You ought to learn a bit of the history of English. It would help you understand the examples you gave.
"cough" is spelled that way because when spelling was standardized, that was how it was pronounced. It has little to do with bad ideas about Greek. (try it - a fake german accent helps) Same with words like knight and through - yes, even the 'gh' was pronounced.
You can have standardized spelling - or you can have spelling that makes sense. Pronunciation changes, so take your pick.
Swam, swum, swimmed. How a language deals with tenses (past, present, future) can change over time. Adding 'ed' is the new way. The old way(s) were different. The more often a word is used, the more likely it is to retain it's old form. Most rare words have already changed to the new way. Some are in transition, spelled is the new way, and spelt the old way. Both are considered correct (for now). English_irregular_verbs
Yeah - it is that funny word the 'IT' guy mumbles when he tells me in that frustrated voice to click on the blue 'E'. I have no idea why he thinks I should have been able to figure this out myself, that blue 'E' thing was clear over on the other side of the screen. How was I supposed to know what to do! And I wish he would point at the desk instead of the screen when he is talking about the desktop. That is just so confusing!!!
Note: in RL I am that 'IT' guy. This minor exaggeration does not apply to most people, but it does describe a lot of them. They are not all elderly. If you call the company website, and IE, 'the internet' do you really know what a browser is?
The difference between a dialect and a language has always been more of a political and cultural question than one of linguistics. If the Roman Empire had survived until today in western europe, French, Spanish and Italian (as spoken today!) would be latin dialects, not languages. (That is about how different Mandarin and Cantonese are)
That 'wrong' stink you smell? it is called nationalism, a modern variant of the human tribal instinct. Take a good sniff, you should be able to smell it in your own nation now too. (I am assuming you aren't in China - I could be wrong about that...)
Really? You fall on the side of caution? Are those wavelengths that our eyes see as 'red' dangerous? Just to be safe, I think you should stop wearing red shirts, and never, ever go near a red car. Do you avoid black cats? You never know, you might have some bad luck afterwards.
Thing is, we know why some wavelengths are dangerous, and why. Cellphone wavelengths are only harmful if the power levels are high enough to heat up the target and cook it. (microwave ovens!) Visible light wavelengths have far more energy than cell phones, and they are not dangerous either. The red light from you red shirt in full sunlight, has more energy, both the individual photons, and the total energy of all of the photons, than your cellphone emits at full power. If your red shirt didn't give you cancer, your phone won't either.
There is no reason to show caution about spilling salt, or having a black cat cross our path - we know that these things do not cause bad luck. Likewise, there is no reason to show caution about cell phone wavelengths, they do not cause cancer. Cannot ignore the obvious, yeah, right. You are ignoring what is obvious to any half-intelligent non-ignorant person on the planet.
Ah - I think I see the problem. You aren't talking about backups. You are talking about archives. (this is fine, archives do matter) You aren't talking about now, you are talking about 1989.
Backups are copies of data that already exists on a live machine, ready to be put back on those machines in the event of data loss. If you ever want the data that is in your backups, it is because something else failed, and the original is gone. If there is any other reason for wanting that data - then what you have is not a backup. Most of what I deal with is backup, not archive. Hard drives already have huge advantages over tapes for backup.
Archiving - You would have been insane to go with anything but tape in 1989 for archiving stuff. As you state, the cost would have been prohibitive. I am not talking about then, I am talking about now. I am talking about new archives, not old ones. You are insane if the only reliable copy of data that you know you will need at least some of, sometime in the next 20 years, is on tapes from 1989. (as you state you have had to use them a dozen times, so this applies.) Do think about how hard it is going to be to maintain those 20 year old tape drives through 2030. Think about maintaining new, modern tape drives through 2030. Don't forget about interface cards, and drivers for new OSes. If the answer isn't simple and cheap... you need a new archive tool. One that is priced with 2010 and later in mind, not 1989. Basic servers with big hard drives in a RAID 5, that get moved to new servers/disks every 5 years or so sounds simple and cheap for the next 20 years. Tapes don't. Tapes no longer have much advantage, even just in price. That one will be reversed in the next 5 years or so, and then there will be no advantage at all. Enormous cost? in 1989 - yes. I don't live then anymore. You shouldn't either.
I don't have much data that I know I will want in 2030. what there is, is on a RAID 1 live backup. (This is personal, not work data.) I have data from over 10 years ago, happily moving from HD to HD every couple years. It is simple, and cheap, and I have no reason to think that this will change in the future.
What is the point of your 'disks still under warranty' comment? I couldn't care less about the warranty. Replacing the disk isn't cost prohibitive, and that is all a warranty helps with. The R in RAID means redundant, you shouldn't lose data to a hard drive failure. And if the drive fails, the warranty doesn't cover the data anyway. Why would you care about the warranty?
Those examples were to refute your specific claims that tapes in a warehouse are immune to loss - they aren't, and that since the tapes themselves last a long time, that the data is safe for that amount of time - it isn't. I am not trying to refute 'a whole field', just you. Live backups have few drawbacks compared to tapes, mostly power costs. And those only matter for archive. For backup, tapes suck. And this is how it is NOW. I don't care that 1989 was different.
"OK, you've missed a lot of points, but the major one is drives are not built to last a long time unused and tapes are."
No, I didn't miss that, I am just aware that that doesn't matter much in the real world.
Try this for example : Tapes stored for 20 years. Then someone wanted the data. It took another 20 years to get funding and expertise to try. It has been 4 years and 100's of thousands of dollars, and they still are not done! That may be an extreme example, but you get the idea. Technology, and more particularly interfaces and software are still changing very fast. If the media - drives or tape - lasts longer than the interface and software it relies on, it is long enough. Currently both tapes and hard drives qualify. If you want the data to last longer, you need to transfer the data to new media long before the old is dead. And the software that uses that data needs to be ported to the newer OSes.
"The way I see it live storage is convenient but prone to change or erasure when you don't want it,"
Oh, so that is why tapes of the Apollo landings survived so well. They were on tape, not live backup... Ooops Not quite... In theory, you are correct. In practice, not so much.
I may be a bit biased against tapes - my experience with them has been bad. It could be down to the particular type of tape: these things. I hear they worked well before I got there, but they were slow, clunky, failure-prone, and more often than not we couldn't restore from them. The hard drive backups we have now work well, and with no hassle. Oh, and fast. Can't rsync with tapes...
one new RAID array... instead of a single tape??? - what 'single tape' holds 10TB? (that is 6 2TB drives, a simple array...)
All that electricity - that the tape library and the server to run it don't use?
Tapes are immune to user error? so if I grab the wrong tapes and load them by mistake, no harm?
A mechanical drive turned off and carefully stored for a few decades will cost a fortune and weeks of time hunting down antique software and hardware to get access to the data anyway. The tape will likely suffer from the same issue, although not quite to the same extent. (hint, IDE is only 24 years old, and lasted a long time in computer terms...) If you aren't moving your backups to new media every 5 years or so, you can consider them gone anyway.
Not really, 'cause without net neutrality - I might just be paying more to my ISP, who would be charged by the search engine for the privilege of having the government track my searches....plus costs of course.
What, you thought keeping the government out of net neutrality would also keep them out of this sort of crap???
Well, the government chose to take responsibility for the results when they decided to regulate air traffic. What did you expect? Those who make the call should take the flak.
Note: I am not implying that governments should or should not regulate air traffic, just pointing out the obvious results of doing so.
Did you strip out births to first generation immigrants like I said to? No? There is where you are wrong. If you count births of only second-generation and older immigrants, we are negative. We actually need some of the immigrants just to be stable. (granted we overdid it a bit)
Plus ~1%/year for a place as sparsely populated as the US, is fine for now. Go work on places with 4x or more people/useable area and growth rates 3+%. Those are the places to worry about population growth. The US is fine for now, and self-correcting. (so far anyway)
"but in case you haven't noticed, supporting our own internal population growth isn't sustainable, let alone taking in others."
Your numbers are at least 50 years out of date. The only reason our (US) population growth is even positive is due to immigration. (direct immigration and children of first time immigrants) If zero population growth isn't sustainable, we have bigger problems than immigration to worry about.
The fact that your facts are so off makes me doubt the rest of your argument.
Are you opposed to coffee? Caffeinated soda? Do you encourage everyone you know to avoid these? They are addictive too. Once you are free from the harm that the addiction does, there is little reason to be upset about the addiction itself. Nicotine addiction, once the harm from cigarette smoke is gone, isn't any more harmful than caffeine addiction.
So the question is, what are you really trying for? A "DONT USE ANY DRUGS" anti-anything addictive rule, or are you more concerned about general health and happiness? If it is the first one, then e-cigs aren't any different than regular ones, or coffee for that matter. Given human nature, this is a fight that you can never win, and by fighting it, you will cause more heartache pain and suffering than all the harmful addictions combined.
If you are worried about health and happiness, then who cares that e-cigs may not get rid of all of the addictive properties of smoking - these addicts will still be healthy, happy, and productive members of society. Not much, if any, worse than if they were not addicted.
This is factually incorrect. Well, the lungs bit anyway. The studies done so far indicate that the compounds in the e-cigs are harmless to the lungs. (compared to regular cigs anyway, think inhalers for asthma) Granted this has not been studied enough to say for sure.
What some of the others here are saying (and I can't say they are wrong) is that e-cigs are harmless enough that there is little point in quitting. Think coffee.
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You ought to learn a bit of the history of English. It would help you understand the examples you gave.
"cough" is spelled that way because when spelling was standardized, that was how it was pronounced. It has little to do with bad ideas about Greek. (try it - a fake german accent helps) Same with words like knight and through - yes, even the 'gh' was pronounced.
You can have standardized spelling - or you can have spelling that makes sense. Pronunciation changes, so take your pick.
Swam, swum, swimmed. How a language deals with tenses (past, present, future) can change over time. Adding 'ed' is the new way. The old way(s) were different. The more often a word is used, the more likely it is to retain it's old form. Most rare words have already changed to the new way. Some are in transition, spelled is the new way, and spelt the old way. Both are considered correct (for now). English_irregular_verbs
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Not worse than Greece.
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bit of bored googleing
Conspiricay theories are the result of two things. An inability to understand how the world works, (ignorance or stupidity usually) and fear.
The current economic climate has recently upped the fear factor - I've been expecting just this sort of crap for a while.
Take away either of those two things and the crazy theories go away. (much easier said than done BTW...)
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"Most people do know what a browser is."
Yeah - it is that funny word the 'IT' guy mumbles when he tells me in that frustrated voice to click on the blue 'E'. I have no idea why he thinks I should have been able to figure this out myself, that blue 'E' thing was clear over on the other side of the screen. How was I supposed to know what to do! And I wish he would point at the desk instead of the screen when he is talking about the desktop. That is just so confusing!!!
Note: in RL I am that 'IT' guy. This minor exaggeration does not apply to most people, but it does describe a lot of them. They are not all elderly. If you call the company website, and IE, 'the internet' do you really know what a browser is?
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That 'wrong' stink you smell? it is called nationalism, a modern variant of the human tribal instinct. Take a good sniff, you should be able to smell it in your own nation now too. (I am assuming you aren't in China - I could be wrong about that...)
And those people are currently buying up US Treasuries....
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Really? You fall on the side of caution? Are those wavelengths that our eyes see as 'red' dangerous? Just to be safe, I think you should stop wearing red shirts, and never, ever go near a red car. Do you avoid black cats? You never know, you might have some bad luck afterwards.
Thing is, we know why some wavelengths are dangerous, and why. Cellphone wavelengths are only harmful if the power levels are high enough to heat up the target and cook it. (microwave ovens!) Visible light wavelengths have far more energy than cell phones, and they are not dangerous either. The red light from you red shirt in full sunlight, has more energy, both the individual photons, and the total energy of all of the photons, than your cellphone emits at full power. If your red shirt didn't give you cancer, your phone won't either.
There is no reason to show caution about spilling salt, or having a black cat cross our path - we know that these things do not cause bad luck. Likewise, there is no reason to show caution about cell phone wavelengths, they do not cause cancer. Cannot ignore the obvious, yeah, right. You are ignoring what is obvious to any half-intelligent non-ignorant person on the planet.
Did I just feed a troll?
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Backups are copies of data that already exists on a live machine, ready to be put back on those machines in the event of data loss. If you ever want the data that is in your backups, it is because something else failed, and the original is gone. If there is any other reason for wanting that data - then what you have is not a backup. Most of what I deal with is backup, not archive. Hard drives already have huge advantages over tapes for backup.
Archiving - You would have been insane to go with anything but tape in 1989 for archiving stuff. As you state, the cost would have been prohibitive. I am not talking about then, I am talking about now. I am talking about new archives, not old ones. You are insane if the only reliable copy of data that you know you will need at least some of, sometime in the next 20 years, is on tapes from 1989. (as you state you have had to use them a dozen times, so this applies.) Do think about how hard it is going to be to maintain those 20 year old tape drives through 2030. Think about maintaining new, modern tape drives through 2030. Don't forget about interface cards, and drivers for new OSes. If the answer isn't simple and cheap... you need a new archive tool. One that is priced with 2010 and later in mind, not 1989. Basic servers with big hard drives in a RAID 5, that get moved to new servers/disks every 5 years or so sounds simple and cheap for the next 20 years. Tapes don't. Tapes no longer have much advantage, even just in price. That one will be reversed in the next 5 years or so, and then there will be no advantage at all. Enormous cost? in 1989 - yes. I don't live then anymore. You shouldn't either.
I don't have much data that I know I will want in 2030. what there is, is on a RAID 1 live backup. (This is personal, not work data.) I have data from over 10 years ago, happily moving from HD to HD every couple years. It is simple, and cheap, and I have no reason to think that this will change in the future.
What is the point of your 'disks still under warranty' comment? I couldn't care less about the warranty. Replacing the disk isn't cost prohibitive, and that is all a warranty helps with. The R in RAID means redundant, you shouldn't lose data to a hard drive failure. And if the drive fails, the warranty doesn't cover the data anyway. Why would you care about the warranty?
Those examples were to refute your specific claims that tapes in a warehouse are immune to loss - they aren't, and that since the tapes themselves last a long time, that the data is safe for that amount of time - it isn't. I am not trying to refute 'a whole field', just you. Live backups have few drawbacks compared to tapes, mostly power costs. And those only matter for archive. For backup, tapes suck. And this is how it is NOW. I don't care that 1989 was different.
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No, I didn't miss that, I am just aware that that doesn't matter much in the real world.
Try this for example : Tapes stored for 20 years. Then someone wanted the data. It took another 20 years to get funding and expertise to try. It has been 4 years and 100's of thousands of dollars, and they still are not done! That may be an extreme example, but you get the idea. Technology, and more particularly interfaces and software are still changing very fast. If the media - drives or tape - lasts longer than the interface and software it relies on, it is long enough. Currently both tapes and hard drives qualify. If you want the data to last longer, you need to transfer the data to new media long before the old is dead. And the software that uses that data needs to be ported to the newer OSes.
"The way I see it live storage is convenient but prone to change or erasure when you don't want it,"
Oh, so that is why tapes of the Apollo landings survived so well. They were on tape, not live backup... Ooops Not quite... In theory, you are correct. In practice, not so much.
I may be a bit biased against tapes - my experience with them has been bad. It could be down to the particular type of tape: these things. I hear they worked well before I got there, but they were slow, clunky, failure-prone, and more often than not we couldn't restore from them. The hard drive backups we have now work well, and with no hassle. Oh, and fast. Can't rsync with tapes...
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All that electricity - that the tape library and the server to run it don't use?
Tapes are immune to user error? so if I grab the wrong tapes and load them by mistake, no harm?
A mechanical drive turned off and carefully stored for a few decades will cost a fortune and weeks of time hunting down antique software and hardware to get access to the data anyway. The tape will likely suffer from the same issue, although not quite to the same extent. (hint, IDE is only 24 years old, and lasted a long time in computer terms...) If you aren't moving your backups to new media every 5 years or so, you can consider them gone anyway.
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What, you thought keeping the government out of net neutrality would also keep them out of this sort of crap???
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(or punctuation)
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Efficiency isn't everything.
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Note: I am not implying that governments should or should not regulate air traffic, just pointing out the obvious results of doing so.
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Did you strip out births to first generation immigrants like I said to? No? There is where you are wrong. If you count births of only second-generation and older immigrants, we are negative. We actually need some of the immigrants just to be stable. (granted we overdid it a bit)
Plus ~1%/year for a place as sparsely populated as the US, is fine for now. Go work on places with 4x or more people/useable area and growth rates 3+%. Those are the places to worry about population growth. The US is fine for now, and self-correcting. (so far anyway)
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Your numbers are at least 50 years out of date. The only reason our (US) population growth is even positive is due to immigration. (direct immigration and children of first time immigrants) If zero population growth isn't sustainable, we have bigger problems than immigration to worry about.
The fact that your facts are so off makes me doubt the rest of your argument.
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So the question is, what are you really trying for? A "DONT USE ANY DRUGS" anti-anything addictive rule, or are you more concerned about general health and happiness? If it is the first one, then e-cigs aren't any different than regular ones, or coffee for that matter. Given human nature, this is a fight that you can never win, and by fighting it, you will cause more heartache pain and suffering than all the harmful addictions combined.
If you are worried about health and happiness, then who cares that e-cigs may not get rid of all of the addictive properties of smoking - these addicts will still be healthy, happy, and productive members of society. Not much, if any, worse than if they were not addicted.
Which is it?
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What some of the others here are saying (and I can't say they are wrong) is that e-cigs are harmless enough that there is little point in quitting. Think coffee.
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