Day: November 3, 2005

Saving Private Information

I just googled “information” and got 5,930,000,000 hits, or nearly 6 billion hits in 0.06 seconds.

Compared to someone sitting at home about 20 years ago, my access to information from within the comfort of my home is a few orders of magnitude higher. Hal Varian and Peter Lyman at UC Berkeley estimated that the rate of production of information was two exabytes, or two billion billion bytes in 2001. That information could take a stack of floppy discs about 2 million miles high. That rate must have gone up and I can reasonably assert that for this year we will need a stack 3 million miles high to contain all our NEW data. Thankfully we don’t use floppy discs and depend on hard-drives.
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India Funding Pakistani Jihad — Followup

“India funding Pakistani jehadis” prompted Dan to comment:

Couldn’t you make the argument Indian charity and compassion during Pakistan’s time of need might make a positive impression on at least a few Pakistanis. Maybe the aid provided will change a couple of hearts and minds and they will be less likely to “throw a bomb over your fence.

Dan, unless you are kidding, your naivety is touching. If $25,000,000 were to change a couple of hearts, then to change the few hundred million hearts that need changing would require a brazillion** dollars (which is more money than the entire debt–foreign and domestic–of the United States which is merely in the order of thousands of billions of dollars.)
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