* Posts by Destroy All Monsters

16005 publicly visible posts • joined 3 Jun 2008

Microsoft's developer conference sells out at $2,095 per head

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Mushroom

Re: If we all club together...

He would probably explode like an hexogen-vest laden "black widow", and be totally unspottable at entry control.

Microsoft partial decapitation strike accomplished!

We also need an icon of a fluffy cat being stroked.

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Trollface

Re: Uh, boss....

Woah I got a downvote. Either it's Matt or someone thinks people go on conferences to do actual work.

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Uh, boss....

Haha! Looks like a lot of people rise to the occasion to get out of the office buildings, see new people, get some fresh air and go on VACATION!

Hubble boffins: Incredibly old supernova could explain EVERYTHING

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Pint

Re: Isn't the question really...

They don't write galactic hardboiled stuff like they used to.

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Paris Hilton

Don't blame the lonely electron

> universe of 5 billion years has a maximum size of 10 billion light years, as the universe expanded at the speed of light

The "expansion speed" gives a flying fuck about the speed of light. Regions "causally connected" before inflation hit the nitro may have been flung apart so quickly that they disappeared across each other's cosmological event horizon (i.e. redshifted to flatline and only reachable with speeds > c). These regions would now be "reconnecting", i.e. light from them can reach us as time progresses.

Indeed, the actual universe may be very much vaster than a measly 15 billion LY, which is why is appears exceedingly "flat" (no sign of curvature even at cosmologial distances). It may even be infinite, who knows.

Moreover, there is the idea that as cosmological expansion accelerates, it may all end in a "Big Rip" whereby at each point, the acceleration of the expansion will become such that the cosmological event horizon will be infinitesimally near. Every subatomic particle will feel very lonely indeed in that case.

And why the Big Brother icon?

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Alien

Dwarf tossing is allowed if they are white!

> two white dwarfs don't just crash into each other at high speed

Very unlikely. That would be better than gunslingers colliding their 9mm projectiles while firing along the length of a street. You need to put them into orbit around each other first, then dump the angular momentum and the energy somewhere (tides, gas, other objects, mysterious forces, gravitational radiation?) so that they spiral into each other.

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Headmaster

> until it greedily accretes too much mass and explodes

Hrm! It's not as if the physical system has any choice in deciding whether it wants that last little mint or not. This is not Mises' "Human Action" but Misner's "Gravitation".

> If supernovae were popcorn, the question is how long before they start popping?

Someone clearly is channelling Carl Sagan.

Gartner: RIP PCs - tablets will CRUSH you this year

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Devil

Me not buy Windows for a loooong time.

> Microsoft have by far the best ...

Sorry, the LAN interface disconnected.

Why does our galaxy spiral?

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Alien

Re: All of this is just pure fantasy. It's not science!

If you speculate you better come up with some seriously reasonable shit having minimum assumption (i.e. "best compressible theory"). Otherwise I will cut your throat with Occam's razor.

> laws of physics not immutable

Not minimal.

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Alien

Re: Why do galaxies spiral?

Do I have to spell everything out for you first-graders?

The Gödel Metric

Following Gödel, we can interpret the dust particles as galaxies, so that the Gödel solution becomes a cosmological model of a rotating universe. Besides rotating, this model exhibits no Hubble expansion, so it is not a realistic model of the universe in which we live, but can be taken as illustrating an alternative universe which would in principle be allowed by general relativity (if one admits the legitimacy of a nonzero cosmological constant). A less well known solution of Gödel's exhibits both rotation and Hubble expansion, and has the other qualities of his first model, so Gödel's model is really killed by the inconvenient observations that the universe is not rotating. The quality of these observations improved continually up until his death, and he would always ask "is the universe rotating yet?" and be told "no, it isn't."

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WTF?

Re: Waste of time and money

Anyone who has read the Captain Future episode "Quest Beyond the Stars" KNOWS that there isn't a BLACK HOLE but actually a WHITE HOLE at the center of the galaxy.

No, it's not a good read.

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Facepalm

Re: All of this is just pure fantasy. It's not science!

> It's just like creating any simulation in any videogame and that's it. Nothing more than that.

Implying the potemkin village of a videogame does any "simulation".

You are right insofar as numerical cutoffs (gotta stop subdividing time and space at some point) and the floating-point rounding and logarithmic scaling will influence the computation. These influences must be quantified and reasons must be given why such effects do not unduly affect the overall results. But in the end it's just an experiment in statistics, like weather pattern computation. You don't care about any exact results at all, just an representative result of an ensemble.

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Re: Why do galaxies spiral?

In a sense. If the universe ITSELF rotates, then this will be apparent in the distribution of galactic rotation axis (no conclusive effect has been found AFAIK). I think it also means CLOSED TIMELIKE CURVES are possible, and one might have an UNIVERSE THAT CREATES ITSELF BY CURVING AROUND.

More on this in papers that are way over my paygrade.

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Angel

Re: re: Mad Downvoters

I know. Have an upvote.

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Trollface

Mad Downvoters are on the loose again, I see.

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Holmes

Re: Ye cannae change the laws of physics

This actually reminded me that I have This Olden Book From 1996 lying around. So long ago... when EDO RAM was fresh...

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Why am I playing Summly?

> there are more things than stars in galaxies were these included in the simulation

From the paper:

The galaxies in our study consist of dark matter halos and rotationally supported disks of stars. The parameters describing each component are independent and the models are constructed in a manner similar to the approach described in previous works (Hernquist 1993; Springel 2000; Springel et al. 2005).

2.2. Dark Halo

We model the dark matter mass distribution with a Hernquist (1990) profile:

rho_dm = M_dm/ (2*Pi) * a / (r * (r + a)³)

which has a cumulative mass distribution M (< r) = M_dm * r² / (r + a)² , where a is the radial scale length and M_dm is the total halo mass here set to 9.5 * 10¹¹ M_solar.

In the past, models of disk galaxies run in isolation and used to study the properties of spiral arms employed only a few million particles to sample both the stellar disk and the dark matter halo. In such experiments, randomly-placed particles produce fluctuations in the halo potential. Even if the disk is initially featureless, the Poisson noise owing to such discretization of the mass in N-body experiments is inevitably swing amplified, producing trailing multi-armed spiral patterns in the disk (Toomre 1977; Fujii et al. 2011; Sellwood 2012).

In order to suppress the development of artificial features in all the N-body experiments that follow, we set up a live disk of stars embedded in a rigid dark matter potential. We employ simulations with a sufficiently large number of particles in the disk, i.e. 100 million, so that the disks are essentially featureless when evolved without any perturbers acting on them. These simulations serve as “controls,” making it possible to identify the response of the disk to imposed perturbations. In this manner, we will be able to separate the sources responsible for exciting features in the disk from the stars which react to the perturbations, unlike previous experiments in which the stars themselves acted as perturbers, complicating the interpretation of the experiments, as emphasized by Toomre (1990).

Looking forward to gas + full stellar evolution simulations for added beauty.

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Re: Interesting simulation

From the paper:

A long-standing controversy over the nature of spiral arms is whether they correspond to density enhancements in the background stellar distribution (density waves), or are made up of stars that always remain in the arm and are just more concentrated than the stars outside the arm (material arms). In the early studies, the arms were assumed to be density waves, because if they were material they would quickly wind up as the galaxy rotates. Thus, both the swing amplification and the static density wave theories argue that the arms are overdense regions of the disk moving around at a different speed relative to the stars themselves. Stars thus continuously move in and out of the spiral arms. However, recent investigations using numerical simulations of stellar disks have challenged this claim and and argue that the arms might be material structures (Grand et al. 2012). To investigate this in the context of our simulations, we identify a patch of stars along the arm in the stellar disk after the arms are fully developed (after 100 Myrs) as displayed in top panels of Fig. 6, where the patch is colored in black. Then, we follow the positions of the stars originally in the patch forward in time and display the outcome after two galactic years (bottom panels). We note that the stars initially in the patch spread out, confirming that the spiral patterns in our simulations are density waves and not material structures. This is shown in polar coordinates in the bottom panel of Fig. 6 where it is clear that the patch is being sheared out by differential rotation and the pitch angle of the patch differs significantly from that of the spiral features.

Looking forward to Matt Bryant complaining how Suns are shit.

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Paris Hilton

Re: Waste of time and money

You must have been one of those differently abled kids with special needs?

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Re: Ye cannae change the laws of physics

More at the Galaxy Zoo

Boffins shine new light on dark matter

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Re: State of the Universe?

> If 23% of the universe is dark matter and it is annihilating itself and producing positrons

No, it MIGHT decay to a positron/electron pair. After all, you must keep the totals of quantum numbers as they were, so the charge total must stay zero, you can't just spit out out a positron.

So you want into speculative ideas? Start Here

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Devil

Re: It works and is good work, but ....

The non-paywalled goodies are here:

http://physics.aps.org/featured-article-pdf/10.1103/PhysRevLett.110.141102 (PDF)

(In another matter entirely, if the Reg Sciencedesk decides to link to a paper on the Arxiv, please use the Arxiv abstract page (from where the PDF can be reached), do not link directly to the PDF...)

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Obvious to the meanest intelligence.

The question is: wrong how?

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Re: Confused

If there is "dark matter" by definition it modifies the gravitational field (otherwise it wouldn't be matter and it would only be connected with the universe in a metaphysical manner).

Light paths have to follow the shape of the gravitational field (because the gravitational field, in essence, IS spacetime), so...

Yes, "dark matter interacts gravitationally with light"

If Dark Matter does not absorb, reflect or emit light...what happens when a photon hits it?

By definition, if Dark Matter does not interact with the electromagnetic field, it cannot interact with the electromagnetic field. So no photon will ever "hit it" (a better view: there is no "spark" between the dark matter field and the electromagnetic field ever).

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Headmaster

It works and is good work, but ....

Matt Strassler says:

The results look very nice, indicating the AMS experiment is working very well. Yet the conclusions from the results so far are not very dramatic, and, in my opinion, have been significantly over-sold in the press. Despite what you may read, we are no closer to finding dark matter than we were last week. Any claims to the contrary are due to scientists spinning their results (and to reporters who are being spun).

The Jester:

So, AMS-02 made some bold claims today. Dark matter is mentioned 9 times in the press release, supersymmetry twice. They say that “...over the coming months, AMS will be able to tell us conclusively whether these positrons are a signal for dark matter...”. However this is just a lot of smoke without fire. There's absolutely no way that measurements of the positron spectrum may give us a reliable evidence for dark matter: not now, and not anytime soon. We simply have no robust way of telling a dark matter signal from a boring astrophysics background in that channel, because we don't know the shape nor the normalization of the background. It doesn't mean that AMS cannot provide a tantalizing signature of dark matter in the future. The most important thing we learned today is that AMS works and exceeds in precision the previous instruments (which wasn't that obvious: it's the first time a serious experiment is performed on a space station, and besides the mission underwent a dramatic downgrade shortly before the launch). We're waiting most eagerly on the AMS measurements of the antiproton and anti-deuterium spectra. A correlated excess in several channels could give us more confidence in the dark matter origin. Until that happens, the history has taught us to be skeptical about any evidence of dark matter from astrophysics experiments.

Norkoshop: How Pyongyang well and truly forked Adobe

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Pint

Big Brother Printer!

And then Winston Smith woke up. Had it just been a dream?

HP chairman Lane yields to 'here's you hat, what's your hurry?' pressure

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Trollface

Entitled, moi?

"rightful place at the pinnacle of global business"

HP .... the once and future king. Any continuity between Hewlett-Packard company and HP? Hmmm.

Bitcoin-mining malware ENSLAVES computers

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Devil

> late-to-the-party shady speculator that telegraphs a jarring fall

Isn't that more like a diamond rush into Belgian congo though? "There's stones in those hills, young man, and the locals are .. willing and eager to help."

Steve Jobs' 'spaceship' threatened by massive cost overruns

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Holmes

Re: The cost doesn't matter

If the shareholders say no, then it's no.

It's their building.

Mars to go offline for a month as vast nuclear furnace gets in the way

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Re: We need a relay

Hell yeah. Full-fat Lithium-Deuterium provides a higher density than the exceedingly rare fusion reactions in an even highly-compressed mix of simple hydrogen, juiced with some catalytic carbon and nitrogen.

Anonymous joins forces with arch-enemy The Jester against Norks

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Re: Great...

" try to use their nuclear weapons"

Do they have any functional ones?

Are they even weaponized?

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Is this now the forum for "Concerned Soccer Moms?"

Bitcoin briefly soars to record $147 high, driven by Cyprus bank flap

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Holmes

For those with interest in the "dismal science", there is an article of some interest about bitcoin:

The Money-ness of Bitcoins

written by:

Nikolay Gertchev is an economist with the European Commission, Brussels, Belgium. The views expressed in this article are strictly personal and do not engage the responsibility of the European Commission.

In particular, we read:

In conclusion, virtual monies, of which bitcoins seem to be the most perfected specimen up to date, do not allow acting individuals to manage the uncertainty of the future as well as material monies do. They could serve to intermediate exchanges among those who invest in the technology that creates them, stores them, and transfers them. Nevertheless, they could never achieve that degree of universality and flexibility that material monies carry with them by nature. Thus, on the free market, commodity monies, and presumably gold and silver, still have a great comparative advantage.

Bank card-slurp nasty 'infects tills, ATMs', corrupt staff fingered

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Mushroom

Total and utter failure of any secure process at ATM building and installing

1) "Any shit OS like Windows shurely will be enough for that application"

2) "Reviews and software audits?" We have heard of them.

3) Secure practices? That's when you use condoms, right?

4) Yeah, this ATM will just FTP out. Doe the requirements forbid it? No. so it's ok.

5) Independent Verification and Validation? We are not NASA.

6) We always buy Diebold as they also make voting machines

The "financial industry". Only good at lending out more money than it actually owns. At interest.

> The malware is written in C++

Counts as Mad Skillz in 2013.

Hate being stalked by Facebook? Why not try Google+ stalking

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Paris Hilton

Re: Me, personally, I shun the advertising moguls ...

Actually, I think it was a spinoff of research in building nuke-resistant networks, so that the glitterati could continue to talk about cats falling down stairs while the rubes were being transformed into shadows on wall...

Is NBN Co about to pay for 80 years of power pole access?

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Big Brother

Re: Sensationally wrong analysis

True dat!

Dat NBN is gonna run for A HUNDRED YEARS and we WANNA THAT MONEY NOW, UPFRONT, we will even discount it properly to HALF A BEELION.

Monkey poo probe reveals secrets of middle-management brains

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Facepalm

"Maybe they seek conflict for entertainment"

Frack I DETEST people who are so retarded that they believe they can competently criticize research because they once read an article in "Jesus News" about this and now think they know everything about it.

The Dunning–Kruger effect is a cognitive bias in which unskilled individuals suffer from illusory superiority, mistakenly rating their ability much higher than average. This bias is attributed to a metacognitive inability of the unskilled to recognize their mistakes.

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Holmes

Re: What this study mainly proves..

Are you hailing from the top or from the bottom?

Scottish SF master Iain M Banks reveals he has less than a year to live

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Pint

This world is too random.

I remember being in a bookstore way back when amazon didn't even exist and book ordering meant leafing through large catalogues, braving the frowns of the lady with the terminal and having lots of luck to actually get the book delivered. On this lazy saturday afternoon, I checked through the "freshly printed / just in" bookstacks on a large table. There were the usual tie-ins with Star Trek, romance novels, thrillers, maybe a phonebook-sized Ludlum, a Rushdie (which I wasn't ready to read yet) and over there a relatively thin book in tacky blood red with something that looked like a robotized eagle soaring above a landscape deep below. The title was incomprehensible: "Feersum Endjinn". Written by a "Ian M. Banks". Something about arabian legends? Nope. Some chapters looked like phonetics or really bad chatroom spelling. Apparently it had to do with cyberstuff.

Thinking it might not be the worst of the lot, I bought it.

That night, no sleep was to be had.

US to chat again with Campaigners Against Stuff on mobile health regs

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Pint

Re: Wearable tech

The idea is that if you are using a bluetooth device clamped to your ear, and the mobile on your belt, you will be keeping W/m² low and the most harmful device with the devilish application of the Maxwell Equations away from your most sensitive neural substrate. Bluetooth is considered softer.

Production-ready ZFS offers cosmic-scale storage for Linux

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Holmes

Re: Destroyed All Braincells, Maximum Damage Control

Why should I indulge you?

These "convenient cartoons" can be easily had these days btw. Just use google image search.

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Trollface

Re: Destroyed All Braincells Gordon Gordon Phil Gordon Gordon AC Destroyed All .....

Maximum Damage Control

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Re: Michael Wojcik A more important ZFS feature

A Conversation with Jeff Bonwick and Bill Moore, September 1, 2007

BILL MOORE We had several design goals, which we’ll break down by category. The first one that we focused on quite heavily is data integrity. If you look at the trend of storage devices over the past decade, you’ll see that while disk capacities have been doubling every 12 to 18 months, one thing that’s remaining relatively constant is the bit-error rate on the disk drives, which is about one uncorrectable error every 10 to 20 terabytes. The other interesting thing to note is that at least in a server environment, the number of disk drives per deployment is increasing, so the amount of data people have is actually growing at a super-exponential rate. That means with the bit-error rate being relatively constant, you have essentially an ever-decreasing amount of time until you notice some form of uncorrectable data error. That’s not really cool because before, say, about 20 terabytes or so, you would see either a silent or a noisy data error.

JEFF BONWICK In retrospect, it isn’t surprising either because the error rates we’re observing are in fact in line with the error rates the drive manufacturers advertise. So it’s not like the drives are performing out of spec or that people have got a bad batch of hardware. This is just the nature of the beast at this point in time.

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Coat

Re: zpool scrub == fsck

But was it labeled AE-35?

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Re: Must say it..

Your NEEDS will GROW. ZFS can help!

“We're in the process of receiving two visitors from Earth.” Gisela was astonished. “Earth? Which polis?” “Athena. The first one has just arrived; the second will be in transit for another ninety minutes.” Gisela had never heard of Athena, but ninety minutes per person sounded ominous. Everything meaningful about an individual citizen could be packed into less than an exabyte, and sent as a gamma-ray burst a few milliseconds long. If you wanted to simulate an entire flesher body — cell by cell, redundant viscera and all — that was a harmless enough eccentricity, but lugging the microscopic details of your “very own” small intestine ninety-seven light years was just being precious.

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Facepalm

Re: Michael Wojcik A more important ZFS feature

When that "mythical" bit-rot blows away a good chunk of your encrypted filesystem, you will be singing from another sheet - and from another hole.

Seriously, I sure hope responsible people keep you in the cellar, away from anything critical. The way you are sounding off, you must be pulling a good spiel and bedazzle quite a few of the people with the purse strings, so probably not.

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Trollface

Re: Gordon Gordon Phil Gordon Gordon AC Destroyed All Braincells Gordon BTRFS?....

Matt, just stop it ... mmm'okay. There is a good boy. Take a deep breath, watch some heist movie, open a bottle of fine red for tonight.

I'm getting flashbacks to the scenes of rabid retardation of clueless testosterone-filled nerds in the uni computer room attempting one-upmanships in the Commodore-vs-Atari flamewars via local chatrooms.

Once two of them found out they were actually sitting in the same room, and it came to blows...

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Holmes

Re: XFS not safe

"ZFS on linux is production ready? Hmmm...."

It's always a question of: how much production readiness do you want?

Is it production-ready enough? I guess so. You left out this little thing in the middle of the text, written in 2009:

"In the case of ext3, it's actually an interesting story. Both Red Hat and SuSE turn on barriers by default in their Enterprise kernels. SuSE, to its credit, did this earlier than Red Hat. We tried to get the default changed in ext3, but it was overruled by Andrew Morton...."

Is the sky falling? Evidently not. Is it getting better? Yes! And seriously, is there anyone (except the ones who like to riding bikes where their unprotected balls 5 are cm from the tarmac) who uses ReiserFS?

Also:

BARRIERS ON BY DEFAULT IN EXT4: YES PLEASE and Enabling/Disabling Write Barriers in Fedora 14

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Thumb Up

Re: A more important ZFS feature

Cool.

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Devil

Re: Gordon Phil Gordon Gordon AC Destroyed All Braincells Gordon BTRFS? You must...

Woah epic thread.

Give it up Matt, you are just coming across as a juvenile angry neckbeard with mysterious chips on the shoulder.