I have been investigating the state of the maple syrup industry for a number of years now. I have determined that this year a new record was achieved - it was at least the 243rd successive worst year in history for maple syrup production. (The best year in history occurs approximately three times per decade on average.)

Why in the world would one be "proud" of a crater? It is a fact (maybe). It happened a long time ago. No one had anything to do with it. What is there to be "proud" of??

OK - this study: https://encrypted.google.com/url?sa=t&rct=j&q=chronic%20illness%20canada&source=web&cd=4&ved=0CFUQFjAD&url=http%3A%2F%2Fwww.gpiatlantic.org%2Fpdf%2Fhealth%2Fchroniccanada.pdf&ei=VBN6T4-5N8rp0QHn3vGoDQ&usg=AFQjCNFkNG2k1ReuE_oxF-pMf78NLvowgg&sig2=g7Vzwd5KJiWRC0tr1_UfAQ&cad=rja says 35% of deaths in Canada are due to heart disease, stroke, and atherosclerosis, 29% to cancer, etc. The study isn't directly comparable to the CDC study, since the methodologies differ, but the numbers are fairly comparable.

The article is talking about comparing US and Canadian hospital outcomes. Why do you think your reference would explain this? I doubt that there is very much difference between lifestyle-related chronic disease issues in the US and Canada.

No - most of the work in most modern code is done in the (presumably) highly-optimized libraries. The application-specific code typically has little effect on performance. (The application design probably does, though.) That's a lot of the reason programming isn't as interesting as it used to be. Young uns just don't know what they missed.

Donald Knuth made this point in 1971, in his Empircal Study of Fortran Programs - virtually none of most programs has any significant effect on performance.

The rest of the world tends to follow more sensible date conventions - by increasing significance (14-3-2012) or by decreasing significance (2012-3-14). The latter works best for sorting.

Slashdot seems to post a lot of stories about improved solar cells, but solar cells never seem to improve.

Only if you can find some way to make the economics work, and we don't seem to be able to do that. Most people do not want to push wheelchairs and wipe butts for a living, and even those jobs are being substantially automated. Virtually all manual labor can be eliminated with current or easily foreseeable technology, and our society doesn't like paying people who don't work, needed or not.

But there is no reason to think all those extra years of potential labor is needed. We already have more people than we need to do the available work.

One component of a solution might be to make lower-resolution versions of the pictures (e.g. use ImageMagick to do a batch scale-down) and store those in multiple copies. You could probably reduce the size by 90% and still have perfectly useable pictures. Obviously lower-resolution is not as good as the original, but it would make it more practical to make many backups, and keep them in many places. Lower-resolution is better than nothing. (This is not meant to replace backup of the originals - just make it possible to make a lot more, and as a result a lot better chance of something surviving.) BTW - Make sure you also backup the captions for the pictures - you are going to do that, right? I've just spent the last few months going through my father's old slides, trying to figure them out. BTW2 - I made a bunch of backups on CDs about 10 years ago. I went through them a few months ago - about 75% were unreadable.

"Edmunton Protocol" produced nothing interesting. "Edmonton Protocol" was more effective.

Copy the bug into your own messages, and swamp their stats base with crap.

And SCCS was far from the first version control system. The major features SCCS introduced was automatic generation of the change files (thanks to diff) which made it much easier to use, and (made possible as a result) keeping the latest version as the "base" version, so applying the change files produced earlier versions, instead of later ones - that produced much better performance for the most common task, getting the latest version.