No, because in the train you can stand up. It's not comfortable to stand up for a long time, but it sure beats many seats.
FWIW, I have a knee problem that makes it difficult to stand for a long time, but it make it MUCH worse to keep it at a fixed angle. And I'm sensitive to rises at the front of seats, so it's often more comfortable to have a seat without padding.
I don't know the Tokyo trains, in particular, but in most such things there are overhead rails that you can hold to support much of your weight, so I can shift my weight from joint to joint. This isn't good, but it's a lot better than keeping my knee bent at an inflexible angle.
Now lets consider shoulder width. This is less significant, but I'm about 2 ft. from shoulder to shoulder, depending on how you measure it. This is much less accurate than "I'm 6 ft. from finger tip to finger tip with my arms spread", because the exact points of measure are more diffuse. I have a strong suspicion that I wouldn't even fit into the Ryanair seats. And I'm not near the outer edge of the population.
I would ride the train in Tokyo without qualm (though admittedly I haven't done so in 3 decades). I wouldn't willingly even try to right Ryanair.
Did you read the comments on that article? The GP isn't the only person to have experienced rising costs for decreased service over the time period measured, and at least one person said that the time interval used was cherry picking.
I don't know the author of that article, but I suspect that he may not be unbiased. Just about nobody agreed with him (though there were a few).
One person, in particular, said that the general pattern was that when an airline started up it would have low fares, and as time went by the fares would increase. He claimed to be studying the pattern professionally. Was he right? I don't know, but then I have my doubts about the article, too.
Perhaps it would make more sense if there were a comparison between train costs and airline costs as a function of time between multiple destinations. Or airplane vs. bus. Auto is too variable to be a good choice.
Van Voght was not a second rate science fiction author. You need tor realize that styles change over the decades. I often have trouble reading stories now that I once thought were superb...and it's not just that I'm older (though that's a factor, too), and it not just that science has advanced (many of them were really fantasy anyway). It's that habit of thought that were reasonable now seem silly. And some things that seemed silly now seem reasonable. But just try to read, e.g., "A Logic Named Joe". Or "The Voyage of the Space Beagle". In contrast "The World of Null-A" has held up rather well.
Science fiction is often a reflection of current politics. When the politics changes, the fiction often stops working. This doesn't mean the author wasn't good, it means he was (subtly?) topical.
You are talking about different parts of the process. The person performing the experiment needs to be objective and keep it falsifiable. The person reading a report of the experiment should "trust but verify". (I'm not real sure about that "trust" word in there. It sort of depends on how unreasonable the finding is, and what the source is that claims it.. And those that trust least will be most inclined to verify.) Remember, though, that we are talking about a population of scientists (i.e., all those who read the article making a particular report), not a particular individual scientist. If everybody had to replicate every finding from scratch it would be really difficult to make any progress.
More to the point, negative results have a very hard time getting published, even though they are nearly as valuable as positive results.
Also, replication of a result doesn't usually bring much in the way of kudos, even though it's an essential part of the scientific method. I won't say that a replicated result has a hard time getting published, but I will say it has a hard time of getting many inches of print.
It's a bit stronger than that. Yes, Apple can, but so can any man-in-the-middle. So you have to trust the entire chain of connections between you and Apple.
Now man-in-the-middle attacks aren't that common, but they also aren't that difficult. It would probably only affect a small group of people at a time, depending on where the compromise took place. But this would seem to mean that Apple may have been telling the truth when they denied sharing information with the NSA. The NSA didn't need to ask them.
They're also saying that any man-in-the-middle would get sufficient information to impersonate you, and could do anything that you are allowed to do.
That was "good enough" security in 1970 on mainframe terminals, but they weren't broadcast over the internet. And there wasn't much malicious hacking. As it is.... well, I'm just glad that I don't use their services.
How long is the expected to last? Last I checked F2PY didn't work with Python3. I can't remember whether it worked with versions of fortran past Fortran95. Python2 is still being supported, but it's probably only got a couple of years before it's mothballed. (I think the original promise was 5 years of support after Python3 was released.)
OTOH, perhaps Python2 will be more durable than expected. Or perhaps F2PY supports...when I checked just now I got a bunch of people reporting errors in using F2PY with Python3, but many of them were over a year old, so maybe it's working now.
OTOH, a modern Fortran is actually pretty good just by itself if you don't need bunches of external libraries. And as for I/O...well, nothing is good at that, it's too general a requirement. Fortran77 is quite good a binary I/O, I haven't tried a recent fortran. OTOH, I will agree that Fortran77 is rather poor at character I/O.
One consideration that you might have is handling unicode. The last time I checked (quite awhile ago) fortran (all of them) was as poor as C at dealing with unicode, whereas Python handles it quite well. I don't know whether this has changed (or which version of Fortran you would be using, or whether it matters for your application).
OTOH, support in dealing with Fortran is rather limited. If you don't know someone, you may have trouble finding support. Few people use it. As you said you haven't used it for a rather long time, this may be significant.
The real answer is that it depends on details of your application. It depends on what you mean by a large amount of data. It depends on your computer. (Also, my recent experience is with Linux. You appear to be using MSWind, judging by your comment about VBA. I have no knowledge of how any Fortran works on an MSWind system, but I suspect that it's barely supported. Which would make Python a better choice. (You said you could load the system with either MSWind or Linux, but there's much to be said for familiarity.)
That's what patents are supposed to be. That's also what they usually aren't. I don't believe in patents not only because they are generally something obvious, but because they generally do *not* "make patent" the devices that they are claiming a patent on. This may be an exception (though I haven't read the patent, and don't intend to). It is clearly the kind of thing that patents are intended to cover. So if the description does "make patent" the device, i.e. reveal it in sufficient detail that those skilled in the art can reproduce it, then I would consider this a valid instance of a patent. I estimate that this is true of perhaps 1 out of 1,000 patents, to be optimistic. Usually they are written in patent lawyer bafflegab and are of no use whatsoever to those skilled in the art that is not being described. I do not believe that those should be considered valid patents (and I do not so consider them). OTOH, I'm not a judge in a patent court. They seem happy to swallow any garbage and pronounce it valid.
I believe someone said that, but I don't believe it would happen. China has a VERY long history of independent capitalists, merchants, and traders. (And also, of course, of state control and taxing of same.)
OTOH, I'm quite willing to believe that the international cooperation would end if it were no longer to the benefit of China. That's a separate issue. That's also in accord with Chinese history. Everyone used to consider their home country the country under the center of heaven's gaze, but China never had reason to stop the way, e.g., Babylon did. I don't know if the Chinese language still speaks of china the "The middle kingdom" (meaning the country in the middle of the earth), but I wouldn't be surprised. Please note that this is separate from government policy, or what people know is true. It has to do more with how they feel about things. It means only things that happen within China are really important. If you don't think other countries have a tendency in this direction, you just aren't observant, but China is HUGE, so there's really little to challenge it. Especially if external news is controlled. And people are generally quite willing to discount the doings of "Those silly foreigners", even if they encounter them frequently, so this is just the government reinforcing the kind of belief that makes most people comfortable.
Smaller countries, where people more frequently move outside the bounds of the country, as a bit less given to this kind of belief, but it's always there lurking in the background. Ever see one of those maps centered around some particular city, where everything distant from it is depicted as increasingly small and unimportant?
Knowing *something* isn't the problem, the problem is that need to already know what the tools you are going to need to solve the problem are called.
OTOH, I'm not sure what a better way to handle this at the command line would be. Python and Ruby and C++ and Smalltalk have decent documentation where you can find out how to solve your problem even if you don't already know the exact term, but I'm not sure how one could handle this at the command line. The official attempt, info, failed miserably, to the point were everyone still relies on man pages and appropos, or on the web and gui.
That said, the documentation that Oracle provides for free for the products of theirs that I have considered using is so poor that I went elsewhere choosing, e.g., KyotoCabinet over BerkeleyDB. I don't know whether BerkeleyDB would have been a better choice, but the documentation was so terrible that I'm not likely to ever know, either. P.S.: I'm not thrilled with Java documentation, though it's not too bad, but that's mainly Sun's doing. I definitely prefer Doxygen in tree format over what Javadoc turns out. Still, that's a matter of personal taste, and the Java documentation (supplemented by several books) is adequate. But not as good as that of Python, and also not as good as Ruby's documentation in most places. (Some of Ruby's documentaiton is frankly lamentable, being just lists of function names with their parameter lists, and no description of what the functions do. Vala has the same problem. Having documentation tools available isn't sufficient, they've got to be used reasonably.)
FWIW, Smalltalk (in particular Squeak) has a combination of the best and worst documentation around. It's worst because you need to be in the Smalltalk environment to use it. It's the best because everything seems to be documented completely. (Unfortunately, this often means that the code is most of the documentation. Fortunately, for Smalltalk this usually doesn't make things hard to understand. [In principle, I like Smalltalk a lot. In practice, it's totally enclosed environment makes it difficult to actually do anything.])
The problem isn't storing the data, it's understanding it. And codes can be ANYTHING. There's no plausible way to break a code besides stealing the codebook. Cryptography is something totally different.
P.S.: Yes, I know that in principle you can break a code by getting a large enough pile of messages and observing what reactions that cause to be initiated. But that's just not plausible. And you have to decide what's important, is the the way Viagr? is misspelled, or what words occur next to it? What is the "chunk size" of that message? does it represent one letter, a complete sentence, or something in between? Etc. How does the target delouse the signal? Does he pay attention to the third word after each misspelled word? Does it matter how the word is misspelled? Etc. So it's not plausible. It would probably take longer to break the code than the particular code would be in use.
It should be pretty easy to infiltrate a spam provider. All you need is someone sufficiently expert who's willing to work cheaper than those who don't have a mission. The spam provider wouldn't even care...unless the feds started knocking on his door.
The coded message would be justified as chaff to get the spam through filters. And the organization could even provide additions e-mail addresses to send the stuff to. This might even end up being a profit center, with only the upper management of the spamming organization unaware of what's going on.
The weakness here is that you need to have a way to get the communication flowing backwards. So you need to have several spamming companies in different locations so that information can flow easily. And, of course, it *IS* a relatively low bandwidth kind of thing, so you will need to spread every actual message over several spam messges. And you'll need to think of it as a telegram, or a twit, not as an e-mail.
The problem is, who do you trust enough to run that currency? Certainly no country throughout all of history has been that trustworthy. Except, possibly, Croessus and Darius...but that was quite a long time ago. Basically, at that point all official money was was a promise of a certain degree of purity in the gold. Every country since then debased the currency when things got tough.
We could have survived Reagan. I'm not thrilled with the chances he took (or his social policies), but he did end the cold war. Clinton was actively reducing the deficit...which is probably why he ran into trouble. (You don't really think that was about possibly smoking a joint in college and screwing an willing aide do you? Be serious.)
Well, the presidents since then seem to have taken the warning, and none of them have done ANYTHING calculated to reduce the deficit.
Correction: Buy something valuable that isn't taxed after you buy it. Gold is nice, because it's portable, but nearly anything valuable will do. Real estate is bad, because there's a continuing tax on it. Steel ingots are a bit difficult to move. Wheat doesn't store well. So many people prefer gold. It's bright, shiney, malleable, etc.
But note, buying gold is only reasonable if you actually take possession of it. Promissary notes aren't worth much more than dollars. And if you take possession of it, you need to worry a lot more about theives. Because they also like things that are valuable, anonymous, and portable. Safe deposit boxes aren't much more reliable than the banks that offer them, and they also represent an on-going expense. Etc.
There are many reasons why gold has gone out of fashion. Perhaps the best investment would be wood for violin bodies. That appreciates in value for generations while it's seasoning. But disposing of it is a bother, storing it properly is a bother, and there are recurrent promisses of a technical fix that will allow wood that isn't seasoned over the long term to serve as well. You'd need to be an expert in that area to evaluate the worth of the idea (which I'm not...there aren't many).
But why gold? Irridium or platinum would be as reasonable, and probably better unless civilization really collapses, in which case whiskey would be a better choice. Gold prices, the reasonably high, are artificially inflated by monetary speculators...and that popularity waxes and wanes. It's currently higher than it has been several times during my lifetime.
P.S.: If we ever start extracting uranium from the ocean, gold will fall out automatically as a secondary result, and the market will crash seriously. And it would currently be energetically efficient to do the extraction. It's just that other ores are easier and cheaper. But if we DO start, we'll get LOTS of other elements nearly automatically. It wouldn't pay to do it for gold, not even at the currently inflated prices, but it could pay to do it for uranium. And if we start doing it, you know we'll discover more efficient ways that we currently know about. So gold isn't safe over the long term.
No. There have been universal standards before. Gold, e.g.
I don't really think much of BitCoin as a currency. It has several features that favor it, but it has no utility in and of itself. Its only value is it's scarcity, and that dissipates with increase in computational power.
What I really favor is something difficult to acquire and capable of being made anywhere, and useful. For the past several decades I favored the monocrystaline silicon standard. Currently, due to signs that it may be replaced in utility, I favor the whiskey standard. This has the defect that different manufacturers produce notably different varieties, so arguements about relative values could be expected. But it would retain it's value even if civilization collapsed.
In that case go on the whiskey standard. When there's too much money around, consume it.
(I normally favor mono-crystaline silicon, but there are signs that that may soon be replaced in actual use. Whiskey is stable, storable, and valuable even if the market collapses.)
Your second point has merit, though I'm not sure how much. I refuse to consider military pensions welfare, however, nor will I consider medical treatment of military personnel to be welfare. Those are a part of the employment contract, which is already tilted heavily in favor of the employer. To the extend that military recuiters normally lie in order to get people to sign up. Which should automatically void the enlistment, but doesn't even when it's proven (which is made absurdly difficult).
Money spend on healthcare of military personnel and their dependents IS spent on defense. So is money spent on retirement benefits, and attempt to rehabilitate the wounded. And when soldier are killed, I feel their families are grossly cheated at the penurious way they are recompensed.
P.S.: The military is rediculously oversized when considered as an army of defense. It is only about the right size if you include in it's job protection of, e.g., Saudi Arabia's oil wells. Even then it's a bit oversized budgetarially. Much of the fancy stuff is silly. Frequently is isn't even something the military wanted, but rather something some congressman wanted.
Caution: This is my assessment, and I'm not an expert, and don't even follow the news carefully. But I think it's a good model of what's happening.
China is following a very different strategy. In the US vs. the USSR both sides were spending all they could afford, and a bit more. Sort of like a potlatch with threats. But when the US won, because the USSR went broke, the US didn't stop potlatching.
China was never a part of that particular contest, and never saw a reason to join it. It would have been starting with a real handicap, and there was no real benefit in playing.
So China is winning the economic contest because the US is fighting with the last wars strategies. It was always a silly strategy, and the US won only by bluffing (or possibly by lying to it's citizens). We could never have built "Star Wars" as a defensive shield...though we could have built enough of it to make a dandy first strike weapon. Russia couldn't match our spending, so it couldn't put one up of it's own. What it could have done was destroy it shortly before it was complete. But that would have been a blatant act of war, which they didn't want, not being quite as crazy as the US leaders.
So. WRT everyone on the planet the US already has a first strike weapon....if all you want to end up with is a sterliized planet. (That's the ICBMs.) There's no advantage in having more of them. They can't be intercepted, because air bursts can be just as deadly as ground bursts. And winning that way is as bad as losing, or perhaps worse, as you get to experience the long dying. The crazy thing is we don't know what the minimum exchange required for a dead planet is. It could be that a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could do it. (Well, it's pretty sure that that wouldn't kill off everything, but it's not sure that it wouldn't kill off all mammals. That's estimated as very unlikely, not impossible.)
So China looked at that and said to itself "Why should I play that game?" All it needs is ICBMs enough to hit anywhere in the world, and a minimal nuclear weapon capability. And that only needs to actually work if their goal is to kill everyone. (Actually, their military capabilities are sufficiently spread that a first strike against them, even if they didn't bother to retaliate, would probably leave everyone dead. So why go an extra mile.)
Now as for fancy military weapons that are usable, again, China sees no particular value in having them. China has LOTS of people, and those things are mainly useful in minimizing the number of people you need to commit. So China saves money by not bothering. I suspect that they're going all out on developing drones, however. Those things have so many uses that not developing them would be foolish. I'm not at all sure that it's pushing weaponizing them. (It certainly could.) Japan iand Korea are more likely to be pushing weaponizing drones. They have much more limited populations. All of them, however, are pushing work with drones. (As is the US.)
Think about robots: China isn't working hard at developoing robots, though it's quite willing to use those that others develop. Robots mainly give advantage to those with limited and expensive populations. But some factories in China are as roboticized as any elsewhere. But the robots weren't developed in China...except possibly on contract for someone else.
Also, note that China isn't really centrally controlled. SOME things are centrally controlled, or there is a strong attempt at central control. Other things are much looser. I don't always approve of this, because it includes things like enforcement of environmental regulations, though there are signs that China is starting to take these more seriously. (And I can't go into details, because I neither know them, nor have a good model of them. But remember that much of this is my mental model.)
P.S.: If you disagree, that's fine. All I really know about China is based on news reports, and they are nortorious for lying. If you know someone from China, trust what they say more than anything you get on the news, and still remember that everyone has a biased viewpoint.
Slashdot Mirror
No, because in the train you can stand up. It's not comfortable to stand up for a long time, but it sure beats many seats.
FWIW, I have a knee problem that makes it difficult to stand for a long time, but it make it MUCH worse to keep it at a fixed angle. And I'm sensitive to rises at the front of seats, so it's often more comfortable to have a seat without padding.
I don't know the Tokyo trains, in particular, but in most such things there are overhead rails that you can hold to support much of your weight, so I can shift my weight from joint to joint. This isn't good, but it's a lot better than keeping my knee bent at an inflexible angle.
Now lets consider shoulder width. This is less significant, but I'm about 2 ft. from shoulder to shoulder, depending on how you measure it. This is much less accurate than "I'm 6 ft. from finger tip to finger tip with my arms spread", because the exact points of measure are more diffuse. I have a strong suspicion that I wouldn't even fit into the Ryanair seats. And I'm not near the outer edge of the population.
I would ride the train in Tokyo without qualm (though admittedly I haven't done so in 3 decades). I wouldn't willingly even try to right Ryanair.
Did you read the comments on that article? The GP isn't the only person to have experienced rising costs for decreased service over the time period measured, and at least one person said that the time interval used was cherry picking.
I don't know the author of that article, but I suspect that he may not be unbiased. Just about nobody agreed with him (though there were a few).
One person, in particular, said that the general pattern was that when an airline started up it would have low fares, and as time went by the fares would increase. He claimed to be studying the pattern professionally. Was he right? I don't know, but then I have my doubts about the article, too.
Perhaps it would make more sense if there were a comparison between train costs and airline costs as a function of time between multiple destinations. Or airplane vs. bus. Auto is too variable to be a good choice.
Actually it makes it quite clear that the airlines are claiming that. People just aren't believing them. Possibly because they've been lied to before.
Van Voght was not a second rate science fiction author. You need tor realize that styles change over the decades. I often have trouble reading stories now that I once thought were superb...and it's not just that I'm older (though that's a factor, too), and it not just that science has advanced (many of them were really fantasy anyway). It's that habit of thought that were reasonable now seem silly. And some things that seemed silly now seem reasonable. But just try to read, e.g., "A Logic Named Joe". Or "The Voyage of the Space Beagle". In contrast "The World of Null-A" has held up rather well.
Science fiction is often a reflection of current politics. When the politics changes, the fiction often stops working. This doesn't mean the author wasn't good, it means he was (subtly?) topical.
You are talking about different parts of the process. The person performing the experiment needs to be objective and keep it falsifiable. The person reading a report of the experiment should "trust but verify". (I'm not real sure about that "trust" word in there. It sort of depends on how unreasonable the finding is, and what the source is that claims it.. And those that trust least will be most inclined to verify.) Remember, though, that we are talking about a population of scientists (i.e., all those who read the article making a particular report), not a particular individual scientist. If everybody had to replicate every finding from scratch it would be really difficult to make any progress.
More to the point, negative results have a very hard time getting published, even though they are nearly as valuable as positive results.
Also, replication of a result doesn't usually bring much in the way of kudos, even though it's an essential part of the scientific method. I won't say that a replicated result has a hard time getting published, but I will say it has a hard time of getting many inches of print.
Try 555-1212.
OTOH, I rarely give my phone #, even if they ask. If they won't take a fictitious one, and don't allow you to skip it, then I just don't go there.
It's a bit stronger than that. Yes, Apple can, but so can any man-in-the-middle. So you have to trust the entire chain of connections between you and Apple.
Now man-in-the-middle attacks aren't that common, but they also aren't that difficult. It would probably only affect a small group of people at a time, depending on where the compromise took place. But this would seem to mean that Apple may have been telling the truth when they denied sharing information with the NSA. The NSA didn't need to ask them.
They're also saying that any man-in-the-middle would get sufficient information to impersonate you, and could do anything that you are allowed to do.
That was "good enough" security in 1970 on mainframe terminals, but they weren't broadcast over the internet. And there wasn't much malicious hacking. As it is.... well, I'm just glad that I don't use their services.
How long is the expected to last? Last I checked F2PY didn't work with Python3. I can't remember whether it worked with versions of fortran past Fortran95. Python2 is still being supported, but it's probably only got a couple of years before it's mothballed. (I think the original promise was 5 years of support after Python3 was released.)
OTOH, perhaps Python2 will be more durable than expected. Or perhaps F2PY supports...when I checked just now I got a bunch of people reporting errors in using F2PY with Python3, but many of them were over a year old, so maybe it's working now.
OTOH, a modern Fortran is actually pretty good just by itself if you don't need bunches of external libraries. And as for I/O...well, nothing is good at that, it's too general a requirement. Fortran77 is quite good a binary I/O, I haven't tried a recent fortran. OTOH, I will agree that Fortran77 is rather poor at character I/O.
One consideration that you might have is handling unicode. The last time I checked (quite awhile ago) fortran (all of them) was as poor as C at dealing with unicode, whereas Python handles it quite well. I don't know whether this has changed (or which version of Fortran you would be using, or whether it matters for your application).
OTOH, support in dealing with Fortran is rather limited. If you don't know someone, you may have trouble finding support. Few people use it. As you said you haven't used it for a rather long time, this may be significant.
The real answer is that it depends on details of your application. It depends on what you mean by a large amount of data. It depends on your computer. (Also, my recent experience is with Linux. You appear to be using MSWind, judging by your comment about VBA. I have no knowledge of how any Fortran works on an MSWind system, but I suspect that it's barely supported. Which would make Python a better choice. (You said you could load the system with either MSWind or Linux, but there's much to be said for familiarity.)
That's what patents are supposed to be. That's also what they usually aren't. I don't believe in patents not only because they are generally something obvious, but because they generally do *not* "make patent" the devices that they are claiming a patent on. This may be an exception (though I haven't read the patent, and don't intend to). It is clearly the kind of thing that patents are intended to cover. So if the description does "make patent" the device, i.e. reveal it in sufficient detail that those skilled in the art can reproduce it, then I would consider this a valid instance of a patent. I estimate that this is true of perhaps 1 out of 1,000 patents, to be optimistic. Usually they are written in patent lawyer bafflegab and are of no use whatsoever to those skilled in the art that is not being described. I do not believe that those should be considered valid patents (and I do not so consider them). OTOH, I'm not a judge in a patent court. They seem happy to swallow any garbage and pronounce it valid.
I believe someone said that, but I don't believe it would happen. China has a VERY long history of independent capitalists, merchants, and traders. (And also, of course, of state control and taxing of same.)
OTOH, I'm quite willing to believe that the international cooperation would end if it were no longer to the benefit of China. That's a separate issue. That's also in accord with Chinese history. Everyone used to consider their home country the country under the center of heaven's gaze, but China never had reason to stop the way, e.g., Babylon did. I don't know if the Chinese language still speaks of china the "The middle kingdom" (meaning the country in the middle of the earth), but I wouldn't be surprised. Please note that this is separate from government policy, or what people know is true. It has to do more with how they feel about things. It means only things that happen within China are really important. If you don't think other countries have a tendency in this direction, you just aren't observant, but China is HUGE, so there's really little to challenge it. Especially if external news is controlled. And people are generally quite willing to discount the doings of "Those silly foreigners", even if they encounter them frequently, so this is just the government reinforcing the kind of belief that makes most people comfortable.
Smaller countries, where people more frequently move outside the bounds of the country, as a bit less given to this kind of belief, but it's always there lurking in the background. Ever see one of those maps centered around some particular city, where everything distant from it is depicted as increasingly small and unimportant?
You weren't supposed to notice that they slipped that in there.
Still? I thought they'd been doing their own tree since the fork.
O, well. Not a real surprise. Guess they didn't want to do the work.
Knowing *something* isn't the problem, the problem is that need to already know what the tools you are going to need to solve the problem are called.
OTOH, I'm not sure what a better way to handle this at the command line would be. Python and Ruby and C++ and Smalltalk have decent documentation where you can find out how to solve your problem even if you don't already know the exact term, but I'm not sure how one could handle this at the command line. The official attempt, info, failed miserably, to the point were everyone still relies on man pages and appropos, or on the web and gui.
That said, the documentation that Oracle provides for free for the products of theirs that I have considered using is so poor that I went elsewhere choosing, e.g., KyotoCabinet over BerkeleyDB. I don't know whether BerkeleyDB would have been a better choice, but the documentation was so terrible that I'm not likely to ever know, either.
P.S.: I'm not thrilled with Java documentation, though it's not too bad, but that's mainly Sun's doing. I definitely prefer Doxygen in tree format over what Javadoc turns out. Still, that's a matter of personal taste, and the Java documentation (supplemented by several books) is adequate. But not as good as that of Python, and also not as good as Ruby's documentation in most places. (Some of Ruby's documentaiton is frankly lamentable, being just lists of function names with their parameter lists, and no description of what the functions do. Vala has the same problem. Having documentation tools available isn't sufficient, they've got to be used reasonably.)
FWIW, Smalltalk (in particular Squeak) has a combination of the best and worst documentation around. It's worst because you need to be in the Smalltalk environment to use it. It's the best because everything seems to be documented completely. (Unfortunately, this often means that the code is most of the documentation. Fortunately, for Smalltalk this usually doesn't make things hard to understand. [In principle, I like Smalltalk a lot. In practice, it's totally enclosed environment makes it difficult to actually do anything.])
How do they handle it if single letters change in each copy? It seems like that should also be compressible, but would normal deduplication work?
The problem isn't storing the data, it's understanding it. And codes can be ANYTHING. There's no plausible way to break a code besides stealing the codebook. Cryptography is something totally different.
P.S.: Yes, I know that in principle you can break a code by getting a large enough pile of messages and observing what reactions that cause to be initiated. But that's just not plausible. And you have to decide what's important, is the the way Viagr? is misspelled, or what words occur next to it? What is the "chunk size" of that message? does it represent one letter, a complete sentence, or something in between? Etc. How does the target delouse the signal? Does he pay attention to the third word after each misspelled word? Does it matter how the word is misspelled? Etc. So it's not plausible. It would probably take longer to break the code than the particular code would be in use.
It should be pretty easy to infiltrate a spam provider. All you need is someone sufficiently expert who's willing to work cheaper than those who don't have a mission. The spam provider wouldn't even care...unless the feds started knocking on his door.
The coded message would be justified as chaff to get the spam through filters. And the organization could even provide additions e-mail addresses to send the stuff to. This might even end up being a profit center, with only the upper management of the spamming organization unaware of what's going on.
The weakness here is that you need to have a way to get the communication flowing backwards. So you need to have several spamming companies in different locations so that information can flow easily. And, of course, it *IS* a relatively low bandwidth kind of thing, so you will need to spread every actual message over several spam messges. And you'll need to think of it as a telegram, or a twit, not as an e-mail.
The problem is, who do you trust enough to run that currency? Certainly no country throughout all of history has been that trustworthy. Except, possibly, Croessus and Darius...but that was quite a long time ago. Basically, at that point all official money was was a promise of a certain degree of purity in the gold. Every country since then debased the currency when things got tough.
(When thinking about this, look up Gresham's law. http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Gresham's_law )
Also consider how that agency is going to fund itself...because unless it can use force, whoever pays the bills is going to control the policy.
We could have survived Reagan. I'm not thrilled with the chances he took (or his social policies), but he did end the cold war. Clinton was actively reducing the deficit...which is probably why he ran into trouble. (You don't really think that was about possibly smoking a joint in college and screwing an willing aide do you? Be serious.)
Well, the presidents since then seem to have taken the warning, and none of them have done ANYTHING calculated to reduce the deficit.
Correction:
Buy something valuable that isn't taxed after you buy it. Gold is nice, because it's portable, but nearly anything valuable will do. Real estate is bad, because there's a continuing tax on it. Steel ingots are a bit difficult to move. Wheat doesn't store well. So many people prefer gold. It's bright, shiney, malleable, etc.
But note, buying gold is only reasonable if you actually take possession of it. Promissary notes aren't worth much more than dollars. And if you take possession of it, you need to worry a lot more about theives. Because they also like things that are valuable, anonymous, and portable. Safe deposit boxes aren't much more reliable than the banks that offer them, and they also represent an on-going expense. Etc.
There are many reasons why gold has gone out of fashion. Perhaps the best investment would be wood for violin bodies. That appreciates in value for generations while it's seasoning. But disposing of it is a bother, storing it properly is a bother, and there are recurrent promisses of a technical fix that will allow wood that isn't seasoned over the long term to serve as well. You'd need to be an expert in that area to evaluate the worth of the idea (which I'm not...there aren't many).
But why gold? Irridium or platinum would be as reasonable, and probably better unless civilization really collapses, in which case whiskey would be a better choice. Gold prices, the reasonably high, are artificially inflated by monetary speculators...and that popularity waxes and wanes. It's currently higher than it has been several times during my lifetime.
P.S.: If we ever start extracting uranium from the ocean, gold will fall out automatically as a secondary result, and the market will crash seriously. And it would currently be energetically efficient to do the extraction. It's just that other ores are easier and cheaper. But if we DO start, we'll get LOTS of other elements nearly automatically. It wouldn't pay to do it for gold, not even at the currently inflated prices, but it could pay to do it for uranium. And if we start doing it, you know we'll discover more efficient ways that we currently know about. So gold isn't safe over the long term.
No. There have been universal standards before. Gold, e.g.
I don't really think much of BitCoin as a currency. It has several features that favor it, but it has no utility in and of itself. Its only value is it's scarcity, and that dissipates with increase in computational power.
What I really favor is something difficult to acquire and capable of being made anywhere, and useful. For the past several decades I favored the monocrystaline silicon standard. Currently, due to signs that it may be replaced in utility, I favor the whiskey standard. This has the defect that different manufacturers produce notably different varieties, so arguements about relative values could be expected. But it would retain it's value even if civilization collapsed.
In that case go on the whiskey standard. When there's too much money around, consume it.
(I normally favor mono-crystaline silicon, but there are signs that that may soon be replaced in actual use. Whiskey is stable, storable, and valuable even if the market collapses.)
Your second point has merit, though I'm not sure how much. I refuse to consider military pensions welfare, however, nor will I consider medical treatment of military personnel to be welfare. Those are a part of the employment contract, which is already tilted heavily in favor of the employer. To the extend that military recuiters normally lie in order to get people to sign up. Which should automatically void the enlistment, but doesn't even when it's proven (which is made absurdly difficult).
Money spend on healthcare of military personnel and their dependents IS spent on defense. So is money spent on retirement benefits, and attempt to rehabilitate the wounded. And when soldier are killed, I feel their families are grossly cheated at the penurious way they are recompensed.
P.S.: The military is rediculously oversized when considered as an army of defense. It is only about the right size if you include in it's job protection of, e.g., Saudi Arabia's oil wells. Even then it's a bit oversized budgetarially. Much of the fancy stuff is silly. Frequently is isn't even something the military wanted, but rather something some congressman wanted.
Caution: This is my assessment, and I'm not an expert, and don't even follow the news carefully. But I think it's a good model of what's happening.
China is following a very different strategy. In the US vs. the USSR both sides were spending all they could afford, and a bit more. Sort of like a potlatch with threats. But when the US won, because the USSR went broke, the US didn't stop potlatching.
China was never a part of that particular contest, and never saw a reason to join it. It would have been starting with a real handicap, and there was no real benefit in playing.
So China is winning the economic contest because the US is fighting with the last wars strategies. It was always a silly strategy, and the US won only by bluffing (or possibly by lying to it's citizens). We could never have built "Star Wars" as a defensive shield...though we could have built enough of it to make a dandy first strike weapon. Russia couldn't match our spending, so it couldn't put one up of it's own. What it could have done was destroy it shortly before it was complete. But that would have been a blatant act of war, which they didn't want, not being quite as crazy as the US leaders.
So. WRT everyone on the planet the US already has a first strike weapon....if all you want to end up with is a sterliized planet. (That's the ICBMs.) There's no advantage in having more of them. They can't be intercepted, because air bursts can be just as deadly as ground bursts. And winning that way is as bad as losing, or perhaps worse, as you get to experience the long dying. The crazy thing is we don't know what the minimum exchange required for a dead planet is. It could be that a nuclear war between India and Pakistan could do it. (Well, it's pretty sure that that wouldn't kill off everything, but it's not sure that it wouldn't kill off all mammals. That's estimated as very unlikely, not impossible.)
So China looked at that and said to itself "Why should I play that game?" All it needs is ICBMs enough to hit anywhere in the world, and a minimal nuclear weapon capability. And that only needs to actually work if their goal is to kill everyone. (Actually, their military capabilities are sufficiently spread that a first strike against them, even if they didn't bother to retaliate, would probably leave everyone dead. So why go an extra mile.)
Now as for fancy military weapons that are usable, again, China sees no particular value in having them. China has LOTS of people, and those things are mainly useful in minimizing the number of people you need to commit. So China saves money by not bothering. I suspect that they're going all out on developing drones, however. Those things have so many uses that not developing them would be foolish. I'm not at all sure that it's pushing weaponizing them. (It certainly could.) Japan iand Korea are more likely to be pushing weaponizing drones. They have much more limited populations. All of them, however, are pushing work with drones. (As is the US.)
Think about robots: China isn't working hard at developoing robots, though it's quite willing to use those that others develop. Robots mainly give advantage to those with limited and expensive populations. But some factories in China are as roboticized as any elsewhere. But the robots weren't developed in China...except possibly on contract for someone else.
Also, note that China isn't really centrally controlled. SOME things are centrally controlled, or there is a strong attempt at central control. Other things are much looser. I don't always approve of this, because it includes things like enforcement of environmental regulations, though there are signs that China is starting to take these more seriously. (And I can't go into details, because I neither know them, nor have a good model of them. But remember that much of this is my mental model.)
P.S.: If you disagree, that's fine. All I really know about China is based on news reports, and they are nortorious for lying. If you know someone from China, trust what they say more than anything you get on the news, and still remember that everyone has a biased viewpoint.