Where are the space arks? 

The great and terrible scientific and technological inventions we associate with the present are almost all more than half a century old... During that axial age, humanity dreamed of ecumenopolises, of heavy industry and its by-products removed off-planet, of giant cylindrical worlds in orbit, of towers stretching into the heavens, of Dyson swarms of man-made infrastructure harvesting the full power of the Sun, of a Kardeshev II civilisation capable of re-engineering the solar system. These dreams already seem absurd.

"Our intuitive interpretation in such cases seems to arise from the association of connected ideas, not by logical inference on the basis of known facts about the world."

The concept of cat face

Silently corrupt

This is a terrifying bug: any ZoL pool that was created with v0.6.4 and above (released April 8, 2015) is corrupt. Worst of all, it is silently corrupt.

Silently corrupted file in snapshots after send/receive

ZFS on Linux with LUKS startup automount; Ubuntu 16.04

When ZFS became a first class citizen under Ubuntu, the issue of ZFS on Linux with LUKS not auto-mounting properly at startup was finally addressed in Xenial 16.04.

The following steps successfully produced a successful auto-mount on a nightly build of Xenial in VirtualBox:

# list block devices using /dev/disk/by-id
sudo ls /dev/disk/by-id

# identify the block device for the LUKS container; here, the example is a VirtualBox device
ata-VBOX_HARDDISK_VBd5b297e5-009dc9f9

# create a key file
sudo dd if=/dev/urandom of=/root/key bs=1024 count=64

# encrypt [using defaults here for simplicity] target block device with key file
sudo cryptsetup luksFormat /dev/disk/by-id/ata-VBOX_HARDDISK_VBd5b297e5-009dc9f9 /root/key

# find the newly encrypted LUKS container uuid
sudo blkid

# the result should show the device with TYPE="crypto_LUKS"
/dev/sdc: UUID="b7458a4d-2d45-42bc-8fe7-f392e0a0f85f" TYPE="crypto_LUKS"

# open the LUKS container with key file and map it to a name, example here is mapped to "crypt-c"
sudo cryptsetup luksOpen UUID=b7458a4d-2d45-42bc-8fe7-f392e0a0f85f --key-file /root/key crypt-c

# add a line for the new LUKS container under crypttab so it can be identified during startup
sudo nano /etc/crypttab
crypt-c UUID=b7458a4d-2d45-42bc-8fe7-f392e0a0f85f /root/key luks

# Identify the LUKS partition UUID
sudo ls /dev/disk/by-id

# the result should show the device starting with dm-uuid-CRYPT
dm-uuid-CRYPT-LUKS1-b7458a4d2d4542bc8fe7f392e0a0f85f-crypt-c

# create the zfs partition on top of the LUKS partition
sudo zpool create -o ashift=12 zfs-test-pool /dev/disk/by-id/dm-uuid-CRYPT-LUKS1-b7458a4d2d4542bc8fe7f392e0a0f85f-crypt-c

# nothing added under /etc/fstab

# upon restarting, zfs-test-pool is auto-mounted and can be verified with zpool status

Reference links:
zfs-raid-and-luks-encryption-in-linux
zfs-on-linux-with-luks-encrypted-disks
zfs-raidz-encryption
zfsonlinux/pkg-zfs/issues/126
cryptsetup/+bug/1422153
Dm-crypt/Device_encryption manual

Equity

As all Western legal systems have known since Aristotle, literal interpretation of any legal material will sometimes produce unintended unjust results, which can and should be corrected by the invocation of "equity."

 The Linux Kernel, CDDL, ZFS, Dtrace

ZFS tracker

ZFS is a very nice combined file system and logical volume manager. I have been using it for the past couple of years. I follow the development discussions and find some of them fascinating: a very subtle bug became the first time for the project in its history to contain a major data lost issue in its production release; a few scenarios and drastic implications on changing a default code.

What would John Rawls say about... the GPL?

I sometimes wondered about how Rawl's philosophy would apply to certain contemporary issues and how the general approach can be reconcile with the specificity of the concern.

I say sometimes, because I didn't think about Rawls at all when reading about permissive licensing versus copyleft. But then, I found a most cogent argument in favor of copyleft, and it used the exact argument that Rawls made: "what is the better option for EVERYONE?":

"People who really care about freedom care about it for EVERYONE, and licensing that maximizes freedom for everyone trumps the "strings attached" in that regard, that is such a simple thing to see that it challenges credulity to think that someone who cares about freedom could say otherwise."

Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software

"The term “open source” quickly became associated with ideas and arguments based only on practical values, such as making or having powerful, reliable software."

Why Open Source misses the point of Free Software

Consensus

"I suspect capital will do well in any variant of the current political order, it'd be nice if money-transfer was easier, cheaper and better automatable, and I'm not expecting banks to vanish anytime soon..."

"Bitcoin throws a whole pile of obnoxious goldbug monetary theory and ponzi scheme incentives into the mix ..."

"...in order to resist sybil attacks... [it] burned a small country worth of oil, and produced a "transaction processing" network with extremely confusing and non-obvious failure modes that can sustain about the same rate of account-updates as, say, a team of human slide-rule operators."

Stellar Consensus Protocol

Thinking out loud on FOSS

Free and Open-source Software has yet to revolutionize ERP systems. It is one of those areas where the value lies mostly in implementation due to the highly customized and proprietary nature of individual businesses.

The bigger problem, I think, is the two track nature of technological progress and organizational competence. There is nowhere to hide if the ERP is not working.