The chip will probably be embedded in the book's cover, in the same way that magnetic anti-theft coils are hidden in battery packaging, razor blade boxes and, for all I know, book covers. So to remove the chip you'll have to rip the cover off the book, which means you won't be able to re-sell it, which means you'll always be listed as the book's owner, which means They will no longer need to track the ownership of the book.:-/
Destroy their military arsenals? Taliban artillery don't threaten the US. The threat comes from terrorists living in the US, using weapons bought in the US.
Reduce their cash funds? Before you bomb anyone, try regulating the world banking system. (Probably impossible, but if you can't do it you will never stop donations reaching Al Qaeda.)
If you killed every human on earth, there could be no more terrorists.
That doesn't invalidate my argument, it just provides a limiting case. If you killed every human on earth apart from one, do you think that person would try to kill you?
It is also possible, even probable that other actions could be taken that would not result in an equal number of people becoming terrorists.
I agree, and I hope the US government looks at all possible courses of action, not just military retaliation. The recent diplomatic pressure on Israel is an encouraging sign.
Yes, of course it's just an assertion. So is every other sociological "fact". I assert that if you asked members of the IRA why they became terrorists, most if not all would cite Britain's history of oppressing the Irish people, including the killing of suspected terrorists. Terrorists are volunteers fighting for a cause they passionately believe in, while most Nazi soldiers were conscripts, so my assertion applies better to terrorists than to Nazis.
According to your reasoning, if someone comes into your house, kills your family, and eats your pizza, you should just sit there and hand them a beer lest you run the risk of pissing them off.
Of course not. You kill him to avenge your family and then rationalize later that you did it for the good of society. But do you kill his countrymen? His family? His friends? If you can't find him, do you bomb his house? His city? The whole planet?
In short, if we are a nation that claims to believe in a set of principles above all else, but we are unwilling to fight for these principles, then we are a nation of hypocrites.
If one of your principles is not to kill innocent people, then it may be necessary to not fight in order to uphold that principle.
Only if you define success as the destruction of the enemy, which in the case of terrorism is an impossible goal. (You cannot destroy an idea, except by killing everyone who has been exposed to it, which includes yourself.) Even if you define success as the destruction of terrorists, the numbers are against you: for every terrorist you kill, at least one new terrorist will be recruited. And you will probably have to kill several innocent people per terrorist, because terrorists don't do you the favour of living in barracks.
Appeasement to make "other people like us" is guaranteed to fail, and furthermore, makes dirty bastards like you as guilty as the killers.
Let me see if I understand you: someone like me who objects to the bombing of innocent people is a dirty bastard and guilty of terrorism. Whereas someone like you who openly supports the bombing of innocent people is the farthest thing you can imagine from a terrorist.
Your type killed millions of Czechs by appeasing Hitler.
And your "type" killed millions of Americans and Germans by opposing Hitler. Perhaps that was necessary, perhaps it was the right decision in 1941, perhaps more than 55 million people would have been killed if the world had not gone to war. But despite what CNN tells you, Osama bin Laden is not Hitler. He is not the head of a national army. He is a terrorist. His followers live among us, so they cannot be stopped by purely military means. The only way to stop terrorism is to address the issues that make people so angry that they decide to become terrorists.
Do you think more terrorists like him will follow along if we don't act? Clue: Look at the Carter presidency.
You obviously watched Ronald Reagan's election campaign before you retreated to your bunker, but I have some news for you: while you were underground, we found out that the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran (yes, the same Iran that took those hostages) to fund terrorists in Nicaragua. Which makes any criticism of the Carter administration for appeasing terrorists look pretty stupid.
Look at your examples supplied and a culture of minimal response. Clue: Look at Syria. Have a city threatening with insurrection? Exterminate it and set an example.
Look at Canada. Have a province that wants to secede? Hold an election. Are you seriously suggesting that the US should model itself on Syria?
For our sake, I'd encourage you to seek the closest bridge, jump and get it over with. Quit bothering us with your fascination with suicide.
I'm not opposing the bombing because I want to be killed. I'm opposing the bombing because I don't want to be killed. Bombing Afghanistan is drawing people to the terrorist cause and making it more likely that I'll get killed. It's also killing innocent people on the ground.
Not to open a can of worm here, but neither does doing nothing. I'd rather go after the guy who did it than not.
Given that neither reaction nor inaction will prevent further attacks, which is the better course to take? Consider these points:
Which course will polarise world opinion, leading previously moderate people to support radical organisations? (Clue: look at Pakistan.)
Which course will kill innocent people abroad, in addition to those who have already died in the US? (Clue: look at Afghanistan.)
Which course will perpetuate a cycle of violence and be used to justify further attacks? (Clue: look at the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine.)
Is your desire to feel like you're doing something worth the consequences?
Q1. And it's memory that gives something intelligence? In that case, Solaris is AI.
That's an oversimplification of what I was trying to say: that the complexity and bandwidth of artificial information systems will soon surpass the complexity and bandwidth of human brains. Maybe that's unimportant, or maybe it creates an environment where AI could evolve. I doubt that humans will ever be able to create AI programmatically, but I believe intelligence will eventually emerge in any environment that is complex enough to give intelligent entities an evolutionary advantage. (It might not be anything we would recognise as intelligence, of course - how do you define 'intelligence' without reference to the biological world? Even the abstract idea of 'survival advantage obtained through unpredictable action' depends on two ultimately biological concepts: 'survival' and 'action'. Is a virus intelligent if it evolves to exploit a weakness in its host? It's obeying the same laws of physics as any other creature, so why call one behaviour 'intelligence' and another 'chance'? Intelligence boils down to physics, leaving a dry residue of teleology.) But given that the world of computers is a world of meaningful symbols, I think we would more readily recognise that a complex, autonomous entity in the computing world was intelligent than we would admit the intelligence of a whale or a weather system.
Q2. Are those bitrates an average, or the maximum?
I think they're the maximum but I'm afraid don't have the book in front of me. It's worth buying, although it gets rather mystical in the second half.
I was talking about recording the information that is experienced - obviously the amount of information in the world that might be experienced is much larger. But you will never experience it at a rate faster than 11 Mbps.
Tor Norretranders' estimate had nothing to do with DVDs. It was based on two psychological phenomena known as Just Noticable Difference (JND) and Subjective Time Quantum (SZQ, from the German).
A JND is the change in the level of a stimulus that is just large enough to be noticable. For example, the JND in the brightness of a dim light is extremely small while the JND in the brightness of a bright light is quite large. It is this phenomenon that allows compression techniques like MP3 to discard information from a signal without audibly changing the signal - loud sounds can be stored with less precision than quiet sounds, quiet sounds that are masked by loud sounds of the same pitch can be discarded, etc. Of course MP3 compression doesn't perfectly match your own psychoacoustic compression, so sometimes the difference is audible. But in theory it is possible to remove information from an audio signal without creating a noticable difference (e.g. by reducing the sampling rate from 500 kHz to 250 kHz).
A Subjective Time Quantum is a period of time about one sixteenth of a second long. Two stimuli that occur within the same SZQ are experienced simultaneously - the subject cannot tell which occurred first. If the time separation is greater than 1/16 s, the subject can detect the order in which the events occurred. This phenomemon is related to 'binding', in which separate stimuli are identified as aspects of the same event. To test it for yourself, try watching a game of football from the other side of the playing field. Because light travels faster than sound, you will see the ball being kicked before you hear the thump. If you are less than 1/16 s away at the speed of sound (50 m IIRC), you won't notice the delay. But if you are further away (and it's a quiet day) you'll notice that the sight and sound of the ball being kicked become two separate experiences. You still know at a logical level that they are aspects of the same event, but at the level of immediate experience it's obvious that one occurred before the other.
Just Noticable Differences and Subjective Time Quanta mean that the amount of information received by our senses is smaller than the amount of information that could potentially be received. (Common sense tells us the same thing - our senses cannot be 100% accurate, they are subject to noise and distortion like any other physical device, and there's no point in recording below the noise floor.) In other words, although the world is analog our experience of it is quantised. (After all, sensory information is carried by nerve impulses with invariant magnitude, similar to digital signals.) Using experimentally-derived JNDs for all the senses (not just sight and sound like a DVD), Norretranders calculated that the bandwidth of human experience was 11 million bits per second. That's 1,375,000 bytes per second or 118,800,000,000 bytes (roughly 120 GB) per day.
The size of information storage devices and the bandwidth of networks are approaching meaningful limits: the size and bandwidth of human experience. Tor Norretranders claims in his book The User Illusion that the amount of information absorbed by the senses is around 11 Mbits per second. In other words, a totally immersive virtual experience with sight, sound, smell, taste, touch and motion could be transmitted over a standard Ethernet connection. An entire day of a human life could be recorded in perfect detail (with no compression) on a 120 GB disk. So there is a limit to how much information you could ever want to store. In your entire life you will experience less than 3.5 petabytes of information. 1.44 petabytes will never seem small to a human being.
However, there might one day be information processing systems to which 1.44 petabytes is a small amount of information. In a sense, these systems will have a richer experience of the world than human beings. I wonder if human consciousness would seem marvellous or valuable to such a machine.
To relive the experience, a newer Wolfenstein would have to again push current hardware beyond what is currently viewed as possible. It's quite a shame this is unlikely to happen
The reason it's unlikely to happen is that current PC hardware was designed with 3D games in mind. The game designers aren't going to come up with any new 3D tricks that the hardware manufacturers haven't thought of, because there are so many brains focussed on that area. The next big innovation in game design will probably come from a relatively neglected area: input devices, speech, plot structure, emergent behaviour etc.
The original Wolfenstein was written for a platform that nobody ever expected to use for 3D games. To create as much of a stir, the sequel would have to do much more than push the limits of the hardware within the FPS genre: it would have to create an entirely new genre.
Re:Hmmm.... that's a nice quote... but....
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I like your argument about the murderer in the grocery store - it's the best argument I've yet heard in favour of the war, because it's the only pragmatic argument I've come across. (The rest have all been revenge-oriented.) But perhaps your story would be closer to reality if the police deliberately shot the murderer's landlord and his family because they were unable to find the murderer himself. Many people would not regard that as justice.
Re:Hmmm.... that's a nice quote... but....
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Pursuit of someone who kills N people in a terrorist action isn't "retaliation". It's pursuit of a criminal to bring them to justice PERIOD.
True. But killing anyone who wasn't involved in the original terrorist action (which is inevitable when you bombard a city) is retaliation and is no more morally justifiable than the original terrorist attack. Innocent people are innocent regardless of what their government has done. You might say that civilians have a responsibility to ensure their government behaves in a moral way, and they should be "punished" if they do not uphold that responsibility. Well, the same argument was used to justify the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and frankly it makes more sense when applied to a democracy than it does when applied to a dictatorship of priests and warlords. I reject the argument regardless of which side uses it - there is no heap of innocent bodies tall enough to justify adding more.
The trial will come after the direct attack is done and when all that remains is the aftermath. Therein lies the real challenge.
I hope you're right, but I fear that the aftermath will last so long that Osama Bin Laden will be long dead and forgotten by the time the war is finally over. Pop quiz: whatever happened to Gavrillo Princip?
Pick up a rotten branch in the woods, you'll see a dozen. Trilobites are just fossilized wood lice (or peppercorn bugs or whatever you Americans call them). They seem larger because the rocks which preserved them have stretched over time - same reason that dinosaurs and everything else from prehistory appears so big. In reality T rex was about the size of a dog. Paleontologists know this but they've hushed it up because all their funding would disappear if the public discovered the truth.
if the larger dinosaurs were really cold-blooded, a la iguana, they'd require over a day of continuous sunlight to warm up enough to move
Is it possible that a huge meteor hitting the Earth's surface at an angle could affect its period of rotation? Perhaps a day was hundreds of hours long in the time of the dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs became extinct because shorter days made it impossible for them to absorb enough sunlight to get moving in the morning?
The distinction isn't logical at all. Object code isn't a "composition of zeroes and ones" any more than source code - source code is represented as binary inside a computer, and so is Hamlet for that matter, but that doesn't stop them from being speech.
IIRC, the act of burning the American flag is protected by the First Amendment because it is a way of communicating your political beliefs to another person. Written communication is protected even though it is not literally "speech". Likewise, photographs allow people to communicate without using speech, so they too are protected. Why should object code be any different? Granted, there are very few people who can make any sense out of object code. The same is probably true of Joyce's Ulysses. But if a work is known to have some meaning, even if that meaning is obscure, it should be protected by the First Amendment.
The cost of transferring terabytes of archives to new media has cost the loss of literally TONS of data.
How many bits in a ton, son? Literally speaking, I mean.
Film (preferably black and white, or separations on black and white film) is the ONLY suitable medium for archiving image data.
If black and white film is such a great storage medium, digital archives can be printed on black and white microfilm.
Re:Hmmm.... that's a nice quote... but....
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Globalization
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Unfortunately I think you're right - there is no single action that will stop the terrorists. However, retaliation comes closer to granting the terrorists' wishes than almost any other action. These people want a holy war between the United States and Muslims everywhere. The United States might not be destroyed by such a war, but its suffering would be 100 times worse than the current terrorist campaign.
Retaliation is what the terrorists want, because it justifies further atrocities and wins them support among their own people. Why else would they commit an act so terrible that it is almost unthinkable not to retaliate? Osama Bin Laden wants US forces removed from Saudi Arabia, and to achieve that aim he intends to make the United States as hated in the Arab world as Israel. Saudi Arabia would not allow Israeli bases on its soil, and if Bin Laden achieves his aims it will not allow American bases either. If Bin Laden can make the United States act as badly towards Muslims as Israel has done (albeit in the face of terrible provocation) - if he can make the US invade a Muslim country and kill innocent Muslim people - he will achieve his aim. If he can turn the people of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia against their own governments, he will achieve his aim.
Appeasement in the face of evil purpose is tantamount to suicide.
Only if your enemy has the power to destroy you. Bin Laden does not have the power to destroy the United States through terrorism, but he has the power to draw it into a long and terrible war which it cannot win.
Slashdot Mirror
The chip will probably be embedded in the book's cover, in the same way that magnetic anti-theft coils are hidden in battery packaging, razor blade boxes and, for all I know, book covers. So to remove the chip you'll have to rip the cover off the book, which means you won't be able to re-sell it, which means you'll always be listed as the book's owner, which means They will no longer need to track the ownership of the book. :-/
Yes there is, and you're looking at it right now.
Perhaps they've set their servers up to switch over to light content automatically during traffic spikes (wouldn't be very hard to do).
Reduce their cash funds? Before you bomb anyone, try regulating the world banking system. (Probably impossible, but if you can't do it you will never stop donations reaching Al Qaeda.)
No, it's on Friday.
That doesn't invalidate my argument, it just provides a limiting case. If you killed every human on earth apart from one, do you think that person would try to kill you?
It is also possible, even probable that other actions could be taken that would not result in an equal number of people becoming terrorists.
I agree, and I hope the US government looks at all possible courses of action, not just military retaliation. The recent diplomatic pressure on Israel is an encouraging sign.
Yes, of course it's just an assertion. So is every other sociological "fact". I assert that if you asked members of the IRA why they became terrorists, most if not all would cite Britain's history of oppressing the Irish people, including the killing of suspected terrorists. Terrorists are volunteers fighting for a cause they passionately believe in, while most Nazi soldiers were conscripts, so my assertion applies better to terrorists than to Nazis.
Of course not. You kill him to avenge your family and then rationalize later that you did it for the good of society. But do you kill his countrymen? His family? His friends? If you can't find him, do you bomb his house? His city? The whole planet?
In short, if we are a nation that claims to believe in a set of principles above all else, but we are unwilling to fight for these principles, then we are a nation of hypocrites.
If one of your principles is not to kill innocent people, then it may be necessary to not fight in order to uphold that principle.
A lack of response guarantees failure.
Only if you define success as the destruction of the enemy, which in the case of terrorism is an impossible goal. (You cannot destroy an idea, except by killing everyone who has been exposed to it, which includes yourself.) Even if you define success as the destruction of terrorists, the numbers are against you: for every terrorist you kill, at least one new terrorist will be recruited. And you will probably have to kill several innocent people per terrorist, because terrorists don't do you the favour of living in barracks.
Appeasement to make "other people like us" is guaranteed to fail, and furthermore, makes dirty bastards like you as guilty as the killers.
Let me see if I understand you: someone like me who objects to the bombing of innocent people is a dirty bastard and guilty of terrorism. Whereas someone like you who openly supports the bombing of innocent people is the farthest thing you can imagine from a terrorist.
Your type killed millions of Czechs by appeasing Hitler.
And your "type" killed millions of Americans and Germans by opposing Hitler. Perhaps that was necessary, perhaps it was the right decision in 1941, perhaps more than 55 million people would have been killed if the world had not gone to war. But despite what CNN tells you, Osama bin Laden is not Hitler. He is not the head of a national army. He is a terrorist. His followers live among us, so they cannot be stopped by purely military means. The only way to stop terrorism is to address the issues that make people so angry that they decide to become terrorists.
Do you think more terrorists like him will follow along if we don't act? Clue: Look at the Carter presidency.
You obviously watched Ronald Reagan's election campaign before you retreated to your bunker, but I have some news for you: while you were underground, we found out that the Reagan administration sold arms to Iran (yes, the same Iran that took those hostages) to fund terrorists in Nicaragua. Which makes any criticism of the Carter administration for appeasing terrorists look pretty stupid.
Look at your examples supplied and a culture of minimal response. Clue: Look at Syria. Have a city threatening with insurrection? Exterminate it and set an example.
Look at Canada. Have a province that wants to secede? Hold an election. Are you seriously suggesting that the US should model itself on Syria?
For our sake, I'd encourage you to seek the closest bridge, jump and get it over with. Quit bothering us with your fascination with suicide.
I'm not opposing the bombing because I want to be killed. I'm opposing the bombing because I don't want to be killed. Bombing Afghanistan is drawing people to the terrorist cause and making it more likely that I'll get killed. It's also killing innocent people on the ground.
Given that neither reaction nor inaction will prevent further attacks, which is the better course to take? Consider these points:
- Which course will polarise world opinion, leading previously moderate people to support radical organisations? (Clue: look at Pakistan.)
- Which course will kill innocent people abroad, in addition to those who have already died in the US? (Clue: look at Afghanistan.)
- Which course will perpetuate a cycle of violence and be used to justify further attacks? (Clue: look at the Balkans, Northern Ireland, Israel and Palestine.)
Is your desire to feel like you're doing something worth the consequences?That's an oversimplification of what I was trying to say: that the complexity and bandwidth of artificial information systems will soon surpass the complexity and bandwidth of human brains. Maybe that's unimportant, or maybe it creates an environment where AI could evolve. I doubt that humans will ever be able to create AI programmatically, but I believe intelligence will eventually emerge in any environment that is complex enough to give intelligent entities an evolutionary advantage. (It might not be anything we would recognise as intelligence, of course - how do you define 'intelligence' without reference to the biological world? Even the abstract idea of 'survival advantage obtained through unpredictable action' depends on two ultimately biological concepts: 'survival' and 'action'. Is a virus intelligent if it evolves to exploit a weakness in its host? It's obeying the same laws of physics as any other creature, so why call one behaviour 'intelligence' and another 'chance'? Intelligence boils down to physics, leaving a dry residue of teleology.) But given that the world of computers is a world of meaningful symbols, I think we would more readily recognise that a complex, autonomous entity in the computing world was intelligent than we would admit the intelligence of a whale or a weather system.
Q2. Are those bitrates an average, or the maximum?
I think they're the maximum but I'm afraid don't have the book in front of me. It's worth buying, although it gets rather mystical in the second half.
I was talking about recording the information that is experienced - obviously the amount of information in the world that might be experienced is much larger. But you will never experience it at a rate faster than 11 Mbps.
A JND is the change in the level of a stimulus that is just large enough to be noticable. For example, the JND in the brightness of a dim light is extremely small while the JND in the brightness of a bright light is quite large. It is this phenomenon that allows compression techniques like MP3 to discard information from a signal without audibly changing the signal - loud sounds can be stored with less precision than quiet sounds, quiet sounds that are masked by loud sounds of the same pitch can be discarded, etc. Of course MP3 compression doesn't perfectly match your own psychoacoustic compression, so sometimes the difference is audible. But in theory it is possible to remove information from an audio signal without creating a noticable difference (e.g. by reducing the sampling rate from 500 kHz to 250 kHz).
A Subjective Time Quantum is a period of time about one sixteenth of a second long. Two stimuli that occur within the same SZQ are experienced simultaneously - the subject cannot tell which occurred first. If the time separation is greater than 1/16 s, the subject can detect the order in which the events occurred. This phenomemon is related to 'binding', in which separate stimuli are identified as aspects of the same event. To test it for yourself, try watching a game of football from the other side of the playing field. Because light travels faster than sound, you will see the ball being kicked before you hear the thump. If you are less than 1/16 s away at the speed of sound (50 m IIRC), you won't notice the delay. But if you are further away (and it's a quiet day) you'll notice that the sight and sound of the ball being kicked become two separate experiences. You still know at a logical level that they are aspects of the same event, but at the level of immediate experience it's obvious that one occurred before the other.
Just Noticable Differences and Subjective Time Quanta mean that the amount of information received by our senses is smaller than the amount of information that could potentially be received. (Common sense tells us the same thing - our senses cannot be 100% accurate, they are subject to noise and distortion like any other physical device, and there's no point in recording below the noise floor.) In other words, although the world is analog our experience of it is quantised. (After all, sensory information is carried by nerve impulses with invariant magnitude, similar to digital signals.) Using experimentally-derived JNDs for all the senses (not just sight and sound like a DVD), Norretranders calculated that the bandwidth of human experience was 11 million bits per second. That's 1,375,000 bytes per second or 118,800,000,000 bytes (roughly 120 GB) per day.
However, there might one day be information processing systems to which 1.44 petabytes is a small amount of information. In a sense, these systems will have a richer experience of the world than human beings. I wonder if human consciousness would seem marvellous or valuable to such a machine.
The reason it's unlikely to happen is that current PC hardware was designed with 3D games in mind. The game designers aren't going to come up with any new 3D tricks that the hardware manufacturers haven't thought of, because there are so many brains focussed on that area. The next big innovation in game design will probably come from a relatively neglected area: input devices, speech, plot structure, emergent behaviour etc.
The original Wolfenstein was written for a platform that nobody ever expected to use for 3D games. To create as much of a stir, the sequel would have to do much more than push the limits of the hardware within the FPS genre: it would have to create an entirely new genre.
I like your argument about the murderer in the grocery store - it's the best argument I've yet heard in favour of the war, because it's the only pragmatic argument I've come across. (The rest have all been revenge-oriented.) But perhaps your story would be closer to reality if the police deliberately shot the murderer's landlord and his family because they were unable to find the murderer himself. Many people would not regard that as justice.
True. But killing anyone who wasn't involved in the original terrorist action (which is inevitable when you bombard a city) is retaliation and is no more morally justifiable than the original terrorist attack. Innocent people are innocent regardless of what their government has done. You might say that civilians have a responsibility to ensure their government behaves in a moral way, and they should be "punished" if they do not uphold that responsibility. Well, the same argument was used to justify the attacks on the World Trade Center and the Pentagon, and frankly it makes more sense when applied to a democracy than it does when applied to a dictatorship of priests and warlords. I reject the argument regardless of which side uses it - there is no heap of innocent bodies tall enough to justify adding more.
The trial will come after the direct attack is done and when all that remains is the aftermath. Therein lies the real challenge.
I hope you're right, but I fear that the aftermath will last so long that Osama Bin Laden will be long dead and forgotten by the time the war is finally over. Pop quiz: whatever happened to Gavrillo Princip?
Pick up a rotten branch in the woods, you'll see a dozen. Trilobites are just fossilized wood lice (or peppercorn bugs or whatever you Americans call them). They seem larger because the rocks which preserved them have stretched over time - same reason that dinosaurs and everything else from prehistory appears so big. In reality T rex was about the size of a dog. Paleontologists know this but they've hushed it up because all their funding would disappear if the public discovered the truth.
Maybe.
Is it possible that a huge meteor hitting the Earth's surface at an angle could affect its period of rotation? Perhaps a day was hundreds of hours long in the time of the dinosaurs, and the dinosaurs became extinct because shorter days made it impossible for them to absorb enough sunlight to get moving in the morning?
With licensing fees to be determined by Microsoft, of course.
Then when they've broken your spirit with a diet of bland food... THEY'LL ATTACK!
IIRC, the act of burning the American flag is protected by the First Amendment because it is a way of communicating your political beliefs to another person. Written communication is protected even though it is not literally "speech". Likewise, photographs allow people to communicate without using speech, so they too are protected. Why should object code be any different? Granted, there are very few people who can make any sense out of object code. The same is probably true of Joyce's Ulysses. But if a work is known to have some meaning, even if that meaning is obscure, it should be protected by the First Amendment.
How many bits in a ton, son? Literally speaking, I mean.
Film (preferably black and white, or separations on black and white film) is the ONLY suitable medium for archiving image data.
If black and white film is such a great storage medium, digital archives can be printed on black and white microfilm.
Retaliation is what the terrorists want, because it justifies further atrocities and wins them support among their own people. Why else would they commit an act so terrible that it is almost unthinkable not to retaliate? Osama Bin Laden wants US forces removed from Saudi Arabia, and to achieve that aim he intends to make the United States as hated in the Arab world as Israel. Saudi Arabia would not allow Israeli bases on its soil, and if Bin Laden achieves his aims it will not allow American bases either. If Bin Laden can make the United States act as badly towards Muslims as Israel has done (albeit in the face of terrible provocation) - if he can make the US invade a Muslim country and kill innocent Muslim people - he will achieve his aim. If he can turn the people of Pakistan and Saudi Arabia against their own governments, he will achieve his aim.
Appeasement in the face of evil purpose is tantamount to suicide.
Only if your enemy has the power to destroy you. Bin Laden does not have the power to destroy the United States through terrorism, but he has the power to draw it into a long and terrible war which it cannot win.
I am Ozymandias, King of Kings. Look on my holiday snaps, ye mighty, and despair.