typed "You mad bro?" to someone.

Holy fuck, man - you're hardcore!

If it can't be done with a Smartphone, it isn't worth doing

Lest anyone misunderstand, We might as well try to crap gold bricks.

The problem is that the pluggable employee simply doesn't exist. And it never will for almost any position on the planet above the completely menial.

Where I worked, we had three employees with the exact same job description as my own, and they all had the appropriate education.

But through the situation, I had lots of other education due to a longer career. an ability to think fast on my feet, and willingness to do whatever it took to get the job done. The other two performed adequately according to the job description. I could go into my customers, do my job as defined, plus fix their computers, even troubleshoot the electronics they were working on. And I'd stay all night to get any of those done.

The others performed just fine in their respective fields, but anything I would just step in and fix would take several more people, therefore despite my making a lot more money, a lot of folks were requesting my services rather than my less expensive but fully qualified (in the job description) co workers. Who were not at all pluggable into what I could do

It was hilarious to watch HR try to quantify my job tasks. They gave up in the end.

So until all humans have the same outlook, the same abilities, the same career paths, and the same attitude, Plug-in people won't work.

You?

Netcraft confims, you win a Beowulf cluster of internets.

You're right, of course.

When I looked into ZFS on OS X as a way to do an ultra-fault-tolerant RAID for a friend's massive media collection (after I painstakingly recovered the data on his Buffalo RAID, as per my original post), the state of the state wasn't very promising, and so I ultimately punted on the idea. But it most certainly looks like the situation has MUCH improved, thanks in large part to the efforts of the OpenZFS Group.

Maybe now Apple will come around and take another look at full-support of ZFS, like what was going to happen in Snow Leopard Server, before Apple got cold feet.

Fortunately, Apple tends to listen to its Userbase pretty well, and there appears to be renewed interest among Users for full-on ZFS Support in OS X. At least we can hope...

At least OpenZFS is now compatible with the newly-released OS X 10.10 (Yosemite).

Thanks for the info!

Well, at least a few ZFS (albeit non-bootable?) versions that work at least up to Mavericks (10.9) seem to be alive and well on OS X, as seen here and here. And here is an informative forum thread from someone who has been using ZFS as his primary filesystem on OS X for over 2 years.

However, to answer the GGP's concerns about not supporting ZFS on a boot drive: If you are truly running a "Server"-type of setup, why, oh, why would you be keeping your main data stores on the System (boot) Drive, anyway? And once you are past that point, then it seems like ZFS is pretty much as "supported" on OS X as it is on most *NIX-based systems. That is to say, to a somewhat greater or lesser extent, depending on your needs/expectations.

But if does seem like ZFS on OS X is anything but a "dead" issue, at least as far as the F/OSS community is concerned. Yes, it would be very nice for Apple to take another look at full-support of ZFS, now that it has matured. Let's hope they get serious about it again someday...