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?

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.

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

Why shouldn't they? People building that close to disaster are a giant liability payout waiting to happen. This is pretty much a textbook case of "preexisting condition". If someone chooses their home's location so poorly, why should I have to subsidize their stupidity with higher premiums on my non-poorly-located property? If those builders want to take the risk, let them pay for it.

In response to this attack, the team that develops Simurgh has instituted a check that will warn the user if they are running a compromised version of the software

Ummm, and an attacker would be unable to modify the verifyIntegrity() function to return "I'm perfectly OK!"?

That's so sweetly naive and incredibly wrong. My wife and I are married and share a joint checking account. There's no difference between "my money" and "her money" at any important level; even if we kept track of who contributed how much, it still gets stirred into the same pot. It's not like I take her to dinner with "my money" and she buys clothes with "her money", regardless of whether we pretend that's the case.

It's the same with Planned Parenthood. Ultimately, they have a total budget. The government pays for non-abortion services, but the end result is that by financing those services, PP is freed up to spend some of its other-sourced money on abortions.

I'm sure that Planned Parenthood has a spreadsheet that demonstrates that abortion funds and non-abortion funds are separate. That's nice. But realistically, it's all drawn from the same pool.

Please tell me it's not screenshot compatible, because that's the ugliest freaking mess of a horrid GUI editor that I've encountered. Otherwise, no wonder I've seen so many Windows devs with multiple huge monitors: they'd need them to be able to see a useful amount of code at one time. Seriously, those screenshots dedicate, what, 20% of the window to actual content?

Strange to me that I do not recall writing this, but it's an almost perfect description of my upbringing and later re-evaluation.

I assure you you're not alone in your experience.

How would that be? Dams don't make the water go away. Over time, the amount of water going into the reservoir equals the amount leaving, or else the water levels would either drop or overflow the dam. The only significant change I'd see is that dams increase the surface area of the water and would therefore raise evaporation, so some of the water that would normally go downstream would turn into atmospheric moisture instead. For global warming purposes, that's probably not a good thing. But would it actually have a non-negligible effect on ocean levels?

1) "LOL I'M WAY SMARTER THAN TEH CHIP DESIGNERS". 2) So don't use those instructions when you need IEEE 754 math. 3) But do use them in your video decoder when you can sacrifice accuracy in the 5th digital of a float for 1/15th (.06668) the power consumption.