I've been running ZFS on FreeBSD for a few years and it's lived up to its promises, but I think I'll be migrating off of it. The problem is that I trusted Sun. They did some goofy things, but you knew where you stood with them. They release ZFS under an Open Source license? You could take them at face value and know that you were allowed to use it. But now that Oracle holds the reins, I have no desire to depend on any Sun-borne projects anymore. Yes, ZFS is Open Source. So was Java, and Google just spent roughly a bazillion dollars defending themselves for using something that looked like it. I can't afford to take on a case like that.

Other than the Oracle-owned btrfs, what ZFS alternatives are available and ready for use today?

Only half joking, my freshman math professor actually did this. He was finishing up his doctorate at the time he taught the class I was in. Couple years later he was in a CS class with me. He'd decided the pure math jobs out there were crap, but math programming there was a market for.

The problem is that tanks and jets are pretty good for larger scale destruction, they aren't so good for keeping a population in check. For that you need soldiers on the ground, and that is real hard to do if you are literally getting shot at from every windows (the US doesn't have 10,000 armed citizens, it has more like 100,000,000). I mean yes, ultimately the government could (in theory, if the soldiers would obey) simply turn its nuclear weapons on the citizens and level all the cities. Ok fine, but to what end? What do you get as ruler of a glass radioactive parking lot?

The US military is well equipped to unleash destruction, as we've seen. However they are not well equipped to do an occupation, as we've also seen. So it would be rather difficult for the government to suppress a massive rebellion with high tech weapons, and not also annihilate its cities at the same time.

Also you might ask how useful the planes would be if a massive armed force attacked the airfields and so on.

Large amounts of people with small arms are quite an effective guerrilla force.

That's not really true, but it's a risky proposition. I grew up in a religious family, and the last church I attended as an adult was wonderfully logic-driven. The preacher was fantastic, and he presented every sermon almost like a mathematical proof. He'd start with some basic axioms from the belief system ("the Bible is literally true", "Jesus is a real person and said everything credited to him exactly like the Bible says, barring negligible translation mismatches", etc.). Then he'd present a premise and build a formal proof for it based upon facts derived from those axioms. Sometimes he reached some surprising conclusions, but as in math class, if you accept the axioms then you can't really disagree with results that come from them.

But that works both ways. By presenting an effectively bulletproof belief framework, it's left open to disproof by formal methods. In my case, that was disproof by counterexample, where the premises were "the world is 6,000 years old" and "God loves us", and the counterexample was "there's a vast amount of hard evidence that the Earth and universe are billions of years old". Given that "the Earth is more than 6,000 years old" is roughly as demonstrable as "the sky is blue", that led to at least one of two conclusions: either God hates us and wants to trick us for some sociopathic reason known only to Him, or one of those axioms was invalid. And once you reach that point, what axiom do you throw out? "The Bible is literally true" is the obvious choice. But there's a huge amount of other conclusions predicated upon that axiom's validity, and once it disappears...

Ever had everything you know yanked out from under you in an instant? It sucks. But that's the risk of rigorous examination of religious beliefs. If you examine them closely enough to "prove" that your beliefs are true, then you run the very real risk of demonstrating that they're not.

There's Washington DC. They have some of the toughest gun laws in the US, yet also one of the highest violent crime and murder rates.

So you have to ask is it really the gun laws doing it, or do the places have lower crime for other reasons?

You have to realize that there are many different conditions in different countries that lead to different crime rates. One example is Canada, quite a low homicide rate. Now they aren't nearly as gun friendly as the US (but then pretty much nobody is) but civilians can get firearms up to things like AR-15s. Also guns could easily be illegally smuggled from the US, since the border security is very, very lax.

It isn't as easy as just saying "Oh well this European country doesn't allow guns and they have less crime." Ok sure, but maybe they just have less crime period. The guns don't make much difference.

Correct. Today's market looks almost exactly as if MS was not selling smartphones before iPhone came along.

We wont' don't worry, budget is ALWAYS an issue where I work (state university). The main area I'd have interest in it is not staff and faculty computers, though I'd want to try it there, but labs. We have a bunch of instructional labs, many of which run software not available to students to use at home. If I virtualized all of that, then they could run it anywhere. Also it would make it easy to restructure labs for multiple classes. A lab that was normally used for a class that just does light C programming work could be repurposed for a class doing HFSS simulations no problem since they'd just log in to the HFSS VMs (HFSS needs a shit ton of power and memory, not the kind of thing you can afford to buy for every lab).

I'm not sold on it as the One True Way(tm), as should be obvious, but I think it could work well and if we had budget, I'd try it. However we don't, so individual systems it stays. That works just fine, and will keep working just fine.

It worked to crack my father-in-law's WEP-secured, SSID hidden network in about 30 minutes of capturing, and a couple minutes cracking. For what it's worth, key length was 10 digits.

I did plug in the power supply for the operation, since it does suck the juice as noted above.

My father-in-law uses WEP at his house since he's got at least one laptop that won't work with anything else. To be extra secure -- in his estimation -- he hides the SSID. When they visit me, he asks me to switch my router to WEP so he can use my wireless network. I decline and just hand him a long cable and point him to a wired port.

On the other hand, when I visit them, I don't need to bother him to dig out the WEP key for me. Sniffing and cracking is faster than him going through his piling system.

Well if I had an unlimited (or at least much larger) budget I'd do it for stability and convenience reasons. A proper VDI setup would be much more stable because everything would run on high end server backends, and have full redundancy. The thin clients are quite cheap so we'd have extras and if one broke down we'd just grab another and slap it in the person's office.

Plus it would be very flexible. You could log in and get your desktop anywhere in the building, or indeed the world. So for the professors that have offices in multiple buildings there would be nothing to roaming their data or anything, because any station you used would be your stuff. Also you can do things like snapshot a user's desktop when you are trying upgrades and so on.

Flexible hardware wise too. So long as the back end is nice and powerful, people can be assigned a lot of resources, and that can be grown on a moment's notice. So if someone was previously just doing Office and web shit, but now needs to do Matlab simulations there's no waiting to upgrade the computer, just reconfig their node on the backend.

I think it would be quite a nice setup. As I said though the cost would be the issue. It would require very powerful quality servers, in a configuration that offered redundancy with failover, a fully redundant network, some very fast, reliable storage, and so on. It would cost far more to do it than what we have on desktops.

If we spent the same as we did on desktops the system would be unreliable without depth, and a failure would take out a large number of people rather than just one. Also net user experience would be worse due to lack of resources for the client instances.

It is a "do it right or don't do it" kind of thing. Do it right, you get a better more flexible environment, at a greater cost. However you don't get cost savings by doing it wrong.