My major criticism of btrfs is the horrid sync performance. Hosting virtual machines tends to require lots of small writes to disk that make btrfs incredibly non-performant.

ZFS has similar problems, FYI. If you run VM's on it, you have two choices. Buy SSD's for the ZIL, or disable the ZIL.

C//

It wasn't just perception that killed the housing market. The homes were objectively over valued. Things like rental value to investment cost actually matter. The change in perception involved people waking up to that.

80% profit? I can believe that NG was slow to submit, but this was not a government contract. Either that, or you don't really know what you're talking about here.

This could have back fired. Threatening to call someone at 8AM every day until some outcome occurs... this is not a good idea at all. Supposing you catch a narcissistic CEO (and aren't they all narcissistic?) in a bad mood (and can't you imagine them in a bad mood, the job is actually a high stress one), then one possible outcome is the next phone call you get is from their corporate counsel advising you to not to attempt to extort their executive staff.

C//

Well, sometimes we can think up things that are "better" that are nevertheless unfeasible and even possibly ethically dubious. Disabling "all"
  patents would put every major drug manufacturer out of business. Software companies, on the other hand, wouldn't even blink.

One reason I'm against software patents is that copyrights cover software companies adequately.

No. You aren't.

Deliberately rude, are we?

Political reasoning is abhorrently dishonest, even in really smart people. Curiously enough, the mind prevents us from seeing just how dishonest we are being with ourselves.

In my mind it's all about confirmation bias. Which is to say, when confronted with a larger list of facts to assess, human beings have a remarkable ability to select only a small subset of the facts and use those to confirm their beliefs. I encountered this last year. I will relay the anecdote.

Sometime last year a study came out that "proved" that caffeine drinkers who regularly drink caffeine induce no practical effect to themselves, and only restore themselves to what would be a baseline level. Over a twenty year period I have read summaries on many, many caffeine studies. This particular study stood alone as an outlier in a much larger field of study. I noted this with amusement and went on with my life.

One day not so long later, I was getting coffee at work. A coworker of mine intruded to attempt to tell me about the study. I cut him off cold, and was quite irritated. This coworker was Mormon. I did not need to mire in the narrowly minded comfort-confirmed mentality of someone who is able to learn nothing else. It's just sad, really.

Of course on the subject of global warming, the issue is political. I once heard a great definition of politics, once: "politics is who gets what". It's true. While politics is about many things, it's certainly about resource allocation, and when you consider it from that perspective, and decide to tolerate the notion that for human beings resource allocation will always be highly contentious, what you will do is become a bit jaded like me, which is to say, unsurprised, disdainful, and accepting of the ugliness of politics all at the same time.

C//

if the globe warms, but the temperature in a specific area of the globe remains well below freezing, that area could very easily accumulate more ice, particularly if the warmer globe carries more water vapour to that area than it otherwise would.

I am personally rather indifferent to the whole GW/AGW affair. That said, it's just silly to infer that extra snow means the globe isn't warming. For example, consider: if 100 billion tons of ice melts at the poles, and global snow levels then increase, in winter, when was the water cooler: 1) when it spent all year round being ice, or 2) when it spends 4 months a year as ice? If you guessed #1, you'd be right.

Of course, I can ask the question a different way, and just make you mental. If the globe is warming, and the average temperature goes up, would it be possible for the increased water vapor as it traveled across the poles to actually generate an expanding ice sheet? If you agreed that it was possible, you'd be right.

Now the part that will make you mental is that these two questions imply answers that could be superficially viewed as contradictory. I'm fun at a party, eh?

C//

While patents may have a great deal of benefit in many of their use cases, software/process patents are an abortion that needs to be flushed down the toilet.