Regardless of it's cutting ability, the lightsaber shares something in common with more mundane bladed instruments: You really don't want to get hit by it. I imagine that would lead to more commonality in fighting style than you might expect.
I bloody hate Virtual Desktops. Why do they even exist? I'm serious... I don't get it. What's their advantage?
You might hate them, but I love mine. I have dual monitors, and use VirtuaWin to have three virtual windows (in Windows XP). They are not "connected", and I can only swap between them with a keystroke, per my own configuration choices.
They let me easily switch between six different screens worth of software, without having to play "which layer is on top". Most importantly, let me separate windows by task, or by conceptual differences. E-mail client on screen 1, out of the way. Code editor on the right monitor in all three views, because I want it visible in all three. Full-screen runtime environment used or testing code is on Screen 2. Folder windows are usually in screen 3, while documentation is often in Screen 1.
In short, it lets me re-purpose my workspace on the fly, so that I can mentally change modes, and avoid visual clutter. I/hate/ having to always bring different windows to the front, and this lets me swap between them with Win-1, Win-2, and Win-3. (On Linux, where I first used them, my shortcuts were different. Not a big deal.)
I consider them like using dual monitors. Until you've seen how they can change your workflow, you might see them as useless. Once you have, people will have to pry them from your cold, dead hands. (Well, we hope not.)
Star wars blasters are actually (I can't believe I said that) bolts of superheated plasma, not lasers. The plasma is what does the damage, not the laser. That's why they call them "blasters" and not "lasers", as well as why they have visible flight time instead of being nigh-instantaneous. (It doesn't explain why one side's ships have orange bolts and the other side has green, though. That never made sense to me.) More details at [ http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Blaster ].
Similarly, a lightsaber is described as a blade of plasma, held in place by a projected energy field. It's not a laser either. ( per [ http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lightsaber ] )
I doubt it's going to go well if you try to disable, remove, or relocate the device. It's probably legal but I wouldn't want to be the one to go to trial to prove that.
On the other hand, I would imagine that it's much more legal to encase it in a faraday cage. Would that prevent it from receiving signals, and thus from accurately cataloguing your whereabouts?
- Your basic premise "well if we have fast spaceships we must have amazing laser guns too" isn't really a valid argument. look at the past 50 years, computers and technology have made amazing leaps and bounds, but we still put on pants one leg at a time. Great advancements in spaceflight doesn't automatically mean we would also have equal advancements in weapons.
I completely agree.
Chemically-propelled kinetic weapons (bullets) are remarkably effective and efficient, when they hit. Wound cavities, tissue damage, and fluid shocks should be fairly effective versus most organic life forms that we might encounter. Large chunks of destroyed flesh might be more detrimental to someone's operation than a cauterized air-hole, depending on where you shot them.
They also have the benefit of being low-tech, relatively easily maintained, and so forth. I'd hate to have to recalibrate or realign (or even clean) the mirrors in a laser weapon, and I'd hate to see someone's plasmacaster's energy pack malfunction and explode. Now, the mass budget for TRANSPORTING them across space is probably absurd, but it's possible that the safety precautions and charging equipment for some sci-fi maser tech would be pretty expensive too.
Mainly, though, it's that this was a relatively hard sci-fi movie, as far as the humans' tech goes. Travel involved cryosleep, guns were basically guns, flying vehicles were basically helicopters, and other things were beefed-up VTOLs. The "magic" material (room temperature superconductor) which was being mined didn't really have an effect on the technology developed for the humans, because it was much too valuable not to just send home. Instead, everyone there got expedition grade stuff. This means that it was intended to be rugged, resilient to damage or environmental stresses, and usable (and maintainable) by replaceable grunts if necessary. So, their walkers are giant inelegant exoskeletons, their guns are recognizeable as such, and so on. The only real "science fiction" aspect of it was in the Avatar systems themselves, and the vat-grown chimaeras.
North Korea has a Dear Leader loved by nearly the entire populace; many outsiders feel this must be due to brainwashing. US has a president hated by roughly half of our populace (and hated nearly rabidly by a smaller subset), and believed to be loved by roughly the other half. (Ignoring those who say "Meh, NotBush" and neither love nor hate him.)
Given that in the US you can express disapproval of the president and his policies without getting "reeducated" or shot, I think it's clear that one country is better than the other. =D
Being civil and considerate to others is simple and costs you nothing. Being a jerk is also easy. If you'd rather take the latter path as a more general mode of operating on the internet, rather than treating others you encounter here with the sort of civility and (small) amount of respect that normal people accord each other in the meat world, that's your call. I'll just be glad that I don't have to deal with people like you more regularly.
Just because many people on the internet act like jerks (e.g., trolls) doesn't make it any more right for you to preemptively act that way to others. What kind of example are you setting for kids or new internet users? A poor one. Perhaps if more people decided to actively NOT be jerks to others, the internet might be a nicer place for all of us. Consider it a social courtesy, similar to not peeing on trees in the park or picking up your garbage at the beach when no one else is looking.
"Would you sit through a 3 hour movie where the main actor was a speak & spell?" Well, only if it had spectacular cinematograhy set to something powerful like Richard Strauss. Nobody'd be crazy enough to do that, though.
Ethics and morals? You mean like the ethics of coldly using the excuse of grief to stiff the people who tried to save your baby's life?
How dare you wish harm on me for calling someone out who is trying to make up his own exceptions as he goes?... He could go find out what's up with his debt right now but he'd rather bury his head in the sand, with the potent excuse of a dead baby, whose corpse he will apparently pull out and shake in the face of whoever dares to ask for money
We must have read and understood the original poster differently. He said,
I never paid that bill... though I think some insurance coverage might have
I took that to mean that, while he didn't specifically pay that bill, he assumed that his insurance covered it, along with the myriad of other medical bills with similar large-sounding numbers. If he had "stiffed" the hospital, he would have heard about it by now from either the hospital or a collection agency. I think it's much more likely that the bill was payed by insurance on his behalf than that he decided not to pay them.
Also... your words in this thread have been remarkably insensitive to a man who has lost his baby. Try exercising some empathy, instead of heaping your scorn and animosity on anyone that disagrees with you or sympathizes with this man. I realize that you feel strongly about hospitals which are poorly funded, and about insurance companies who are (by definition) in the business of paying out as little as possible. I assure you, many of us feel similarly about that, but this man is not the person on whom to be heaping all of that on. I mean, you CAN do that, if you want, but most civilized people will classify that as being a jerk.
I always found that cobbling together BorderLayouts and GridLayouts seemed both simpler and more resilient to additions than using GridBagLayouts. It's possible that's because I learned them first, and because I tended to think about my UI in that sandbox. Thanks for the links to MIGlayout, I'm going to save that for future reference.
Because it's interesting? Perhaps he enjoyed reading stuff by Feynman and wanted to understand the world better. Perhaps he will find some inscrutable symbols, and be inspired to pursue math farther/faster than average. Maybe he just likes learning new words. Maybe he likes being different. Maybe he's already read everything else in his classroom bookcases, the school library, and his parents' house which might be "kid-oriented", and so picked that up as Something To Read, even if it's over his head? People who like reading will read suprising things.
My source for torture not working is several years of various readings, news articles, and so on. Sorry, I don't have a library saved, but I've been hearing it over and over for nearly the past decade. Here's what a google search for "torture truth" yields, among other things:
Washington Post: 5 myths about torture and truth - Gestapo had better results from tips and informers, and failed to break (with torture) many. - between 1500 and 1750, French prosecutors tried to torture confessions out of 785 individuals.... the number of prisoners who said anything was low, from 3 percent in Paris to 14 percent in Toulouse. [note: that's three percent said ANYTHING, let alone the truth] - the CIA's own 1963 interrogation manual explains that "a time-consuming delay results" -- hardly useful when every moment matters. - you can't reliably train to resist torture
Army Col. Stuart Herrington, a military intelligence specialist who conducted interrogations in Vietnam, Panama and Iraq during Desert Storm, and who was sent by the Pentagon in 2003 -- long before Abu Ghraib -- to assess interrogations in Iraq.... says Herrington, torture is simply "not a good way to get information." In his experience, nine out of 10 people can be persuaded to talk with no "stress methods" at all, let alone cruel and unusual ones. Asked whether that would be true of religiously motivated fanatics, he says that the "batting average" might be lower: "perhaps six out of ten." And if you beat up the remaining four? "They'll just tell you anything to get you to stop."
That's from someone whose job has been to extract information, and he says that torture doesn't work well.
Perhaps you don't like the Washington Post. Let's look at the BBC, reknowned as one of the better news sources in the world. (This was found by googling for "torture effective".)
BBC News: The truth about torture This would actually seem to support your claims: they note several torturers who feel it's very effective. I'll accept that as a counterpoint. I'm including it so that you don't claim that I'm not linking things which disagree with what I expected to find. (There are several articles/pages about harsh techniques having yielded valuable information.)
When CIA officials subjected their first high-value captive, Abu Zubaida, to waterboarding and other harsh interrogation methods.... The methods succeeded in breaking him, and the stories he told of al-Qaeda terrorism plots sent CIA officers around the globe chasing leads.
In the end, though, not a single significant plot was foiled as a result of Abu Zubaida's tortured confessions.... Nearly all of the leads attained through the harsh measures quickly evaporated, while most of the useful information from Abu Zubaida -- chiefly names of al-Qaeda members and associates -- was obtained before waterboarding was introduced, they said.
(Bold emphasis added by me. The "results" yielded by torture were valueless, whereas what he said before they tortured him was useful.)
No, you just don't understand that fear will make someone say anything. Haven't you read 1984?
If I were to kidnap you, slowly burn you with hot irons, and then tell you that I would melt off one of your fingers (and then toes, and then other sensitive parts) every hour until you told me which of your neighbors was a treasonous traitor who had leaked sensitive information to China, how long would you last before you told me? How long would you last, if you didn't believe any of your neighbors were traitors, before you lied and fingered an innocent person? One finger? Two fingers? I'd wager that most people wouldn't even last long enough to lose a digit.
Insert your favourite brand, flavour, or technique for torture, and you will get similar answers.
Torture gets you an answer which they think you want to hear, not the answer which is truthful. If there's a truthful answer that they think you want to hear, you'll likely get it, but you have no way to know that the answer you got is truthful. If I think that telling you that my boss is selling secrets to the enemy will get you back to my family, you bet your ass off I'll try to find out what you want to hear, and then tell it to you -- especially after what I believe to be the truth ("he's not a spy/traitor/terrorist/witch") is met with more torture.
So how you get from "torturing people in Gitmo".... And to put torturing a terrorist for information that will protect an innocent life on par in the ethical scale with burying people alive because "God" told you to? That's just wrong.
Torture does not yield reliable information. It yields statements which the victim thinks you want to hear, even if they're entirely false. Torturing people is always bad, it is never ethically sound.
Okay, back to the real topic: playing virtual terrorists or Really Bad People in a multiplayer video game. People are not playing these games to stone virtual children or mass-murder civilians. Yes, as far back as Counter-Strike there's been sides that are planting bombs, or kidnapping hostages -- but the "crimes" of Team A are merely a plot hook, a vector for the competetive gameplay that the players want.
Hostages are "easily killable assets which require extraction". Bombs are, well, bombs, but the target could be a weapons cache, a school, or a harbor, and gamers wouldn't really notice or care. They care much more that it's a bomb placed behind that building, or through this choke point, than what the fictional target is. The goal of the game, when playing as the OpFor, is to achieve tactical success.
Frankly, I feel that America's Army did it best, as someone noted above: each side sees themselves as being on the "good guys" team, with objectives explained appropriately. However, we've been playing Counter-Strike, Global Operations, Call of Duty, and Enemy Territory for over a decade, and this is not very different. The only difference is that the Bad Guys are a group we are currently fighting against. Pretty much any gamer won't care - the reasons to choose Team A vs Team B are either aesthetic ("I don't want a mask") or logistical ("Team B has better guns"). Most servers will even auto-assign a team to preserve team balance. Very rarely does any ideological ("I want to be a bad guy") viewpoint have any bearing on team choice, because both sides swap roles (attacker vs defender) after rounds in most such games.
The name, nationality, or character models used for Team A and Team B are completely orthogonal to the gameplay in just about any game. Counter-Strike is the only exception I can think of, where each team has a different stable of guns to choose from. Many players preferred to play with the M4+silencer, whereas many other players were die-hard fans of the AK-47, even going so far as to use captured guns when they were forced to be on the team that could not buy them. In nearly every newer game I can think of (OK, not Battlefield 2) all characters can choose from the same guns, so the teams are effectively Team A and Team B.
What's fascinating about that (for someone who knew no one there) is that, as you put it, it's a digital Pompeii-style record. We now have the technology to store such mundane details that, in theory, someone from centuries from now could look at a slew of Twitter postings, or Facebook statuses, and piece together what someone's life was like just before ${DISASTER}. So much of the data is "useless", and yet we get excited about things like shopping lists and graffiti posted at Pompeii and other ruins simply because they give us a window into a past culture. This could be one such window into ours.
Assuming the data is even readable a thousand years from now, of course, and that anyone will care.
Slashdot Mirror
Regardless of it's cutting ability, the lightsaber shares something in common with more mundane bladed instruments: You really don't want to get hit by it. I imagine that would lead to more commonality in fighting style than you might expect.
As the software developer, isn't he in a position to release a (by definition) perfect "crack" for it?
You might hate them, but I love mine. I have dual monitors, and use VirtuaWin to have three virtual windows (in Windows XP). They are not "connected", and I can only swap between them with a keystroke, per my own configuration choices.
They let me easily switch between six different screens worth of software, without having to play "which layer is on top". Most importantly, let me separate windows by task, or by conceptual differences. E-mail client on screen 1, out of the way. Code editor on the right monitor in all three views, because I want it visible in all three. Full-screen runtime environment used or testing code is on Screen 2. Folder windows are usually in screen 3, while documentation is often in Screen 1.
In short, it lets me re-purpose my workspace on the fly, so that I can mentally change modes, and avoid visual clutter. I /hate/ having to always bring different windows to the front, and this lets me swap between them with Win-1, Win-2, and Win-3. (On Linux, where I first used them, my shortcuts were different. Not a big deal.)
I consider them like using dual monitors. Until you've seen how they can change your workflow, you might see them as useless. Once you have, people will have to pry them from your cold, dead hands. (Well, we hope not.)
Star wars blasters are actually (I can't believe I said that) bolts of superheated plasma, not lasers. The plasma is what does the damage, not the laser. That's why they call them "blasters" and not "lasers", as well as why they have visible flight time instead of being nigh-instantaneous. (It doesn't explain why one side's ships have orange bolts and the other side has green, though. That never made sense to me.) More details at [ http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Blaster ].
Similarly, a lightsaber is described as a blade of plasma, held in place by a projected energy field. It's not a laser either. ( per [ http://starwars.wikia.com/wiki/Lightsaber ] )
While I'm not going to call the GP a troll, I'm genuinely curious how testing would rack up such a large cost.
Really? I hadn't even thought about that. Pretty cool.
I doubt it's going to go well if you try to disable, remove, or relocate the device. It's probably legal but I wouldn't want to be the one to go to trial to prove that.
On the other hand, I would imagine that it's much more legal to encase it in a faraday cage. Would that prevent it from receiving signals, and thus from accurately cataloguing your whereabouts?
Criminals should have most of the rights the rest of us do. I imagine that a growing number of Americans do not agree with this sentiment.
I completely agree.
Chemically-propelled kinetic weapons (bullets) are remarkably effective and efficient, when they hit. Wound cavities, tissue damage, and fluid shocks should be fairly effective versus most organic life forms that we might encounter. Large chunks of destroyed flesh might be more detrimental to someone's operation than a cauterized air-hole, depending on where you shot them.
They also have the benefit of being low-tech, relatively easily maintained, and so forth. I'd hate to have to recalibrate or realign (or even clean) the mirrors in a laser weapon, and I'd hate to see someone's plasmacaster's energy pack malfunction and explode. Now, the mass budget for TRANSPORTING them across space is probably absurd, but it's possible that the safety precautions and charging equipment for some sci-fi maser tech would be pretty expensive too.
Mainly, though, it's that this was a relatively hard sci-fi movie, as far as the humans' tech goes. Travel involved cryosleep, guns were basically guns, flying vehicles were basically helicopters, and other things were beefed-up VTOLs. The "magic" material (room temperature superconductor) which was being mined didn't really have an effect on the technology developed for the humans, because it was much too valuable not to just send home. Instead, everyone there got expedition grade stuff. This means that it was intended to be rugged, resilient to damage or environmental stresses, and usable (and maintainable) by replaceable grunts if necessary. So, their walkers are giant inelegant exoskeletons, their guns are recognizeable as such, and so on. The only real "science fiction" aspect of it was in the Avatar systems themselves, and the vat-grown chimaeras.
Jesus, didn't they see Doctor Strangelove?? (Wait, if we know about it, I guess they did. :))
North Korea has a Dear Leader loved by nearly the entire populace; many outsiders feel this must be due to brainwashing.
US has a president hated by roughly half of our populace (and hated nearly rabidly by a smaller subset), and believed to be loved by roughly the other half. (Ignoring those who say "Meh, NotBush" and neither love nor hate him.)
Given that in the US you can express disapproval of the president and his policies without getting "reeducated" or shot, I think it's clear that one country is better than the other. =D
Being civil and considerate to others is simple and costs you nothing. Being a jerk is also easy. If you'd rather take the latter path as a more general mode of operating on the internet, rather than treating others you encounter here with the sort of civility and (small) amount of respect that normal people accord each other in the meat world, that's your call. I'll just be glad that I don't have to deal with people like you more regularly.
Just because many people on the internet act like jerks (e.g., trolls) doesn't make it any more right for you to preemptively act that way to others. What kind of example are you setting for kids or new internet users? A poor one. Perhaps if more people decided to actively NOT be jerks to others, the internet might be a nicer place for all of us. Consider it a social courtesy, similar to not peeing on trees in the park or picking up your garbage at the beach when no one else is looking.
"Would you sit through a 3 hour movie where the main actor was a speak & spell?"
Well, only if it had spectacular cinematograhy set to something powerful like Richard Strauss. Nobody'd be crazy enough to do that, though.
We must have read and understood the original poster differently. He said,
I took that to mean that, while he didn't specifically pay that bill, he assumed that his insurance covered it, along with the myriad of other medical bills with similar large-sounding numbers. If he had "stiffed" the hospital, he would have heard about it by now from either the hospital or a collection agency. I think it's much more likely that the bill was payed by insurance on his behalf than that he decided not to pay them.
Also ... your words in this thread have been remarkably insensitive to a man who has lost his baby. Try exercising some empathy, instead of heaping your scorn and animosity on anyone that disagrees with you or sympathizes with this man. I realize that you feel strongly about hospitals which are poorly funded, and about insurance companies who are (by definition) in the business of paying out as little as possible. I assure you, many of us feel similarly about that, but this man is not the person on whom to be heaping all of that on. I mean, you CAN do that, if you want, but most civilized people will classify that as being a jerk.
Have you considered not feeding rugs to your yak?
I always found that cobbling together BorderLayouts and GridLayouts seemed both simpler and more resilient to additions than using GridBagLayouts. It's possible that's because I learned them first, and because I tended to think about my UI in that sandbox. Thanks for the links to MIGlayout, I'm going to save that for future reference.
To *knowingly* assert a copyright violation where none exists. Often they may think there is one, and only find out later that there isn't.
Because it's interesting?
Perhaps he enjoyed reading stuff by Feynman and wanted to understand the world better.
Perhaps he will find some inscrutable symbols, and be inspired to pursue math farther/faster than average.
Maybe he just likes learning new words.
Maybe he likes being different.
Maybe he's already read everything else in his classroom bookcases, the school library, and his parents' house which might be "kid-oriented", and so picked that up as Something To Read, even if it's over his head? People who like reading will read suprising things.
My source for torture not working is several years of various readings, news articles, and so on. Sorry, I don't have a library saved, but I've been hearing it over and over for nearly the past decade. Here's what a google search for "torture truth" yields, among other things:
Washington Post: 5 myths about torture and truth
- Gestapo had better results from tips and informers, and failed to break (with torture) many.
- between 1500 and 1750, French prosecutors tried to torture confessions out of 785 individuals.... the number of prisoners who said anything was low, from 3 percent in Paris to 14 percent in Toulouse. [note: that's three percent said ANYTHING, let alone the truth]
- the CIA's own 1963 interrogation manual explains that "a time-consuming delay results" -- hardly useful when every moment matters.
- you can't reliably train to resist torture
Washington Post: The Torture Myth
That's from someone whose job has been to extract information, and he says that torture doesn't work well.
Perhaps you don't like the Washington Post. Let's look at the BBC, reknowned as one of the better news sources in the world. (This was found by googling for "torture effective".)
BBC News: The truth about torture
This would actually seem to support your claims: they note several torturers who feel it's very effective. I'll accept that as a counterpoint. I'm including it so that you don't claim that I'm not linking things which disagree with what I expected to find. (There are several articles/pages about harsh techniques having yielded valuable information.)
FBI Interrogator says cookies are more effective than torture
On the other hand, there are lots of pages about torture being ineffective, too:
Information Secured Through Torture Proved Unreliable, CIA Concluded
(Bold emphasis added by me. The "results" yielded by torture were valueless, whereas what he said before they tortured him was useful.)
Former Head of the Defense Intelligence Agency Says Torture Produces Unreliable Information
http://www.youtube.
No, you just don't understand that fear will make someone say anything. Haven't you read 1984?
If I were to kidnap you, slowly burn you with hot irons, and then tell you that I would melt off one of your fingers (and then toes, and then other sensitive parts) every hour until you told me which of your neighbors was a treasonous traitor who had leaked sensitive information to China, how long would you last before you told me? How long would you last, if you didn't believe any of your neighbors were traitors, before you lied and fingered an innocent person? One finger? Two fingers? I'd wager that most people wouldn't even last long enough to lose a digit.
Insert your favourite brand, flavour, or technique for torture, and you will get similar answers.
Torture gets you an answer which they think you want to hear, not the answer which is truthful. If there's a truthful answer that they think you want to hear, you'll likely get it, but you have no way to know that the answer you got is truthful. If I think that telling you that my boss is selling secrets to the enemy will get you back to my family, you bet your ass off I'll try to find out what you want to hear, and then tell it to you -- especially after what I believe to be the truth ("he's not a spy/traitor/terrorist/witch") is met with more torture.
Torture does not yield reliable information. It yields statements which the victim thinks you want to hear, even if they're entirely false. Torturing people is always bad, it is never ethically sound.
Okay, back to the real topic: playing virtual terrorists or Really Bad People in a multiplayer video game. People are not playing these games to stone virtual children or mass-murder civilians. Yes, as far back as Counter-Strike there's been sides that are planting bombs, or kidnapping hostages -- but the "crimes" of Team A are merely a plot hook, a vector for the competetive gameplay that the players want.
Hostages are "easily killable assets which require extraction". Bombs are, well, bombs, but the target could be a weapons cache, a school, or a harbor, and gamers wouldn't really notice or care. They care much more that it's a bomb placed behind that building, or through this choke point, than what the fictional target is. The goal of the game, when playing as the OpFor, is to achieve tactical success.
Frankly, I feel that America's Army did it best, as someone noted above: each side sees themselves as being on the "good guys" team, with objectives explained appropriately. However, we've been playing Counter-Strike, Global Operations, Call of Duty, and Enemy Territory for over a decade, and this is not very different. The only difference is that the Bad Guys are a group we are currently fighting against. Pretty much any gamer won't care - the reasons to choose Team A vs Team B are either aesthetic ("I don't want a mask") or logistical ("Team B has better guns"). Most servers will even auto-assign a team to preserve team balance. Very rarely does any ideological ("I want to be a bad guy") viewpoint have any bearing on team choice, because both sides swap roles (attacker vs defender) after rounds in most such games.
The name, nationality, or character models used for Team A and Team B are completely orthogonal to the gameplay in just about any game. Counter-Strike is the only exception I can think of, where each team has a different stable of guns to choose from. Many players preferred to play with the M4+silencer, whereas many other players were die-hard fans of the AK-47, even going so far as to use captured guns when they were forced to be on the team that could not buy them. In nearly every newer game I can think of (OK, not Battlefield 2) all characters can choose from the same guns, so the teams are effectively Team A and Team B.
Can you patent a language, though? I thought you had to patent some feature of the implementation of it.
It might have mentioned meetings with unnamed leaders at ${LOCATION}s, which would allow someone to deduce who it was. I don't know.
I thought Apple had send them Cease-and-Desist letters, and the project shut down?
Ah -- http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/FairPlay indicates that while they did get a C&D, the software has since moved to torrent networks. Thanks.
What's fascinating about that (for someone who knew no one there) is that, as you put it, it's a digital Pompeii-style record. We now have the technology to store such mundane details that, in theory, someone from centuries from now could look at a slew of Twitter postings, or Facebook statuses, and piece together what someone's life was like just before ${DISASTER}. So much of the data is "useless", and yet we get excited about things like shopping lists and graffiti posted at Pompeii and other ruins simply because they give us a window into a past culture. This could be one such window into ours.
Assuming the data is even readable a thousand years from now, of course, and that anyone will care.