College administrations are bureaucracies, and what's going on is the Iron Law of Bureaucracy:

In any bureaucratic organization there will be two kinds of people:

First, there will be those who are devoted to the goals of the organization. Examples are dedicated classroom teachers in an educational bureaucracy, many of the engineers and launch technicians and scientists at NASA, even some agricultural scientists and advisors in the former Soviet Union collective farming administration.

Secondly, there will be those dedicated to the organization itself. Examples are many of the administrators in the education system, many professors of education, many teachers union officials, much of the NASA headquarters staff, etc.

The Iron Law states that in every case the second group will gain and keep control of the organization. It will write the rules, and control promotions within the organization.

(Thanks to Jerry Pournelle for this observation of emperical fact. Alas, without any sure-fire way to kill the damned thing.)

Note also, if you take him up on that referral link, not only does he get an extra 5GB, but you do, too. 20GB, not 15GB. (Rats, he beat me to it...)

Another feature of copy.com is that the storage accounting for shared storage is shared. So, if you have a 1GB file that you share with nine other copy.com users, you each get charged only 100MB.

That brings up a question I've never been able to find the answer to -- is there, in any Native American language, a word for "Native American", as opposed to the people who came to this hemisphere a few thousand years after their ancestors did? I'm looking for a word that existed before, oh, say 1800 or so, not a recent coinage.

This. I've idly thought about this every now and then, and passguardian.com is exactly the tool I was thinking of.

In my case, what I'll be distriubting is parts of my LastPass login and password, with the actual data stored there.

That's what I get from Native Americans I know -- they don't give a rip about sports team names. They've told me the only ones that make a noise about this are "Professional Indians". (They say with a grimace of distaste.)

Basically, I don't much care, because I despise all professional sports equally, but I don't have any evidence for the claim that actual Native Americans find the team name offensive, and I do have evidence otherwise.

There's an 18 minute gap in the backups.

The difficult part is finding some place to put your device where it can transmit data that everyone can receive, but it can not be otherwise accessed. ("Recipe for unicorn soup: First, catch a unicorn...") However, there are some possibilities. On the Moon would be good for a decade or so. Even an ordinary orbit, with "destruct if anyone gets close" circuitry, would be a possibility.

Now, the easy part. Generate a bunch of ginormous public/private key pairs, one for each day of secrecy expiration you want to provide with this device. Store the private keys on the device, programmed to continuously transmit all expired private keys. Publish the public keys.

Now, to encrypt something to be revealed on January 1, 2038, you just encrypt it with the "January 1, 2038" public key. Not even you can decrypt it until the private key is transmited by the repository.

Of course, there is the itty bitty trust issue that the entity making the device didn't keep a copy of the private keys.

Isn't that what was done before? With Nevada winning the competition, and all those jobs building the repository at Yucca Mountain?

Heh... Yeah, I'd like to see this fully generalized: If law enforcement is allowed to have it, private citizens are allowed to have it. If private citizens are not allowed to have it, law enforcement is not allowed to have it. No exceptions whatsoever, period, ever.

As I was reading that article, my thought was "Who wrote this crap?" Tendentious scare-mongering and blatant misrepresentation of ... practically everything he mentions.

Then I looked at the URL at the top of my web browser. thebulletin.org. Ah. Figures. If I'd looked at where that link went before I clicked on it, I'd probably not have bothered.

Ah well, looking on the bright side, at least it wasn't a goatse link.

Every place in the entire Federalist Papers that firearms are mentioned, maybe?

In a TED Talk debate by Stuart Brand and someone who was taking the "All we need is sunny days when the wind is blowing energy" type person, Stuart Brand made the statement:

"I am not so much pro-nuclear as I am pro-artithmetic."

This, big-time. Industrial-technological civilization is not compatible with "energy only on sunny days when the wind is blowing". The numbers just do not add up for the energy storage schemes proposed.

Aritimetic denialism seems to rule the day among most of the people who claim to be oh so very concerned about CO2, alas.

As Seymore Cray said, when asked what the scientific programming language of the 21st Century would be, "I have no idea what it will look like, but I'm sure it will be called Fortran."

No, but one term in it, the probability of a star having planets, has recently been determined to be pretty close to 1.0.

Doesn't tell us anything about abiogenesis, etc., of course.

Besides, speaking as someone who made quite a bit of that particular mixture ... oh, 40 something years ago ... I can state as a fact that James Tomcat Kirk's formula could not possibly have worked. Sure, he probably had the proportions right. But getting a kaboom? That requires extensive grinding to get the mixture really thorougly incorporated together at a small scale before you get anything that's possible to light at all. Then, for any kind of projectile device, there's the korning process...