Science funding was different back then. It was a rich men hobby, something done for amusement or to impress other rich men.

Today, science funding comes out of the tax collected from everyone. The taxpayers want an explanation for how their money is spent. It could be, of course, vanity, just like it was before (taxpayer money is spent on sporting events, for example because people root for the athletes who represent them)... but, maybe there's a better way?

> Science funding was different back then. It was a rich men hobby, something done for amusement or to impress other rich men.

This is not the full story, but fits today's cartoon history caricature. In reality, there were also salaried employees who were teaching or working on developing practical applications, there were church fundings, the universities like Göttingen etc. Not all were particularly rich, Euler came from a modest background etc.

Erm... not really. Well, since you mentioned Euler: most of his funding came from the St. Petersburg Academy, which, in turn, was bankrolled by the Russian Czar (Catherine the Great, in this instance). The crown had absolutely no need to report back to its subjects on how and why it spends its money. The primary reason academies like that existed was that his or her highness wanted to impress their royal cousins with how intellectual they were and how much money they could spend on the matters they believed themselves to be responsible for.

That's why if you look back at scientific publications or organizations, a lot of them have a "royal" in their name "the royal society of this", "the royal college of that". This is because of their sponsors.

Since we are talking about Russia here, basically, until Alexander II (second half of 18 hundreds), there weren't any government institutions that could, in principle, manage the tax collected from the royal subjects and had to report and justify their activity. Until then, by and large, all the tax collected belonged to the crown and the crown was free to do with it however their heart desired. The initial ministry of education created by Alexander I (early 18 hundreds) was the first step towards transparency, but it wasn't much.

If you are interested in the reasons: both the liberation of the peasants and the defeat in the Crimean campaign created a large hole in the crown's finances. If, until then, the crown disbursed some undisclosed amount to the minister, who would use the money however he wished (mostly stole), the changes in the 1860s made it harder to steal (the minister had to report the expenditures). One could say that at this point, the current approach to financing the education began. A lot of things, however, were still subsidized directly by the crown or various elites, rather than in centralized government-sanctioned way. Another large reform, that made the system more transparent and rule-based followed in 1904, but since the Communists completely reorganized the government in 1917, it's hard to tell what the results might have been. It's only really since 1917 that education and science became exclusively financed by the tax and not through private donors.

Some complexity levels not mentioned in the article:

* Consistency groups. The article kinda almost gets there, but stops right before it realizes there's a problem. If you have multiple programs accessing the storage, s.a. a database (that you are snapshotting) and the application using the database, then you are risking an inconsistent snapshot when the database state you wrote is ahead or behind the application state. You need a mechanism to freeze all I/O beside the snapshot in order to ensure that the snapshot data is useful.

* ACLs. And similar external mapping to the storage being used, eg. what if the users come from an LDAP server? Similar problem with symlinks coming from/going to ouitside the snapshot.

* Sparse file support. Let's say you have a few VM images in your snapshot: if your tool doesn't support sparse files, it will likely greatly inflate the image sizes.

Bottom line, either use the product's own snapshot functionality (ZFS has those), or switch to the product that does.

Thanks for the input. These things never crossed my mind, even the first one which in hindsight should have been obvious to me. I will update the article to include these.

Programs like filesystems typically have their own schedulers that aggregate writes, it would be an extreme performance hit if they wrote each checksum individually, as a separate I/O operation. They are certainly bundled with some other data that needs to be written.

And if you are concerned about the compute rather than storage, then writing to a block device is still slow enough so that computing a checksum isn't important performance-wise.

Failures in storage software are very rare. Which makes it very hard to test... (you need to run it a lot, for a very long time if you hope to find errors by chance).

Also, some failure modes are worse than others. The failures known as DI (data integrity) are the worst. Even though they aren't expected to happen to everyone at a certain frequency (because, again, mature storage software is comparatively very reliable), even a single DI error that happened to any user sets up a major alarm.

In the storage industry, the running joke is that after first DI in your product you lose funding, after the second DI you loose the product.

And it did happen to Btrfs quite a bit... I've seen it with my own eyes when a system didn't come back after power failure. (But I'm in the business of testing software storage products, so, it's less surprising that it happened to me).

So... it's perfectly plausible that you have never seen Btrfs fail, and it's been more error prone than eg. EXT4. The error rate is low enough so that if you don't actively try to cause the error you will never experience one. But, over a large group of diverse use patterns, the rate is still worse than expected.

> Failures in storage software are very rare.

Famous last words. Most failures are not reported, because people move on.

I disagree with the (2). The laws of war are and have been evolving, and there's plenty of evidence in recorded history. The first records we have come from Ancient Babylon and they have been modified and amended multiple times since. Another aspect of this development is the existence of international arbitrage with laws that also keep evolving, something that minimizes the need to go to war.

And there's more: the relationship between the state and its army changed a lot. The role, the rights and the duties of individual soldiers changed a lot. Just to give you some examples: the Lieber Code is the one created during the US Civil War -- it's perhaps the first to mention the concept of unlawful orders, exonerating the soldiers who wouldn't follow such orders. Traditionally, St. Maximilianus is described as the first conscientious objector to draft, a concept that, too, went through multiple iterations... And, really, we didn't even scratch the surface mentioning these. Military history is probably the most eventful and rich sub-field of history.

In Israel, we used to have post-office issued debit cards. You buy the card at the counter, with cash, and then it could be used for online payments, until you exhaust your credit. This is not entirely different from a bank, of course, but it allowed users to separate their purchases history from their income history.

Post office is also used for things like utility payments. You can pay them online, or write down the invoice id, the recipient, and pay with cash at the post office. I'm not sure how it works from the recipient perspective: i.e. how would you register your business with the post office, but, the existence of some such payments implies it should be possible.

NB. Also, technically, these services while physically provided in the post office are sometimes referred to as being provide by "postal bank". I'm not sure why it's called a bank though, since it doesn't provide key banking services s.a. loans or check-in accounts... Maybe it's just a "historic" name.

I doubt Iranians needed sanctions as an excuse to install their own CAs and require their citizens to use them. Many authoritarian regimes require their citizens to use domestically produced networking software that is different degrees of compromised.

This is not a good question to ask. It's not for what. It's to prevent what.

Even if you don't care about how Iran treats its own population, you should care about how it treats others because one day it might be you.

Iran's ideology is expansionalist. They want to export their ideas far and wide. While also physically suppressing their opponents.

Since the emergence of two global superpowers after WW2, most armed conflicts were, essentially, between those two. Directly or indirectly. If the two could find a peaceful solution, the world at large had a good day. And for a while it seemed like we might be left with just one superpower, and so no conflicts at all. Only policing.

The whole "multipolar" spiel you might hear from powers that challenge this policing is what is going to result in a long and bloody struggle for world domination. It won't be like the world wars we remember, where most of the world had to choose one of the two sides. It will be a quagmire of more local conflicts with very volatile alliances and a lot more casualties overall. More like Italian city states.

It's necessary to police Iran and similar bad countries because if their challenge of the power monopoly succeeds, the world will be hurled into anarchy equipped with very deadly weapons...

Your comment is so bizarre I don’t know quite how to respond and I’m left wondering what your news feed looks like.

There is only one country in the Middle East with an aggressive expansionist mentality, and it’s not Iran.

And what’s with the superpower commentary, you neglected to connect it to Iran and are you saying Russia is bigger than China?

I live (with a short intermission when I lived in the EU) in the Middle East, so, outside of reading the local news, sometimes I can just look out of the window.

I don't understand the question about Russia vs China: bigger in what sense? Geographically, it surely is, but that's not likely what you were going for.

To comment on expansionism: there are several ideologies in the region that seek to establish some sort of a "center of gravity" to attach more territory / resources to it. Islamic Revolutionary Guards is one of them, it's been "copied" by others s.a. various Hezballah organizations in different countries or Ansarallah. If eg. Hezballah wins in Lebanon, they will become a sort of a copy of Iran. Think like Warsaw Pact countries were "copies" of the Soviet Union.

Another such ideology / force is Muslim Brotherhood. Broadly, any Al-Qaeda affiliates belong there. This is a more popular / organic Arab thing as opposed to Islamic Guards, who are a foreign influence. They, however, lack a "center of gravity", but, potentially, they can take over Egypt as the current government is unpopular, while Muslim Brotherhood is. Eventually, there might be a popular revolt that will topple the current military government and then it's very likely that Egypt will try to expand its influence over the Middle East by violent means.

And there's a list of failures / non-threats, s.a. BAAS (Arab Communists, essentially): they used to be popular during the Cold War but now nobody cares about them. Wahhabi ideology that was propped by Saudis for a while, but now it's basically forgotten. Western liberal news like to mention "Greater Israel": this idea is about as popular in Israel as Scientology is in the US. It does exist in some form in the very fringe part of Israeli society, but it has zero chance of having a popular support. It makes the news domestically mostly because of how unrealistic and out of touch it is. It has about as much influence on Israeli foreign policy as Scientology does in the US.

Multipolarity is inevitable. You can’t forcefully hold most of the world’s population down, especially when you already shipped off your manufacturing capacity to earn a few bucks.

As always, the question for the declining hegemon is whether a new order can arise peacefully or not. The UK managed to go peacefully in the end, but only after two brutal and deadly world wars sapped them of their remaining strength. Still, their acquiescence allowed them to retain an outsized seat at the table.

China doesn’t seem interested in becoming a unipolar hegemon, at least based on public statements and openly published policy/position papers, so perhaps they have learned that it’s bad to be the hegemon from watching both the UK and the US take it on the chin. Rather than the Yuan becoming the default international currency, it’s possible that Keynes’s Bancor (or something like it) may finally replace the notion of a singular reserve currency, which always fails in predictable ways.

Well, if it's inevitable, then we are facing a long stretch of history when everybody is having a bad time... And by that I mean that it's going to be worse than it is today. War will become a new normal for most people in the world, just like it was before the world wars.

War is the historical norm. The relative quiet of the Cold War across Western Eurasia, Japan, and Anglo nations was an aberration. Most of the world still experienced major conflicts during and after this period, including Africa, South America, Southeast Asia, Central and South Asia, the Philippines and Indonesia, and of course the Middle East. After the Cold War, conflict spread into Russia and Eastern Europe.

The false “norm” of peace and quiet in Western suburbs will finally be ending, that’s all. We may even have our own Yugoslav moment, although I hope that’s not the case.

I'm not disagreeing with you. I just don't like where this is going :)

Oh, and I have an anecdote, somewhat relevant to the situation.

So, my grandma lived through the Nazi occupation of the Western Ukraine. She died in the early 90s, so, the events I'm describing must've happened some time between the Chernobyl disaster and the fall of the Soviet Union. I was an elementary school student and had a very simple picture of the Great Patriotic War: Nazis were bad, we were all around good, and we showed them...

One day she took me to the local farmers' market. On our way there we had to come by a liquor store, and there was, prostrated on the ground alcoholic who must've fallen asleep waiting for the store to open.

Holding her nose, my grandma uttered "had Germans been here, this would never have happened!"

Her admiration for Nazis came to me as a bit of a shock, but I made this mental trick, explaining it away by describing my grandma as "strict and law-abiding" and didn't think much of the incident until much, much later. Eventually, by talking to others who lived through the occupation and trying to understand what was so attractive about the Nazis that a lot of people welcomed them with open arms, I realized that the Nazis, beside the bad things they are known for today, leaned heavily into upholding law and order. In a Doctor Doom sort of way, but still. A lot of people were willing to give away their freedoms in exchange for the very "radical" law enforcement... And this is the aspect that doesn't get a lot of attention when the Nazis are mentioned in the history class...

So, there's a part of me that wants law and order at any cost, be it the US bombing the shit out of some country (it could be my country, if necessary! although, understandably, I'd rather it be some other country, better yet none at all). Just so that, by and large, there'd be peace and stability... On the other hand: fairness and all that... :)

How can something "always fail" if it's never been tried? Negativity much?

Maybe I wasn’t clear, I mean that singular, nation-state issued (but internationally held) reserve currencies always fail, whether they are backed by “hard” currency or not. Keynes’s idea is an attempt to solve the problem, and as you mentioned it has not been tested.

They also have single quote, dollar and backtick... this is a lot worse than just whitespace. The problem with whitespace surface when the programmer made no effort to escape the string used as a file name. This adds a whole new vector of problems that happen when the programmer tried to escape the string, but it didn't work.

It was too long ago, so, I've forgotten the names, but I remember the saga with PHP escaping (and failing) SQL queries (some sort of sql_real_now_honest_real_escape_string() function or something like that).

It depends on the shell you use and how your file names are handled.

Bash is a clusterfuck waiting to happen when it comes to file names, but not all shells would be at risk here. For example the shell I maintain would be fine because file names are tokenised like how variables are tokenised in SQL strings when using parametrised queries (to use your SQL/PHP example).