Day: August 29, 2004

Storing Everything — Will 1 Terabyte Do for Power Users?

One of the reasons I am so obssessed with increasing hard drive storage is that I am constantly running out of it. As I mentioned before for the past week or so I’ve been using a FireFox extension to automatically save every web page that I visit. Doing a bit of surfing about similar applications led me to this short essay by Microsoft researchers Gordon Bell and Jim Gemmell about LifeBits. LifeBits is a program/concept whereby pretty much every document, photograph, video, audio, etc. that you create or receive would be stored. The trick is creating an interface to actually find things later when the data you’ve stored approaches the terrabyte levels and beyond.

Anyway, what strikes me about Bell and Gemmell’s essay is that they have what I think are unrealistically low estimates for total storage requirements for a hypothetical 40 year professional life of storing everything. They seem to think it could be done in under at terabyte. So just for fun I looked at what I’ve been accumulating on an annual basis and projected that out over how much storage I’m going to need 40 years from now if I keep acquiring/generating data at the same rate I have over the last 10 years. And it breaks down something like this:

E-Mail – 16gb
Web pages/books/other text – 772gb
Pictures – 400gb
Music (MP3) – 234gb
Video (MPEG4)- 750gb
Misc – 200gb

That yields a grand total of 2.372 terabytes if I just continue at the same rate for the next 30 years. And given the way data generation/acquistion has accelerated I suspect the reality is that 30 years from now I’m going to want closer to 10-20 terabytes. Why?

Well, I’m likely to start taking pictures with a 6 or 7 megapixel camera rather than a 3 megapixel one. Rather than MP3, I’m likely to be using FLAC or some other lossless compression scheme for music (why not if storage gets cheap enough). As video becomes cheaper to record, manipulate and store, I find my usage of it accelerating as well.

As far as finding data I need, frankly I think the tools already exist for that provided they will scale to 100,000 photographs or almost a terabyte of text. The main problem is that these tools currently aren’t integrated and are relatively difficult to use for non-geeks.

Karen Davis Promotes Radio Show Highlighting Her Claim That 9/11 Was a Good Thing

On Friday, August 27, the Howard Stern show repeated a show from April 10, 2002 in which United Poultry Concerns’ Karen Davis defended her comments that the 9/11 terrorist attacks may have reduced net suffering by sparing many chickens. For those who missed her comments the first time, in a letter on Dec. 26, 2001 to Vegan Voice, Davis said,

Doubtless the majority, if not every single one, of the people who suffered and/or died as a result of the September 11 attack ate, and if they are now a life continue to eat, chickens. It is possible to argue, using (Peter Singer’s) utilitarian calculations, that the deaths of thousands of people whose trivial consumer satisfactions included the imposition of fundamental misery and death on hundreds of thousands of chickens reduced the amount of pain and suffering in the world.

Davis has also claimed that Jewish victims of the Holocaust who ate meat were the moral equivalents of their Nazi persecutors (emphasis added),

It’s been said that if most people had direct contact with the animals they consume, vegetarianism would soar, but history has yet to support this hope. It isn’t just the Nazis who could see birds in the yard, slaughter them and eat them without a qualm, and in fact with euphoria. In this respect, the persecuted Jewish communities were no different than their persecutors.

The odd thing is that Davis herself was promoting the re-broadcasting of the Stern show on the UPC web site. Hey, good for her — more people should know that animal rights leaders like Davis think that it could be argued that the 9/11 terrorist attack was a good thing or that Jewish families who ate chicken were just like the Nazis.

Davis is now writing a book length treatment of these bizarre beliefs, The Holocaust and the Henmaid’s Tale: A Case for Comparing Atrocities, to be published in 2005.

Source:

UPC President Karen Davis Talks about Chickens on The Howard Stern Show. Press Release, Untied Poultry Concerns, August 27, 2004.

Hypocrite Against Animal Research

Over the weekend, the Times of London ran an interesting profile of an animal rights activist who has actively campaigned against Huntingdon Life Sciences and other animal research firms in the UK, but who now is using treatments tested on animals to treat her breast cancer.

According to the Times, Janet Tomlinson, 61, has been an active campaigner in a number of animal rights protests in the UK, from the successful campaign against Hilgrove, to the current campaigns against the Newchurch guinea pig farm and Huntingdon Life Sciences. But when she was diagnosed with breast cancer, Tomlinson had no problem running to doctors to receive the sort of treatments that would never have been developed had she had her way.

Tomlinson uses a number of justifications for her behavior. The classic, of course, is the Mary Beth Sweetland defense — Tomlinson’s taking the drugs for the animals,

I can do more good for animals staying alive than dying.

Well, of course — she and her fellow animal rights activists are special. Why shouldn’t they partake of the fruits of the animal research industry? Hell, who could blame Tomlinson if she wanted to enjoy a nice steak or wear leather, either. After all, she’s doing it for the animals.

Her second line of reasoning is that it’s really all the drug companies fault. In fact — pay close attention here — the drug companies are guilty of criminal behavior for providing her with a treatment that might extend her life,

If this testing on animals is as beneficial as the doctors say, then it would stop cancer. But it hasn’t — and that has to be criminal. It helps some, and chemo might help me and kill the infected cells, but it might not. I should not have to live with that fear when scientists have had so much money and tested enough animals and yet they can’t tell me the treatment will work.

Thanks to medical advances in detection and treatment, the 20-year breast cancer survival rate is as high as 65 percent in some countries. In the United States, deaths from breast cancer fell from almost 34 per 100,000 in the late 1980s to less than 27 per 100,000 in 1999. Ah, those wiley criminal scientists.

And, of course, Tomlinson hedges her bets. In case she does live another 20 years or more, it won’t be due to the animal-tested drugs she’s taking,

If I’m saved, it will be in spite of the drugs being tested on animals. All my friends are telling me I’m the guinea pig because whether you recover or not, it is a fluke of nature, a lottery.

Just because the drugs are tested on animals it does not mean that we are going to survive. I am only taking the course of action I am because there is no alternative. I really don’t see how putting an electrode in a monkey’s head or stripping fur on a guinea pig and sticking toxic liquid on it has helped me or is going to help me. It’s disgusting that I don’t have a choice.

But, of course, she has an obvious choice — don’t accept the treatment. If animal research is complete hooey and Tomlinson can’t see how experimenting on animals might help her or other breast cancer patients, then don’t reward drug companies by buying their wares. Just say not to animal-tested drugs.

Instead Tomlinson would prefer the hypocrisy of accepting the only treatments proven to increase the odds of survival in women afflicted with breast cancer, while simultaneously raging against the individuals, companies and governments for encouraging the sort of research that led to these treatments in the first place.

Source:

The animal lab critic, cancer and hypocrisy. Valerie Elliott, The Times (London), August 28, 2004.

Vlasak Again Defends Violence

As if to re-emphasize why David Blunkett was right to bar him from traveling to Great Britain, Jerry Vlasak again defended the use of violence in the animal rights cause on British radio show.

In an interview with Radio 4’s World at One, Vlasak said,

I am simply saying that it [violence] is a morally acceptable tactic and it may be useful in the struggle for animal liberation.

Source:

Banned activist defends violence. Sandra Laville, The Guardian, August 28, 2004.