Re:EMusic and Bitrot
on
How DRM Won
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· Score: 3, Informative
This is why I've been working on getting FreeNAS+ZFS working so I have some bitrot protection on my mp3's.
Just an FYI: plain ZFS has bitrot detection, not protection. You need something like ZFS mirroring or ZFS RAID-Z for bitrot protection.
Furthermore, if you're using external USB drives then I strongly suggest you consider double-parity RAID-Z2 that can withstand the loss of any two drives. ZFS is very, very robust, but I have had USB 3.0 flakiness cause more than one drive to be simultaneously dropped during a scrub.
Oh, and if you are considering FreeNAS and are considering using their GELI-based disk encryption support then be very careful. As of a few months ago there were code paths in the FreeNAS GUI that would nuke your array by destroying volume keys. Be aware that the FreeNAS (GELI-based) encryption uses both a keyfile *and* a passphrase... and you need both in order to be able to mount the volume. By default, FreeNAS manages the keyfile for you behind the scenes so that it appears that all you need is the passphrase. However, FreeNAS's GUI configuration silently nuked the associated volume keyfile one time while I was attempting to bring a disconnected volume back online.
Anyway, the "sharp corners" were so bad that I eventually abandoned FreeNAS and ended up using a straight FreeBSD 9.0 configuration instead. It's not that hard to manage and it's very stable once it's setup. If you choose to use FreeNAS encryption then be sure you keep backup copies of your keyfiles and be sure you understand how GELI works behind the scenes.
Good luck in your efforts; I'm very happy with my BSD/ZFS NAS. Now that it's setup it's hassle-free.
Marriage is a religious rite. Government has no business regulating or even recognizing a religious rite.
Well, that's how it should be and that's how it has been marketed politically; however, the truth really comes out when one considers the following situations:
1) If two people have a marriage ceremony in a church without a marriage license, are they married? (no) 2) If two people obtain a marriage license and then have an irreligious solemnization ceremony with a justice of the peace, are they married? (yes)
Like you said, I just don't like government redefining what has been a religious concept a thousand years before western culture, much less America or American law.
I agree entirely, but the concept of marriage got hijacked by the state hundreds of years ago (to varying degrees, culminating in what we have today)—the "redefinition" happened long before we were born. Now, the government just allows the window-dressing of an optional religious ceremony (for those who desire it) in order to placate those who mistakenly believe modern marriage is a religious rite.
The fundamental problem with a legally-recognized union is that the government is allowed to change the terms after the commitment is made. Married/unioned individuals delegate to the state the ability to define (and redefine at whim) what the individuals' responsibilities are to one another, whether their interpersonal contractual agreements are enforceable, etc.
It was an epiphany to me when I realized that my only reticence to a permanent, exclusive commitment to my partner was due to these considerations. I had zero concerns about spending the rest of our lives together, better/worse, forsaking all others, etc, etc. However, I wouldn't agree to any other type of significant contract where another party has the ability to unilaterally change the contract after I had signed, so why would I allow this with the most important relationship in my life?
Besides, it's just offensive that the state implicitly wants to be a third party in our relationship. So, we rejected that notion entirely.
However, there is a purpose to the government recognition of marriage, specifically taxes, shared property ownership, power of attorney, inheritance rights and so on
There are very few "features" of a legal union that cannot be replicated via individual contractual agreements. Inheritance, property ownership, power of attorney, etc are all trivial to handle (this makes sense, because you can elect to partner/delegate these to *anyone*). Joint filing of taxes is the main unresolvable issue, but that is a flaw in our legal system: why should two people in a relationship have a substantially different tax treatment than two individuals?
I agree with the conceptual basis for your statement, but I disagree with your overall point. Well, specifically I agree with you that I am against the existence of civil unions.
However, I am also against the existence of marriage as a state-regulated legal construct for anyone.
What difference does it make what the government called it?
Exactly. Having the government involved in defining this most intimate of interpersonal relationships is a horrible idea. If labels really matter to people, then let them choose a religious/group affiliation that will give them a ceremony/label for their relationship. However, none of these labels should carry the force of law. You could therefore get your heterosexual-only marriage at the Catholic church, or your het/homo marriage at an Episcopalian church.
In case you were wondering if this is an instance of Poe's Law: I practice what I advocate. My partner and I decided we wished to have a lifelong exclusive commitment but we did not want the government to define our relationship for us. So, we setup health care powers of attorney, durable powers of attorney, wills, etc, and then gave each other a ring.
Oh, and we're heterosexuals living in a non-common-law marriage state. Not that it matters.
What difference does it make what the government called it?
I agree with you: let's not allow gay marriage under law—in fact, let's not allow any legal concept of marriage at all. Sounds like you would be fine with that, because no one will be able to force your chosen religion to violate its tenets to label any nonadherents as "married". And if some people are really desperate for the government to define the parameters of their relationship for them, then I suppose that allowing the legal concept of civil unions might be an option (for both gays and straights).
I guess it sucks if you don't like it. It is everywhere. Personally I love it, although a lot of people think it tastes like soap. They should have a cilantro free side of the menu or something. Maybe a new restaurant, "Cilantro Optional".
It's just another allele, similar in concept to the one that causes certain people to have the inability to smell cyanide. I have certainly tested my cilantro sensory interpretation, but I hesitate to test cyanide.
the test only works once, and only if the developer has never been exposed to it during a previous employment.
True, which is why we eventually created our own "basic Java concepts" exam that we required all applicants to take (on-site) as part of the hiring process. I believe it was about the best possible way this could be done: a standardized exam that all applicants were required to take, which was administered by allowing the applicant as much time as they wanted, by themselves in a room (to reduce the pressure of having observers). They were told not to access the internet for solutions, but it was an honor system.
Once they passed this test that demonstrated they at least understood, for example, the difference between an abstract class and an interface, then this created a rebuttable presumption that the person at least understood Java and had the ability to perform basic algorithmic development tasks.
What about the developers who pass the basic tests; they commit plenty of code, BUT the code is dodgy, and creates problems for other people on the team, or other teams trying to integrate.
Yes, I have had to deal with this before. Typically these people don't adhere to development standards, which is usually the way they can be objectively identified. For example, if their work product consistently fails to properly implement the published use cases/user stories in the development ticket, fails to have the requisite/adequate test case implementation as stipulated in the development ticket, etc, then they get flagged for review—or, at least, it's corroborating evidence for the "torches and pitchforks" crowd to cite.
In the end, though, it's hard to convince a manager that someone with copious code output is dragging the team down. That said, it *should* require a lot of convincing to fire someone like that... the team should have the burden of proof to establish that this isn't just a witch hunt. However, I suppose that if I were the subject of a witch hunt I would just go someplace else to work. Why stay someplace where there is a toxic atmosphere for me? If you are truly competent it isn't hard to find another position elsewhere.
One person's bad code can compromise the performance of other developers.
So such measures could only identify rather extremely poor performers....
This is precisely what I have been saying: all objective developer performance metrics are only unambiguous in extreme outlier cases. However, such objective metrics *do* exist. Recall that my point of contention with your original post was your assertion that all developer performance metrics are entirely subjective.
Triviality is subjective. In my experience, people who are not programmers tend to greatly underestimate the complexity of certain programming and other technical tasks.
I concur with your experience with non-programmers, but that's a different subject. However, one can set an objective bar for triviality with something like the Fizzbuzz test. If a developer can't solve something like this on their own within several hours in the programming language in which they were hired to develop, then... well, it's fairly self-evident.
But the ability to write code that compiles and describe algorithms to solve trivial problems is only sufficient to reject a hypothesis; it is not sufficient to imply that the person is a good or average programmer.
Correct, and this goes back to the typical misapplication of metrics to developer performance that we both agree happens in the overwhelming preponderance of cases. As you have pointed out with numerous examples, most metrics are ambiguous in common cases and do not provide a good discriminator function between good/bad performance (and typically yield perverse incentives for developers).
The cases where objective metrics would be unambiguous are those cases where it is blatantly apparent that the developer is substandard/excellent.
In the end, though, the problem of identifying inferior developers is important. It would be nice to have some objective metrics that flag a developer for further, human-based review. The alternative to this is the "torches and pitchforks" approach to culling "inferior" developers on the team: terminations solely due to complaints from other developers (which can rapidly degenerate into a witch hunt/Reign of Terror).
I think an analogous example of what I am suggesting is the use of BMI as a metric in US armed forces recruitment. Any applicant with a BMI over a certain threshold is automatically rejected as obese. However, BMI is a flawed metric and can misclassify an outlier, highly muscular, fit person with low body fat as "obese". In this case, a human review is conducted (photographic evidence is sufficient proof) and the BMI rule is waived. Hm... technically, they could even patch this example with a separate objective test of body fat percentage, but I'm sure you get the general idea.
In the wake of the case of the inferior developer that I cited in my previous post, we established rules about forcing people to commit within a certain interval so that *some* progress could be verified/reviewed. If a developer did not meet that objective metric of "committed work-in-progress code to the version control server at least once per week for cursory human code review" (for whatever reason), then they were chided and became subject to a more in-depth human review of their progress (yes, this part is definitely subjective). This helped a lot, because not only did it prevent a repeat case of the inferior developer debacle, it also allowed the team to help decent developers with their progress by pointing out pitfalls or helping devs "get unstuck".
I guess one might term this to be the use of potentially-ambiguous objective metrics prompting subjective review.
That's not developer performance. That is participation as an employee and degree of conformance with expectations. If you're hired as a developer, and not writing any code when directed to, then you're not doing a job -- which is different from doing the job but performing poorly.
Haha, if only a true Scotsman existed, eh? I see that at least you did not disagree that this was an objective metric.
My main point is: when you have a developer that is actually working though. Performance measurement is too hard.
Okay, then I suppose you will refuse to count "frequent inability to write code that even compiles" and "nigh-continuous inability to describe an algorithm to solve even a trivial problem" as somehow not an objective sign of inferior developer performance?
Here's an anecdote: once, there was a high-priced contractor who was hired to join our very busy dev team. He was given a task that should have required two weeks at most. Every weekday he came in and worked standard business hours. We kept checking up on him, asking him if he needed any help or had encountered any issues in development. After about a month of him saying he was making great progress yet could not check *any* code into the team's version control system (for myriad excuses), one evening after he left for the day we went into his only working copy on his only dev machine to check his code in for him. All we found were two or three Java classes with nothing more than a getter/setter pair and a few properties. No business algorithms. When we confronted him the next day, he couldn't even describe a basic approach to solving the problem that he had been assigned and about which he had been claiming for a month that he was making great progress. He was summarily fired, and subsequently someone else on the team implemented his assigned feature (fully tested!) in well under two weeks.
That underperforming developer's performance was objectively bad... and he was technically doing the job (I say "technically" because of his extremely poor performance). However, this comes back to my original assertion that in the cases where an objective discriminator metric would be unambiguous you don't really need the metric to tell you that someone is inferior/superior.
Again, I believe you have a generally reasonable point—that metrics are too broadly applied because many people fallaciously believe that attaching any number to something confers objectivity to any subsequent decisions—but I disagree with you that are there no objective metrics at all.
[...] developer performance is entirely subjective... any attempts to measure it, so far, have been inherently flawwed.
Haha, oh, please. Entirely subjective? As in, "there's no possible objective standard that could be applied"? Are you suggesting that it would be subjective to say that a developer has poor performance if, for example, he or she decides to just not come into work for weeks at a time for no reason other than degenerate indolence and who continuously refuses to write any code or assist the development team in any way?
I believe that person could be objectively assessed to be a developer with inferior performance.
To be more precise, I think there exist discriminator functions that could objectively categorize developers in certain circumstances—mostly the outliers (significantly superior/inferior). The error only emerges when the metrics-based formula is applied too broadly.
In practice, however, I think we are in agreement: the cases where objective metrics would be unambiguous are the same cases where you don't *need* metrics at all (such as my contrived "objectively inferior developer" example), and applying metrics to all other cases is ambiguous at best. That said, as I have demonstrated through proof by contradiction, there *are* objective metrics that can be applied to assess developer performance and which are not capricious.
I have one major problem with SVN but it is a big one. When creating branches and particularly branches of subprojects, you have to create directories with branch names. That means that you can only compile the main branch of subprojects unless you modify your build system to take branches into account.
Or, you know, you could check out from deeper within the tree. That's something that svn allows that git does not.
So, you setup your svn repo with/trunk/,/branches/, and/tags/, and then your local working copy is just, say, a checkout "svn checkout svn://your.server/svn/yourRepo/branches/foo/ localDevWorkingCopy" which is now rooted in/foo/.
A simple "svn switch" allows you to change over to/trunk/ or/tags/bar2.0...
This is similar to the concept of chroot in Linux (et al), but the ability to checkout part of the repo is the reason this can work in svn.
If this doesn't address your issue, then perhaps I misunderstood what you were describing.
I could never live in country full of such despicable law abiders. They are getting what they deserve.
Verily. I doubt I would ever be able to fit in a culture where it is presumed that the law deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Good thing we have a border, eh? They can engage in their cultural predilections there and we can pursue ours here, without either group having to force their perspective on the other.
I just hope their perspective isn't a spreading meme. Ugh.
It's the same reason Ethical Vegetarians can still wear leather shoes without feeling guilty because hundreds of millions of cattle will be slaughtered for meat each year yielding plenty of leather regardless of how many shoes are produced.
That seems rather arbitrary, perhaps even cognitively dissonant.
Are they also okay with eating meat as long as it would otherwise go to waste (eg. meat at the grocery store that expires today, or leftover catered meat, or "pink slime" reclaimed meat)? Either way, it seems like the demand for leather further bolsters the cattle industry by making it more profitable to raise and slaughter cattle. I would even posit that buying leather shoes is in the same class as buying a hamburger: both are contributing nigh negligible material support for the farming/slaughter of cattle.
But hey, whatever they want to do is fine. I just prefer it when others' belief systems are self-consistent.
I thought I recalled the use of hollow pots in the aggregate, but I couldn't find a cite for that claim so I omitted it. It was an ingenious idea, though.
Eh... I am fairly certain it depends on the arch/dome curvature. Here's a HowStuffWorks cite:
"But as with beams and trusses, even the mighty arch can't outrun physics forever. The greater the degree of curvature (the larger the semicircle of the arch), the greater the effects of tension on the underside of the bridge.
It makes sense: if you have a very low curvature the arch/dome trends toward being a flat beam and is obviously is experiencing tension. You can try to counterbalance that by building more support structure to counteract the tension by compressing the low curvature beam, but then we are quickly approaching the concept that prestressed concrete accomplishes intrinsically.
I will say that it is a shame we don't see as many flying buttresses anymore (haha).
Question is - why is it necessary for concrete to be reinforced? Obviously, the Romans didn't have steel or iron rebar. They formed and poured their structures without any rebar, and they've lasted a couple thousand years. It seems more than obvious that our architects and engineers can learn a few things from the Romans.
IANASE (structural engineer), but from my understanding one key difference that reinforced concrete confers is that it allows the concrete to be prestressed to perform better under tension. Concrete (Roman or modern) is just fine under compression, so it can support a prodigious amount of weight loading down on it. However, once you try to span an area then the concrete in the middle of the span is normally under tension. As you can imagine, this often leads to cracking and outright failure. Furthermore, it's why the Romans had such a predilection to using arches and domes, which keep the concrete predominantly under compression rather than tension.
Think about it this way: our highway bridges couldn't be built the way they are if we were using unreinforced Roman concrete; however, if the concrete is prestressed then the tensile forces are balanced by the compressive forces. This also allows us to do many other interesting things with architecture that weren't feasible before.
I have wondered about whether something like carbon fiber could be used in the future to produce prestressed concrete that wasn't as prone to corrosion as the steel rebar-based approach. Something like that might be the best of both worlds. Okay, so I just Googled and it looks like at least one carbon-fiber approach is already patented.
Just as an aside, the Romans were quite ingenious when it came to implementing their architectural application of concrete. I read that when Hadrian ordered the construction of the current version of the Pantheon, the Roman engineers were faced with difficulty designing a dome that would not collapse under its own weight (again, tensile forces and concrete are not friends). The Romans overcame this by reducing the density of the concrete in the dome by using pumice in the aggregate and reducing the thickness of the concrete as the dome progressed. The dome of the Pantheon remains the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world—not because we can't replicate the techniques, but because reinforced concrete performs so much better under tension.
You raised an interesting point about the distinction between the use of domesticated and wild animals, but then the followup ethical cases applicable to your distinction would be wildlife hunting and oceanic fishing in general.
Ignoring the practical policy and legal debates, is there an ethical difference between hunting, killing, and eating a wild member of a least concern deer species vs a member of a least concern whale species? What about eating a least concern fish that was yanked out of the ocean via the rod & reel of a deep-sea fisher?
I believe both of those cases are commonly accepted as an appropriate use of animal life; regardless, I don't perceive a ethical distinction.
How many fisheries are actually run with catch limits low enough to maintain them?
It seems every fish that is popular on a world wide scale is likely over fished.
Granted, though this is a concern separate from whether a sustainable catch could, in fact, exist. All of these fisheries seem to be recapitulating the Tragedy of the Commons. That said, I'm sure that some of these least concern whale species can easily tolerate some taking.
However, internationally the political situation seems to be an all or nothing wrt to fishing any given species: "Go ahead, fish that species all you want! [...one year passes...] ZOMG! Collapse! No more fishing any of that species evar!" If those are the alternatives for the whales, then I guess we are better off with a ban.
the difference would be cows are currently maintained as a sustainable managed food source. whales are not; whales would only be able to provide food on the scale of cows for a year or two before being going from LC to EX.
True, but is anyone actually proposing that? As with fisheries, there is a sustainable catch limit on these least concern animals. Though this isn't a binary consideration, it seems concern should be allocated more for the northwestern Atlantic cod fishery than taking a sustainable number (whatever that means objectively in context) of these non-threatened whales.
I mentioned the cod because Americans are likely to be consuming fish sticks, etc, even though we don't have a cultural predilection to eat whale.
What part of "sitting unwanted in freezers" and "killing whales" is part of your moronic idea of popluation study? Oh! The Bald Eagle is Endangered.... Guess What's For Dinner! Get bent you idiot.
As you can see, those species are listed as "Least Concern" by the IUCN, which happens to be the same category that the sewer rat receives. There have been allegations that endangered whales have been killed by the Japanese whaling industry, which is obviously reprehensible.
I don't really have an opinion on the ethics of whaling "least concern" whale species. I consider that concept similar to the beef industry. Why is killing and eating cow acceptable if killing and eating non-threatened whale species is not? Of course, you will notice that the ethical consideration is orthogonal to the legality consideration.
I am vegetarian, so I am not faced with cognitive dissonance about the situation, but I don't care which animals that other people eat if it isn't actively promoting extinction of a species.
Take it from me: bicycle lanes are confined to larger metro areas, and even then coverage is minor.
Instead, bikers are driving in the road lanes, as is required by law in most places... bikes aren't allowed on sidewalks (where they exist). This often upsets people in cars because there's some biker tooling along at 20 kph in the middle of a single available road lane with a speed limit of 75 kph and thus the biker is restricting all the traffic.
Besides, as another poster pointed out: is it really ideal to bike 100+ km a day in order to commute to/from work? Note that taking the bus isn't practical in most cases due to "inability to get there from here" (in the case of commuting to another area), very poor latency where available, having to switch lines often, and having to walk 2+ km at each end to reach a terminal from home and work. And there are essentially no commuter trains anywhere in the US (this is a reasonable first pass estimate).
Having a car (or carpooling) is essential. I stay fit using methods other than biking to work and then having to baste in my own stink all day (because, you know, most workplaces don't have showers here).
So, you can chalk this up as "sorry, dude, cool idea but it won't work here in most cases" rather than a defense of the stereotypically obese American couch potato who drives their car to get to their mailbox 10 meters away.
the laptop area in the sketch is just funny - it's certainly meant for some different kind of nonexistant type of homeless person.
Are you sure? Last time I volunteered to serve dinner at the homeless shelter I saw that approximately 15% of the residents had smartphones. Maybe that correlates to the residents who had nicer cars than my 12 year old vehicle.
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised to encounter homeless people with laptops.
My retort to your allegations of pedantry is that you are being deliberately obtuse. Definitions matter—especially in law.
The well water they use is not distilled: it has various adulterants in various proportions. Some of which, like arsenic and radium, are definitely in their water and are toxic in high doses that are not currently present. Apparently, these don't count as non-whitelisted "ingredients", but fracking byproducts appearing in the well water somehow *do* violate the purity law.
If the fracking byproducts are in excess of allowable limits then this is purely a drinking water regulatory issue. Either that, or the Germans just subjectively interpret this purity law based on however the regulator capriciously feels that day about whatever adulterant present in the water is being discussed at the moment. "Potassium carbonate? Not an ingredient! Methane? Ingredient... banned in any amount! Magnesium chloride? Not an ingredient! Mercury? Not an ingredient! Urea? Not an ingredient!..."
I mean, if they are seriously solely pointing to the purity law as the barrier to making this beer, are they suggesting it would be safe to drink but they are legally prohibited from using it to make beer "...because ingredients!"?
Again, toxic water is unfit for human consumption and they must already have regulations for that. Because, you know, there's always been a nonzero amount of benzene (and everything else) in their water. And, gasp, in your water and my water too! It's merely a matter of proportionality, and the translation of the present applicable law didn't have a definition callout/footnote that I could see.
The brewers' line of argument regarding "ingredients" may be effective if the enforcement of the purity law is left solely to human subjective caprice, but it makes as much sense as hippies bitching about "chemicals" in food. Of *course* there are chemicals in food, and of course their water has adulterants that could be toxic if they are present in excessive levels. However, that kind of bitching is not an objective standard; I am just clinging to the idea that the Germans would have an objective standard applicable to this drinking water issue rather than leaving it to the whim of some bureaucrat who shakes a magic eight ball to decide whether some ubiquitous adulterant in well water counts as an "ingredient".
However, it doesn't address the fact that the argument is inconsistent: "some" chemicals dissolved in water are implicitly allowed despite not being whitelisted in the law and "others" are not. Perhaps "types of matter dissolved in water" is not considered an ingredient in Germany? However, in that case, it would undermine the argument that "fracking pollutants" would be considered an unacceptable "ingredient" if the minerals are not considered "ingredients".
Regardless, I'm sure this ultimately devolves to a safe drinking water limits regulatory issue. If it's a question of toxicity, then again, the safe drinking water standards apply. For instance, I'm rather certain they don't have to shut down their brewery due to the purity law for radium concentrations of 1 picocurie/L in their source water. If the permissibility is based on "natural" dissolved chemical content then what makes the currently present chemicals acceptable while others that may arrive later are not, even if the definition is closer to "clean" than "pure"? Does it merely come down to selective enforcement, similar to the way obscenity law is defined in the United States?
Furthermore, is any dissolved chemical acceptable so long as it is at non-toxic levels? Could they add artificial flavorings to the water and still have it considered "clean"/"pure", or would that be an "ingredient"? If that would be an ingredient and dissolved minerals are "not", then what would happen if said artificial flavors were injected into the well so that the flavoring came out at the spring? Furthermore, what if the brewers decide that the well water needs more dissolved minerals? Can they add them to the water without it being considered an "ingredient", or are they forced to find some other water source where the additional mineral content is "natural" despite the net effect being exactly the same?
Anyway, googling around seems to suggest that this whole "Reinheitsgebot compliance" thing is often co-opted for marketing purposes, especially given that the cited law has been subsumed by later (similar) laws. At best, this is a proxy argument for the safe drinking water regulations or it is, as I suspect, deliberately leveraged for publicity.
The health issue is real if the pollution levels exceed safe limits, but the way the issue is couched may well be sensationalized.
"Pure" in reference to water means "safe to drink."
Cool. Got a citation for your claim that this the operating definition of the word "pure" as it applies to this German law? My argument was based on the definition of "pure" in English, which does not typically denote what you suggest (connotations are another matter). We could have a heated semantic debate where we link each other to English dictionaries, but that's not very salient to the German law.
If the well has been poisoned, the water is no longer pure.
If the water is toxic then it is unfit for human consumption. No need to cite the purity law, which apparently handwaves on dissolved molecules of certain types and doesn't seem to form a coherent argument for the brewers' position. The German equivalent of the Clean Water Act or drinking water safety regulations would seem to be a more cogent & applicable argument.
But, like I said before: it's likely to be a publicity stunt to cite the purity law. Much more likely to grab headlines this way ("our hands are tied... the beerpocalypse has arrived and the very existence of German beer is threatened!") rather than a back page blurb about how some well now has excessive VOC and the brewery is suing a fracking company over pollution damages.
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This is why I've been working on getting FreeNAS+ZFS working so I have some bitrot protection on my mp3's.
Just an FYI: plain ZFS has bitrot detection, not protection. You need something like ZFS mirroring or ZFS RAID-Z for bitrot protection.
Furthermore, if you're using external USB drives then I strongly suggest you consider double-parity RAID-Z2 that can withstand the loss of any two drives. ZFS is very, very robust, but I have had USB 3.0 flakiness cause more than one drive to be simultaneously dropped during a scrub.
Oh, and if you are considering FreeNAS and are considering using their GELI-based disk encryption support then be very careful. As of a few months ago there were code paths in the FreeNAS GUI that would nuke your array by destroying volume keys. Be aware that the FreeNAS (GELI-based) encryption uses both a keyfile *and* a passphrase... and you need both in order to be able to mount the volume. By default, FreeNAS manages the keyfile for you behind the scenes so that it appears that all you need is the passphrase. However, FreeNAS's GUI configuration silently nuked the associated volume keyfile one time while I was attempting to bring a disconnected volume back online.
Anyway, the "sharp corners" were so bad that I eventually abandoned FreeNAS and ended up using a straight FreeBSD 9.0 configuration instead. It's not that hard to manage and it's very stable once it's setup. If you choose to use FreeNAS encryption then be sure you keep backup copies of your keyfiles and be sure you understand how GELI works behind the scenes.
Good luck in your efforts; I'm very happy with my BSD/ZFS NAS. Now that it's setup it's hassle-free.
Marriage is a religious rite. Government has no business regulating or even recognizing a religious rite.
Well, that's how it should be and that's how it has been marketed politically; however, the truth really comes out when one considers the following situations:
1) If two people have a marriage ceremony in a church without a marriage license, are they married? (no)
2) If two people obtain a marriage license and then have an irreligious solemnization ceremony with a justice of the peace, are they married? (yes)
Like you said, I just don't like government redefining what has been a religious concept a thousand years before western culture, much less America or American law.
I agree entirely, but the concept of marriage got hijacked by the state hundreds of years ago (to varying degrees, culminating in what we have today)—the "redefinition" happened long before we were born. Now, the government just allows the window-dressing of an optional religious ceremony (for those who desire it) in order to placate those who mistakenly believe modern marriage is a religious rite.
The fundamental problem with a legally-recognized union is that the government is allowed to change the terms after the commitment is made. Married/unioned individuals delegate to the state the ability to define (and redefine at whim) what the individuals' responsibilities are to one another, whether their interpersonal contractual agreements are enforceable, etc.
It was an epiphany to me when I realized that my only reticence to a permanent, exclusive commitment to my partner was due to these considerations. I had zero concerns about spending the rest of our lives together, better/worse, forsaking all others, etc, etc. However, I wouldn't agree to any other type of significant contract where another party has the ability to unilaterally change the contract after I had signed, so why would I allow this with the most important relationship in my life?
Besides, it's just offensive that the state implicitly wants to be a third party in our relationship. So, we rejected that notion entirely.
However, there is a purpose to the government recognition of marriage, specifically taxes, shared property ownership, power of attorney, inheritance rights and so on
There are very few "features" of a legal union that cannot be replicated via individual contractual agreements. Inheritance, property ownership, power of attorney, etc are all trivial to handle (this makes sense, because you can elect to partner/delegate these to *anyone*). Joint filing of taxes is the main unresolvable issue, but that is a flaw in our legal system: why should two people in a relationship have a substantially different tax treatment than two individuals?
I agree with the conceptual basis for your statement, but I disagree with your overall point. Well, specifically I agree with you that I am against the existence of civil unions.
However, I am also against the existence of marriage as a state-regulated legal construct for anyone.
What difference does it make what the government called it?
Exactly. Having the government involved in defining this most intimate of interpersonal relationships is a horrible idea. If labels really matter to people, then let them choose a religious/group affiliation that will give them a ceremony/label for their relationship. However, none of these labels should carry the force of law. You could therefore get your heterosexual-only marriage at the Catholic church, or your het/homo marriage at an Episcopalian church.
In case you were wondering if this is an instance of Poe's Law: I practice what I advocate. My partner and I decided we wished to have a lifelong exclusive commitment but we did not want the government to define our relationship for us. So, we setup health care powers of attorney, durable powers of attorney, wills, etc, and then gave each other a ring.
Oh, and we're heterosexuals living in a non-common-law marriage state. Not that it matters.
What difference does it make what the government called it?
I agree with you: let's not allow gay marriage under law—in fact, let's not allow any legal concept of marriage at all. Sounds like you would be fine with that, because no one will be able to force your chosen religion to violate its tenets to label any nonadherents as "married". And if some people are really desperate for the government to define the parameters of their relationship for them, then I suppose that allowing the legal concept of civil unions might be an option (for both gays and straights).
But no marriage under law.
they put cilantro on everything
I guess it sucks if you don't like it. It is everywhere. Personally I love it, although a lot of people think it tastes like soap. They should have a cilantro free side of the menu or something. Maybe a new restaurant, "Cilantro Optional".
Interestingly enough, the cilantro quale is genetic. Cf.
Love To Hate Cilantro? It's In Your Genes And Maybe, In Your Head
It's just another allele, similar in concept to the one that causes certain people to have the inability to smell cyanide. I have certainly tested my cilantro sensory interpretation, but I hesitate to test cyanide.
the test only works once, and only if the developer has never been exposed to it during a previous employment.
True, which is why we eventually created our own "basic Java concepts" exam that we required all applicants to take (on-site) as part of the hiring process. I believe it was about the best possible way this could be done: a standardized exam that all applicants were required to take, which was administered by allowing the applicant as much time as they wanted, by themselves in a room (to reduce the pressure of having observers). They were told not to access the internet for solutions, but it was an honor system.
Once they passed this test that demonstrated they at least understood, for example, the difference between an abstract class and an interface, then this created a rebuttable presumption that the person at least understood Java and had the ability to perform basic algorithmic development tasks.
What about the developers who pass the basic tests; they commit plenty of code, BUT the code is dodgy, and creates problems for other people on the team, or other teams trying to integrate.
Yes, I have had to deal with this before. Typically these people don't adhere to development standards, which is usually the way they can be objectively identified. For example, if their work product consistently fails to properly implement the published use cases/user stories in the development ticket, fails to have the requisite/adequate test case implementation as stipulated in the development ticket, etc, then they get flagged for review—or, at least, it's corroborating evidence for the "torches and pitchforks" crowd to cite.
In the end, though, it's hard to convince a manager that someone with copious code output is dragging the team down. That said, it *should* require a lot of convincing to fire someone like that... the team should have the burden of proof to establish that this isn't just a witch hunt. However, I suppose that if I were the subject of a witch hunt I would just go someplace else to work. Why stay someplace where there is a toxic atmosphere for me? If you are truly competent it isn't hard to find another position elsewhere.
One person's bad code can compromise the performance of other developers.
Haha, an understatement if I have ever heard one.
So such measures could only identify rather extremely poor performers....
This is precisely what I have been saying: all objective developer performance metrics are only unambiguous in extreme outlier cases. However, such objective metrics *do* exist. Recall that my point of contention with your original post was your assertion that all developer performance metrics are entirely subjective.
Triviality is subjective. In my experience, people who are not programmers tend to greatly underestimate the complexity of certain programming and other technical tasks.
I concur with your experience with non-programmers, but that's a different subject. However, one can set an objective bar for triviality with something like the Fizzbuzz test. If a developer can't solve something like this on their own within several hours in the programming language in which they were hired to develop, then... well, it's fairly self-evident.
But the ability to write code that compiles and describe algorithms to solve trivial problems is only sufficient to reject a hypothesis; it is not sufficient to imply that the person is a good or average programmer.
Correct, and this goes back to the typical misapplication of metrics to developer performance that we both agree happens in the overwhelming preponderance of cases. As you have pointed out with numerous examples, most metrics are ambiguous in common cases and do not provide a good discriminator function between good/bad performance (and typically yield perverse incentives for developers).
The cases where objective metrics would be unambiguous are those cases where it is blatantly apparent that the developer is substandard/excellent.
In the end, though, the problem of identifying inferior developers is important. It would be nice to have some objective metrics that flag a developer for further, human-based review. The alternative to this is the "torches and pitchforks" approach to culling "inferior" developers on the team: terminations solely due to complaints from other developers (which can rapidly degenerate into a witch hunt/Reign of Terror).
I think an analogous example of what I am suggesting is the use of BMI as a metric in US armed forces recruitment. Any applicant with a BMI over a certain threshold is automatically rejected as obese. However, BMI is a flawed metric and can misclassify an outlier, highly muscular, fit person with low body fat as "obese". In this case, a human review is conducted (photographic evidence is sufficient proof) and the BMI rule is waived. Hm... technically, they could even patch this example with a separate objective test of body fat percentage, but I'm sure you get the general idea.
In the wake of the case of the inferior developer that I cited in my previous post, we established rules about forcing people to commit within a certain interval so that *some* progress could be verified/reviewed. If a developer did not meet that objective metric of "committed work-in-progress code to the version control server at least once per week for cursory human code review" (for whatever reason), then they were chided and became subject to a more in-depth human review of their progress (yes, this part is definitely subjective). This helped a lot, because not only did it prevent a repeat case of the inferior developer debacle, it also allowed the team to help decent developers with their progress by pointing out pitfalls or helping devs "get unstuck".
I guess one might term this to be the use of potentially-ambiguous objective metrics prompting subjective review.
That's not developer performance. That is participation as an employee and degree of conformance with expectations.
If you're hired as a developer, and not writing any code when directed to, then you're not doing a job -- which is different from doing the job but performing poorly.
Haha, if only a true Scotsman existed, eh? I see that at least you did not disagree that this was an objective metric.
My main point is: when you have a developer that is actually working though. Performance measurement is too hard.
Okay, then I suppose you will refuse to count "frequent inability to write code that even compiles" and "nigh-continuous inability to describe an algorithm to solve even a trivial problem" as somehow not an objective sign of inferior developer performance?
Here's an anecdote: once, there was a high-priced contractor who was hired to join our very busy dev team. He was given a task that should have required two weeks at most. Every weekday he came in and worked standard business hours. We kept checking up on him, asking him if he needed any help or had encountered any issues in development. After about a month of him saying he was making great progress yet could not check *any* code into the team's version control system (for myriad excuses), one evening after he left for the day we went into his only working copy on his only dev machine to check his code in for him. All we found were two or three Java classes with nothing more than a getter/setter pair and a few properties. No business algorithms. When we confronted him the next day, he couldn't even describe a basic approach to solving the problem that he had been assigned and about which he had been claiming for a month that he was making great progress. He was summarily fired, and subsequently someone else on the team implemented his assigned feature (fully tested!) in well under two weeks.
That underperforming developer's performance was objectively bad... and he was technically doing the job (I say "technically" because of his extremely poor performance). However, this comes back to my original assertion that in the cases where an objective discriminator metric would be unambiguous you don't really need the metric to tell you that someone is inferior/superior.
Again, I believe you have a generally reasonable point—that metrics are too broadly applied because many people fallaciously believe that attaching any number to something confers objectivity to any subsequent decisions—but I disagree with you that are there no objective metrics at all.
[...] developer performance is entirely subjective... any attempts to measure it, so far, have been inherently flawwed.
Haha, oh, please. Entirely subjective? As in, "there's no possible objective standard that could be applied"? Are you suggesting that it would be subjective to say that a developer has poor performance if, for example, he or she decides to just not come into work for weeks at a time for no reason other than degenerate indolence and who continuously refuses to write any code or assist the development team in any way?
I believe that person could be objectively assessed to be a developer with inferior performance.
To be more precise, I think there exist discriminator functions that could objectively categorize developers in certain circumstances—mostly the outliers (significantly superior/inferior). The error only emerges when the metrics-based formula is applied too broadly.
In practice, however, I think we are in agreement: the cases where objective metrics would be unambiguous are the same cases where you don't *need* metrics at all (such as my contrived "objectively inferior developer" example), and applying metrics to all other cases is ambiguous at best. That said, as I have demonstrated through proof by contradiction, there *are* objective metrics that can be applied to assess developer performance and which are not capricious.
I have one major problem with SVN but it is a big one.
When creating branches and particularly branches of subprojects, you have to create directories with branch names.
That means that you can only compile the main branch of subprojects unless you modify your build system to take branches into account.
Or, you know, you could check out from deeper within the tree. That's something that svn allows that git does not.
So, you setup your svn repo with /trunk/, /branches/, and /tags/, and then your local working copy is just, say, a checkout "svn checkout svn://your.server/svn/yourRepo/branches/foo/ localDevWorkingCopy" which is now rooted in /foo/.
A simple "svn switch" allows you to change over to /trunk/ or /tags/bar2.0 ...
This is similar to the concept of chroot in Linux (et al), but the ability to checkout part of the repo is the reason this can work in svn.
If this doesn't address your issue, then perhaps I misunderstood what you were describing.
Really?!
He said what he said.
I could never live in country full of such despicable law abiders. They are getting what they deserve.
Verily. I doubt I would ever be able to fit in a culture where it is presumed that the law deserves the benefit of the doubt.
Good thing we have a border, eh? They can engage in their cultural predilections there and we can pursue ours here, without either group having to force their perspective on the other.
I just hope their perspective isn't a spreading meme. Ugh.
It's the same reason Ethical Vegetarians can still wear leather shoes without feeling guilty because hundreds of millions of cattle will be slaughtered for meat each year yielding plenty of leather regardless of how many shoes are produced.
That seems rather arbitrary, perhaps even cognitively dissonant.
Are they also okay with eating meat as long as it would otherwise go to waste (eg. meat at the grocery store that expires today, or leftover catered meat, or "pink slime" reclaimed meat)? Either way, it seems like the demand for leather further bolsters the cattle industry by making it more profitable to raise and slaughter cattle. I would even posit that buying leather shoes is in the same class as buying a hamburger: both are contributing nigh negligible material support for the farming/slaughter of cattle.
But hey, whatever they want to do is fine. I just prefer it when others' belief systems are self-consistent.
I thought I recalled the use of hollow pots in the aggregate, but I couldn't find a cite for that claim so I omitted it. It was an ingenious idea, though.
IIRC in a dome all the stresses are compressive.
Eh... I am fairly certain it depends on the arch/dome curvature. Here's a HowStuffWorks cite:
"But as with beams and trusses, even the mighty arch can't outrun physics forever. The greater the degree of curvature (the larger the semicircle of the arch), the greater the effects of tension on the underside of the bridge.
It makes sense: if you have a very low curvature the arch/dome trends toward being a flat beam and is obviously is experiencing tension. You can try to counterbalance that by building more support structure to counteract the tension by compressing the low curvature beam, but then we are quickly approaching the concept that prestressed concrete accomplishes intrinsically.
I will say that it is a shame we don't see as many flying buttresses anymore (haha).
Prestressed concrete
Question is - why is it necessary for concrete to be reinforced? Obviously, the Romans didn't have steel or iron rebar. They formed and poured their structures without any rebar, and they've lasted a couple thousand years. It seems more than obvious that our architects and engineers can learn a few things from the Romans.
IANASE (structural engineer), but from my understanding one key difference that reinforced concrete confers is that it allows the concrete to be prestressed to perform better under tension. Concrete (Roman or modern) is just fine under compression, so it can support a prodigious amount of weight loading down on it. However, once you try to span an area then the concrete in the middle of the span is normally under tension. As you can imagine, this often leads to cracking and outright failure. Furthermore, it's why the Romans had such a predilection to using arches and domes, which keep the concrete predominantly under compression rather than tension.
Think about it this way: our highway bridges couldn't be built the way they are if we were using unreinforced Roman concrete; however, if the concrete is prestressed then the tensile forces are balanced by the compressive forces. This also allows us to do many other interesting things with architecture that weren't feasible before.
I have wondered about whether something like carbon fiber could be used in the future to produce prestressed concrete that wasn't as prone to corrosion as the steel rebar-based approach. Something like that might be the best of both worlds. Okay, so I just Googled and it looks like at least one carbon-fiber approach is already patented.
Just as an aside, the Romans were quite ingenious when it came to implementing their architectural application of concrete. I read that when Hadrian ordered the construction of the current version of the Pantheon, the Roman engineers were faced with difficulty designing a dome that would not collapse under its own weight (again, tensile forces and concrete are not friends). The Romans overcame this by reducing the density of the concrete in the dome by using pumice in the aggregate and reducing the thickness of the concrete as the dome progressed. The dome of the Pantheon remains the largest unreinforced concrete dome in the world—not because we can't replicate the techniques, but because reinforced concrete performs so much better under tension.
You raised an interesting point about the distinction between the use of domesticated and wild animals, but then the followup ethical cases applicable to your distinction would be wildlife hunting and oceanic fishing in general.
Ignoring the practical policy and legal debates, is there an ethical difference between hunting, killing, and eating a wild member of a least concern deer species vs a member of a least concern whale species? What about eating a least concern fish that was yanked out of the ocean via the rod & reel of a deep-sea fisher?
I believe both of those cases are commonly accepted as an appropriate use of animal life; regardless, I don't perceive a ethical distinction.
How many fisheries are actually run with catch limits low enough to maintain them?
It seems every fish that is popular on a world wide scale is likely over fished.
Granted, though this is a concern separate from whether a sustainable catch could, in fact, exist. All of these fisheries seem to be recapitulating the Tragedy of the Commons. That said, I'm sure that some of these least concern whale species can easily tolerate some taking.
However, internationally the political situation seems to be an all or nothing wrt to fishing any given species: "Go ahead, fish that species all you want! [...one year passes...] ZOMG! Collapse! No more fishing any of that species evar!" If those are the alternatives for the whales, then I guess we are better off with a ban.
It is stupid, though.
the difference would be cows are currently maintained as a sustainable managed food source. whales are not; whales would only be able to provide food on the scale of cows for a year or two before being going from LC to EX.
True, but is anyone actually proposing that? As with fisheries, there is a sustainable catch limit on these least concern animals. Though this isn't a binary consideration, it seems concern should be allocated more for the northwestern Atlantic cod fishery than taking a sustainable number (whatever that means objectively in context) of these non-threatened whales.
I mentioned the cod because Americans are likely to be consuming fish sticks, etc, even though we don't have a cultural predilection to eat whale.
What part of "sitting unwanted in freezers" and "killing whales" is part of your moronic idea of popluation study? Oh! The Bald Eagle is Endangered.... Guess What's For Dinner! Get bent you idiot.
Just an FYI: not all whale species are endangered. You can see some examples here (prepare to give your L type cones a function test):
Humpback whale, Minke whale, Southern Right whale.
As you can see, those species are listed as "Least Concern" by the IUCN, which happens to be the same category that the sewer rat receives. There have been allegations that endangered whales have been killed by the Japanese whaling industry, which is obviously reprehensible.
BTW, there have also been allegations that the "Least Concern" bald eagle (oh, also FYI: it's no longer endangered) have been killed by the Amish chicken farming industry.
I don't really have an opinion on the ethics of whaling "least concern" whale species. I consider that concept similar to the beef industry. Why is killing and eating cow acceptable if killing and eating non-threatened whale species is not? Of course, you will notice that the ethical consideration is orthogonal to the legality consideration.
I am vegetarian, so I am not faced with cognitive dissonance about the situation, but I don't care which animals that other people eat if it isn't actively promoting extinction of a species.
Take it from me: bicycle lanes are confined to larger metro areas, and even then coverage is minor.
Instead, bikers are driving in the road lanes, as is required by law in most places... bikes aren't allowed on sidewalks (where they exist). This often upsets people in cars because there's some biker tooling along at 20 kph in the middle of a single available road lane with a speed limit of 75 kph and thus the biker is restricting all the traffic.
Besides, as another poster pointed out: is it really ideal to bike 100+ km a day in order to commute to/from work? Note that taking the bus isn't practical in most cases due to "inability to get there from here" (in the case of commuting to another area), very poor latency where available, having to switch lines often, and having to walk 2+ km at each end to reach a terminal from home and work. And there are essentially no commuter trains anywhere in the US (this is a reasonable first pass estimate).
Having a car (or carpooling) is essential. I stay fit using methods other than biking to work and then having to baste in my own stink all day (because, you know, most workplaces don't have showers here).
So, you can chalk this up as "sorry, dude, cool idea but it won't work here in most cases" rather than a defense of the stereotypically obese American couch potato who drives their car to get to their mailbox 10 meters away.
the laptop area in the sketch is just funny - it's certainly meant for some different kind of nonexistant type of homeless person.
Are you sure? Last time I volunteered to serve dinner at the homeless shelter I saw that approximately 15% of the residents had smartphones. Maybe that correlates to the residents who had nicer cars than my 12 year old vehicle.
Anyway, I wouldn't be surprised to encounter homeless people with laptops.
My retort to your allegations of pedantry is that you are being deliberately obtuse. Definitions matter—especially in law.
The well water they use is not distilled: it has various adulterants in various proportions. Some of which, like arsenic and radium, are definitely in their water and are toxic in high doses that are not currently present. Apparently, these don't count as non-whitelisted "ingredients", but fracking byproducts appearing in the well water somehow *do* violate the purity law.
If the fracking byproducts are in excess of allowable limits then this is purely a drinking water regulatory issue. Either that, or the Germans just subjectively interpret this purity law based on however the regulator capriciously feels that day about whatever adulterant present in the water is being discussed at the moment. "Potassium carbonate? Not an ingredient! Methane? Ingredient... banned in any amount! Magnesium chloride? Not an ingredient! Mercury? Not an ingredient! Urea? Not an ingredient! ..."
I mean, if they are seriously solely pointing to the purity law as the barrier to making this beer, are they suggesting it would be safe to drink but they are legally prohibited from using it to make beer "...because ingredients!"?
Again, toxic water is unfit for human consumption and they must already have regulations for that. Because, you know, there's always been a nonzero amount of benzene (and everything else) in their water. And, gasp, in your water and my water too! It's merely a matter of proportionality, and the translation of the present applicable law didn't have a definition callout/footnote that I could see.
The brewers' line of argument regarding "ingredients" may be effective if the enforcement of the purity law is left solely to human subjective caprice, but it makes as much sense as hippies bitching about "chemicals" in food. Of *course* there are chemicals in food, and of course their water has adulterants that could be toxic if they are present in excessive levels. However, that kind of bitching is not an objective standard; I am just clinging to the idea that the Germans would have an objective standard applicable to this drinking water issue rather than leaving it to the whim of some bureaucrat who shakes a magic eight ball to decide whether some ubiquitous adulterant in well water counts as an "ingredient".
Thank you for the clarification.
However, it doesn't address the fact that the argument is inconsistent: "some" chemicals dissolved in water are implicitly allowed despite not being whitelisted in the law and "others" are not. Perhaps "types of matter dissolved in water" is not considered an ingredient in Germany? However, in that case, it would undermine the argument that "fracking pollutants" would be considered an unacceptable "ingredient" if the minerals are not considered "ingredients".
Regardless, I'm sure this ultimately devolves to a safe drinking water limits regulatory issue. If it's a question of toxicity, then again, the safe drinking water standards apply. For instance, I'm rather certain they don't have to shut down their brewery due to the purity law for radium concentrations of 1 picocurie/L in their source water. If the permissibility is based on "natural" dissolved chemical content then what makes the currently present chemicals acceptable while others that may arrive later are not, even if the definition is closer to "clean" than "pure"? Does it merely come down to selective enforcement, similar to the way obscenity law is defined in the United States?
Furthermore, is any dissolved chemical acceptable so long as it is at non-toxic levels? Could they add artificial flavorings to the water and still have it considered "clean"/"pure", or would that be an "ingredient"? If that would be an ingredient and dissolved minerals are "not", then what would happen if said artificial flavors were injected into the well so that the flavoring came out at the spring? Furthermore, what if the brewers decide that the well water needs more dissolved minerals? Can they add them to the water without it being considered an "ingredient", or are they forced to find some other water source where the additional mineral content is "natural" despite the net effect being exactly the same?
Anyway, googling around seems to suggest that this whole "Reinheitsgebot compliance" thing is often co-opted for marketing purposes, especially given that the cited law has been subsumed by later (similar) laws. At best, this is a proxy argument for the safe drinking water regulations or it is, as I suspect, deliberately leveraged for publicity.
The health issue is real if the pollution levels exceed safe limits, but the way the issue is couched may well be sensationalized.
"Pure" in reference to water means "safe to drink."
Cool. Got a citation for your claim that this the operating definition of the word "pure" as it applies to this German law? My argument was based on the definition of "pure" in English, which does not typically denote what you suggest (connotations are another matter). We could have a heated semantic debate where we link each other to English dictionaries, but that's not very salient to the German law.
If the well has been poisoned, the water is no longer pure.
If the water is toxic then it is unfit for human consumption. No need to cite the purity law, which apparently handwaves on dissolved molecules of certain types and doesn't seem to form a coherent argument for the brewers' position. The German equivalent of the Clean Water Act or drinking water safety regulations would seem to be a more cogent & applicable argument.
But, like I said before: it's likely to be a publicity stunt to cite the purity law. Much more likely to grab headlines this way ("our hands are tied... the beerpocalypse has arrived and the very existence of German beer is threatened!") rather than a back page blurb about how some well now has excessive VOC and the brewery is suing a fracking company over pollution damages.