You didn't do very well in high-school Economics, did you?

I don't think those exceptions are so few. I'd say about 40% of Chicago is "socially" off-limits to white guys, and I imagine the same is true in Detroit, DC, New York, and LA. In a lot of neighborhoods in Chicago, a white dude can find himself in serious trouble simply because of his lack of melanin. Unless you look like a cop, which is why I've grown a sweet Ditka mustache and wear mirrored Ray-Bans.

Only if you're stuck in the LVM-on-Linux mindset, which frankly sucks. There are many reasons why; any of Jeff Bonwick's writings will explain these ZFS design choices. It's also one of the main reasons well-heeled shops run Linux volumes from SANs instead of just using LVM.

For example, LVM snapshots require space reservations, and copy a block to every snapshot with every write. This is extraordinarily slow, and gets worse with each additional snapshot. This makes LVM snapshots effectively unusable for high-volume server systems, where they are needed most.

How can filesystems that don't exist in stable release form yet be "better" than ZFS?

ZFS is far ahead of btrfs, both in terms of stability, features, and usability. Btrfs doesn't have parity RAID, dedupe, or replication yet. These are critical features for large-scale systems. In short, it isn't even close to ZFS. ZFS is also "cleaner" in my opinion, in both design and UI. Oracle funding most btrfs development also raises a question of btrfs momentum now that they own ZFS and Solaris.

No, it isn't. It is unethical, but perfectly legal.

And anyway, the Democratic party has the biggest paid shill operation in history, far exceeding anything the GOP does with a few bloggers. It's called Hollywood.

With high-density SSDs at roughly $2.50/GB, and high-density (8+ GB) server-class DIMMs at roughly $50/GB, there is still a huge window where SSDs are the right choice versus in-memory databases. For applications where the IOPS requriements exceed mechanical disk, and the data size isn't trivially small, SSDs are the logical choice if the factor of 100+ improvement in IOPS is enough. That includes the majority of IOPS-bound databases, I think.

When you add in the fact that SSDs are "drop-in" replacements for an existing architecture piece, and do not require any code or operational changes at all, the appeal is great. In-memory databases are, by and large, still niche products. You can run MySQL, PostgreSQL, Oracle, DB2, and MSSQL from SSDs simply by swapping out the mechanical drives.

It's funny. I do the same thing often the server space, but include total system costs, including chassis, memory, lifetime power & cooling costs, lifetime warranty and maintenance costs. These costs actually dominate the raw chip costs to such a degree that it almost always makes sense to buy the fastest processor you can and fully load the chassis with as much memory, networking, storage, etc. as you can. Assuming, of course, your workloads can actually use all those resources. Thanks to virtualization, this is pretty much always true these days.

I imagine this is why AMD has been so dominated by Intel in the server space in the last few years: a cheaper chip might make the TCO of a system 5% lower over 4 years. But if it is 30% slower, it's a bad deal.

Cameras don't prevent crime. They may help solve a crime after the fact, but I imagine a camera means little to a crackhead wearing a ski mask.

London is one example of this. Total "violence against the person" rates are largely unchanged in the last 5 years. Similar statistics can be seen in Chicago, USA, despite thousands of cameras added in "high crime" areas over the last 5 years. The cameras have been a bonanza for local contractors who install and maintain them, but that's about the only benefit.

To paraphrase Bruce Schneier, replacing smart people with dumb technology rarely results in increased security.

Which is... umm... pretty much exactly what Windows Vista, Windows 7, and Windows Server 2008 can do.

Wow, there's an app for haircuts too?

Chuck Norris, of course.

Yeah, OK.

Maybe. But not if your ISP is a tier-1 provider (like Sprint, Verizon, AT&T, Qwest). Or if your ISP has a crapload of private settlement-free peering arrangements that cover the traffic in question. This is far more common than people think. Looking at traceroutes, my ISP, for instance, seems to peer directly with Google, MSFT, Akamai, and Limelight. That's a huge chunk of traffic not crossing any "backbone". Tier-2 and smaller ISPs are happy to peer directly with these big boys for nothing, since it lowers their infrastructure costs and keeps traffic off connections for which they do pay.

Not really, at least most of the time. What we think of as the Internet "backbone" - the collection of Tier-1 providers - do "settlement-free" peering with each other. They do this because it is cheaper to simply connect up and let the data flow than it is to meter and bill each other for any imbalances. It's an exclusive club that resists new players, but some upstarts have "joined" or come very close in recent years (XO and Cogent).

You better stay the hell out of Europe. Police there have vastly greater powers of search, seizure, and detention than they do in the USA. I particularly enjoyed being "monitored" by two jackbooted thugs with sub-machine guns while being "interviewed" by customs in Frankfort. And that was in the late 90s, pre-9/11.

Actually, that's not such a terrible argument. If someone has such a fundamental disconnect with your own personal values that they promote something which you consider murder by natural law and common sense, it's very hard to trust them. You're simply too different to deal with one another.

I believe this is actually the same reason WWII ended for Japan in a mushroom cloud... we in the USA simply had no basis for understanding how the Japanese people at the time thought - their culture was too different. It was alien to us that a nation - including civilians - would effectively commit suicide to preserve traditions and a notion of honor that we just didn't understand. I fear the same divide exists between the western world and fundamentalist Islam - we simply can't grok them, nor they us.

Do you trust apt/yum/portage/whatever on your Linux/BSD distro of choice? Same thing... you trust that the developer's code-signing and key management policies are solid, and they won't dick you by releasing something really bad.

If you're not turning on automatic updates on Windows boxes (and even MacOS and Linux boxes), you might be part of the problem. Yes, you should have centralized patch review and deployment in place for all the machines you manage... but make sure it is all of them. All my company's servers and workstations have managed deployments, but I've configured Mom's laptop to get all updates ASAP straight from the vendor so I don't have to fuck with it and she remains malware-free. She hasn't had major breakage from an automatic update from any vendor in more than a decade (unless you count Adobe, whose best code is still horribly broken). There are probably 20-30 machines I "manage" informally at any given time, and I don't want to tackle patching them interactively, or deal with setting up my own WSUS or apt repository for them.