You are both unnecessarily aggressive and downright foolish. I simply don't care. Yet you threaten me and my country with annihilation in your foolish paranoia. As for wiping out my 'piss-ant' country, well you already overturned our democratically elected government and replaced it with puppets in 1975. Not much more you can do. At least it wasn't violent. But so what. America will eventually collapse from its own internal rot as have all other "water" empires.

Yes. In Australia and the UK and various other places lawyers can and are sanctioned for bringing frivolous actions.

Which continent? You would be correct for North America. Not so much elsewhere.

However, the debt is now so high that the rest of the world wonders if you (the USA) has the capability to pay it back. I the rich are not taxed and military spending is not reigned in then is is more than possible that you do not have that capability.

No. There is no need to retract anything. I made no erroneous claim. Stop trolling.

Which is precisely what I said. The filesystem metadata that is _used_ is in memory. It is periodically _saved_ to disk iff there have been changes (i-node 0 for standard unix filesystems).

I'm not confusing anything. I know exactly how it works.

There is s difference between filesystem metadata and file metadata. You mention scientific and engineering uses as being particularly bad when it is my belief that the system architects are the cause of this. It is common to find bad architects in those fields. Directory structure is important. If you do not understand the particular filesystem architecture you cannot design for good and fast access. If you want a good fast access system it is absolutely necessary to understand things at that level. Most delays are not in accessing the file itself or the data within it but actually finding the file (or the bit you want) in the first place.

That really depends on the directory layout and directory sizes. Study the i-node structure to understand why.

Traditional filesystems hold their metadata on disc? Ermmm... Exactly what do you think that the 'sync' command does. Traditionally metadata is held in memory and periodically written to disc for storage.