I've no hard evidence whatsoever for this, but I suspect the convention started with "Doom".
They wanted the function-keys to used for operations (run, map etc) which, if they were to lie under the pinky, would make WASD the most naturally accessible replication of the classic arrow-key layout for the remaining three fingers. And, as everyone knows, id-software set the benchmark for FPS for years.
Personally I don't have any problem with it. I can't conceive of any arrangement on a QWERTY keyboard that's significantly more intuitive or ergonomic for right-handed players. You're not expected to undertake typing and fast-pace FPS gaming simultaneously, and in fact I find the ergonomic distinction to be beneficial - motor-memory may make it confusing otherwise.
Seriously? You didn't get it? Okay, he's just described a clear anecdote in which his teacher was demonstrably wrong in stating that K is significantly more reactive than Na. He followed this by stating that:
K is less reactive than Na, but not by very much.
He's mocking the teacher's error by treating it as an overstatement of the facts, rather than a complete falsehood. It's the humour of subtle understatement. If subtlety isn't your thing, try sickipedia or 4chan.
When someone has been whooshed, make really sure you haven't missed the joke yourself before stating that there isn't one.
Christ, Samuel Clemens was right. It's like dissecting a frog.
I live a few miles from one of the Humber Oil Refineries (east coast UK). A few years back, it blew up.
Windows & doors got blown through in Immingham, a couple of miles from the site. I was maybe 5 miles away and heard the blast.
Because this is/. I'll tell you what happened - I had a friend working there at the time, so they all got the report. Turns out there was a large high-temp gas pipe that had a little inlet, used to release a slow, steady drip of water into the flow and cool the gas. For one reason or another (principally because nobody could be bothered to flag it up for replacement), the valve got a bit temperamental over time, and so people going around doing the checks would occasionally open the valve a little because they thought it had stopped.
A drip became a thin stream, which hit a bend in the pipe and eroded the wall. Eventually the wall got so thin that the gas leaked out, and, well, boom.
It's gratifying, and somewhat surprising, to see state officials put a stake through the bloated, foetid, rotting corpse of that ridiculous little man.
The guy's always been a noxious little puke, but when he started having a crack at Penny Arcade, it became clear just how deranged a nut-job he was.
Sorry, I don't really have anything to add to the discussion. I just really wanted to smile and breathe a sigh: Yessssss...
This doesn't take into account the vast, vast amount of time, energy and resources wasted by people who don't know how to use the fucking things properly in the first place. Let's start there before we get to titivating with power-management.
I've lost count of the number of times I've had to show people how to do the simplest things, to save them hours of wasted effort each week. This usually leads to me writing explicit instructions and disseminating to those concerned but, ultimately, people just don't care (and I have trained people for a living with notable success, so it's not a "techie-personality pissing people off" thing).
Power-management? How about education. If every office-worker were to spend one day a year going through their daily grind with someone sat beside them who knows how to use their PC's potential (and how to explain it), productivity would double. I'm not just slagging off my luddite colleagues here; I know there are things I could do better, and would genuinely welcome the attention of someone who could show me how.
Sorry to vent my frustrations here, but it's that or do it at work. To put it bluntly: nice study, but frankly you're just pissing in the ocean.
It was inevitable, surely. Once governments came to realise that the web was becoming a legitimate medium rather than an entity, they would obviously start to employ it in the same way they have every other.
I have to ask: is this story about governments wising-up in the ways of the intertubes and turning it to their advantage, or about the fact that this was discussed at a conference? I'd have thought the former was self-evident, and the latter was completely un-newsworthy. Maybe we can discuss specific examples of political internet jiggery-pokery, but this kind of vague allusion is just going to prompt hot-air discussions with no real content, isn't it?
1. Nobody comes to arrest you. Why the hell would the police get involved? You'll get increasingly strongly-worded letters and then, eventually, a court summons.
2. What if you don't pay your gas/credit-card/porn-subscription bill? Same story. Does that mean NPower/Barclays/shemaleswithdiseasedsheep.com is affiliated with the government?
3. I said they were autonomous, not completely independent and uninvolved. This means they can follow that charter in whatever way they see fit.
Know what? I'm tired of discussing this point. The Beeb's history and reputation speaks for itself. If you have a serious point then please make it, and then show me a more effective alternative. Insofar as it's possible, the Beeb is as I've described.
Mens Rea is almost always about your level of intent, not what you intended to do. This is important for things such as assault or murder, where intent can range from "I meant to kill him" to "I just wanted to stop him hitting me" to "I didn't know he was standing there". As such, the mens rea will affect the nature of the crime.
However, in most cases it is merely a case of "Did you intend to do it?" In the case of burglary, for example, the only way you could argue the mens rea would be either by pleading insanity (didn't know you were doing it) or demonstrating that you thought you had the right to enter the place you entered and take what you took. You're pleading that you were not knowingly guilty of doing what you did. For the majority of crimes you can't be excused by claiming that you did it with good reason; though that may mitigate your sentencing, it won't mitigate the conviction.
Since the crime in this case was illegal access of someone's personal computer, the crime was knowingly undertaken irrespective of what the ultimate intention was. However, as I've said in a later post, I don't think this particular case will even see the courts; nor do I think it should.
Yes, this is illegal. There was an embarrassing attempt to cover their asses with the following:
If this exercise had been done with criminal intent it would be breaking the law.
There's no question of mens rea - they knew exactly what they were doing, whether or not they thought it was a crime - while actus reus is satisfied if they undertook the crime. The crime in this case was gaining unauthorised access to personal computers. "Criminal intent" doesn't come into it - they deliberately did something which is a criminal act.
However, they won't get prosecuted. This has nothing to do with "ties to the guv'mint", and everything to do with journalistic licence. They exposed criminal activity without effecting any damage to property or reputation, and in doing so helped to inform and protect not only the several thousand people directly involved, but a whole nation of news-reading, tech-ignoring proles.
This is exactly what investigative journalism is about. While technically they broke the law, there is a fine history of decades of case-law precedent where journalists went undercover and got involved in criminal practices purely in an effort to expose and prevent it in future.
There's no way in hell the CPS (the body responsible for prosecuting criminal cases) would touch this. Flimsy though it may be, journalistic integrity is afforded impressive leniency in British culture and law, provided it is seen to be of public benefit.
Your quote diametrically refutes your posit! It is funded by the public and given a mandate of political neutrality and autonomy by that charter. That charter was issued by the government many years ago and has been essentially sacrosanct since then. The BBC is "owned" by the people, more so than the government is.
Contemporary History, with regards to the BBC, demonstrates that they have managed to maintain that detachment and impartiality - even to the detriment of the ruling government - on many occasions. It's out of keeping with the increasingly totalitarian character of UK government, I know, but somehow the Beeb seems to be just-about maintaining its function. Whether that will continue indefinitely is anybody's guess, but for god's sake, give them credit where it's due for now...
Possibly the most damningly insightful comment I've ever read about this debate.
The big problem when geeks/scientist/engineers interact with politics and politicians is language. While the former group treats language as a tool for communicating ideas as clearly as their skill allows, the latter typically treats it as the exact opposite: a tool for subverting ideas and initiatives to meet their own ends; for deceiving and twisting rather than clarifying and simplifying.
Because of this, there always seems to be a certain level of naivety evident when geeks try to interact with politicians in such a forum. It seems inevitable that they will get burned, their ideas corrupted and their spirit killed.
It seems our only hope, in a democracy, is for the demos - the hoi-polloi - to become ever more savvy, such that the emergent state representatives will be a little better-adjusted and more enamoured of technological and ideological advancement.
Whenever Google does something big like this, the "Do No Evil" manifesto gets brought up. The question then, irrespecitve of profit motive, is: Is this move going to be of net benefit or not?
If Google pull this off, the net impact over the years will be absolutely huge. Ultimately I envisage it resulting in the final shift of the prime medium for creative work from physical to digital.
In 20 years, when people look back at all the physical media we used to hoard (from the context of a society in which nearly everything is transmitted and viewed digitally), I suspect Google's efforts to digitise all printed media will be seen as a very significant milestone.
Not only that; I also imagine it will, over time, play a significant role in reducing the copyright debate to an academic one. I fully expect copyright as it exists today to be obsolete in 50 years, and this project will help in facilitating that cultural change.
Good or evil? It's usually a matter of historical perspective. Key events over the millennia of human history are viewed from the context of a culture that those events shaped; imagine how the holocaust would be viewed, had the Third Reich come to dominate politically and philosophically (I'm absolutely not an apologist - I'm just using an extreme example). It's not just a case of the victor rewriting history - it's about the victor rewriting the future.
Personally, I like what they're doing because I yearn for the future that Google seem to be trying to bring about. Others - authors, artists and copyright lawyers - may feel differently, and I quite understand their position. However, if they're successful, I think even the authors and artists of the future will look back on the attitudes of their historical contemporaries as blinkered and technophobic.
Whatever your opinion on the morality of Google's efforts, there's one thing on which I hope we can agree: Google really do seem to be using their dominant position to effect significant change, not just significant profit. Their success has always been through aggressively dynamic innovation, and I'm grateful for it.
I agree that this is the ultimate goal of procedurally generated content - a whole world built upon a set of "simple" well-defined rules, some starting parameters and a little room for God to play dice.
Not only would this make the world unpredictable, un-walkthru-able, endlessly inventive and open, it would lend itself to more and more elaborate worlds as developers learned to optimise procedural generation and spawn more and more depth and detail without games becoming unwieldy to install. Forget Spore: see kkrieger for a real-world example of just how efficient and powerful this concept can be. (I'm also excited about Introversion's latest project, Subversion).
However, there are problems with this. The first and most obvious is that designing procedural algorithms to generate good quality content is an enormously complex and challenging task when compared to conventional content development. It's like the difference between building a creature by adding and changing organs (again, see Spore), and building a creature by coding some DNA from scratch and chucking it in a cell nucleus. It's much more elegant, but so very much more difficult.
Add some randomness into the mix to make the world not only procedural but also unique, and you have a hell of a tricky project on your hands. Setting the range of starting parameters, such that the resultant world will always be interesting and varied enough to be playable, would be very difficult, even with a very simple system - see the Game Of Life if you don't understand why.
Secondly, there is the subtler problem of how to make good game content. Talented developers spend years learning their art and the pitfalls of the trade, and even then can screw it up too easily. Making good scenarios and content is an impressive skill, and the result can only be judged in human terms - how can a computer judge what makes a good mission, quest, set-piece or whatever? Even with a simple thing like Sudoku, hand-made puzzles are almost always more satisfying, more taxing in particular ways, more elegant... Procedurally generating a really good puzzle or quest on a consistent basis is, I suspect, impossible.
I really hope that what you suggest comes to pass - it's the holy grail of PG games - but for the foreseeable future it's exactly that. Quixotically difficult, and quite probably an impossible fantasy.
...but also increases the thickness of the spacecraft walls, which is not ideal for fitting spacecraft into launch vehicle fairings.
Did anybody consider developing the Whipple Shield to "expand" on deployment? Store the layers tightly packed, then space the layers apart either mechanically or using some kind of compressed filler-material once the payload is deployed.
The laminated nature of the hull would provide additional benefits to pressurised, manned payloads, since it would provide tougher, lighter shielding and insulation.
I remember discussing related "small-scale storage" issues with my brother once. Two concepts were of particular interest:
1. Spin and such: If we want to store on a very small scale, why not use the intrinsic properties of molecules, atoms and particles? A simple example would be using a caffeine molecule, which can exist in 8 different molecular arrangements (I forget the exact details - was it aggregate Spin?), as 3-bit memory. I'm sure there are more suitable molecules, or applications on smaller scales, but the concept is sound.
2. Holographic storage: When part of a holographic surface is destroyed or decayed, it does not result in the hologram missing parts, but in a degradation of its overall clarity, since each area of the surface encodes a little of the information about the whole hologram. If storage could be designed around the same concept, data would not be lost unless enough of the whole holograph were destroyed or corrupted.
I particularly like this last idea, but unfortunately I suspect it would only work as permanent - not active - storage, such as read-only media. I think you could only write each bit of the hologram (or equivalent) if you knew what the whole was going to look like.
This study seems to demonstrate the same conceptual problem, although it isn't mentioned. The resultant "picture" could only be constructed by moving atoms around until the interference between their electrons produced the desired pattern. Trying to add to it would require a re-arrangement of the whole structure every time, and such arrangements would increase in complexity exponentially.
I feel for you, I really do. Just wait and see what happens with ContactPoint, the new all-embracing central child database. Home Secretary's dream come true, I tell you...
There is a private health-care industry in the UK - and it's growing all the time, out of sheer necessity. It's just prohibitively expensive for the proles, especially given that we already pay for the NHS, which is chartered to provide for every person's health-care needs.
"From the cradle to the grave" used to be an unofficial slogan, back in its more socialist hey-day. Now it's more of a grim prediction...
Slashdot Mirror
I've no hard evidence whatsoever for this, but I suspect the convention started with "Doom".
They wanted the function-keys to used for operations (run, map etc) which, if they were to lie under the pinky, would make WASD the most naturally accessible replication of the classic arrow-key layout for the remaining three fingers. And, as everyone knows, id-software set the benchmark for FPS for years.
Personally I don't have any problem with it. I can't conceive of any arrangement on a QWERTY keyboard that's significantly more intuitive or ergonomic for right-handed players. You're not expected to undertake typing and fast-pace FPS gaming simultaneously, and in fact I find the ergonomic distinction to be beneficial - motor-memory may make it confusing otherwise.
"Explaining the facts of life to a teenager is like giving a fish a bath."
Supplant "facts of life" with "web".
I think that may be the least of his nephew's eccentricities.
You're right, it was.
Seriously? You didn't get it? Okay, he's just described a clear anecdote in which his teacher was demonstrably wrong in stating that K is significantly more reactive than Na. He followed this by stating that:
He's mocking the teacher's error by treating it as an overstatement of the facts, rather than a complete falsehood. It's the humour of subtle understatement. If subtlety isn't your thing, try sickipedia or 4chan.
When someone has been whooshed, make really sure you haven't missed the joke yourself before stating that there isn't one.
Christ, Samuel Clemens was right. It's like dissecting a frog.
Little anecdote for you pyromaniacs:
I live a few miles from one of the Humber Oil Refineries (east coast UK). A few years back, it blew up.
Windows & doors got blown through in Immingham, a couple of miles from the site. I was maybe 5 miles away and heard the blast.
Because this is /. I'll tell you what happened - I had a friend working there at the time, so they all got the report. Turns out there was a large high-temp gas pipe that had a little inlet, used to release a slow, steady drip of water into the flow and cool the gas. For one reason or another (principally because nobody could be bothered to flag it up for replacement), the valve got a bit temperamental over time, and so people going around doing the checks would occasionally open the valve a little because they thought it had stopped.
A drip became a thin stream, which hit a bend in the pipe and eroded the wall. Eventually the wall got so thin that the gas leaked out, and, well, boom.
Off topic? Go ahead, I have Karma to burn.
Whoooooossshhh!
It's gratifying, and somewhat surprising, to see state officials put a stake through the bloated, foetid, rotting corpse of that ridiculous little man.
The guy's always been a noxious little puke, but when he started having a crack at Penny Arcade, it became clear just how deranged a nut-job he was.
Sorry, I don't really have anything to add to the discussion. I just really wanted to smile and breathe a sigh: Yessssss...
This doesn't take into account the vast, vast amount of time, energy and resources wasted by people who don't know how to use the fucking things properly in the first place. Let's start there before we get to titivating with power-management.
I've lost count of the number of times I've had to show people how to do the simplest things, to save them hours of wasted effort each week. This usually leads to me writing explicit instructions and disseminating to those concerned but, ultimately, people just don't care (and I have trained people for a living with notable success, so it's not a "techie-personality pissing people off" thing).
Power-management? How about education. If every office-worker were to spend one day a year going through their daily grind with someone sat beside them who knows how to use their PC's potential (and how to explain it), productivity would double. I'm not just slagging off my luddite colleagues here; I know there are things I could do better, and would genuinely welcome the attention of someone who could show me how.
Sorry to vent my frustrations here, but it's that or do it at work. To put it bluntly: nice study, but frankly you're just pissing in the ocean.
Might I recommend Firefox Portable for such people? It's a bloody godsend.
It was inevitable, surely. Once governments came to realise that the web was becoming a legitimate medium rather than an entity, they would obviously start to employ it in the same way they have every other.
I have to ask: is this story about governments wising-up in the ways of the intertubes and turning it to their advantage, or about the fact that this was discussed at a conference? I'd have thought the former was self-evident, and the latter was completely un-newsworthy. Maybe we can discuss specific examples of political internet jiggery-pokery, but this kind of vague allusion is just going to prompt hot-air discussions with no real content, isn't it?
Agreed. Less trolling in the HoL... Well, marginally.
1. Nobody comes to arrest you. Why the hell would the police get involved? You'll get increasingly strongly-worded letters and then, eventually, a court summons.
2. What if you don't pay your gas/credit-card/porn-subscription bill? Same story. Does that mean NPower/Barclays/shemaleswithdiseasedsheep.com is affiliated with the government?
3. I said they were autonomous, not completely independent and uninvolved. This means they can follow that charter in whatever way they see fit.
Know what? I'm tired of discussing this point. The Beeb's history and reputation speaks for itself. If you have a serious point then please make it, and then show me a more effective alternative. Insofar as it's possible, the Beeb is as I've described.
Almost.
Mens Rea is almost always about your level of intent, not what you intended to do. This is important for things such as assault or murder, where intent can range from "I meant to kill him" to "I just wanted to stop him hitting me" to "I didn't know he was standing there". As such, the mens rea will affect the nature of the crime.
However, in most cases it is merely a case of "Did you intend to do it?" In the case of burglary, for example, the only way you could argue the mens rea would be either by pleading insanity (didn't know you were doing it) or demonstrating that you thought you had the right to enter the place you entered and take what you took. You're pleading that you were not knowingly guilty of doing what you did. For the majority of crimes you can't be excused by claiming that you did it with good reason; though that may mitigate your sentencing, it won't mitigate the conviction.
Since the crime in this case was illegal access of someone's personal computer, the crime was knowingly undertaken irrespective of what the ultimate intention was. However, as I've said in a later post, I don't think this particular case will even see the courts; nor do I think it should.
Yes, this is illegal. There was an embarrassing attempt to cover their asses with the following:
There's no question of mens rea - they knew exactly what they were doing, whether or not they thought it was a crime - while actus reus is satisfied if they undertook the crime. The crime in this case was gaining unauthorised access to personal computers. "Criminal intent" doesn't come into it - they deliberately did something which is a criminal act.
However, they won't get prosecuted. This has nothing to do with "ties to the guv'mint", and everything to do with journalistic licence. They exposed criminal activity without effecting any damage to property or reputation, and in doing so helped to inform and protect not only the several thousand people directly involved, but a whole nation of news-reading, tech-ignoring proles.
This is exactly what investigative journalism is about. While technically they broke the law, there is a fine history of decades of case-law precedent where journalists went undercover and got involved in criminal practices purely in an effort to expose and prevent it in future.
There's no way in hell the CPS (the body responsible for prosecuting criminal cases) would touch this. Flimsy though it may be, journalistic integrity is afforded impressive leniency in British culture and law, provided it is seen to be of public benefit.
NO!!!
Your quote diametrically refutes your posit! It is funded by the public and given a mandate of political neutrality and autonomy by that charter. That charter was issued by the government many years ago and has been essentially sacrosanct since then. The BBC is "owned" by the people, more so than the government is.
Contemporary History, with regards to the BBC, demonstrates that they have managed to maintain that detachment and impartiality - even to the detriment of the ruling government - on many occasions. It's out of keeping with the increasingly totalitarian character of UK government, I know, but somehow the Beeb seems to be just-about maintaining its function. Whether that will continue indefinitely is anybody's guess, but for god's sake, give them credit where it's due for now...
Possibly the most damningly insightful comment I've ever read about this debate.
The big problem when geeks/scientist/engineers interact with politics and politicians is language. While the former group treats language as a tool for communicating ideas as clearly as their skill allows, the latter typically treats it as the exact opposite: a tool for subverting ideas and initiatives to meet their own ends; for deceiving and twisting rather than clarifying and simplifying.
Because of this, there always seems to be a certain level of naivety evident when geeks try to interact with politicians in such a forum. It seems inevitable that they will get burned, their ideas corrupted and their spirit killed.
It seems our only hope, in a democracy, is for the demos - the hoi-polloi - to become ever more savvy, such that the emergent state representatives will be a little better-adjusted and more enamoured of technological and ideological advancement.
Whenever Google does something big like this, the "Do No Evil" manifesto gets brought up. The question then, irrespecitve of profit motive, is: Is this move going to be of net benefit or not?
If Google pull this off, the net impact over the years will be absolutely huge. Ultimately I envisage it resulting in the final shift of the prime medium for creative work from physical to digital.
In 20 years, when people look back at all the physical media we used to hoard (from the context of a society in which nearly everything is transmitted and viewed digitally), I suspect Google's efforts to digitise all printed media will be seen as a very significant milestone.
Not only that; I also imagine it will, over time, play a significant role in reducing the copyright debate to an academic one. I fully expect copyright as it exists today to be obsolete in 50 years, and this project will help in facilitating that cultural change.
Good or evil? It's usually a matter of historical perspective. Key events over the millennia of human history are viewed from the context of a culture that those events shaped; imagine how the holocaust would be viewed, had the Third Reich come to dominate politically and philosophically (I'm absolutely not an apologist - I'm just using an extreme example). It's not just a case of the victor rewriting history - it's about the victor rewriting the future.
Personally, I like what they're doing because I yearn for the future that Google seem to be trying to bring about. Others - authors, artists and copyright lawyers - may feel differently, and I quite understand their position. However, if they're successful, I think even the authors and artists of the future will look back on the attitudes of their historical contemporaries as blinkered and technophobic.
Whatever your opinion on the morality of Google's efforts, there's one thing on which I hope we can agree: Google really do seem to be using their dominant position to effect significant change, not just significant profit. Their success has always been through aggressively dynamic innovation, and I'm grateful for it.
I agree that this is the ultimate goal of procedurally generated content - a whole world built upon a set of "simple" well-defined rules, some starting parameters and a little room for God to play dice.
Not only would this make the world unpredictable, un-walkthru-able, endlessly inventive and open, it would lend itself to more and more elaborate worlds as developers learned to optimise procedural generation and spawn more and more depth and detail without games becoming unwieldy to install. Forget Spore: see kkrieger for a real-world example of just how efficient and powerful this concept can be. (I'm also excited about Introversion's latest project, Subversion).
However, there are problems with this. The first and most obvious is that designing procedural algorithms to generate good quality content is an enormously complex and challenging task when compared to conventional content development. It's like the difference between building a creature by adding and changing organs (again, see Spore), and building a creature by coding some DNA from scratch and chucking it in a cell nucleus. It's much more elegant, but so very much more difficult.
Add some randomness into the mix to make the world not only procedural but also unique, and you have a hell of a tricky project on your hands. Setting the range of starting parameters, such that the resultant world will always be interesting and varied enough to be playable, would be very difficult, even with a very simple system - see the Game Of Life if you don't understand why.
Secondly, there is the subtler problem of how to make good game content. Talented developers spend years learning their art and the pitfalls of the trade, and even then can screw it up too easily. Making good scenarios and content is an impressive skill, and the result can only be judged in human terms - how can a computer judge what makes a good mission, quest, set-piece or whatever? Even with a simple thing like Sudoku, hand-made puzzles are almost always more satisfying, more taxing in particular ways, more elegant... Procedurally generating a really good puzzle or quest on a consistent basis is, I suspect, impossible.
I really hope that what you suggest comes to pass - it's the holy grail of PG games - but for the foreseeable future it's exactly that. Quixotically difficult, and quite probably an impossible fantasy.
I just tried to open a .pdf in Reader 9, and it's completely locked up - I've been stuck on the splash screen for 20 minu--
Oh wait, it's opened now. False alarm, sorry.
Reading the article you linked:
Did anybody consider developing the Whipple Shield to "expand" on deployment? Store the layers tightly packed, then space the layers apart either mechanically or using some kind of compressed filler-material once the payload is deployed.
The laminated nature of the hull would provide additional benefits to pressurised, manned payloads, since it would provide tougher, lighter shielding and insulation.
I remember discussing related "small-scale storage" issues with my brother once. Two concepts were of particular interest:
1. Spin and such: If we want to store on a very small scale, why not use the intrinsic properties of molecules, atoms and particles? A simple example would be using a caffeine molecule, which can exist in 8 different molecular arrangements (I forget the exact details - was it aggregate Spin?), as 3-bit memory. I'm sure there are more suitable molecules, or applications on smaller scales, but the concept is sound.
2. Holographic storage: When part of a holographic surface is destroyed or decayed, it does not result in the hologram missing parts, but in a degradation of its overall clarity, since each area of the surface encodes a little of the information about the whole hologram. If storage could be designed around the same concept, data would not be lost unless enough of the whole holograph were destroyed or corrupted.
I particularly like this last idea, but unfortunately I suspect it would only work as permanent - not active - storage, such as read-only media. I think you could only write each bit of the hologram (or equivalent) if you knew what the whole was going to look like.
This study seems to demonstrate the same conceptual problem, although it isn't mentioned. The resultant "picture" could only be constructed by moving atoms around until the interference between their electrons produced the desired pattern. Trying to add to it would require a re-arrangement of the whole structure every time, and such arrangements would increase in complexity exponentially.
Oh never mind.
I feel for you, I really do. Just wait and see what happens with ContactPoint, the new all-embracing central child database. Home Secretary's dream come true, I tell you...
There is a private health-care industry in the UK - and it's growing all the time, out of sheer necessity. It's just prohibitively expensive for the proles, especially given that we already pay for the NHS, which is chartered to provide for every person's health-care needs.
"From the cradle to the grave" used to be an unofficial slogan, back in its more socialist hey-day. Now it's more of a grim prediction...