Just another nerd.
I found this image in the RSS feed of a popular atheist multi-author blog. When I went to visit the site, however, the image and its post had gone 404. Apparently someone decided it was a bit too offensive for the tone of the site. Me, I don’t have any such compunctions (plus, seriously, its meant to be funny, get over it),
This New York Times blog entry is simply insane,
Ohio is an election battleground state with perennial problems at the polls. So what have election officials in some precincts of the state been doing to keep their voting machines safe from tampering?
Taking the machines home with them and stashing them in their garages in the days before a big election.
. . .
Many local election officials who defend the “sleepover” practice say it makes it easier for them to transport the machines to polling sites, and that it allows them to keep an eye on the machines. But their critics call that nonsense, and argue that allowing people to take voting machines home with them — where they can access them at any time, and potentially hack into them — is the very definition of a security risk.
Ya think? Ohio’s secretary of state issued a directive putting a stop to the practice as of this month, which wouldn’t be all that comforting if you were on the losing side of past election in Ohio.
Wow — I remember back in 2000 when the Long Now project first started talking about its Rosetta Disc project. The idea was to look at ways of preserve cultural information for very long periods of time. We’ve got more data than ever before, but how much of it is going to be preserved in a readable format 100 years from now?
The Long Now Project took that even further — what would it take to preserve information with a high degree of reliability for 1,000 years? Longer?
Back then the idea was to use technology from Norsam which essentially etches images of pages onto a metal disk. The images etched onto the disk are small enough that they have to be viewed using a special microscope, but allowing for potentially hundreds of thousands of pages to be stored on a single 3- inch disk. And the upshot was the lifespan — somewhere in the 2,000 to 10,000 year span.
Anyway, after eight years, they’ve finally managed to produce the disk for the Long Now Project.
The disc is titanium on the front (the side depicted here) and nickle on the back, where the information is actually etched. There are 13,500 pages here including 1,500 different translations of Genesis 103, a list of common words for those 1,500 languages, etc.
There’s actually another, less ambitious, Rosetta Disc that was produced back in 2004, but it was launched on the Rosetta Space Probe scheduled to rendezvous with a comet in 2014.
You can have your own copy of the latest iteration of the Rosetta Disc for a mere $25,000.
Personally, I’m hoping for a version of Charles Stross idea of using synthetic diamonds to store information,
My model of a long term high volume data storage medium is a synthetic diamond. Carbon occurs in a variety of isotopes, and the commonest stable ones are carbon-12 and carbon-13, occurring in roughly equal abundance. We can speculate that if molecular nanotechnology as described by, among others, Eric Drexler, is possible, we can build a device that will create a diamond, one layer at a time, atom by atom, by stacking individual atoms — and with enough discrimination to stack carbon-12 and carbon-13, we’ve got a tool for writing memory diamond. Memory diamond is quite simple: at any given position in the rigid carbon lattice, a carbon-12 followed by a carbon-13 means zero, and a carbon-13 followed by a carbon-12 means one. To rewrite a zero to a one, you swap the positions of the two atoms, and vice versa.
It’s hard, it’s very stable, and it’s very dense. How much data does it store, in practical terms?
The capacity of memory diamond storage is of the order of Avogadro’s number of bits per two molar weights. For diamond, that works out at 6.022 x 1023 bits per 25 grams. So going back to my earlier figure for the combined lifelog data streams of everyone in Germany — twenty five grams of memory diamond would store six years’ worth of data.
Six hundred grams of this material would be enough to store lifelogs for everyone on the planet (at an average population of, say, eight billion people) for a year. Sixty kilograms can store a lifelog for the entire human species for a century.
In more familiar terms: by the best estimate I can track down, in 2003 we as a species recorded 2500 petabytes — 2.5 x 1018 bytes — of data. That’s almost ten milligrams. The Google cluster, as of mid-2006, was estimated to have 4 petabytes of RAM. In memory diamond, you’d need a microscope to see it.
Now that would be a diamond worth paying a couple months’ salary for.
Just when it looked like we were actually going to finally get to see a Watchmen movie, along comes a lawsuit by 20th Century Fox claiming that it — not Warner Bros. — has the film rights to Watchmen.
That in itself wouldn’t be all that surprising. Rights to properties like this can pass through multiple entities, sometimes under very odd circumstances, and sorting things out can be tough. Typically, though, this would be a way for 20th Century Fox to shake some money out of Warner Bros. Except if we are to take 20th Century Fox at face value, they’re not interested in any compensation for its rights according to Variety,
“We will be asking the court to enforce Fox’s copyrights interests in ‘The Watchmen’ and enjoin the release of the Warner Bros. film and any related ‘Watchmen’ media that violate our copyright interests in that property.
Surprisingly, Fox said it would rather see the film killed instead of collecting a percentage of the box office.
“When you have copyright infringement, there are some damages you never recover,” said a source close to the litigation.
I suspect that’s more of a threat to increase their negotiating position, but when Fox originally filed the lawsuit back in February 2008, they did seek to enjoin the movie from going into production, so perhaps they’re serious.
Presumably this lawsuit also places in jeopardy all of the Watchmen action figures and prop replicas that DC Direct had announced, since those relied on the characters in the movie rather than the comic book. DC Direct had once planned to proceed with Watchmen-based action figures, but abandoned it after Alan Moore and Dave Gibbons said they wanted no part of it. DC may have been playing nice in withdrawing the figures, but more likely it was afraid of a lawsuit that would have threatened its hold over the Watchmen rights.
Oh, what a tangled web we weave (wait — that’s a character froma different company. Sorry about that).
Atomic Learning’s StoryBoard Pro is a free storyboarding software package “designed to give teachers, students, and home movie makers a tool to plan ahead when creating video projects.”
I was going to write a gratuitous slam on Pray At The Pump’s efforts to pray for lower gasoline prices in the United States. Then I realized that Pray at the Pump’s understanding of how oil markets work is no less irrational than either John McCain or Barack Obama’s apparent understanding of oil markets, so what’s the point?
It’s really sad — but so typical — to see the US election boil down to a battle of The Moron vs. The Messiah.
Sigh.