Nevertheless, it doesn't affect what I was trying to get across in the first place. My point was that we estimate the distance to stars based upon the assumption that we know how light behaves. As soon as you claim that we don't know how fast light may have been going, you have only succeded in making our little bubble of reliably-observable space smaller than before.
Oh, and that article you linked to... sorry, but that didn't look like real science to me. Digging through old measurment data is not how an experiment is done. Set up an apparatus specifically for that purpose, then take measurements of the speed of light over an extended period of time. Whichever direction you orient the device, whenever you take the measurements, you'd be guaranteed a place in scientific history if you could manage to demonstrate any change in the measured speed of light in correlation with time.
Here's a bit of Creationist cosmology that gets skipped over a lot by the fundamentalists...
The "Young Earth" (more accurately, "young universe") viewpoint supposes that the universe was created about 6000 years ago. Okay, okay, quit laughing. That viewpoint HAS managed to turn up some interesting cases of rapid rock formation and "instant fossilization" which should really be examined with a more open mind. ANYway, they say that nothing is more than 6000 years old.
Then these same people go on and on about how huge the universe is, with all those stars so far away... star clusters, nebulae, galaxies, galactic clusters, etc. The problem is, most astronomically observed objects are more than 6000 light-years away. So if the universe is only 6000 years old, how did the light from those objects get here?
I've seen a couple ways to talk around this problem. The least idiotic one is, "God created everything in its finished form". They say that animals and people were created as adult creatures, and so the universe was created all-grown-up. Quit giggling and wait for the real obvious problem that they skip.
Okay, so even if you buy into all that about creation, you still have a really, really big problem with measuring distances to the stars. The whole idea is based on the assumption that the light which we see actually came all the way from the star in a more-or-less straight line at the speed of light. We measure angles and we measure parallax to get even more accuracy but it's still based on the assumption that the light actually came from the distant object in the normal way. The problem is, according to the creation doctrine, no light could have been going anywhere for more than 6000 years because that would have been before the pronouncement of "Let ther be light."
What that means is that according to creationist doctrine anything which appears to be more than 6000 light-years away is actually "faked" by God to look that way.
So make a dot on a chalkboard. That's us. Now draw a circle around it. That's the 6k light-year limit of what we can really see and measure by what we know about light. Everything outside of that may or may not really exist because it had to be "faked" by God at creation for us to see it at all. Now for the real fun... Stellar events. Every supernova that we see, since it's more than 6k light-years away, never really happened! It's just a light show that God puts on just to make the universe look old. All those most-distant quasars and pulsars, high-energy signals from the beginning of the universe... none of it is real. It's a gazillion-year-long history falsified, for what purpose?
The heavens declare that the god of these "Creationists" is a liar.
Re:Should've optimized the rectangular space
on
The Solar Death Ray
·
· Score: 1
I wouldn't think it'd be too hard if you'd use putty to mount the mirrors.
It doesn't matter where the mirror is, so you might as well cram them as close together as you can. Rows and columns are best for rectangular mirrors. If you have an odd number of rows and columns, you'll get a "center" spot which will be handy for the next step. Pencil a grid onto the backboard. Drill a hole in the center spot.
Put a ball on the end of a straight stick and mount it in the hole in the center of the backboard so you can make sure it's aimed at the sun (by centering the shadow of the stick on the backboard). The ball will be the focus.
Glop some putty onto the back of a mirror, put it in place, and tip it so its beam hits the ball (the focus). Make sure that the shadow of the ball is centered on the base of the aiming stick before you aim each the mirror. Now cover the little mirror you just aimed with something. Tape a piece of dark paper over it or something like that which won't slip off accidentally. Now you're ready to do the next little mirror the same way, and so on until you've covered the backboard with masked mirrors.
Take away the aiming stick and ball. Then unmask the little mirrors. There's your solar furnace!
Oh... and one of those afterthoughts that you should probably think about beforehand... You might want to keep a short aiming stick in the middle, but maybe only half or quarter of the way to the focus. That will make it easier to set up. Also, you should keep a tarp or cloth to cover the mirrors while setting it up or when it's not in use, because even when it's not aimed at the sun the focus will be somewhere and you can't see it.
Using this "masked mirrors" method, you could create a solar furnace nearly anywhere.
Should've optimized the rectangular space
on
The Solar Death Ray
·
· Score: 1
This mirror is layed out in concentric rings for some dumb reason. He should've just done lots of solid rows of mirrors. There's no reason they have to be in circles. He'd have gotten nearly double the power out of it for the same sized board.
Because the e-Scrabble URL is of no use to you, it should be transferred to Hasbro. We also demand that you provide us with information concerning the extent of your uses of any elements of the SCRABBLE game, as well as information regarding the distribution of your electronic Scrabble game to enable us to assess more precisely the extent of the damage done.
Isn't this just Hasbro saying "we'll take the game and the site from you and run it ourselves... then possibly take any money you made from it in the last year"?
First, I'm not a lawyer but I've seen this sort of thing before. In ordinary English it would go more like this:
"You can't use that URL (which you paid for) so you should just hand it over to us, for free." Notice the soft wording. They can't force him to transfer it but they may have had success in provoking others in similar ways.
"We demand that you tell us how many people have ever used your game, so we can multiply that by the price of our most expensive version and claim that everyone who tried your free game would have bought ours instead. (Later on, we're going to try to get a judge to make you pay us that big number!)" And the nasty part is that later on, a similar question could have a judge's signature on it. Any information he gives them would be ignored until they get him to give it again, then maybe they'd add those two numbers together since that's how these things tend to go...
Imagine the reaction at SETI if we finally got an obviously artificial signal from somewhere out there and dozens of people spent weeks or months trying to figure out how to decode it...
...only to find out that it was some stupid prank or stunt.
I don't think NASA should be using their equipment (and my tax dollars) for this sort of thing.
People who want to just download and run stuff are not the same group of people who advocate Linux... those click-happy people are the ones whom Linux advocates are trying to educate!
Linux under Windows has been available for almost a decade now. It's kind of handy for a few things, but the main reasons for running Linux (the kernel, not just the GNU utilities) are completely negated if you run it on top of any version of Windows.
Saying that Linux under Windows will kill Linux is kind of like claiming that the kids won't want to move out because they've got a playhouse in the back yard.
The most sensible thing that a phone manufacturer could do to beat the price crunch that the mobile phone service companies have them under is
make phones that are capable of communicating directly to each other and/or network through each other without any central service!
They should still be able to use a regular mobile service but keep a little record of numbers which are "direct-callable". Once a phone recognizes another as direct-callable, it would request whatever info it would need to establish point-to-point communications and then see whether it could reach the other. If not but other such phones were in the area, it might even ask them if they could relay the call!
Might as well add in a drop-in charging base station so that it could function as a cordless handset when in range of your home phone line, as long as I'm dreaming.
How much would you pay for a phone that knew how to "cheat" the phone company by leaving their billing system out of some calls whenever it could find a more direct route?
Every public place would become a network hub, every road a backbone...
Maybe you could have skipped the "revert wars" by simply discussing the changes directly with other contributors. That's what the "Discussion" page associated with each Wikipedia page is meant for.
It seems to me, ...that there may be something wrong when none of the students in a class manage to get a passing grade. Some possible reasons:
The instructor didn't teach very well.
The material the instructor taught was insufficient or irrelevant towards meeting requirements.
The instructor set requirements too high.
Students who slaved for weeks, paid good money, and took a chance on a new class hoping they'd learn cutting-edge stuff all turned out to be lazy morons, none of whom deserved to pass.
Robert Heinlein outlined a wonderful scheme in his book, "Time Enough for Love". It might even work.
In a nutshell, a really-really-rich guy surnamed Howard was so disgusted with having to die of old age that he set up a huge trust fund and a foundation to manage it. The idea was that people who could prove that they had grandparents or great grandparents who had lived past 100 years would get a grant and would qualify as "members" of the foundation. Then if two such members married, they'd qualify for another grant. And each child they had would get a grant, and so on. The idea was to promote selective breeding for longevity using financial incentives.
As Heinlein developed the idea through the story, he relates how the foundation had to become a secret society due to persecution of their members. They had to use cosmetic and disguise techniques to make their aging seem more like the public norm and then change identities after faking their own deaths.
The neat twist though was that the main character of the novel, "Lazarus Long", the oldest living "Howard", had never had the benefit of "rejuvenating" treatments. Having gotten a set of DNA without any congenital defects purely by chance, he had been roaming about, disguising his age, changing identities as his various spouses inevitably died.
(The grand finale where he goes back in time to screw his mother and then gets rescued by his clone-daughters who also screw him... well, it totally wrecked an otherwise amazing book, I thought.)
Not to mention that you must keep track of who you need to tell the truth [...]
That would be self-defeating. If you're going to "modify the truth" you should begin early and spread your version to others as rapidly as possible. Even eye-witnesses.
Very few people (if any) have "solid" memories. Most people can't even keep facts straight about private events in their own lives, slightly modifying the memory over time. This is common knowledge to those who take statements from witnesses at the scene of an accident or a crime. In a matter of minutes, an uninvolved witness who hasn't spoken with anyone else can completely change significant details of their account.
It's suspected that this has to do with how we recall memories; that there is no separate area of the brain for them, no division between our active thinking processes and the incomplete impressions stored among them. As we try to recall details, the brain may "approximate" based on other experiences, similar things, attitudes, expectations, personal biases, as well as social pressures and recent vicarious information.
There are a few examples of this sort of thing in Carl Sagan's book, "A Demon Haunted World". One of the more memorable was how Voltaire once went among a crowd of people who were listening to some speaker saying, "I saw the Holy Spirit descend on him like a dove!" Sure enough, people later turned up who claimed to have been eye-witnesses of that lie and who seemed completely convinced that they had actually seen it.
So if you're going to lie, don't worry about eye-witnesses. Worry instead about recording devices, which are becoming increasingly ubiquitous.
Paper... archival, acid-free paper. Carbon-pigmented ink or toner... This can work!
Bear with me. Paper really is a durable medium. How much data can realistically be printed onto a sheet of paper? 2-D barcodes, error-correction, redundancy... The only part you'd have to keep current would be the software to scan the pages and reconstruct the files.
Ooo, I can see a new use for "KBarcode" in this. "Translate file into barcoded pages..." Sure software compatibility might still be a problem, like trying to read old MS-Works files, but data in simpler forms would be fine.
Are you implying that it's better for the uninformed or easily swayed to simply get out of the way and let the people who want to control them do so? People like, you?
Count on people to demand that others act altruistically while selfishly covering their own butts, and you'll have a system that will work with real human beings running it.
"The media" that you blame for your own defeat is just some more ordinary people who have worked real hard at publishing their opinions. Nobody's being forced to believe them. Yeah sure, they're rich... but have you ever noticed how easy it is to become un-rich? Give 'em a little credit for the fact that they're doing something with their cash instead of blowing it.
Likewise, you can publish your opinions to the ignorant masses too. It's a free country, but that doesn't mean you're going to get everything you want for free. So you foot the bill to "inform" all these people of your virtues and some joker comes along and says to them, "You don't know what these other guys stand for, you uninformed mob, so you shouldn't vote." Down the hole goes your support.
Reasons you should vote, even if you don't know how the candidates stand on "issues" and "platforms":
Polititians don't keep campaign promises anyway. Been that way for thousands of years. Remember "Read my lips: No new taxes!" and how quickly that one got broken? Consider yourself un-biased because you haven't been listening to their lies.
By voting, you're participating and that boosts your feeling of responsibility for your part in governing the country... and that's good, no matter who you vote for.
By casting your vote, you're diluting the influence of the extremist nuts who always vote. More people voting helps cancel the disproportionate influence of vocal minorities.
If you don't think your vote will count for much, then you won't feel obligated to vote for "the lesser evil" and you'll be more likely to vote as your conscience leads you.
If you decide to vote, you might even feel motivated to learn something about the candidates, the process, the country, etc.
Y'see, the system was designed to be robust. That's why it's a "representative republic" instead of a direct democracy. That's why there are three branches set at odds with each other. The guys who wrote it up were assuming that the only way to keep a few people from screwing all the rest was to give everybody a chance to take some part in it with lots of opposition and lots of ways to block each other from overstepping their proper limits.
By voting, you're providing that necessary opposition, the much-needed buffer to thwart extremist control-freaks. So, VOTE. Figure out who you'll vote for later however you want but the more votes, the better.
The commercial I saw this morning while exercising off my spare calories (guess who's not going to be drinking the stuff) said that the alcohol content of this new brew would be 6.5% by volume. That's a full percent or more above the popular brews.
Imagine any nuclear waste disposal site... it'll be dangerous for how long? Hundreds, maybe thousands of years??
Now imagine a thousand years in the future there's some workers grading terraces for some new, expensive mountainside subdivision construction...
KLANGGGG!
"Kio estis tio?"
"Mi ne scias. Ho! Vidu! Gxi havas skribajxon en la antikva angla. Gxi nur estas alia peco de antauxmilita forjxetagxo."
"Rigardu la fremdajn simbolojn! Hmmm..."
What do you think are the chances of them understanding that they've just opened a site that was supposed to remain contained to wait out another thousand years of deadly decay? By the time they figure it out, the whole crew will probably already be dying from the stuff that didn't stay contained.
Seriously, the construction of something to last that long and the design of some form of communication that might still convey the intended meaning that far in the future are major problems which have not yet been solved.
This is exactly what those probes were launched for. It's great that they're not behaving as predicted. When everything behaves as we expect we don't learn much, but verifiable errors in our predictions can open entire dimensions of study that we didn't see before.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan, the real moments of discovery aren't when someone shouts, "Eureka!" but sometime before that when someone mumbles, "Hm, that's weird..."
As much as we'd like to blame "the system" it looks to me that the problem is with the users. The students and parents who "use" the education system are largely responsible for their own success or failure.
There are opportunities for those who put the effort into it. Advanced placement classes, competitions and scholarships, etc. It's not the school system's responsibility to deliver opportunities to your child. It's the parent and child's own responsibility to go looking and find them. In the US, they're everywhere.
For gradeschool kids, for example, there are science fairs, there are "4-H" programs (which aren't just 'farm stuff'), academic competitions sponsored by nationwide organizations like National Geographic, and more! ASK the school counsellors, ASK about highschool and college outreach programs and university extensions.
Criticizing "the education system" for failing to develop a child in some particular direction is like criticizing a buffet restaurant for not serving each customer exactly the quisine that they will relish. You can get complete nutrition at almost any restaurant but if you want something special then you've got to find where to get it and go there. Same with education.
Students who really want to learn are hardly being prevented. The horrible truth is that the majority of people are not like that single coal miner or that one group of Jewish mothers. Only a tiny minority really views education as tools of understanding. To most it's just a path to be trodden and forgotten in persuit of a diploma.
(Here's a self-test: Do you still have any of your school books or notes? When was the last time you reviewed the parts of it that you don't use day-to-day? Did you study it without intending to keep it?)
<old_fart_o_the_net>
Back in the late 80's when I was still in school, it was sail, nethack, IRC, e-mail and Usenet. Access for most students meant one of several rooms which seated twelve or twenty at black-and-white ASCII terminals.
Even when the most alluring distraction was the reams and reams of junk on talk.bizarre it was still a "distraction" from schoolwork. I wrote a lockout script to be run by my ".login" script. Of course, one never gets things quite right and I had to find a way to get past it because due to a coding error it wasn't ever going to let me in.
A friend of mine asked me for help on "a little project" which turned out to be his own version of the same thing. I began to suspect that maybe everybody thought of it... which is when I decided I had better just do what needed doing first.
</old_fart_o_the_net>
This new guy has really screwed himself though, considering how much time it must have taken to write it and get it all pretty on freshmeat.
"He who doesn't rule himself is not free."
-Epictetus
I don't generally reply to anonymous cowards (because they typically "diss" a thread and never return) but in case anyone else reads this one...
Sure, learn esperanto... that way you'll only meet people who have also learned esperanto... Not only is it flawed as a language (difficult to pronounce for some people, double consonants, anyone?), it won't let you know people from other places who aren't also actively trying to do the same. [...]
This is an entirely valid point from which, unfortunately, you imply a strange conclusion. You're saying that I should spend more time to learn a language which will put me in crude contact with people in a certain area, most of whom don't care about international communication enough to learn a foreign language which isn't required by law, by duty, or for profit.
On the contrary, I think it's a better idea to learn a language which will bring me quickly and fluently into genuine, friendly association with people all over the world (even from miniscule cultural groups, all of whose languages I could never hope to learn) whose driving motivation towards international, interpersonal communication has already been demonstrated by their decision to learn that same language, Esperanto. These are people who want to share their culture and to learn about others'.
We, "esperantists", are like a right hand held out for an honest handshake. By comparison, your notion looks more like a quick grope on a crowded train.
Slashdot Mirror
Nevertheless, it doesn't affect what I was trying to get across in the first place. My point was that we estimate the distance to stars based upon the assumption that we know how light behaves. As soon as you claim that we don't know how fast light may have been going, you have only succeded in making our little bubble of reliably-observable space smaller than before.
Oh, and that article you linked to... sorry, but that didn't look like real science to me. Digging through old measurment data is not how an experiment is done. Set up an apparatus specifically for that purpose, then take measurements of the speed of light over an extended period of time. Whichever direction you orient the device, whenever you take the measurements, you'd be guaranteed a place in scientific history if you could manage to demonstrate any change in the measured speed of light in correlation with time.
My main intent was to show that the folks who are supporting the notion of "intelligent design" also support other ideas which deserve ridicule.
Pardon me if I indulged in a little of that ridicule myself.
The "Young Earth" (more accurately, "young universe") viewpoint supposes that the universe was created about 6000 years ago. Okay, okay, quit laughing. That viewpoint HAS managed to turn up some interesting cases of rapid rock formation and "instant fossilization" which should really be examined with a more open mind. ANYway, they say that nothing is more than 6000 years old.
Then these same people go on and on about how huge the universe is, with all those stars so far away... star clusters, nebulae, galaxies, galactic clusters, etc. The problem is, most astronomically observed objects are more than 6000 light-years away. So if the universe is only 6000 years old, how did the light from those objects get here?
I've seen a couple ways to talk around this problem. The least idiotic one is, "God created everything in its finished form". They say that animals and people were created as adult creatures, and so the universe was created all-grown-up. Quit giggling and wait for the real obvious problem that they skip.
Okay, so even if you buy into all that about creation, you still have a really, really big problem with measuring distances to the stars. The whole idea is based on the assumption that the light which we see actually came all the way from the star in a more-or-less straight line at the speed of light. We measure angles and we measure parallax to get even more accuracy but it's still based on the assumption that the light actually came from the distant object in the normal way. The problem is, according to the creation doctrine, no light could have been going anywhere for more than 6000 years because that would have been before the pronouncement of "Let ther be light."
What that means is that according to creationist doctrine anything which appears to be more than 6000 light-years away is actually "faked" by God to look that way.
So make a dot on a chalkboard. That's us. Now draw a circle around it. That's the 6k light-year limit of what we can really see and measure by what we know about light. Everything outside of that may or may not really exist because it had to be "faked" by God at creation for us to see it at all. Now for the real fun... Stellar events. Every supernova that we see, since it's more than 6k light-years away, never really happened! It's just a light show that God puts on just to make the universe look old. All those most-distant quasars and pulsars, high-energy signals from the beginning of the universe... none of it is real. It's a gazillion-year-long history falsified, for what purpose?
The heavens declare that the god of these "Creationists" is a liar.
and this is "news", why?
It doesn't matter where the mirror is, so you might as well cram them as close together as you can. Rows and columns are best for rectangular mirrors. If you have an odd number of rows and columns, you'll get a "center" spot which will be handy for the next step. Pencil a grid onto the backboard. Drill a hole in the center spot.
Put a ball on the end of a straight stick and mount it in the hole in the center of the backboard so you can make sure it's aimed at the sun (by centering the shadow of the stick on the backboard). The ball will be the focus.
Glop some putty onto the back of a mirror, put it in place, and tip it so its beam hits the ball (the focus). Make sure that the shadow of the ball is centered on the base of the aiming stick before you aim each the mirror. Now cover the little mirror you just aimed with something. Tape a piece of dark paper over it or something like that which won't slip off accidentally. Now you're ready to do the next little mirror the same way, and so on until you've covered the backboard with masked mirrors.
Take away the aiming stick and ball. Then unmask the little mirrors. There's your solar furnace!
Oh... and one of those afterthoughts that you should probably think about beforehand... You might want to keep a short aiming stick in the middle, but maybe only half or quarter of the way to the focus. That will make it easier to set up. Also, you should keep a tarp or cloth to cover the mirrors while setting it up or when it's not in use, because even when it's not aimed at the sun the focus will be somewhere and you can't see it.
Using this "masked mirrors" method, you could create a solar furnace nearly anywhere.
This mirror is layed out in concentric rings for some dumb reason. He should've just done lots of solid rows of mirrors. There's no reason they have to be in circles. He'd have gotten nearly double the power out of it for the same sized board.
First, I'm not a lawyer but I've seen this sort of thing before. In ordinary English it would go more like this:
"You can't use that URL (which you paid for) so you should just hand it over to us, for free." Notice the soft wording. They can't force him to transfer it but they may have had success in provoking others in similar ways.
"We demand that you tell us how many people have ever used your game, so we can multiply that by the price of our most expensive version and claim that everyone who tried your free game would have bought ours instead. (Later on, we're going to try to get a judge to make you pay us that big number!)" And the nasty part is that later on, a similar question could have a judge's signature on it. Any information he gives them would be ignored until they get him to give it again, then maybe they'd add those two numbers together since that's how these things tend to go...
It's easy to get 100% vesting when your employer doesn't match. :-D
I don't think NASA should be using their equipment (and my tax dollars) for this sort of thing.
Linux under Windows has been available for almost a decade now. It's kind of handy for a few things, but the main reasons for running Linux (the kernel, not just the GNU utilities) are completely negated if you run it on top of any version of Windows.
Saying that Linux under Windows will kill Linux is kind of like claiming that the kids won't want to move out because they've got a playhouse in the back yard.
They should still be able to use a regular mobile service but keep a little record of numbers which are "direct-callable". Once a phone recognizes another as direct-callable, it would request whatever info it would need to establish point-to-point communications and then see whether it could reach the other. If not but other such phones were in the area, it might even ask them if they could relay the call!
Might as well add in a drop-in charging base station so that it could function as a cordless handset when in range of your home phone line, as long as I'm dreaming.
How much would you pay for a phone that knew how to "cheat" the phone company by leaving their billing system out of some calls whenever it could find a more direct route?
Every public place would become a network hub, every road a backbone...
Maybe you could have skipped the "revert wars" by simply discussing the changes directly with other contributors. That's what the "Discussion" page associated with each Wikipedia page is meant for.
Hmmm... I wonder which causes are more likely?
In a nutshell, a really-really-rich guy surnamed Howard was so disgusted with having to die of old age that he set up a huge trust fund and a foundation to manage it. The idea was that people who could prove that they had grandparents or great grandparents who had lived past 100 years would get a grant and would qualify as "members" of the foundation. Then if two such members married, they'd qualify for another grant. And each child they had would get a grant, and so on. The idea was to promote selective breeding for longevity using financial incentives.
As Heinlein developed the idea through the story, he relates how the foundation had to become a secret society due to persecution of their members. They had to use cosmetic and disguise techniques to make their aging seem more like the public norm and then change identities after faking their own deaths.
The neat twist though was that the main character of the novel, "Lazarus Long", the oldest living "Howard", had never had the benefit of "rejuvenating" treatments. Having gotten a set of DNA without any congenital defects purely by chance, he had been roaming about, disguising his age, changing identities as his various spouses inevitably died.
(The grand finale where he goes back in time to screw his mother and then gets rescued by his clone-daughters who also screw him... well, it totally wrecked an otherwise amazing book, I thought.)
That would be self-defeating. If you're going to "modify the truth" you should begin early and spread your version to others as rapidly as possible. Even eye-witnesses.
Very few people (if any) have "solid" memories. Most people can't even keep facts straight about private events in their own lives, slightly modifying the memory over time. This is common knowledge to those who take statements from witnesses at the scene of an accident or a crime. In a matter of minutes, an uninvolved witness who hasn't spoken with anyone else can completely change significant details of their account.
It's suspected that this has to do with how we recall memories; that there is no separate area of the brain for them, no division between our active thinking processes and the incomplete impressions stored among them. As we try to recall details, the brain may "approximate" based on other experiences, similar things, attitudes, expectations, personal biases, as well as social pressures and recent vicarious information.
There are a few examples of this sort of thing in Carl Sagan's book, "A Demon Haunted World". One of the more memorable was how Voltaire once went among a crowd of people who were listening to some speaker saying, "I saw the Holy Spirit descend on him like a dove!" Sure enough, people later turned up who claimed to have been eye-witnesses of that lie and who seemed completely convinced that they had actually seen it.
So if you're going to lie, don't worry about eye-witnesses. Worry instead about recording devices, which are becoming increasingly ubiquitous.
So to match the capacity of a $10 DVD+R(DL) disk, we would need 34 reams of paper. Nasty.
Paper... archival, acid-free paper. Carbon-pigmented ink or toner... This can work!
Bear with me. Paper really is a durable medium. How much data can realistically be printed onto a sheet of paper? 2-D barcodes, error-correction, redundancy... The only part you'd have to keep current would be the software to scan the pages and reconstruct the files.
Ooo, I can see a new use for "KBarcode" in this. "Translate file into barcoded pages..." Sure software compatibility might still be a problem, like trying to read old MS-Works files, but data in simpler forms would be fine.
Count on people to demand that others act altruistically while selfishly covering their own butts, and you'll have a system that will work with real human beings running it.
"The media" that you blame for your own defeat is just some more ordinary people who have worked real hard at publishing their opinions. Nobody's being forced to believe them. Yeah sure, they're rich... but have you ever noticed how easy it is to become un-rich? Give 'em a little credit for the fact that they're doing something with their cash instead of blowing it.
Likewise, you can publish your opinions to the ignorant masses too. It's a free country, but that doesn't mean you're going to get everything you want for free. So you foot the bill to "inform" all these people of your virtues and some joker comes along and says to them, "You don't know what these other guys stand for, you uninformed mob, so you shouldn't vote." Down the hole goes your support.
Y'see, the system was designed to be robust. That's why it's a "representative republic" instead of a direct democracy. That's why there are three branches set at odds with each other. The guys who wrote it up were assuming that the only way to keep a few people from screwing all the rest was to give everybody a chance to take some part in it with lots of opposition and lots of ways to block each other from overstepping their proper limits.
By voting, you're providing that necessary opposition, the much-needed buffer to thwart extremist control-freaks. So, VOTE. Figure out who you'll vote for later however you want but the more votes, the better.
Hint: This is "informative".
Imagine any nuclear waste disposal site... it'll be dangerous for how long? Hundreds, maybe thousands of years??
Now imagine a thousand years in the future there's some workers grading terraces for some new, expensive mountainside subdivision construction...
What do you think are the chances of them understanding that they've just opened a site that was supposed to remain contained to wait out another thousand years of deadly decay? By the time they figure it out, the whole crew will probably already be dying from the stuff that didn't stay contained.
Seriously, the construction of something to last that long and the design of some form of communication that might still convey the intended meaning that far in the future are major problems which have not yet been solved.
To paraphrase Carl Sagan, the real moments of discovery aren't when someone shouts, "Eureka!" but sometime before that when someone mumbles, "Hm, that's weird..."
There are opportunities for those who put the effort into it. Advanced placement classes, competitions and scholarships, etc. It's not the school system's responsibility to deliver opportunities to your child. It's the parent and child's own responsibility to go looking and find them. In the US, they're everywhere.
For gradeschool kids, for example, there are science fairs, there are "4-H" programs (which aren't just 'farm stuff'), academic competitions sponsored by nationwide organizations like National Geographic, and more! ASK the school counsellors, ASK about highschool and college outreach programs and university extensions.
Criticizing "the education system" for failing to develop a child in some particular direction is like criticizing a buffet restaurant for not serving each customer exactly the quisine that they will relish. You can get complete nutrition at almost any restaurant but if you want something special then you've got to find where to get it and go there. Same with education.
Students who really want to learn are hardly being prevented. The horrible truth is that the majority of people are not like that single coal miner or that one group of Jewish mothers. Only a tiny minority really views education as tools of understanding. To most it's just a path to be trodden and forgotten in persuit of a diploma.
Back in the late 80's when I was still in school, it was sail, nethack, IRC, e-mail and Usenet. Access for most students meant one of several rooms which seated twelve or twenty at black-and-white ASCII terminals.
Even when the most alluring distraction was the reams and reams of junk on talk.bizarre it was still a "distraction" from schoolwork. I wrote a lockout script to be run by my ".login" script. Of course, one never gets things quite right and I had to find a way to get past it because due to a coding error it wasn't ever going to let me in.
A friend of mine asked me for help on "a little project" which turned out to be his own version of the same thing. I began to suspect that maybe everybody thought of it... which is when I decided I had better just do what needed doing first.
</old_fart_o_the_net>
This new guy has really screwed himself though, considering how much time it must have taken to write it and get it all pretty on freshmeat.
This is an entirely valid point from which, unfortunately, you imply a strange conclusion. You're saying that I should spend more time to learn a language which will put me in crude contact with people in a certain area, most of whom don't care about international communication enough to learn a foreign language which isn't required by law, by duty, or for profit.
On the contrary, I think it's a better idea to learn a language which will bring me quickly and fluently into genuine, friendly association with people all over the world (even from miniscule cultural groups, all of whose languages I could never hope to learn) whose driving motivation towards international, interpersonal communication has already been demonstrated by their decision to learn that same language, Esperanto. These are people who want to share their culture and to learn about others'.
We, "esperantists", are like a right hand held out for an honest handshake. By comparison, your notion looks more like a quick grope on a crowded train.