Quotes

"Fascism and communism both promise "social welfare," "social justice," and "fairness" to justify authoritarian means and extensive arbitrary and discretionary governmental powers." - F. A. Hayek"

"Life is a Bungling process and in no way educational." in James M. Cain

Jean Giraudoux who first said, “Only the mediocre are always at their best.”

If you have ten thousand regulations, you destroy all respect for the law. Sir Winston Churchill

"summum ius summa iniuria" ("More laws, more injustice.") Cicero

As Christopher Hitchens once put it, “The essence of tyranny is not iron law; it is capricious law.”

"Government’s view of the economy could be summed up in a few short phrases: If it moves, tax it. If it keeps moving, regulate it. And if it stops moving, subsidize it." Ronald Reagan

"Law is where you buy it." Raymond Chandler

"Why did God make so many damn fools and Democrats?" Clarence Day

"If I feel like feeding squirrels to the nuts, this is the place for it." - Cluny Brown

"Oh, pshaw! When yu' can't have what you choose, yu' just choose what you have." Owen Wister "The Virginian"

Oscar Wilde said about the death scene in Little Nell, you would have to have a heart of stone not to laugh.

Thomas More's definition of government as "a conspiracy of rich men procuring their own commodities under the name and title of a commonwealth.” ~ Winston S. Churchill, A History of the English Speaking Peoples

“Laws are like cobwebs, which may catch small flies, but let wasps and hornets break through.” ~ Jonathon Swift

Sunday, June 29, 2014

"an incomprehensible number of zeros" Every Datum Tells a Story

But the era of storytelling was overtaken by the era of information, a wholly new mode of communication revolving around facts, rather than experience.
Every Datum Tells a Story by Mark P. Mills and M. Anthony Mills, City Journal 29 June 2014
MARK P. MILLS AND M. ANTHONY MILLS
The dawning of the age of meta-information
29 June 2014

Every generation has its defining technology, and every decade, it seems, needs a label. The sixties were the Space Age, the nineties the Internet Age. The seventies and eighties saw the computer revolution. The decade just passed may come to be known as the Facebook Decade or the Smartphone Era. Without the benefit of hindsight, it’s not always apparent what a new technology will mean or how it will change the way we live. That’s especially true for the period we’ve just entered, which may one day be known as the Age of Big Data, the Dawn of the Cloud, or even, in Cisco’s formulation, the Zettabyte Era.
The zetta prefix denotes an incomprehensible number of zeros: a billion trillion of them. Because bytes measure the microscopic currency of computers and communications systems, such numbers say a lot about the scale of the hardware infrastructure underlying our modern information technology. But counting bytes today is like counting, in 1914, the comparable number of drops of ink used to form the letters in print circulation. It’s impressive but not terribly useful.
Still, computer and software experts gather at conferences to talk about how big and unprecedented the numbers are, how the concept of “big data” changes everything. …
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