I have a huge hoard of outdated computer components (mostly from the early 1990s). At one point, ALL of these parts were tested good and working.
But I've noticed that merely sitting around doing nothing, even in a fairly controlled environment, is enough to make older parts DIE, and the death rate is around 50%. I don't know why this is, but the same parts in regular use will typically live a lot longer. IDE controller cards in particular have a near-100% death rate once taken out of service, even if in perfect working order when retired.
Which makes me leery of "bury the whole PC". It might work when it comes back out, or it may have died of idleness.
In my experience, the digital media most likely to survive a couple decades are the 5.25" floppy, and the antique 20mb or smaller hard disk. I have some here that are 28 and 22 years old, respectively, and they're still readable.
Jury is still out on CDs and DVDs and newer HDs, if only because they haven't been around long enough to demonstrate longevity.
I think it's already been done, it's called Braille;)
Seriously, that's not a bad idea as secondary and longterm backup for critical binary data that might not be in a practical document format (I don't know what kind of data that would be, but let's postulate that it exists -- perhaps scans of deteriorating historical documents??) You'd need precision printing and OCR capability, but beyond that, all that's really needed for the encoding is DOT/NO DOT, ie. binary ON/OFF -- simple and foolproof. And make two copies, printed a bit offset from one another -- so if both are damaged the same way, it's likely one dataset will survive (this also covers more-random damage).
Not only that, but printed copies would serve as an object lesson about how ephemeral digital copies typically are, compared to hardcopies.
I think it would be very interesting to compare the difficulty in retrieving the digital copies 25 years hence, compared to simply rescanning the printed copies.
OTOH, there's no harm in storing data in both formats, because IF the digital copy is still readable, it might help in restoring any deterioration in the hardcopy.
Well, it's not like the deer would have voluntarily swallowed the cow magnets; as you note they're the size of a man's finger, and are usually given with a pill baller, cuz the cows aren't going to suck 'em down either. The metal trash they DO swallow is a lot smaller (nails and wire fragments). But... I'm not sure it matters, remembering that the earth's magnetic field affects iron, magnetized or not.
And I'm not sure THAT matters...
When I travel more than about 500 miles north or south of wherever I'm living, I start to feel as if the world has rotated around me, so north is no longer where it belongs. Normally I have very good directional sense, but the effect of this is that even tho I know better, my gut is SURE the sun is going to come up in the west. -- When I moved from MT to CA, it took a while for this sensation to subside and the world to feel correctly-oriented again. I've come to believe this is a probably-normal (if somewhat more sensitized than average) reaction to magnetic north, which of course changes its "angle" depending on where you are. There's some thought that migrating birds navigate by just such a sense.
Anyway, I see no reason why cows shouldn't have a similar sense, having evolved on the same planet.
Whoa, down in the wind tunnel:) I used to live in the Bozeman/Belgrade area myself.
Congrats on finding a good job, and on getting out of California... used to be okay here, but has gone completely nuts. Trying to get moved back north myself... and the cows are pointing the way;)
Also possible that disease was a factor, having hit one species but not the next. Sheer chance, that.
But as to Neanderthals being strict carnivores -- none of the other apes are (most like meat but will eat pretty much anything), so why would this single branch be that anomalous?
Chimps have been discovered to hold wars, complete with crude weapons, raiding parties, ambushes, and genocide. You can probably find the article referencing the studies here on/. if you care enough to look it up.
Wolves, dogs, horses, cattle, deer, goats, chickens, ducks, and probably lots of others that don't instantly leap to mind will also commit a sort of tribal warfare against other groups seen as competitors. And for all I know dinosaurs might have done the same thing. Clearly it's just a standard survival mechanism that gets rid of competition when resources are limited. That humans can TALK about it and REFINE it doesn't change that.
And the new calves can freeze mainly because (like all mammals) they're born wet, and thanks to the chinooks the ground can also be wet. Once they've dried off and are standing and drinking good, they can go back outside. As you say, cattle are VERY hardy. (Being close cousins of bison, who thrive in the coldest parts of the continent, often calve in late winter, and are outdoors for the duration.)
BTW where 'zactly are you? I grew up in Montana (Great Falls), tho I'm presently in SoCal.
Someone says, "In America, if an adult cow is grazing, it's almost certainly a dairy cow."
Not true. The dams of all those steers being shipped to market are ranch cows, which you'll find grazing on the open range. Second, most dairies feed largely silage and baled hay, since milk-producing cows need more protein than range graze provides.
If our magnetic sense is very sensitive, maybe the cows are being affected by their magnets, which might over time tend to align per the Earth's magnetic field -- I don't think that's an unreasonable guess.
Hmm... I've noticed that my own sense of which directions are east/west is affected by how far north I am. I wonder if the skew caused by N/S travel could be "fixed" by sleeping with a magnet suitably aligned and placed under my pillow.
Possibly related, I've noticed that snakes generally move from east to west. If a snake is being a nuisance and I don't want it to come back, I've learned to always take it west of my property; then I never see it again. But if I release it to the east, it'll be back in a day or two. Wonder what would happen if I fed 'em a magnet first?:)
Humidity is all, uh, relative. Frex, Montana is very dry compared to the midwest, but it's positively soggy compared to the SoCal high desert. Probably about like S.A. vs your hardrock deserts, at a guess.
California is in deep shit with the feds and is about to be dinged $8 BILLION dollars to construct hospital space for felons -- it's either that or be forced to turn loose half the prison population. Our legislature wants to sell bonds (ie. mortgage our future and raise taxes yet again) to get around paying the piper. And I may be wrong, but I seem to recall CA also has the largest prison population both in numbers and per capita of any state.
Well, I say TURN 'EM LOOSE. Let the nonviolent offenders (about half the prison population per stats I saw last week) work off their time doing community service, instead of costing taxpayers $25k/year to keep in cold storage. Put them to GOOD USE rather than warehousing them where they can learn all about higher crime from bigger losers than themselves. We don't need to keep every stupid kid who sold an ounce of pot in prison, and it's not like the world will end if they do it again.
Another solution might be a return to the indentured servant system -- let that nonviolent offender who lacks employable skills learn a trade while working for entry-level wages, but part of the terms are that he's gotta stick with it for the duration of his "sentence". Teach him to be useful and employable, rather than teaching him to sit on his butt behind bars and to enjoy the company of real crooks.
========= If you can't tell, I don't really believe in prison at all. In my worldview there are four valid ways to deal with criminals: death, exile, pardon, and restitution (including blood money), with that last being of most value to society, but not always workable since there are some people who are perps by nature and can't be changed. Hence the other options. Historically, exile was used very well for this purpose, but at present there's nowhere left to ship 'em to, so we stuff 'em in prison instead.
Thank you for responding far more eloquently than I could have!
And as to verbal testimony... there are a few problems with that.
Even good police are only human. Sometimes they didn't see what they thought they did, or they misremember what they saw, or in their zeal they convince themselves that they saw what wasn't there. Sometimes they'll even manage to convince one another of a nonfact or untruth, despite their best intentions.
And there are bad police. Bad police LIE. (I've personally seen a deposition full of outright lies, written by a senior police sergeant.)
In either case, if a cop's unsubstantiated word is sufficient to convict, without any further evidence -- we're all in a lot of trouble.
As someone above points out, "It's not up to the defendant in a criminal case to prove his innocence. It's up to the prosecution to prove his guilt."
The younger generation seems to have forgotten this, as evidenced by so many posts here today; is it any wonder that law enforcement and legislators are rapidly forgetting it as well?:(
The real issue here is whether you can be made to testify against yourself. Is giving up the key to your personal "evidence locker" required of you or not? If it IS, then absolutely nothing private will ever be safe again.
Very scary business, this B&E of the Constitution.
Maybe not in the U.S., but there was a long discussion here a month or two ago, about somewhere that passed a law against virtual kiddie porn, including WRITTEN kiddie porn (where not even innocent pixels are harmed). Unfortunately I don't recall where this was, but it was a hideously large step toward thoughtcrime.
Normally my bank (WaMu) is good about stuff, but this was just plain stupid... if you want the customer's attention, don't sound like a phone spammer! Anyway:
Credit card accounts (like mortgages) are frequently sold to some other bank, and altho they're supposed to inform you of any policy changes, sometimes they don't. This happened about 10 years ago:
My VISA card had been with the same bank for over 15 years, and life was good. One day the account was sold to PNC Bank. Now, PNC used a 3rd party billing service (whose name I forget) that had a *policy* of sending statements so late that you could not possibly pay on time, then PNC would jack up your interest rate... and wouldn't provide the legally-required notice when they raised your interest rate, either. (One wonders about the kickbacks to, or chain of ownership for the billing service.)
That happened to me. I had to call PNC and whine several months in a row to get the late fees and higher interest rescinded, after their bill didn't even get MAILED (per the clearly visible postmark!) until AFTER the due date!
And then one day I noticed that in addition to mailing the statement late, they'd sneaked a higher interest rate on me (I hadn't paid much attention because I wasn't carrying a big balance)... and I didn't get the notice about that til 6 months later. Which letter they had foolishly dated long after the interest hike that the letter was supposedly to notify me about. This is illegal.
I called PNC one last time, raised hell til I got a supervisor, explained that I had hard evidence of PNC's wrongdoing, and uttered the magic words, "CALIFORNIA BANKING COMMISSION". While I didn't get any satisfaction from PNC's supervisor, my interest rate mysteriously went back down where it belonged, and my statements miraculously started arriving on time.
A few months later (by which time my account had been sold to MBNA, whose service was *impeccable*) both 60 Minutes and 20-20 ran exposes on this particular 3rd party billing service and the banks that used them for the exact purpose of... ta-da!! making sure people couldn't pay on time, so they'd get dinged late fees and interest hikes (which many people don't notice for several months, ie. free money for the bank!)
So, yeah, the lending industry is crooked, and not just for student loans. D'oh!!
Ah, so the REAL win here is that the next incident won't have to reinvent the case from scratch, but instead can build directly on all the records from this case.
Should save both time and money for the next victim who fights the RIAA, and hopefully make it that much easier to progress to the next step after this one.
On that note, my mortgage bank does something stupid if a payment is late. You get this phone call that says, I quote, "Please hold for important information about your account" then it puts you on hold for a LONG time with NO clue who the call is from. Since this is exactly the same as you get from the "sell you another credit card" telemarketers, how do they expect anyone to wait around to find out what the call is about?
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I have a huge hoard of outdated computer components (mostly from the early 1990s). At one point, ALL of these parts were tested good and working.
But I've noticed that merely sitting around doing nothing, even in a fairly controlled environment, is enough to make older parts DIE, and the death rate is around 50%. I don't know why this is, but the same parts in regular use will typically live a lot longer. IDE controller cards in particular have a near-100% death rate once taken out of service, even if in perfect working order when retired.
Which makes me leery of "bury the whole PC". It might work when it comes back out, or it may have died of idleness.
In my experience, the digital media most likely to survive a couple decades are the 5.25" floppy, and the antique 20mb or smaller hard disk. I have some here that are 28 and 22 years old, respectively, and they're still readable.
Jury is still out on CDs and DVDs and newer HDs, if only because they haven't been around long enough to demonstrate longevity.
Well, not if RealID becomes law. Where will we get Anonymous Cowards then?
Come to think of it, how many ACs would we need to power this project??
I think it's already been done, it's called Braille ;)
Seriously, that's not a bad idea as secondary and longterm backup for critical binary data that might not be in a practical document format (I don't know what kind of data that would be, but let's postulate that it exists -- perhaps scans of deteriorating historical documents??) You'd need precision printing and OCR capability, but beyond that, all that's really needed for the encoding is DOT/NO DOT, ie. binary ON/OFF -- simple and foolproof. And make two copies, printed a bit offset from one another -- so if both are damaged the same way, it's likely one dataset will survive (this also covers more-random damage).
Not only that, but printed copies would serve as an object lesson about how ephemeral digital copies typically are, compared to hardcopies.
I think it would be very interesting to compare the difficulty in retrieving the digital copies 25 years hence, compared to simply rescanning the printed copies.
OTOH, there's no harm in storing data in both formats, because IF the digital copy is still readable, it might help in restoring any deterioration in the hardcopy.
Well, it's not like the deer would have voluntarily swallowed the cow magnets; as you note they're the size of a man's finger, and are usually given with a pill baller, cuz the cows aren't going to suck 'em down either. The metal trash they DO swallow is a lot smaller (nails and wire fragments). But ... I'm not sure it matters, remembering that the earth's magnetic field affects iron, magnetized or not.
And I'm not sure THAT matters...
When I travel more than about 500 miles north or south of wherever I'm living, I start to feel as if the world has rotated around me, so north is no longer where it belongs. Normally I have very good directional sense, but the effect of this is that even tho I know better, my gut is SURE the sun is going to come up in the west. -- When I moved from MT to CA, it took a while for this sensation to subside and the world to feel correctly-oriented again. I've come to believe this is a probably-normal (if somewhat more sensitized than average) reaction to magnetic north, which of course changes its "angle" depending on where you are. There's some thought that migrating birds navigate by just such a sense.
Anyway, I see no reason why cows shouldn't have a similar sense, having evolved on the same planet.
Whoa, down in the wind tunnel :) I used to live in the Bozeman/Belgrade area myself.
Congrats on finding a good job, and on getting out of California... used to be okay here, but has gone completely nuts. Trying to get moved back north myself... and the cows are pointing the way ;)
In fact, not long enough to evolve into a species in the first place.
Also possible that disease was a factor, having hit one species but not the next. Sheer chance, that.
But as to Neanderthals being strict carnivores -- none of the other apes are (most like meat but will eat pretty much anything), so why would this single branch be that anomalous?
Chimps have been discovered to hold wars, complete with crude weapons, raiding parties, ambushes, and genocide. You can probably find the article referencing the studies here on /. if you care enough to look it up.
Wolves, dogs, horses, cattle, deer, goats, chickens, ducks, and probably lots of others that don't instantly leap to mind will also commit a sort of tribal warfare against other groups seen as competitors. And for all I know dinosaurs might have done the same thing. Clearly it's just a standard survival mechanism that gets rid of competition when resources are limited. That humans can TALK about it and REFINE it doesn't change that.
http://slashdot.org/~God ID# 5268
I dunno, sounds low to me.... of course, there could be as many as 5267 gods before him!
And the new calves can freeze mainly because (like all mammals) they're born wet, and thanks to the chinooks the ground can also be wet. Once they've dried off and are standing and drinking good, they can go back outside. As you say, cattle are VERY hardy. (Being close cousins of bison, who thrive in the coldest parts of the continent, often calve in late winter, and are outdoors for the duration.)
BTW where 'zactly are you? I grew up in Montana (Great Falls), tho I'm presently in SoCal.
Someone says, "In America, if an adult cow is grazing, it's almost certainly a dairy cow."
Not true. The dams of all those steers being shipped to market are ranch cows, which you'll find grazing on the open range. Second, most dairies feed largely silage and baled hay, since milk-producing cows need more protein than range graze provides.
If our magnetic sense is very sensitive, maybe the cows are being affected by their magnets, which might over time tend to align per the Earth's magnetic field -- I don't think that's an unreasonable guess.
Hmm... I've noticed that my own sense of which directions are east/west is affected by how far north I am. I wonder if the skew caused by N/S travel could be "fixed" by sleeping with a magnet suitably aligned and placed under my pillow.
Possibly related, I've noticed that snakes generally move from east to west. If a snake is being a nuisance and I don't want it to come back, I've learned to always take it west of my property; then I never see it again. But if I release it to the east, it'll be back in a day or two. Wonder what would happen if I fed 'em a magnet first? :)
Humidity is all, uh, relative. Frex, Montana is very dry compared to the midwest, but it's positively soggy compared to the SoCal high desert. Probably about like S.A. vs your hardrock deserts, at a guess.
California is in deep shit with the feds and is about to be dinged $8 BILLION dollars to construct hospital space for felons -- it's either that or be forced to turn loose half the prison population. Our legislature wants to sell bonds (ie. mortgage our future and raise taxes yet again) to get around paying the piper. And I may be wrong, but I seem to recall CA also has the largest prison population both in numbers and per capita of any state.
Well, I say TURN 'EM LOOSE. Let the nonviolent offenders (about half the prison population per stats I saw last week) work off their time doing community service, instead of costing taxpayers $25k/year to keep in cold storage. Put them to GOOD USE rather than warehousing them where they can learn all about higher crime from bigger losers than themselves. We don't need to keep every stupid kid who sold an ounce of pot in prison, and it's not like the world will end if they do it again.
Another solution might be a return to the indentured servant system -- let that nonviolent offender who lacks employable skills learn a trade while working for entry-level wages, but part of the terms are that he's gotta stick with it for the duration of his "sentence". Teach him to be useful and employable, rather than teaching him to sit on his butt behind bars and to enjoy the company of real crooks.
=========
If you can't tell, I don't really believe in prison at all. In my worldview there are four valid ways to deal with criminals: death, exile, pardon, and restitution (including blood money), with that last being of most value to society, but not always workable since there are some people who are perps by nature and can't be changed. Hence the other options. Historically, exile was used very well for this purpose, but at present there's nowhere left to ship 'em to, so we stuff 'em in prison instead.
Thank you for responding far more eloquently than I could have!
And as to verbal testimony... there are a few problems with that.
Even good police are only human. Sometimes they didn't see what they thought they did, or they misremember what they saw, or in their zeal they convince themselves that they saw what wasn't there. Sometimes they'll even manage to convince one another of a nonfact or untruth, despite their best intentions.
And there are bad police. Bad police LIE. (I've personally seen a deposition full of outright lies, written by a senior police sergeant.)
In either case, if a cop's unsubstantiated word is sufficient to convict, without any further evidence -- we're all in a lot of trouble.
Indeed. And I think the "cops and vampires" rule is most apt. Nothing good can come of inviting them into your private space.
As someone above points out, "It's not up to the defendant in a criminal case to prove his innocence. It's up to the prosecution to prove his guilt."
The younger generation seems to have forgotten this, as evidenced by so many posts here today; is it any wonder that law enforcement and legislators are rapidly forgetting it as well? :(
The real issue here is whether you can be made to testify against yourself. Is giving up the key to your personal "evidence locker" required of you or not? If it IS, then absolutely nothing private will ever be safe again.
Very scary business, this B&E of the Constitution.
Hmm... the Protect Act's language therefore strikes me as dangerously ambiguous.
Aside from the obvious thoughtcrime issue.
I'm wondering if TELLING A STORY with a CP plot is also covered (with or without names of real children). Note that it is not written down, nor drawn.
Maybe not in the U.S., but there was a long discussion here a month or two ago, about somewhere that passed a law against virtual kiddie porn, including WRITTEN kiddie porn (where not even innocent pixels are harmed). Unfortunately I don't recall where this was, but it was a hideously large step toward thoughtcrime.
Normally my bank (WaMu) is good about stuff, but this was just plain stupid... if you want the customer's attention, don't sound like a phone spammer! Anyway:
Credit card accounts (like mortgages) are frequently sold to some other bank, and altho they're supposed to inform you of any policy changes, sometimes they don't. This happened about 10 years ago:
My VISA card had been with the same bank for over 15 years, and life was good. One day the account was sold to PNC Bank. Now, PNC used a 3rd party billing service (whose name I forget) that had a *policy* of sending statements so late that you could not possibly pay on time, then PNC would jack up your interest rate... and wouldn't provide the legally-required notice when they raised your interest rate, either. (One wonders about the kickbacks to, or chain of ownership for the billing service.)
That happened to me. I had to call PNC and whine several months in a row to get the late fees and higher interest rescinded, after their bill didn't even get MAILED (per the clearly visible postmark!) until AFTER the due date!
And then one day I noticed that in addition to mailing the statement late, they'd sneaked a higher interest rate on me (I hadn't paid much attention because I wasn't carrying a big balance) ... and I didn't get the notice about that til 6 months later. Which letter they had foolishly dated long after the interest hike that the letter was supposedly to notify me about. This is illegal.
I called PNC one last time, raised hell til I got a supervisor, explained that I had hard evidence of PNC's wrongdoing, and uttered the magic words, "CALIFORNIA BANKING COMMISSION". While I didn't get any satisfaction from PNC's supervisor, my interest rate mysteriously went back down where it belonged, and my statements miraculously started arriving on time.
A few months later (by which time my account had been sold to MBNA, whose service was *impeccable*) both 60 Minutes and 20-20 ran exposes on this particular 3rd party billing service and the banks that used them for the exact purpose of ... ta-da!! making sure people couldn't pay on time, so they'd get dinged late fees and interest hikes (which many people don't notice for several months, ie. free money for the bank!)
So, yeah, the lending industry is crooked, and not just for student loans. D'oh!!
Ah, so the REAL win here is that the next incident won't have to reinvent the case from scratch, but instead can build directly on all the records from this case.
Should save both time and money for the next victim who fights the RIAA, and hopefully make it that much easier to progress to the next step after this one.
On that note, my mortgage bank does something stupid if a payment is late. You get this phone call that says, I quote, "Please hold for important information about your account" then it puts you on hold for a LONG time with NO clue who the call is from. Since this is exactly the same as you get from the "sell you another credit card" telemarketers, how do they expect anyone to wait around to find out what the call is about?