Gimme a break; I was twelve, and had not yet heard of open standards. I just used the software that came on the computer. Now I'm a web services librarian. I write software too, and I sing the open standards gospel daily.

ASCII is great, though I'd actually prefer UTF, thank you, on the grounds that diacritics actually do matter, not to mention the ability to encode things in Cyrillic, Korean, or Scandinavian runes. Though even UTF has its limits. Let me know when you work out a way to store NTSC format video encoded in some damn proprietary codec as text, okay? Or, for that matter, video games, which are literary and artistic works worthy of preservation.

The simple fact is, computers are inherently more complex than older information storage methods. The information they store cannot be read directly by a human. Unless you can hold a hard drive to your head and sense the magnetic charges directly, the information must be interpreted by software first. That simple, undeniable requirement adds several layers of complexity to any attempt at long-term preservation of digital data. For ample demonstration, just go read Keeping Stuff, a delightful essay by a comp sci professor at Grinnell in which he discusses his attempts to preserve his own undergraduate work from the early '70s.

Oh, and you can wag your finger at me some more as soon as you've worked out an open standards solution to the fact that basically every non-geek does all their work in proprietary programs that spit out crappy proprietary files, and then expect them to last forever.

As a librarian, this makes my head hurt.

I guarantee you, those books are sitting on a shelf in a library someplace. Probably within a thousand miles of you. And we have this lovely thing called "interlibrary loan," an arrangement under which you can walk into your local library and borrow those books from the library that has them, either for free or for a small processing fee, depending on how badly the library's budget has fared in recent cuts. We saved those books for you. That's what we do. Please come borrow them.

As for the future, well, digital copies are actually a LOT harder to preserve long term. I myself have files that I can no longer open, because I no longer have a copy of the word processor "Sprint" running on MS-DOS 5.0. They're less than twenty years old, and are essentially unusable.

By contrast, I once held and read a hand-written breviary from fourteenth century Italy, a good six and half centuries old and still usable. If we could find a way to archive digital information which would guarantee its usability a mere century from now, I'd rest a lot more easily.

And yet, consider what Lawrence Lessig wrote about why he failed to persuade the Supreme Court to limit the 1998 extension of copyright terms (Free Culture, pgs. 244-45, emphasis added):

The Supreme Court that Lessig addressed was composed of some of the most highly trained, best respected legal minds in the world. And they could not, and did not dispute the logic of his argument. As Lessig wrote, "It had never even occurred to me that they could reconcile [the Commerce Clause and the Progress Clause] simply by not addressing the argument." (242, emphasis in original) Lessig failed to give the issue a human face: an emotionally real story demonstrating the harms done by the retroactive extension of copyright terms. And because the Justices could not see -- could not feel -- that harms were being done, they ignored his argument and denied his requests.

Geeks worship at the altar of logic. It is a foundational assumption of our sub-culture that reason, based on sound evidence, is the best way to make decisions. But, as Lessig found out, reason is not the only way to make decisions. I would venture to assert that reason is not even the most common way that humans make decisions. On balance, we are creatures of emotion first, and of reason only second.

Bear Lessig's experience in mind the next time you denigrate the "emotional, rhetoric-laden argument style that humanities teaches". Rhetoric is about persuading your audience. If logic alone works, great! But if logic fails in the face of blinkered ideology, or incomprehension, or sheer human cussedness, do not be too proud to present an argument founded more on emotion than on evidence.

Although they said "the recordings ... can no longer be obtained", they later sent him copies of the recordings. Sooo ... how did they send him copies without "obtaining" them? Could it be that they were capable of obtaining the tapes and lied about it because they didn't want to?

Also note that he requested the tapes both during the disclosure proceedings in court and after the charges were dismissed through freedom of information laws. In both cases, they were legally obligated to provide the information if they were capable of doing so.

The response was carefully worded, yes; but phrasing it in the passive voice is not going to get them off the hook this time.

I lived in Britain for two years (I'm American) and never carried my passport except when I was actively traveling across national boundaries.

In fact, I think it would be pretty dumb to carry your passport around when you're not actually using it -- it would be much, much easier to lose it that way. Or have it stolen. I'd much rather carry my American driver's license and have to explain that my passport is stored at my current residence for security's sake.

You might claim that Britain is a "safe" country and that it would be wise to carry your passport in countries with more crime and/or governmental corruption. I don't know whether that's the case or not. If there's more crime, I might want to leave it in my hotel even more, because there's a greater possibility of theft. And if there's all THAT much governmental corruption, I might be afraid that the cops themselves would steal it, sell it on the black market, and then claim I was in the country illegally. It's hard to say.

If I was really worried about it, though, I'd contact the American Embassy (or whatever embassy is appropriate to your own nationality, gentle reader) and ask whether they think I should carry it all the time or not. They know the local laws and law enforcement far better than I could hope to, and would likely get involved if I were arrested for anything.

Hmm, DYI. That stands for "Do Yourself In" ... ?

Somebody tagged this "defectivebydesign", but that's not accurate here. The problem is that it was designed for mostly pleasure-reading, not for academic study (which, as the student pointed out, usually involves highlighting, marginal notations, and so on). I rather doubt the wicked Kindle designers set out to thwart undergraduates. It's just that's not really what they were shooting for. Me, I'm waiting for an e-Reader that supports a wide variety of formats smoothly, and has a much better refresh rate. My Mom has a Sony e-Reader, which runs Linux and worked pretty well when I tried it. The main problem with it is that I read pretty fast, and so I spent lots of time waiting for the screen to re-draw. When they've got the e-ink refresh rate up to civilized standards (say, 500 ms for a full screen, maximum), then I'll be interested.

Impersonating someone in an online class is substantially less risky than doing so face-to-face. If I wanted to hire someone to impersonate me in a face-to-face class, I would have to find someone who:

• Is smart enough to ace the class;
• Looks like more or less like me;
• Is dishonest enough not to report me for trying to hire him/her;
• Is dishonest enough to take the job;
• Is willing to invest the time to take the class;
• Is a sufficiently good actor not to raise suspicion.

I'd also need to either provide a fake student ID, or else limit myself to recruiting from the existing pool of students at the target institution. No matter how you cut it, that's going to be expensive, especially if you want to hire an impersonator to sit in for the entire duration of the class (which is much less risky than doing it only on test days). And on top of the costs of hiring the impersonator, you'd still have to pay tuition for the class (assuming you live someplace where tuition isn't covered by the state).

And then there's always the risk that someone will figure it out -- maybe the instructor has a roster with photos of the students like at the university I taught at, or maybe one of the other students knows the original student from another class and figures out that there's an impostor. There were legends in the grad student community at my last university about one TA who not only recognized an impostor at a final exam, but chased him down, tackled him, and hauled him physically into the dean's office.

Compared to all that, it's trivially easy to hire someone to do the work in an online class. There's no need to hire someone with acting ability who looks like you -- you just need someone who's smart and dishonest. Or smart and poor enough to be persuaded. The risk of discovery is also substantially less, since you can hire someone just to do the paper (or tests), and take care of the rest of the class yourself. Less time, less money, less effort -- the barriers to cheating are a lot lower online.

Here here! And on a related note, hover controls also don't work for the blind, who cannot use a mouse because they can't see the pointer.

And on an UN-related note, I just tried visiting the home page in Opera 9.6. Bad idea. The JavaScript sucked down 100% of my processor cycles and never actually accomplished anything. After a couple of minutes I had to kill the process -- in the process nixing a 70 MB download that was running in another tab. BAD.

Sure, it's entirely possible to retain digital data over long periods of time. It's not impossible. It's just substantially more difficult than retaining printed media, for many reasons. Let me count the ways:

1) Hardware changes. This past spring I was involved in a project to archive source code and executable files for a late '90s "smart toy" game called Redbeard's Pirate Quest, in which the player controlled the game by moving figurines equipped with RFID tags around the deck of a plastic pirate ship. Hooking it up required a computer with a serial port, which are still easily found but increasingly eliminated in order to free up space on the motherboard for more modern, more useful hookups like extra USB ports, DVI output, etc. The game cannot be played without the pirate ship controller. In another few years -- 10? 15? 25? -- it will probably be unusable.

Another group working in parallel to mine had to recover files from 1983 saved on 5.25" floppies using a Kaypro IV machine. It took them months just to get access to the data -- they had to find a working Kaypro IV, hook it up to a linux machine via a null modem cable, and copy the files over via kermit, then find emulators for the versions of early word processors that had been used to write the files. They were only partially successful; five of the eighteen disks they were given proved to be completely unrecoverable.

2) Data formats change, even very basic ones like text encodings. Just look at NASA data -- some of the early stuff (like, say, the Viking mission data) has been stored in cryptic formats interpretable by computer programs for which we no longer have the source code, running on computers that don't exist any more. Recovering data can take months or years, as discussed in this article from the New York Times.

3) A huge amount of data is stored in proprietary formats. In high school, I wrote a whole bunch of papers in a word processor called Sprint running on MS-DOS 5. I've still got a few of the files hanging around, but Sprint died the death years ago. Getting access to the data now would be a non-trivial undertaking, particularly if I wanted to preserve the original formatting.

4) Computerized storage media tend to be particularly sensitive to environmental conditions. It's entirely possible to preserve them over the long term, but doing so requires a good bit of planning. Often, the easiest way to preserve the data is to regularly migrate it from one storage medium to a new one -- which means that you have to have someone doing that. You cannot just throw a disk/CD/thumb drive into a closet and expect it to work reliably 25 years later.

Compared to all that, books are a piece of cake to preserve. Use pH neutral paper and ink, and keep them in a cool environment with low humidity. They can easily survive for centuries.

I have personally handled and used books penned in Latin on parchment 700 years ago. But I don't think I've ever seen functioning computer files which are older than I am. I know that such things exist -- I'm only thirty -- but I've never seen one, and probably never will. All you old-timers out there, who worked on exciting hot new tech in the '60s and '70s? Your early work is, basically, gone. I'll never see it in action. At best, I'll read about it -- in a history book.

P.S. Slashdot is being annoying and not putting paragraph breaks in properly when I preview. Apologies if there's no whitespace in the above.

The "murder your darlings" article is about cutting needless material from your manuscript, not killing off characters. But given the title, and the fact that I was critiquing him for having too many characters, I can see how you would think that.