But that defeats the purpose of having a boring glass building, or birds or modern bridges. The underpinning ideology is that europe should have no history, no culture and no identity, because suggesting anything else 1) will offend the hyper sensitivity of modern left ideologues who think that the said culture, history and identity is terrible and should only be condemned, apologised for, and buried, and 2) would be unwelcoming to immigrants as it would suggest somehow that there is a society they should adapt to rather than the other way round.
I remember a major French pro-european politician (Modem party) attempting to define Europe (in the context of integrating Turkey), as "the friends of democracy". When you can't (or rather refuse to) define your identity, the only thing left to represent it is birds, office buildings and bridges. Notre Damme de Paris or the Pantheon in Rome are just old embarrassing historical artefacts of an evil civilisation.
I as a random Pole with a lefty euroenthusiast stance would gladly accept the Pantheon or Notre Damme. I'd prefer Colosseum and Eiffel tower though.
The blandness comes from the fact that the EU has to tiptoe around the nationalists which will be upset that a country they don't like gets a banknote, and possibly even worse - they didn't get one.
Reading back both your and my post I guess it's the radicals of either stance who the EU desperately needs to cater to, resulting in generic designs. It's erasing itself like any institution with a 1-member veto.[1]
The underpinning ideology is that Europe (meaning the EU) should have no history, no culture and no identity because they are monopoly of the member States/nations. And, as always, if you put a monument or person from some country in the banknotes, the other states will complain
I fail to understand the distinction between an ESTA and a visa to be honest. You need to do the paperwork in advance, pay, provide all sort of personal information, and it can be denied, and if approved only for a limited amount of time. Given that both the EU and the UK have reciprocated, it is a fiction that there exists some visa free travel between these 3 zones. And the more hassle you create, the less tourism you will get.
They're identical but countries pretend they're different. I got an evisa when I went to Indonesia and India. For each country, the process involved uploading a picture, filling in some basic details, and paying a fee. I was approved in 30 seconds for each. I'm pretty sure it was automatic.
ESTA is supposed to be a lower hurdle than a visa. But from what I've heard, approvals take longer and quite a few people get rejected.
Countries like to pretend they're still visa free, but honestly, it's just a pain in the ass and I'd rather they call it a visa. It's very, very easy to book a plane to a country, see all info indicating its visa free and you can just go, then right as you're about to head out, you decide to check for the 50th time just to be sure... and it turns out there's some "visa free process" for your country called EDtdjvubHHVJVF or some other random assortment of letters that involves a 2 hour application process and 24-72 hours (business days only) for approval results to come in. A visa would be preferable because it's more transparent.
ESTAs used to be instant for me, but last time I got one (2023) it took 2 days
The US is particularly bad as you need an ESTA to transit. I had a friend nearly caught out by that on a flight from London to Lima which involved changing in Miami. When changing plane from an international to international flight in most countries you get off a plane, maybe go through security, and then get on another plane. In the US this isn't a thing. You have to immigrate into the country for 20 minutes.
No, you land at Heathrow you don't go pass passport control if you change onto another international flight. You go through security and then into the departure lounge.
Obviously if you land at Heathrow and fly out of Manchester then sure you have to immigrate, but not at the same airport.
Same at Dubai and Qatar, Helsinki and Frankfurt, Singapore. and Seoul.
Indeed last time I transited Seoul I stayed in a hotel airside for 12 hours before my next flight.
> land at Heathrow you don't go pass passport control if you change onto another international flight. You go through security and then into the departure lounge.
This requires a Direct Airside Transit visa, unless you are a citizen of one of the exempt countries or have a visa/residence permit from certain countries (US, Canada, Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Schengen). Applying for this visa involves going to the local visa processing centre, so it is not an online or on-arrival process, and takes around 3 weeks.
majority of countries don't need an airside transit, from Bhutan to Kazakhstan, Indonesia to Venezuela, hell even North Korea.
A US citizen flying New York to London to Egypt does not need to pay £20 for an ETA "visa waiver" to transfer in London. A UK citizen flying London to New York to Lima does need to pay for an ESTA
That's about to change, they are about to introduce a change that will require bios of all relatives, all social media accounts, email addresses, etc. Haven't looked at a US visa recently but it seems as invasive.
To apply for a visa, even a B1 visa, you have to go to a consulate and show them proof of your bank account, property you own, family details, your job and such things (supposedly to show that you are tied to your home company and not secretly trying to immigrate to the US).
Governments don't even have all this information about their own citizens reliably even if they wanted to hand it over.
- with ESTA, your country of origin is "trusted" and individuals in general undergo a lower level of scrutiny at a US port of entry.
- with a VISA, you country of origin is "not trusted" and individuals are granted the right to travel to the US after they undergo interviews at an US embassy and get approved.
Neither is a right to enter the US. Just a right to be transported by air/ship to a US port of entry. If the CBP lets you in it is a different story.
This is the US version. Other countries have their own rules.
For any US visa you do, and you can't take electronic items or bags with you. Costs a lot more too.
A reason I refused to go to Syria a couple of years ago. A colleague who did go said "oh I have a US (i) visa so I'm fine". I asked "how about in 20 years time when you've left a company which will pay for you to have a US visa. He hadn't considered that.
A friend of mine went to Libya on behalf of the US military about a decade ago. He is no longer eligible for a US esta and thus has to get a visa if he goes on holiday.
Last time I went to India I had to get a real visa which involved travelling to an office in London and waiting around for a couple of hours.
It's quite normal for people of "lesser powered" countries who don't have the power of passport that the US and Western European citizens do. Even before the Russian invasion of Ukraine, you would have to fly for hours to a major Russian city a couple of weeks in advance to apply for a visa to visit the UK.
When I went to Pakistan in 2010 it was even worse. Well until I gave up and then used a visa agency which just handled it all for me.
Last time I tried to go to India I went for an electronic visa, and after 7 days of "waiting" they updated it to say "declined". No explanation.
A visa allows you entry, an ESTA doesn't allow you entry but just says you're allowed to travel to the border to see if you'll be allowed entry or not.
It's more for the airline than for you. If you have an ESTA and get refused entry, the airline isn't fined for bringing someone unauthorized to the border.
It states regarding a visa:
"A visa allows a foreign citizen to travel to a U.S. port-of-entry (generally an airport) and request permission to enter the United States. A visa does not guarantee entry into the United States.
The Department of Homeland Security (DHS), U.S. Customs and Border Protection (CBP) officials at the port-of-entry have authority to permit or deny admission to the United States. "
That's incorrect, holding a B1/B2 US visa only allows you to arrive at the port of entry, the actual permission to enter the country is always left to the border officer interviewing you
It is legal to show up at a port of entry without any sort of anything. If all it allows you to do is show up at the port of entry it's a worthless scrap of paper.
If you show up at a US port of entry without any sort of anything the default decision is to deny entry (exceptions for Canadian citizens and citizens of a few small islands). If you show up at a US port of entry with an ESTA/visa you will most likely be allowed entry. Refusals are relatively rare.
Commercial carriers such as airlines are also not allowed to transport people who need ESTAs/visas and do not have them to the US, so in practice it's relatively difficult to even get to the port of entry without a visa.
Not for airlines and international cruise ships with US as destination. The attendants won't let you board unless you have a valid US visas. Carriers get fined if they transport individuals with no proper documents to a US port of entry.
Airlines are fined for inadmissible passengers. Whether they have a visa or not. If they have no visa but are admitted there is no such fine.
The visa is immaterial to the fine unless it conveys something beyond merely allowing you to present at a port of entry, which is allowed to basically everyone.
Most cemeteries in Europe have been destroyed to make space for urbanisation. The underground of Paris is full of bones from those cemetaries (catacombs of Paris). It's fairly common as outside of a few aristocratic families, people keep a very short memory of their ancestry. I have a very vague knowledge of who my ancestors were back to the mid XIX century and nothing prior. Hard to have any emotional attachment to people you never heard about. So if no one cares, better to build a parking lot!
I have very vivid memories as a child of walking through Brookwood Cemetary in south east England seeing a big machine crunching up headstones. Vast swathes of the place was flattened. The cheat code here seems to be "topple testing" for health and safety reasons.
It's the UKs largest cemetery and in a shocking state:
There is a park in Brussels where you literally walk on alleys paved with tombstones from the Jewish cemetery. You can still see some of the inscriptions there.
On the continent, afaik most countries work on a lease system, you rent a plot for a few decades (which may or may not be renewable). Some countries have a “perpetual” lease with an ongoing fee, a few years after the payment stops the plot gets cycled.
‘Course space requirements are also a factor, if you have a family plot in a depopulated village in the countryside odds are good plots will be cheap and renewable forever.
Old church with over hundred years old tombstones around it is literally an English landmark. Even in central London. Tombstones you mention belong to people from wrong social class.
I am not even sure about social class. In any case these old cemeteries are preserved probably more as historical artefacts, like an old Roman wall would be in London, rather than out of respect for the dead.
I've spent some time on genealogy, and really beyond grandparents and maybe great grandparents it's mostly curiosity and for the interesting stories, and I only care about the graves to the extent that it makes solving the puzzles easier. It's not like there is anyone alive in my family who knew older ancestors of mine than my great grandparents.
For my part I've only ever seen even my dads grave once, and feel no need to go back there, though I understand why some might feel it matters to have the grave of someone they knew in person because of the emotional attachment.
It's a bit of a paradox: burial rites are among the earliest and most fundamental elements of any society we know of; but long-term maintenance of burial sites has always been a challenge. That's probably because, after all the fanfare to honour the dead (which is mostly a way to minimize immediate social disruption), everyone eventually moves on.
When my dad died, the funeral mattered to me. But the grave does not. Of course to some it does, but it doesn't take long before everyone it mattered to are dead too. I think it's fine to keep graves for those who cares, but that shouldn't really obligate society to keep them around very long.
I am glad the pantheon still stands. But the real question is are there really any modern structure that will be worth preserving for 2000 years. Architects have long abandoned aiming for beauty to aim for originality. Originality doesn’t last. Humans in 2000 years will only wonder why on earth our society could manufacture atom level micro ships but couldn’t come with a single structure worth preserving.
All structures are worth preserving. The article is about a latrine. Do you think ancient Romans thought a literal shithole was worth preserving? And yet, it is now an important piece of history.
As for beauty, you never know, take the Eiffel tower for instance, when it was built, people found it ugly, and it was to be a temporary structure. Now it is the symbol of Paris, more popular than the Paris Pantheon, which much better fits the classical standards of beauty.
The Eiffel tower is also more historically significant, more representative of its time. The Paris Pantheon, is an imitation of the Roman style, beautiful, but probably not as interesting for future historians. If both building survive that is, which won't happen without continuous maintenance, at least for the Eiffel tower.
The Eiffel Tower dates from the XIX century. Pre the shift to originality. Which XX century building in Paris is objectively beautiful? The tour Montparnasse? The Centre Pompidou? Or Jussieu’s campus? Even the Opera Bastille is pretty lame, not outright ugly but lame.
I like Centre Pompidou, and if it wasn't technically problematic, it could have aged really well.
For those who don't know, Centre Pompidou is built "inside out", with all the technical parts like ducts, framing, elevators, etc... fully visible from the outside. There is some beauty from function here, like looking at an old locomotive. For people in the future, it would be an insight into what a 20th century building is made of.
Problem is: for a form-from-function design it is not very functional. Because the technical parts are also part of the aesthetics, it makes maintenance problematic. Every single pipe you change has to be of the same model or you would ruin the façade, which is crazy. Unfortunately (for me), it is one of the least likely building to stand the test of time, from a technical perspective.
Other than that, the Louvres pyramid is starting to gain some acceptance, even though it was almost universally hated when it was built, who knows how it will be seen a few hundred years from now, if it still stands.
You can make sand by crushing rock, we don't because it is cheaper to extract natural sand. Should we run out of suitable natural sand, we will just have to go with the more expensive option, not a big deal.
There are some structures worth preserving. Sagrada Família is one. Places of worship and private homes (at least those individually architect designed vs standard designs) tend to be a lot nicer than office blocks and other commercial places.
I do think a lot of new building hideous. Looking at St Paul's in London from the west so you see the hideous backdrop to its east is depressing.
What makes you think buildings aren't going to change within the next 2000 years? Hell just look at all of the Tudor buildings dotted around. They probably didn't think they were anything special 600 years ago
Am I right to understand that it will do nothing to big cities, where you share the radio frequency with lots of users just like a wifi? What it the minimum radius where two satellites will not interfere with each others (chatgpt says 40-130km radius if not allocated more spectrum)?
If that understanding is correct it means the addressable market is countryside and transportation (planes/ships/RV). Which necessarily makes starlink at most a fairly modest size ISP in terms of valuation?
For home usage, if you have backups raidz1 is fine (just do an incremental backup at the first sign of trouble). If you don’t have backups, then you probably shouldn’t be running a NAS in the first place.
In the Linux ISO community the math is different because none of the data is essential, however there is a lot of it.
Backing it all up even one time to an off-site location would be a 2x expense for a hobby. So 3-2-1 is hard to justify.
Instead the math can be different e.g. it's ok to lose some data but not all. Therefore you might prefer the unraid approach over zfs where losing more than parity doesn't kill the whole pool.
I'm actually in this boat right now. I have 2x26TB drives in a 4 base nas (two empty, plus 3x M2 empty) and I'm trying to decide the best way to set them up. I have around 3TB of backups that I care about as backups (but they don't need to be online, just archive backups at this point), and around 5TB of media that can be replaced.
I don't want to lose 26TB just for a mirror, and I have a spare 8TB USB HDD. I'm torn between unraid and just Debian, and I'm torn between just two separate devices and one RAID 1 partition one RAID 0
The middle ground I go with is to structure the pool using datasets and zvols, and then periodically backup the critical ones using zfs send. For example, I can live without my movie collection, but I cannot afford to lose personal photos.
This isn’t black and white. You might have huge amounts of non-essential data that aren’t worth the cost of off-site backups, but worth the cost of an extra disk of redundancy to lessen the risk. Even when you do have backups, it will reduce the risk of extended downtime (and possibly egress costs) caused by having to restore large amounts of data from backups.
The risk of z1 is that if you get a read error during resilvering, that data is permanently corrupted. The odds of this happening go way up the larger your individual drives are. This is why I chose RAIDZ2 for my NAS. I've had to resilver 2-3 times over the past 10 years, and never lost a byte of data.
Or like me where you get two SSDs in your pool that happen to likely be from the same batch and both decide to permanently disappear at roughly the same time :(
> The odds of this happening go way up the larger your individual drives are.
Technically true.
Practically? There are several other major factors - such as the quality of your drives, whether you periodically run zfs scrubs and/or disk read tests, and how long a resilver takes to complete.
Behind those are the eternal duo - size of budget and cost of failure.
> The odds of this happening go way up the larger your individual drives are.
This is a common claim, but honestly, citation needed.
We can't just apply bit error rates from the datasheet that haven't been updated in 15 years. I'm sure a 2-day rebuild is a little more risky than a 4-hour rebuild, but I'm not convinced it's by all that much. Especially if you had a monthly scrub going to prevent disk rot and disks secretly getting super fragile.
> I've had to resilver 2-3 times over the past 10 years, and never lost a byte of data.
And how many times did you have a read error on one of your other disks during a resilver?
>> The odds of this happening go way up the larger your individual drives are.
> This is a common claim, but honestly, citation needed.
FWIW, here's the quick & dirty argument for that:
Assume:
- We're working within a given generation of disk technology, with comparable drive and interface tech.
- The drives' I/O speed is relatively constant, not scaling with the drive capacity.
- The chance of any given bit (of data on a disk) going bad, in a given time interval, is relatively constant.
- The drives, regardless of size, will be some fixed-ish percentage full. (If nothing else, the boss won't sign off on overspending for unneeded capacity.)
From there - the time needed for resilvering scales linearly with the drive size. As does the number of non-redundant bits that could go bad in any given second of the resilvering. Linear time linear - so the chance of data loss during resilvering rises with the square of the disk size.
> - The chance of any given bit (of data on a disk) going bad, in a given time interval, is relatively constant.
We can't just assume this, though. Especially for data that's being checked regularly, because the drive can see how many pre-ECC bits have gone bad and rewrite iffy sectors.
And even if it's true, it's normal to go years without errors. If you have a 15% chance of getting an error each year, and your degraded array has 4 drives without redundancy, then the chance of getting an error in 4 hours is .02% and your chance of getting an error in 48 hours is .3%. Having that risk show up once every few years is pretty negligible compared to everything else that could go wrong with your array.
On top of that, if you don't have a hot spare and it takes 5 days to get a new drive, the difference in resilvering speeds is now 5.2 days versus 7 days and that barely matters.
The main situation where you have to worry about extra drives failing is when you think the resilvering process will greatly accelerate drive deaths. And that depends very much on the specific numbers you have in mind.
> This is a common claim, but honestly, citation needed.
This is based on the data I had available 10 years ago when I set up this array… If you have data that points to drives having fewer read errors per GB in recent years, I'd love to see that citation.
> And how many times did you have a read error on one of your other disks during a resilver?
I don't know, because I have RAIDZ2, so that read error would probably be corrected without it being reported to me.
> Data you collected or data you found? Any idea where it was?
I think it was a lengthy blog post citing manufacturer data, found via the FreeNAS forums. The added safety of RAIDZ2 was a good tradeoff. Someone else on this thread reports they lost two SSDs in rapid succession, which I hear happens sometimes with drives from the same batch. In any event, I felt no need to launch an independent investigation of the math and underlying assumptions.
> Zpool status gives you a per-disk error count. I kind of assumed someone doing a resilver would use that command.
Yes, I did indeed use zpool to do the resilver… I don't recall if there were any read errors on other drives at the time of those failures, but probably not, as the scrub probably would have flagged it. They've all been replaced with higher capacity drives, so at the moment I see "No known data errors"
Okay, interesting. Also to be clear I do think Z2 makes sense in a lot of situations, but I suspect that it's not very dependant on drive size like a lot of people think. If I wanted high reliability I'd use Z2 even with small drives.
Also to reply to your other comment: Personally one extra drive is a small price to pay for the peace of mind.
I achieve peace of mind via backups. For each copy, once I get the AFR below 2% I'm not too fussed about pushing it lower.
For most people snapshots are enough backup. It is still useful to have an offsite backup, but realistically fire is rare enough that you can risk it, and that is about the only risk most people have (you can have your NAS in a location likely far from where a fire might break out to reduce the risk farther).
Fire, malware, accidental deletions, capricious RAID controller (pre-ZFS). And that’s only the stuff that happened to me. Add power surge, theft, correlation in SSD failures (eg power on counter overflow firmware bug), damaging the array while moving, etc.
Malware, accidental deletion, RAID controller issues - all things ZFS with snapshots are immune to. You can decide if the other worry you or not - the risk is not zero, but it may be acceptable. Your backups are all subject to similar issues.
Snapshots don’t protect you from malware. I bet 99% of home users use the same credentials on all their machines, once a malware compromised one, the others are compromised within seconds.
[edit] also snapshots aren’t really workable for large files. Remux a movie file and now it occupies twice the space.
I remember a major French pro-european politician (Modem party) attempting to define Europe (in the context of integrating Turkey), as "the friends of democracy". When you can't (or rather refuse to) define your identity, the only thing left to represent it is birds, office buildings and bridges. Notre Damme de Paris or the Pantheon in Rome are just old embarrassing historical artefacts of an evil civilisation.
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