41–50 of 52 posts
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Show me a million people or seven billion people. Will I be able to tell how many they are? I doubt it. These numbers are meaningless because we never see a million of something.
1 million people is meaningless. 7 billion people is everyone: yourself, your parents, your son/daughter, all your friends, your president, etc.
"An exabyte is roughly 100,000 times the size of the printed material in the Library of Congress; a zettabyte is 1,000 times larger." How big is a Mega-Library of Congress? Are people actually able to relate to that measure? (How about instead, say, "one exabyte would store about 5000 short emails for each member of the world's 7 billion population, perhaps more by using compression")
Show me a million people or seven billion people. Will I be able to tell how many they are? I doubt it. These numbers are meaningless because we never see a million of something.
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Show me a million people or seven billion people. Will I be able to tell how many they are? I doubt it. These numbers are meaningless because we never see a million of something.
A million isn't that big or unimaginable. There are a million cubic centimeters in a cubic meter. As for people, here's a picture of Glastonbury festival: http://www.andrews-sykes.com/blog/wp-content/uploads/2010/06... That's about 100,000 people camped out. Picture 10 of those and you have your million. If everybody at the festival crowded shoulder-to-shoulder in front of pyramid stage, it would probably just about…
A million might be just small enough to do that, but the average person doesn't have am intuitive notion of the number "one million" like we have of ten or twenty. Even for a thousand, you'll have to think of a seventh of a cup of rice, or something like that.
Pay no attention to the man behind the curtain. He is powerless and inconsequential, we swear. Look at how incompetant he is. He couldn't possibly be a threat to us. We can rest assured that any information he may (or may not) be collecting (we can neither confirm nor deny) is assuredly badly disorganized, and certainly won't be misused. Let's all simply ignore him and go about our lives as if he didn't exist.
The great paradox of American politics: They're either incredibly stupid or brilliantly evil. Can't be both.
I wonder if they've checked ... KARMA.
"An exabyte is roughly 100,000 times the size of the printed material in the Library of Congress; a zettabyte is 1,000 times larger." How big is a Mega-Library of Congress? Are people actually able to relate to that measure? (How about instead, say, "one exabyte would store about 5000 short emails for each member of the world's 7 billion population, perhaps more by using compression")
Show me a million people or seven billion people. Will I be able to tell how many they are? I doubt it. These numbers are meaningless because we never see a million of something.
https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dictionary-of-numb...
Earlier quoted context omitted.
Show me a million people or seven billion people. Will I be able to tell how many they are? I doubt it. These numbers are meaningless because we never see a million of something.
You should take a look at the Chrome extension "Dictionary of Numbers". It reads through text on a page and any time it sees a quantity, it replaces it with something equivalent that you might actually know. https://chrome.google.com/webstore/detail/dictionary-of-numb...
One thing that has always kept oppressive governments in check was their incompetence. While the Snowden revelations make the NSA seem like some all seeing all knowing bunch of geniuses they are probably more like the people at CIA or FBI. Even with tons of resources and a free reign to do things no normal citizen is allowed to do, they simply don't have incentives to put these abilities to best use and certainly won…
That doesn't make them any less scary. They are too dangerous to your democracy and freedom.
"But without a reliable electrical system to run computers and keep them cool, the NSA’s global surveillance data systems can’t function. The NSA chose Bluffdale, Utah, to house the data center largely because of the abundance of cheap electricity. It continuously uses 65 megawatts, which could power a small city of at least 20,000, at a cost of more than $1 million a month, according to project officials and documen…
Source: I live about 5 miles away from all of this.
