These are government figures that do not reflect private giving. [...] Since we also pay relatively little in taxes,
Well, there you go. Since the US government collects less per capita in taxes than other, more socialist, countries, it stands to reason that it has less per capita to redistribute. Also, the US government has to spend a tremendous amount of money to maintain and expand its empire in its futile attempt dominate the planet.
As far as personal giving goes, the main problem with that is that many so-called "charities" aren't, and my guess is that Americans, being more cynical than the citizens of other nations, realize this (or believe it to be so, even when it's not), and don't support them for that reason.
That said, the USA has things like the Peace Corps, etc., to which many Americans contribute their time, and that can help far more than a simple infusion of money to corrupt third-world governments.
And I find myself getting done with all my projects + my daily work way ahead of time by busting my ass the first few hours while I'm their. [...] I see people everyday that spend most of their time actually trying to look like their working.
I suggest that you take some of your free time to learn the difference between "their", "there", and "they're".
we have this magical solution to rough wood edges called sandpaper
There's no such thing as "sandpaper". Paper made out of sand would quickly wear down any pen or pencil that a person would try to use to write on it. Next thing you know, you're going to try to tell me that there are such things as boys made out of paper, tops made out of boxes, melons and pitchers made out of water, mobiles made out of autos, and balls made out of feet, bases, and baskets. Do you think that I am that gullible? Well, I'm not; there's just no way that I can be turned into a gull.
If you read the rest oof the thread, you'll see that almost the whole thing is full of deep, intelligent and well-reasoned arguments on both sides of the GC in a language issue and so on.
But you're missing the deepest, most intelligent, and mostest well-reasoned argument of all: whether it's pronounced "STROO-strup" or "STROW-strup".
(Yes, I know, that's not a particularly funny joke, but at least it's not Bjarne-yard humor.)
My sunday newspaper has Dilbert in the frontpage. I remember the days when a kid could wake up sunday morning and have only Garfield and other innocent comics.
Nah, we also used to have that godawfulpiece of tripe "Doonesbury", though.
When I was a kid, we had Walt Kelly's "Pogo" and Al Capp's "L'il Abner" for incisive political satire. "Doonesbury" and "Dilbert" both suck in comparison.
I hate the extended (ab)use of 'sexy' with a passion. [...] There are plenty of other words to say that electronic devices are neat.
But some sexy electronic devices aren't neat at all. In fact, I've seen some sexy electronic devices that are positively scruffy (e.g., the radio telescope dish at Arecibo (sp?), which, the last time that I saw (a picture of) it, looked like it could use a good scrub-down and a new coat of paint). Perhaps you meant "cool", but, then again, since the Arecibo (sp?) dish is in Puerto (sp?) Rico, the word "cool" probably doesn't apply, either.
My Plumber - A right-angle junction between the end of one pipe and somewhere other than the end of another.
Julie Andrews - A drink with jam and bread.
Sitting Bull - A kind of pee.
George W. Bush - One of those letters in the back of the alphabet, somewhere near "Z", or 17, or maybe Chicago, I think. It's too hard. What do you think, Dick? Has anybody seen my pretzels?
Until this comment I had never heard anything about it being named for Native Americans.
It's not "Native Americans"; it's "Persons of Pre-Columbian American Immigrant Ancestry". (Even that's not totally accurate, because it wasn't called "America" then.) I was born in New Jersey, which makes me 100% "Native American", even though only some of my ancestors were here before Columbus came.
Calling someone "Native American" is as silly as calling someone "African American" (because all Americans (even Persons of Pre-Columbian American Immigrant Ancestry) are "African Americans", if you go back far enough).
OTOH, people called the Apaches "Indians" (or "American Indians") for the longest time, and I (being part "American Indian") don't see the harm in continuing to use that term (since it wasn't meant in a deragotory way, unlike the way that "the 'N' word" was (and still is) used to describe People of Recent Sub-Saharan African Ancestry), although I think that, in most cases, people shouldn't be classified by race or ancestry in the first place.
I am still left to wonder why they are gone and we are still here.
Possible reasons:
A war with our ancestors triggered by offensive Geico commercials.
Starbucks coffee acted like birth-control pills to Neanderthals, but they didn't find out about it until it was too late
They realized that the Vogons would eventually destroy Earth to make way for an interstellar bypass; they just left ahead of time, rather than at the last minute, like the dolphins.
They destroyed themselves in an internicine war over which was better: vi or emacs.
They stopped breeding when all of the males spent all of their time downloading Internet porn instead of having actual relationships with females.
Does anyone know whether there is an upper limit to text compression?
I remember that some company came up with a great compression utility back in the 1980's that could compress any data down to 1% of its original size. These compressed files could themselves be compressed, resulting in even further compression. By repeated compression, any size file could be compressed down to less than 1024 bytes. The problem was that the company offered no decompression utility to decompress the file. My understanding is that the company went out of business shortly thereafter.
A long, long time ago, a friend of mine in college came up with a great compression scheme while watching a file being punched on paper tape: simply remove all of the zero bits from the file being compressed. This will typically reduce a file size by 50%. Since the upper bit in bytes in ASCII text files is always 0, a text file will typically be compressed by over 50%. In addition, once all of the zero bits are removed, you can compress the file further by counting the one bits left over and using that number as the compressed file. This number can be further compressed, etc. By repeated compression, all files can be compressed down to one bit, and since that bit is always 1 (except in the case of an initially empty file), you can treat that 1 bit as implied and remove it as well, leaving you with a totally empty file. This means that my friend's scheme offers infinite compression! Unfortunately, as with the scheme mentioned above, decompressing such a file is problematic.
The aide's email could be an international "smoking gun" lost forever vs. an eternally archived Presidential request for diet soda on Air Force One.
I gree with this completely. The article mentioned the selective retention of information as one possibility for coping with the massive amounts of data that need to be preserved. I think that it would be a mistake to do this. IMO, all data should be archived in bulk as soon as possible, and then scholars can work on indexing those portions that they deem important, in order to allow more efficient access to such data. However, the "less interesting" information should still be available, so that if a mid-level manager's lunch plan email (mentioned in the article as being something not worth keeping) turns out to be important, then it can be retrieved.
The other thing to consider is that, as AI progresses, it may become possible to have intelligent agents sift through the data, and find subtle relationships not seen by human researchers. If some data are lost, however, such automated research will be crippled to some extent.
I remember reading an essay by Isaac Asimov some years back, where he was responding to criticism of his "Foundation" novels, particularly the fact that nobody in the Empire knows on which planet the human race originated. He mentioned the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria and destruction of all video recordings of the first Superbowl (an event popular in the U.S. involving American football) as examples of how knowledge can be lost. In addition to Asimov's examples, many old movies are rotting away in studio warehouses, centuries-old books are decaying or being eaten by insects, etc., etc. So even non-digital data can be and are being lost.
The solution is to make many copies of data available at many different locations (including off-planet, once that option becomes viable). Do this first; worry about classification/catagorization/etc. later.
Re:OVERKILL: Great Movie != Great Animation
on
Lucas's New HQ
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Or did they cheat by having a real actor there?
They had a real actor there, but I would hardly call it "cheat"ing. Rather, I would call it good movie-making, in that it gave the other actors someone to interact with. In addition, the animators made extensive use of the actor's facial expressions, body language, etc., in the animation, resulting in a superior product.
Rapists should be killed. [...] Same for most murderers, too.
No current criminal justice system is perfect. That means that there are people in prison now who have been falsely convicted of rape and murder. Some people who have been on Death Row for years have been released, thanks to new forensic techniques like DNA analysis. Similarly, convicted rapists who have been in prison for years have been exhonorated due to new forensic techniques. It is a travesty that people still support sending possibly innocent people to their deaths, when future forensic techniques may exhonorate the wrongly convicted.
What are the odds of rats chewing through a main trunk cable on the same day a local power company cutting a second main trunk?
Well, they must be pretty fucking good, considering it did just happen!
OK, time for a statistics lesson. The universe is about 13,000,000,000 years old. In all that time, a rat chewing through one cable while a cutting tool cutting through another has occured just once, where said chewing/cutting has resulted in a communications failure in a major metropolitan area on the plaent Earth. That places the odds of such an event happening in any one year at 1 in about 13,000,000,000. Using that probability as a guide, I think that it's safe to say that everyone can ignore the problem.
Bennie Smith is entirely correct -- if ad blocking becomes standard in popular browsers, that will be the end of free content on the web.
There was free content on the web before the first webvertisement appeared, there is non-webvertisement-supported free content on the web now, and there will be free content on the web after the last webvertisement disappears.
You don't think that Americans have these rights? Tell you what, put a chinese citizen on a TV show and have him on a daily basis bash the president and show every single fault and see what happens to him.
The fact that you are reduced to saying "The USA's human rights record is better than China's." is a sad indication of how far our rights have been eroded. Similarly, Charles Manson didn't murder as many people as Ted Bundy. Hitler's human rights record was better than Stalin's. And the USA's human rights record is better than China's. Yes, what a ringing endorsement that is.
Please don't call it the "Patriot" act It's not the "Patriot" act; it's the "USAPATRIOT" Act. Please use the full acronym, or its full name: "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism". The "USAPATRIOT" Act has nothing to do with patriotism, so calling it the "Patriot Act" is misleading. (Considering how the Act is being misused these days, even using its full name is somewhat misleading.) Personally, I pronounce it "the you sap at riot act" to avoid confusion. Other pronunciations are "the US ap uh TRY ot act" and (as Jar-Jar) "the YOUsa pah TR-R-RE-E-E at act".
At first I thought it said "Long-Term Carbon Shortage"... I was like, WTF?!
I read it correctly, but I interpreted the headline to mean archiving information (long-term backups, etc.) using buckyballs or something similar. My reaction was "Cool!". A DVD/CD made from nanotubes would be able to withstand much higher rotation speeds, meaning faster I/O. Imagine a 200x drive! You wouldn't be able to have them in laptops, though, because of the gyroscopic effects.
Any sufficintly advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology.
AFAIK, this was first used in a short story in the late 1970s / early 1980s, appearing in one of Asimov's, Analog, or F&SF. The story was about a car company that was producing incredibly advanced automobiles very inexpensively. I don't remember very many details about the story (having read it over 20 years ago), but, as I recall, a corporate spy discovered that the company, run by American Indians, was using sophisticated Indian magic to produce the automobiles, and disguising it as advanced technology. "Any sufficintly advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." was the punchline to the entire story. (It was what is sometimes called a "shaggy dog" story.)
All of us in the English-speaking world owe a debt of gratitude to the medieval Englishmen who had the foresight to establish an alphabet free of all those silly little tickmarks.
Now all we have to do is get rid of those pesky dots over "i" and "j".
All right, I can see your point about MS-Windows ME. Nobody deserves to be inflicted with MS-Windows ME (except maybe the people who wrote it). However, an upgrade to MS-Windows 2K, as you mentioned, or even a slight downgrade to MS-Windows 98, would have been better than going to MS-Windows XP.
As to scripting, I've had it disabled for years (at least five years, probably closer to ten), and there are very few sites in which I am interested that I can't visit. However, I don't visit Elementary or High School educational sites, so YMMV. My system has never (to my knowledge) been infected, and that's saying a lot for a MS-Windows 95 machine that's been hooked up to the Internet for over eight years without a firewall. I believe that its good health has been due, in large part, to closing port 135 and disabling scripting. (A very large percentage of security advisories about viruses, etc., suggest temporarily disabling scripting as a workaround until a patch comes out for this or that latest vulnerability. Well, since scripting is disabled all of the time on my system, then it's not vulnerable in the first place, so I don't have to worry about it.)
However, since you say that you don't store anything on the hard drives anyway, I have a suggestion: Add a cheap CD-ROM drive to each machine and make an image of the hard disk on CD-Rs. Then you can go ahead and enable scripting without having to worry about infections, etc. Instead, every few days or so, wipe the disk and restore from the CD-Rs. (If you can fit everything on one CD (or enough to read the rest from a read-only network share somewhere (maybe someone could pop for another disk for your central server)), you can even start this up each night before you go home, and the next morning each machine will be pristine again.) This would be much easier than keeping up with security advisories, etc.
Anyway, the main point that I was trying to make in my earlier post was that your machines should be fine for everyday schoolwork if you don't try to put the latest OS and other software on them, and that there is usually little reason to upgrade your OS unless it is really necessary (for example, MSes new paint program Acrylic runs only on XP, os you'd have to upgrade if you were going to use that). My father recently installed MSW XP on his 400MHz Celeron because he needed to use some program the latest version of which no longer ran under MSW NT. His system no runs like a snail stuck in molasses.
Well, I seem to be blathering again. Good luck with your machines, whatever you decide.
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It should be "in its futile attempt to dominate the planet".
Since the US government collects less per capita in taxes than other, more socialist, countries, it stands to reason that it has less per capita to redistribute.
Also, the US government has to spend a tremendous amount of money to maintain and expand its empire in its futile attempt dominate the planet.
As far as personal giving goes, the main problem with that is that many so-called "charities" aren't, and my guess is that Americans, being more cynical than the citizens of other nations, realize this (or believe it to be so, even when it's not), and don't support them for that reason.
That said, the USA has things like the Peace Corps, etc., to which many Americans contribute their time, and that can help far more than a simple infusion of money to corrupt third-world governments.
Thanks.
Paper made out of sand would quickly wear down any pen or pencil that a person would try to use to write on it.
Next thing you know, you're going to try to tell me that there are such things as boys made out of paper, tops made out of boxes, melons and pitchers made out of water, mobiles made out of autos, and balls made out of feet, bases, and baskets.
Do you think that I am that gullible?
Well, I'm not; there's just no way that I can be turned into a gull.
(Yes, I know, that's not a particularly funny joke, but at least it's not Bjarne-yard humor.)
"Doonesbury" and "Dilbert" both suck in comparison.
In fact, I've seen some sexy electronic devices that are positively scruffy (e.g., the radio telescope dish at Arecibo (sp?), which, the last time that I saw (a picture of) it, looked like it could use a good scrub-down and a new coat of paint).
Perhaps you meant "cool", but, then again, since the Arecibo (sp?) dish is in Puerto (sp?) Rico, the word "cool" probably doesn't apply, either.
Wait! I know!
The Arecibo (sp?) dish is "whack".
However, many eminent scholars have various informed opinions as to what it stands for:
(Even that's not totally accurate, because it wasn't called "America" then.)
I was born in New Jersey, which makes me 100% "Native American", even though only some of my ancestors were here before Columbus came.
Calling someone "Native American" is as silly as calling someone "African American" (because all Americans (even Persons of Pre-Columbian American Immigrant Ancestry) are "African Americans", if you go back far enough).
OTOH, people called the Apaches "Indians" (or "American Indians") for the longest time, and I (being part "American Indian") don't see the harm in continuing to use that term (since it wasn't meant in a deragotory way, unlike the way that "the 'N' word" was (and still is) used to describe People of Recent Sub-Saharan African Ancestry), although I think that, in most cases, people shouldn't be classified by race or ancestry in the first place.
These compressed files could themselves be compressed, resulting in even further compression.
By repeated compression, any size file could be compressed down to less than 1024 bytes.
The problem was that the company offered no decompression utility to decompress the file.
My understanding is that the company went out of business shortly thereafter.
A long, long time ago, a friend of mine in college came up with a great compression scheme while watching a file being punched on paper tape: simply remove all of the zero bits from the file being compressed.
This will typically reduce a file size by 50%.
Since the upper bit in bytes in ASCII text files is always 0, a text file will typically be compressed by over 50%.
In addition, once all of the zero bits are removed, you can compress the file further by counting the one bits left over and using that number as the compressed file.
This number can be further compressed, etc.
By repeated compression, all files can be compressed down to one bit, and since that bit is always 1 (except in the case of an initially empty file), you can treat that 1 bit as implied and remove it as well, leaving you with a totally empty file.
This means that my friend's scheme offers infinite compression!
Unfortunately, as with the scheme mentioned above, decompressing such a file is problematic.
The article mentioned the selective retention of information as one possibility for coping with the massive amounts of data that need to be preserved.
I think that it would be a mistake to do this.
IMO, all data should be archived in bulk as soon as possible, and then scholars can work on indexing those portions that they deem important, in order to allow more efficient access to such data.
However, the "less interesting" information should still be available, so that if a mid-level manager's lunch plan email (mentioned in the article as being something not worth keeping) turns out to be important, then it can be retrieved.
The other thing to consider is that, as AI progresses, it may become possible to have intelligent agents sift through the data, and find subtle relationships not seen by human researchers.
If some data are lost, however, such automated research will be crippled to some extent.
I remember reading an essay by Isaac Asimov some years back, where he was responding to criticism of his "Foundation" novels, particularly the fact that nobody in the Empire knows on which planet the human race originated.
He mentioned the burning of the ancient library at Alexandria and destruction of all video recordings of the first Superbowl (an event popular in the U.S. involving American football) as examples of how knowledge can be lost.
In addition to Asimov's examples, many old movies are rotting away in studio warehouses, centuries-old books are decaying or being eaten by insects, etc., etc.
So even non-digital data can be and are being lost.
The solution is to make many copies of data available at many different locations (including off-planet, once that option becomes viable).
Do this first; worry about classification/catagorization/etc. later.
Rather, I would call it good movie-making, in that it gave the other actors someone to interact with.
In addition, the animators made extensive use of the actor's facial expressions, body language, etc., in the animation, resulting in a superior product.
It means that UMDs won't affect your skin condition.
Oh, sorry, I was thinking ECZEMA.
That means that there are people in prison now who have been falsely convicted of rape and murder.
Some people who have been on Death Row for years have been released, thanks to new forensic techniques like DNA analysis.
Similarly, convicted rapists who have been in prison for years have been exhonorated due to new forensic techniques.
It is a travesty that people still support sending possibly innocent people to their deaths, when future forensic techniques may exhonorate the wrongly convicted.
The universe is about 13,000,000,000 years old.
In all that time, a rat chewing through one cable while a cutting tool cutting through another has occured just once, where said chewing/cutting has resulted in a communications failure in a major metropolitan area on the plaent Earth.
That places the odds of such an event happening in any one year at 1 in about 13,000,000,000.
Using that probability as a guide, I think that it's safe to say that everyone can ignore the problem.
Similarly, Charles Manson didn't murder as many people as Ted Bundy.
Hitler's human rights record was better than Stalin's.
And the USA's human rights record is better than China's.
Yes, what a ringing endorsement that is.
It's not the "Patriot" act; it's the "USAPATRIOT" Act.
Please use the full acronym, or its full name: "Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism".
The "USAPATRIOT" Act has nothing to do with patriotism, so calling it the "Patriot Act" is misleading.
(Considering how the Act is being misused these days, even using its full name is somewhat misleading.)
Personally, I pronounce it "the you sap at riot act" to avoid confusion.
Other pronunciations are "the US ap uh TRY ot act" and (as Jar-Jar) "the YOUsa pah TR-R-RE-E-E at act".
My reaction was "Cool!".
A DVD/CD made from nanotubes would be able to withstand much higher rotation speeds, meaning faster I/O.
Imagine a 200x drive!
You wouldn't be able to have them in laptops, though, because of the gyroscopic effects.
The story was about a car company that was producing incredibly advanced automobiles very inexpensively.
I don't remember very many details about the story (having read it over 20 years ago), but, as I recall, a corporate spy discovered that the company, run by American Indians, was using sophisticated Indian magic to produce the automobiles, and disguising it as advanced technology.
"Any sufficintly advanced magic is indistinguishable from technology." was the punchline to the entire story.
(It was what is sometimes called a "shaggy dog" story.)
All right, I can see your point about MS-Windows ME.
Nobody deserves to be inflicted with MS-Windows ME (except maybe the people who wrote it).
However, an upgrade to MS-Windows 2K, as you mentioned, or even a slight downgrade to MS-Windows 98, would have been better than going to MS-Windows XP.
As to scripting, I've had it disabled for years (at least five years, probably closer to ten), and there are very few sites in which I am interested that I can't visit.
However, I don't visit Elementary or High School educational sites, so YMMV.
My system has never (to my knowledge) been infected, and that's saying a lot for a MS-Windows 95 machine that's been hooked up to the Internet for over eight years without a firewall.
I believe that its good health has been due, in large part, to closing port 135 and disabling scripting.
(A very large percentage of security advisories about viruses, etc., suggest temporarily disabling scripting as a workaround until a patch comes out for this or that latest vulnerability.
Well, since scripting is disabled all of the time on my system, then it's not vulnerable in the first place, so I don't have to worry about it.)
However, since you say that you don't store anything on the hard drives anyway, I have a suggestion:
Add a cheap CD-ROM drive to each machine and make an image of the hard disk on CD-Rs.
Then you can go ahead and enable scripting without having to worry about infections, etc.
Instead, every few days or so, wipe the disk and restore from the CD-Rs.
(If you can fit everything on one CD (or enough to read the rest from a read-only network share somewhere (maybe someone could pop for another disk for your central server)), you can even start this up each night before you go home, and the next morning each machine will be pristine again.)
This would be much easier than keeping up with security advisories, etc.
Anyway, the main point that I was trying to make in my earlier post was that your machines should be fine for everyday schoolwork if you don't try to put the latest OS and other software on them, and that there is usually little reason to upgrade your OS unless it is really necessary (for example, MSes new paint program Acrylic runs only on XP, os you'd have to upgrade if you were going to use that).
My father recently installed MSW XP on his 400MHz Celeron because he needed to use some program the latest version of which no longer ran under MSW NT.
His system no runs like a snail stuck in molasses.
Well, I seem to be blathering again.
Good luck with your machines, whatever you decide.