Slashdot Mirror

Good. Now replace "some people" with "most of the people writing the 'linguistics' articles for Wikipedia," and we'll be getting somewhere...

Oh, and to be fair, what seems to be a reasonable, certaintly non-zero, number of lingustics people don't mind calling etymology an aspect of historical linguistics -- follow up some of the webpages here.

I looked at the first page of results, and overall, they just confirm my point. The first one is a glossary and bibliography in the pages of a historical linguistics course that includes an online syllable. If you see the syllable, there's no "etymology" to be found in it; if you look at the bibliography, the entries that mention it are about the history of linguistics, not about contemporary linguistics.

Most of the other results are similar. The only one that stands out is Elizabeth Traugott's CV, which lists an article called "From etymology to historical pragmatics." I happen to know what this article is about; it's about semantic change, an that historical linguistics has traditionally not dealt with. (But of course, Traugott's goal is to find systematic patterns of semantic change, not to list individual examples...)

I think you point out an interesting problem with wikipedia, which is that a big difficulty exists in the large-scale structures of the information. Generally, a factually incorrect sentence or paragraph gets fixed pretty quickly. But large-scale problems -- involving how various articles are "threaded" together -- are much harder to fix.

Indeed. I have some ideas of how to fix the sort of problem that I pointed out here with the linguistics entries, which is to classify a lot of articles currently labeled as "linguistics" with another term: "traditional grammar." However, actually doing that would be a lot of work; and potentially most of it would be thankless maintenance work (i.e., explaining time after time to the latest newcomers why they shouldn't prominently label an article on, say, Contraction as "linguistics."

I would generalize your statement to say that problems in the presentation of fundamentals are hard to fix. "Fundamentals," in this sense, means something like "highly nuanced basics"; the sort of thing that a layperson who skims a couple of textbooks about a topic feels like they've understood, but when they go and paraphrase it for a Wikipedia entry, an expert can easily see that they didn't understand it. How to organize the articles in a category is indeed a fundamental.

The only reason they're there to begin with is because they're so damn cool, there's no way they could realistically compete in the full race. However check out this video by the stanford team, about one minute in:

http://cs.stanford.edu/group/roadrunner/video/NQE- Day-Three.wmv

The motorcycle runs into a fence and falls over, then manages to right itself and keep going pushing through the fence. That's pretty damn amazing.

I know you were joking, but if you're really looking for something to hammer both cores on your beautiful X2, may I suggest Folding@Home? Donate your unused cycles to help find a cure for cancer.

Extra bonus for you if you join the team I'm on (see my sig).

Come, bombs and blow to smithereens
Those air -conditioned, bright canteens,
Tinned fruit, tinned meat, tinned milk, tinned beans,
Tinned minds, tinned breath.

Mess up the mess they call a town-
A house for ninety-seven down
And once a week a half a crown
For twenty years.

And get that man with double chin
Who'll always cheat and always win,
Who washes his repulsive skin
In women's tears:

And smash his desk of polished oak
And smash his hands so used to stroke
And stop his boring dirty joke
And make him yell.

But spare the bald young clerks who add
The profits of the stinking cad;
It's not their fault that they are mad,
They've tasted Hell.

It's not their fault they do not know
The birdsong from the radio,
It's not their fault they often go
To Maidenhead

And talk of sport and makes of cars
In various bogus-Tudor bars
And daren't look up and see the stars
But belch instead.

In labour-saving homes, with care
Their wives frizz out peroxide hair
And dry it in synthetic air
And paint their nails.

Come, friendly bombs and fall on Slough
To get it ready for the plough.
The cabbages are coming now;
The earth exhales.

This is a great speech for engineers.
Commencement address by Steve Jobs on June 12, 2005

Here's an interesting book about a little company called ID Software
Masters of Doom

Note to author, the glass is half full. You're less than two years into (possibly) a long career and already very jaded. Open your eyes and try to learn more about your situation instead of pointing fingers at why the world has wronged you...

WRONG ! Semantic Web expects minimal agreement within communities and domains, for example all camera companies agree on a 'camera ontology' and TV companies create a 'TV ontology', such domain specific ontologies may or may not be linked to a 'master ontology'.
SW is very much out there.. and is already weaved in to the Web of today..

Well again these may sound just 'specifications' and less of an 'ontology'.. then look in to the rapidly growing billion dollar industry.. bio-chem-pharmaco informatics.. ontologies are becoming backbone of their entire computing, data collection and analysis infrastructure..

Whats more..
Flip through last month's Nature Biotech and you ll find articles talking about ontologies, RDF & Semantic Web.. Yes, its already here
Remember, these Biologist are those people who finished the Genome project 2-3yrs earlier than it was orignally planned.. They are very good at collaboration, strong proponents of open-source and very hard workers.. Semantic Web is the right platform for them that gives them tools and a standard to share data seamlessly.. Lets just wait and watch what these people do with it...

AND...yes there's more.. 5 days ago NIH approved a 20million grant to group at Stanford to create a NATIONAL CENTER for BIOMEDICAL ONTOLOGY. Its the same group which developed the only OWL editor (Protege) available out there !
I just hope that those guys at NIH are not fools to give away hard earned tax payers money on something thats not gonna work

"Oh, and be sure and check out the big kids: Haystack, SIMILE's Piggybank, etc."

Protege

SWOOP

PhotoStuff

Ontology Tools Survey, Revisited

" Ontologies are a way of specifying the structure of domain knowledge in a formal logic designed for machine processing. The effect on information technology (IT) is to shift the burden of capturing the meaning of data content from the procedural operations of algorithms and rules to the representation of the data itself."

Stanford just got it's 2nd NIH super-center for biomedical comptuing -- this one on Ontologies

see
http://mednews.stanford.edu/releases/2005/septembe r/computation.html

soon ontologies will be to computing what politics is to governemnt

Funny, I was thinking the same thing.

<pointless nitpick>Only, the Relativistic time dilation happens when approaching the speed of light, right?
</pointless nitpick>

Zonk is actually accelerating towards the speed of light. Calculation of his velocity as he approaches the speed of light based on the number of duplicate slashdot stories posted is left as an exercise to the reader.

"However, under the Grokster standard, either of the latter could be considered instruments for wanton copyright violation (despite the ridiculousness of it) and be banned...if they were new technologies."

I think two common Slashdot mistakes are exibihited here:

• Making the assumption that everybody who is not engaged in the poster's line of work (in this case, supreme court justices) is foolish and/or naive (you didn't say this specifically, but a common sentiment around here is that since the SCOTUS couldn't understand the fact that Grokster is just like a pencil/camera/xerox machine, they are clearly clueless technophobes who did not do enough research.)
• Relying on a one- or two-line summary as an accurate description of something.

I'm aware that most people have better things to do with their time, but I think that anybody who's passionate about fair use, P2P, and the like should read the actual judgement rather than rely on a brief, misleading summary.

The bad news is that it's 55 pages, but the good news is that you don't need to read very far before the xerography / pen / camera analogy falls down.

Reading the judgement should also demonstrate that the SCOTUS did ask the right questions and does have an understanding of the technology. While it's our right and duty to challenge the rulings of the SCOTUS, let's not make the mistake that they lack cognative power.

At least one team (Stanford) is using learning algorithms. Most (all?) the vehicles sense the environment and build some sort of model of it - in other words they learn about the environment as they go, and they make decisions based on what they learn. Machine learning and other AI techniques can be used in the creation of the control software, even when machine learning is not being done during the race. In short, don't assume that understanding is not being advanced just because yours is not.

Zero CPU implementations of this.

Plato on Ethics

There's always PwdHash.. unfortunately:

- It only works on certain sites - javascript confuses it completely
- They keep changing the f***ing algorythm, so next time you install it none of your passwords work!
- If you're working on another machine you can't log in anywhere.

I gave up on it.. something like that shipped with the browser would probably work though.

                * Up to 24 meg download speed
                * Up to 1.3 meg upload speed


More advertising lies. Megabits measure capacity, not speed.

These are high-capacity links, but we know nothing of their speed. They could Fedex you a 250 GB hard disk every day and that'd be 24 Mbps average, but the latency would obviously be far too poor for playing Counterstrike.

One of the early servers for Google was made from Lego blocks.
http://www-db.stanford.edu/pub/voy/museum/pictures /display/0-4-Google.htm

Here's WAV: http://ccrma.stanford.edu/courses/422/projects/Wav eFormat/

See this for some other formats: http://www.sonicspot.com/guide/fileformatlist.html

An example of "rawer" would have been files in which the headers were assumed (because all snippets were the same format) - kind of like WAV without the header. 1990-ish Amiga junkies (OK, me) frequently ripped these kind of files out of game executables and then slapped headers on them to make them edible to the general population.

I hope that helps - out.

I also can't imagine that any of the clicks the advertisers get are legit. It's probably mostly accidental clicks as people are navigating around.

Of course, the best thing would be to encourage people to make their sites a little more user-friendly with more than a few words of text on each page. But barring that, some form of ad blocker that finds and kills these things would be a good idea. Maybe someone can write one for Firefox and Internet Explorer?

The original Oregon Trail was on mainframes, created by Don Rawitsch. He brought the game with him when he went to work for MECC, which eventually wrote games for microcomputers (the MECC mainframe was taken down in 1983). You youngins may have had fancy low-resolution graphics, but when I was a kid we had to cross the Oregon Trail by teletype. At 110 baud. On paper.

Actually, it's cool that the game survived with its core design in place from mainframe to microcomputer.

And for three Mars summers in a row, deposits of frozen carbon dioxide near Mars' south pole have shrunk from the previous year's size, suggesting a climate change in progress.'

DO NOT believe the evidence! Just because warming trends are happening on two different planets is NO reason to think that there might be a common cause, like the solar energy cycle. DO NOT read up NASA predictions for solar cooling and cooler weather on Earth. DO NOT look at the graph showing the correlation between solar output and the Earth's climate. DO NIT read up on the data showing that most stars like the sun show variability in output. DO NOT read about how the Earth's climate has changed greatly in the past, but always oscillates in a limited range.

Read only government approved scare stories. Believe only government approved computer climate models (even if they do not yet generate outputs that conform to the real data we see). Accept as an article of faith that the "cause" of the "problem" is fossil fuels (even though the majority of warming in the last 200 years occurred before the Industrial Revolution really got underway). Accept only "solutions" to the "problem" like Kyoto (even though Kyoto does not bind the fastest growing nations to any curbs in carbon use, and even though Kyoto would drastically depress standards of living growth in the first world).

When anyone challenges the government story on global warming, accuse them of being in the pay of "Big Oil". DO NOT judge the data and theories on their own merits; preemptorilly disbelieve anything that does not conform to what you've read in Time magazine and heard in Al Gore's political speeches, even if it comes from Mars probes, or experts on solar energy.

There is also quite a bit that is defined by court precendent. You could probably find more on that at groklaw.

You can read a bit about Fair Use from Stanford:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

So could you, but I don't think you'll find any exemption for personal use there.

I know, it's the section that defines "Fair Use" is all. All of the US Code that has to do with it will be located until Title 17, which is the body of copyright law.

There is also quite a bit that is defined by court precendent. You could probably find more on that at groklaw.

You can read a bit about Fair Use from Stanford:
http://fairuse.stanford.edu/

You've got to be bloody kidding!

There is no reason, whatsoever, for binary files not to be shippable and usable under the same architecture across distros. The Linux community is smart enough to overcome this challenge (or perhaps just stubborn enough to get pissed off at it and make it work perfectly). Shipping source-only packages and requiring compilation is a sensless way to waste everyone's time. Why should I spend half a day compiling packages from source every time I install Linux? I can get a Linux box up-and-running in less than two hours because of binary packages.

Requiring everyone to compile everything is a big fat waste of clock cycles that would better be spent on something like Folding @ Home. The challenges of making binary compatibility work properly is irrelevant, and will be solved given enough time. Everything-on-Linux-compiled-locally is throwing the baby out with the bathwater.

Open Source Artificial Intelligence requires a clunker old computer that can run Java, JavaScript, Forth and so on -- that's all.

The Stanford AI Lab (SAIL) has a slight advantage with some good beaches nearby.

The MIT AI Lab has a lot of old AI curmudgeons to confab with.

The German AI Institute -- davor schreckt man zurueck.

The Singularity Institute for Artificial Intelligence does the scutwork of informing the world population about what the Mentifex AI Lab is quietly, inexorably doing.

True AI is here.

"You can't have two computers add 2+2 any faster than you can have one computer do it. You can however, have two computers adding 2+2 and 0+1+1 at the same time to get two answers in half the time it would take one computer to do it."

Maybe not for 2+2, but you could for large numbers which are not atomic to add. If it takes linear time to do a task on one processor, on the Connection Machine it could basically end up being lg n time.

Cf. here

There is a difference between journalism which can have editorals to science which strives for a naturalized epistemology.

No, US policy is not shifting to resemble the French doctorine. French, Britain, and US nuclear doctorines regarding "No First Use" are all already the same, they oppose No First Use, afterall these countries all are part of NATO. US has always rejected No First Use. US policy had been one of "calculated ambiguity," that is we would be ambiguious on nuclear questions as it would contribute to our security. Secretary of Defense William Cohen in November 1998: "We think the ambiguity involved in the issue of nuclear weapons contributes to our own security, keeping any potential adversary who might use either chemical or biological [weapons] unsure of what our response would be." But there are four major problems with Calculated Ambiguity. (And this new doctorine eliminates the benefits of ambiguity, and just strengthens the case that we should not make nuclear threats.) 1. It violates The Non-Proliferation Treaty's (1995 extension conference) guarantee not to threaten non-nuclear states with nuclear use. Violations of the NPT hurt credibility in persuading countries to forgo acquisition of nuclear weapons. And Proliferation is a Bad thing. (See Scott Sagan in _Nuclear Weapons: A debate renewed_) 2. Calculated Amiguity creates a "commitment trap." If a country does threaten WMD, or does use non-nuclear WMD, then the US will be expected to use nuclear weapons, starting a nuclear war. (See Scott Sagan "The Commitment Trap" 2000 [PDF] http://iis-db.stanford.edu/pubs/20284/sagan_is_spr 00.pdf [stanford.edu] ) 3. Nuclear first use contributes to the tyranny of survival, whereby any imaginable evil can be committed in the name of survival. (See Daniel Callahan _Tyranny of Survival_ 1977) 4. Nuclear first use threats underly nuclearism, an ideology that makes nuclear use thinkable and more likely. (See Lifton & Falk _Indefensible Weapons_ 1982) (Sorry that most of these resources are off-line, but the Sagan article should keep most entertained for a while.) Here's the stance of the 5 major nuclear power states on the question of No First Use China has No First Use Russia had No First Use, but revoked it in recent years, due to a lack of reciprication. Britain and France both oppose No First Use. (NATO Members Canada and Germany support No First Use.) US policy is stated above. Also India has No First Use. For more information on US First Use Policy, see Stansfield Turner's _Caging the Genie_ 1998. Turner was of the CIA, and advocates establishing a global No First Treaty, and believes that it would be feasible. Having studied the question of No First Use literature for about a semester, I can say that the academic literature, especially critical academic literature, is slanted in favor of a US No First Use policy, even if not recipricated.

This is the right idea, it reminds me of something from Donald Knuth's website, when he is asked, "Why does Knuth replace MIX by another machine instead of just sticking to a high-level programming language? Hardly anybody uses assemblers these days?" anyone interested should read what he has to say under the heading "Why have a machine language?" at http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/mmix.htm l

The short version is programming languages come and go, right now Java is probably the en vogue language before that C++, before that C, and so on. The point is not to become dependant on any one language and learn the (as Knuth puts it) "timeless truths." Dont learn how to implement a concept, understand it, and once you gain that understanding you should be able to implement in any language that need be.

I also doubt that many people who believe in third eyes are likely to be computer users

And what exactly is your logic behind this statement?

If a person believes that, upon aligning themselves with the nature of the universe, Truthfulness-Compassion-Forebearance, they can ascend to higher states of being, thus opening up more of the universe for them, this somehow means that they aren't computer users? How are these related?Not to mention, many philosophers and scientists have been interested in a physically evident seemingly untapped vestigial "third eye."

While you're obsessed with computers and technology and confining yourself to only those pieces of the universe that you can see and feel, people are trying to improve themselves and return to their origin.

Try opening up your heart and your mind and saving yourself from this prison.

Methinks that over-reaches just a little. Apart from the fact that "propaganda" is a poor choice of word - although it may describe ESR's output - open source pioneers were working effectively in principle long before ESR was out of diapers.

Despite ESR's strenuous self-promotion, the fact is that RMS was of course principally responsible for what we know as open source philosophy and its legal framework. ESR is only one of the slightly loopy hangers-on... valuable, but as is usually the case, in inverse proportion to his ego.

And then there is the Second Act, in which he plans to take credit for the inevitable disintegration of M$. Sorry Eric, that's going to take the whole community to achieve, unless you plan to take your arsenal to Redmond...

I'm not turning to stone at the sight of her, but Julie Farris also does not come anywhere close to my definition of a "babe".

Maybe she cleans up nice, but based on everything Google Images can dig up... not a babe.

Article 9. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary arrest, detention or exile.

Article 12. No one shall be subjected to arbitrary interference with his privacy, family, home or correspondence, nor to attacks upon his honour and reputation Everyone has the right to the protection of the law against such interference or attacks.

Article 18. Everyone has the right to freedom of thought, conscience and religion; this right includes freedom to change his religion or belief, and freedom, either alone or in community with others and in public or private, to manifest his religion or belief in teaching, practice, worship and observance.

Article 19. Everyone has the right to freedom of opinion and expression; this right includes freedom to hold opinions without interference and to seek, receive and impart information and ideas through any media and regardless of frontiers.

Here's a little excerpt from the Stanford Encylopedia of the ideas behind the Charter:

1. The General Idea of Human Rights
The Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR; United Nations 1948b) sets out a list of over two dozen specific human rights that countries should respect and protect. We may group these specific rights into six or more families: security rights that protect people against crimes such as murder, massacre, torture, and rape; liberty rights that protect freedoms in areas such as belief, expression, association, assembly, and movement; political rights that protect the liberty to participate in politics through actions such as communicating, assembling, protesting, voting, and serving in public office; due process rights that protect against abuses of the legal system such as imprisonment without trial, secret trials, and excessive punishments; equality rights that guarantee equal citizenship, equality before the law, and nondiscrimination; and welfare rights (or "economic and social rights") that require provision of education to all children and protections against severe poverty and starvation. Another family that might be included is group rights. The UDHR does not include group rights, but subsequent treaties do. Group rights include protections of ethnic groups against genocide and the ownership by countries of their national territories and resources.

the relevant linux-audio-dev thread.. here

Well...not quite THAT strong. :)

Lawrence Lessig is professor of law at Stanford University.
http://www.law.stanford.edu/faculty/lessig/
http://www.lessig.org/

If the Public Domain is going to die can't we just water it.
http://www.google.com/search?q=define%3Apublic+dom ain

...I would love a few extra (functional) fingers! It would help my Gaspard de la Nuit!

Haha, well this will be my last post since reason is lost on you. All of your responses arise from "well, i break that law so that doesn't apply to me." And against that there is no recourse because you have sunken to the lowest echelon of computer and slashdot users. I'm not saying you're alone, but using it as the basis for an argument is retarded.

Piracy aside, Apple has gone to great lengths to insure that both the IPOD and iTunes are mated exclusively. iTunes will not sync with any other player, and iTunes DRM'd music will only play on an IPOD. Furthermore, an IPOD doesn't support open source formats such as OGG. Yes, the IPOD can be hacked. Yes, iTunes music can be burned to CD and reripped to another music player. However, this involves steps that Apple is using its strength in the market to enforce so that general users feel more inclined to just buy Apple hardware than suffer the inconveniences of workarounds.

OSx86 is an illegal project that as of now works on a very limited hardware platform with no 3D acceleration support. It even needs to be further hacked to allow operation on CPU's without SSE3 extensions. So to say that it runs on ANY x86 machine is false because it still only runs on a limited hardware base. Furthermore, I never established that Apple has a monopoly in the PC world. Apple's US market share is currently estimated to be at 4.5 percent, FYI (http://www.andybudd.com/archives/2005/07/apple_ma rket_share/index.php) .

Windows does support linux networks in the sense that you can download and install Windows Services for Unix which allows you to both export and mount NFS based shares as well as run your own telnet server. It also includes a C shell and a KORN shell as well as the ability to launch X applications locally. From Windows 2000 and on you could install Services for Macintosh that allows you to run the Apple Filing Protocol (AFP as well as AppleTalk. For more information see http://windows.stanford.edu/Public/Infrastructure/ MacConfig.html. So when you're done with your pig-headed rant, try doing your own research before telling me I'm full of it.

Current uptimes:

Avg. of 8 Linux servers: 68 days (since power outage)
Avg. of 4 Windows XP servers: 68 days (since power outage)

There's a real reason, seems pretty stable to me.

107 is the four factor test. Again, I'm not a legal genious, so I'll refer generously to Stanford and the EFF for help in this matter.

1) the purpose and character of the use, including whether such use is of a commercial nature or is for nonprofit educational purposes;
Personal use is clearly non-commercial.
2) the nature of the copyrighted work;
In this case, the work is creative which is a point for their side.
3) the amount and substantiality of the portion used in relation to the copyrighted work as a whole; and
In my case, it's a whole copy of the work, another point for their side, however it's a reduced quality copy which is a point for my side.
4) the effect of the use upon the potential market for or value of the copyrighted work.
With Blockbuster's particular business model, I've already demonstrated it's actually MORE profitable for them to have me rent a movie rip it in 20 minutes and return it. As for future sales loss, that's not relevant to this argument because of a crucial factor - I delete them after I've watched them. The Supreme Court (Universal City Studios v. Sony Corp., 464 U.S. 417 (1984)) ruled that a time shifted copy does not deprive them of revenue, and that was for a broadcast, not even a paid rental as in my case. I firmly believe that the courts would uphold my arguement that I rented the media that it's on but bought a license to watch the movie. In fact, Blockbuster's terms and conditions does not stipulate how many times you may watch a movie that you've rented, it merely stipulates how long you can keep the media. I've time-shifted the right to watch the movie until after the media is returned, but that doesn't negate my right to watch it, and the Supreme Court upheld my right to time shift it.

Maybe you might want to ask Orkut, these exclusionists(who inspired Google towards their current policy), this guy, and maybe CNET. Also, it wouldnt be too far off of them to be evil by making it policy to consider the Midwest as talentless "flyover country".

Maybe they ought to get out there in the sun and take a look at rest of the nation that didnt have blessed connections but has plenty of talent.

Earlier they went after CyberNet Ventures, the people behind the Adult Check age-verification service.

They seem to be extremely serious about protecting their copyrights (as they interpret them). Google is just the latest target.

I don't think you understand.. if we get non-terrestrial life and it's genetic code, the results will be the biggest discovery of the last 100 yrs (leaving out quantum physics and atomic energy).. for instance.. we get to see if it also has a "handedness" in the formation of its molecules. check this:

" The crucial biomolecules of life - such as amino acids, RNA and DNA - are chiral. In order for these polymeric molecules to replicate themselves, their individual components have to be of one kind, either right- or left-handed.

"It is generally agreed that you need homochirality - either all left-handed or all right-handed - for life to get off the ground," Bonner said. "Therefore, a preponderance of one handedness must have evolved in prebiotic times."

The scientists, however, cannot explain how this happened because they have never succeeded in creating chiral molecules of only one kind in laboratory experiments that simulated prebiotic conditions.

Since chiral molecules are necessary to breed new chiral molecules, how did the first ones come about? "

from http://www.stanford.edu/dept/news/pr/93/930210Arc3 408.html

Harm comes in many forms

Can you show me what harm is caused by Polyamory or homosexuality that isn't in monogamous heterosexual relationships?

Nature intended one father and one mother for each child.

I guess you've never heard of asexuality. Asexual organisms reproduce by themselves, either through cloning, vegetative means or self fertilization. Or have you ever heard of intersexuals? Here's a good faq on intersexuals, What is intersexuality (or hermaphroditism)? From the start of the page:

Our culture conceives sex anatomy as a dichotomy: humans come in two sexes, conceived of as so different as to be nearly different species. However, developmental embryology, as well as the existence of intersexuals, proves this to be a cultural construction. Anatomic sex ifferentiation occurs on a male/female continuum, and there are several dimensions.

why do you call yourself an atheist?

I know you're asking in general seeing as you start with "for all of you atheists:" but I'll bite anyway. I'm not an atheist. I am an agnostic, "a" without and "gnosis" knowledge, I am without knowledge and am jealous of those who have faith.

They removed almost all of the books, relaxed the food and drink policy (maybe due to their financial interest the coffee kiosk next door?) and threw open what used to be controlled access doors at Meyer Library at Stanford... in 2000. A glorified computer lab doesn't warrant so much attention in 2005.

Are you wearing a tin foil hat?

Financial records are most certainly better in electronic format than they are on paper. On 9/11, the World Trade Centres were lost. Along with the tragic loss of life, there was an awful lot of data in those towers. Because systems were redundant, the financial information was elsewhere.

It's much easier to keep lots of copies of something in electronic form than it is in print. In this vein, some libraries have banded together to make stuff redundant.

Check out

http://lockss.stanford.edu/

Now, if there's total nuclear annihilation or your luddite WMD EMP, I sense there might be a larger problem than lost knowledge - like no remaining beings to read said wisdom.

That's a good point. People frequently misperceive risks and deal with them irrationally.There is a whole psychological literature on this, due in large part to the late Amos Tversky. One example is fear of flying. Statistically, the risk of flying is much less than the risk of being killed in an automobile accident.

The cost of smoke detectors should really be considerably less than parent calculates, for two reasons. One is that a lot of people already have them. The second is that we don't need one per person. For residential areas, you need at most one per room. Since most couples sleep in the same bedroom and kids often share rooms, the number of smoke detectors needed per person is probably less than 0.5. It should be safe to cut the cost estimate in half.

On the other hand, its hard to compare the damage at risk from terrorism with that from fire. Death by fire arises from a large number of events each of which has only a very small probability of killing more than a few people. Statistically, over a country the size of the United States, estimates of the total number of deaths by fire and other such causes are going to be quite reliable. Terrorists, unlike fire, do not strike at random. They usually want to cause as much damage as they can, and modern technology gives them the means to do that. With luck a suicide bomber kills no one but himself; without it, he'll take a dozen or so people with him. The 9/11 terrorists killed 3,000. They probably could have increased that number by an order of magnitude if they gone for something less flashy than the world trade center, say blowing up a major sports arena or concert venue while an event was going on. A small nuke could kill several hundred thousand. The problem is, it is very hard to estimate the relative probability of a successful terrorist act that kills only a few and one that kills many thousands. This makes it hard to distribute resources rationally, even if you are so inclined and in principal understand how to do so.

Now, those are the roots of video gaming.

I was doubtful about this because of entanglement so I quickly googled entanglement information and the first result, from Stanford encyclopedia says this:

Quantum Entanglement and Information
Quantum entanglement is a physical resource, like energy, associated with the peculiar nonclassical correlations that are possible between separated quantum systems. Entanglement can be measured, transformed, and purified. A pair of quantum systems in an entangled state can be used as a quantum information channel to perform computational and cryptographic tasks that are impossible for classical systems. The general study of the information-processing capabilities of quantum systems is the subject of quantum information.

So information transfer isn't limited by C.

I was doubtful about this because of entanglement so I quickly googled entanglement information and the first result, from Stanford encyclopedia says this:

Quantum Entanglement and Information
Quantum entanglement is a physical resource, like energy, associated with the peculiar nonclassical correlations that are possible between separated quantum systems. Entanglement can be measured, transformed, and purified. A pair of quantum systems in an entangled state can be used as a quantum information channel to perform computational and cryptographic tasks that are impossible for classical systems. The general study of the information-processing capabilities of quantum systems is the subject of quantum information.

So information transfer isn't limited by C.

My critique of the above arguments is a standard critique used by biologists when dealing with evolutionary "just so" scenarios. See, for example, some comments by Stephen Jay Gould. If I look intellectually lame, I think that's for others to judge, because I don't think you're up to the task.

"Google is curing cancer." As a matter of fact, that's true. From the Folding@Home website: "What happens if proteins don't fold correctly? Diseases such as Alzheimer's disease, Huntington's disease, cystic fibrosis, BSE (Mad Cow disease), an inherited form of emphysema, and even many cancers are believed to result from protein misfolding. "