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NP Monday November 25, 2019

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As for shorthand in the era of classical antiquity...

Shorthand note taking was a well developed art in Imperial Rome.  There were as many lawyers per capita in that city as there are in modern cities.  The Ampersand "&" is actually one of the survivors of Roman Shorthand, being derived from the Latin "et"

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6 minutes ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

As for shorthand in the era of classical antiquity...

Shorthand note taking was a well developed art in Imperial Rome.  There were as many lawyers per capita in that city as there are in modern cities.  The Ampersand "&" is actually one of the survivors of Roman Shorthand, being derived from the Latin "et"

I could be wrong but wasn't the Demotic cursive script based on a simplification of hieroglyphs, too?

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30 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

wasn't the Demotic cursive script based on a simplification of hieroglyphs

Yes
I forgot about that
But I tend to think of the Demotic script as a transitional phase into what would become the written form of the Coptic language

Also, "Simplified" does not necessarily equate to "Shorthand"

 

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40 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

True that. I was just trying to think of related phenomenons.

It is course, still happening, with the advent of texting and internet chat, phrases get abbreviated like brb, lol, gtg, ttyl. And single words get replaced by letters or numbers like "R U going 2 change b4 leaving?"

Digital archaeologists 500-1000 years from don't have to worry about trying to figure out the images from our time they come across, it's the IRC logs that will have them pulling their hair out trying to decipher.

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2 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

There were as many lawyers per capita in that city (Rome) as there are in modern cities.

... and then Rome fell, so do what you can to eliminate lawyers.

 

2 hours ago, Pharaoh RutinTutin said:

As for shorthand in the era of classical antiquity...

Shorthand note taking was a well developed art in Imperial Rome.  There were as many lawyers per capita in that city as there are in modern cities.  The Ampersand "&" is actually one of the survivors of Roman Shorthand, being derived from the Latin "et"

For shorthand of the Cretaceous Era, see T Rex.

 

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39 minutes ago, Scotty said:

It is course, still happening, with the advent of texting and internet chat, phrases get abbreviated like brb, lol, gtg, ttyl. And single words get replaced by letters or numbers like "R U going 2 change b4 leaving?"

Digital archaeologists 500-1000 years from don't have to worry about trying to figure out the images from our time they come across, it's the IRC logs that will have them pulling their hair out trying to decipher.

Paperless should make it easy, there won't be much left to recover, the digital media will have fallen apart (tape), randomized (nanoscopic domains), or just unreadable because the formats are forgotten. Even the paper record is dicey, modern paper is generally not as robust as historical paper; the focus tends toward low cost, and unless you specify low acid paper for archival purposes, they tend to deteriorate. I have many old books, and yes, they do deteriorate just sitting on the shelf. The better quality ones hold up much better.

I laugh, because at work, I'm dealing with retiring an enterprise software system; some folks want to preserve their data in perpetuity, and I'm thinking, "Yeah, what software are you going to read that with twenty years from now?" On the plus side, to quote Dilbert, I get paid the same either way.

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19 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:
22 hours ago, hkmaly said:

But yes, "everyone knows" that Dracula is Vlad III Dracula, Voivode of Wallachia. Which also doesn't make much historical sense, but it's how Bram Stoker (who didn't spend too much time researching history) meant it.

I'm curious why Vlad Tepes makes no sense as proto-vampire?

Note following sentence in the article: Deleanu's Țiganiada (Gypsy Epic) (which was published only in 1875, almost a century after its composition) presented Vlad as a hero fighting against the boyars, Ottomans, strigoi (or vampires), and other evil spirits at the head of an army of gypsies and angels.

Basically, his cruelty notwithstanding, Vlad was seen as national hero by Romanians. And, obviously, he fought on the side of Christianity against the Ottoman Empire, and converted to Catholicism.

Of course, some of later interpretations of Dracula legend takes this into account, with stuff like "... and Dracula cursed God he was faithfully serving", saying that he "changed sides" after death. But Stoker himself didn't cared: his source were stories from Saxon people Vlad also fought against.

10 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Paperless should make it easy, there won't be much left to recover, the digital media will have fallen apart (tape), randomized (nanoscopic domains), or just unreadable because the formats are forgotten.

How long the media itself will last could easily be irrelevant ; digital data can be copied extremely easily. If there wouldn't be any major catastrophe, huge "cloud" databases of data could survive by being automatically copied from old media to new ones for centuries because either someone decided it might be worth presenting ... or forgot to set automatic delete policy.

Remember that it can takes weeks of manhours to catalogize gigabyte of text, but just few seconds to give command to copy all of it.

And, well ... depending on exact laws, it may be illegal (against copyright law) to remove history of wikipedia for example.

 

 

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21 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Note following sentence in the article: Deleanu's Țiganiada (Gypsy Epic) (which was published only in 1875, almost a century after its composition) presented Vlad as a hero fighting against the boyars, Ottomans, strigoi (or vampires), and other evil spirits at the head of an army of gypsies and angels.

Basically, his cruelty notwithstanding, Vlad was seen as national hero by Romanians. And, obviously, he fought on the side of Christianity against the Ottoman Empire, and converted to Catholicism.

Of course, some of later interpretations of Dracula legend takes this into account, with stuff like "... and Dracula cursed God he was faithfully serving", saying that he "changed sides" after death. But Stoker himself didn't cared: his source were stories from Saxon people Vlad also fought against.

Dracul means Dragon, which is not an atypical kind of title for the era, not particularly sinister. His cruelty does not appear to be cruelty for cruelty's sake, rather to send a message, albeit harsh by our standards. As you say, he impaled Saxons; after he was invaded by the Saxons. And he learned it while captive of and serving under the Ottomans. (Under the Ottomans? There's not enough room!)

I think you could make a better case for Vlad being an opportunistic turncoat with a track record of little loyalty, but again, not that much different than the folks around him.

Elizabeth Bathory, however, was bat shit crazy.

"Make sure they don't come back as vampires" does seem to be a particularly Romanian pass time.

So, being 'mercan, I'm kind of out of touch with the significance of ranks of nobility, but a boyar seems roughly equivalent to a baron, true? We have a brand of canned Italian pasta products called Chef Boyardi, named after the founder, who was an Italian chef, surname Boyardi. Boyardi looks like it means "From a family line of boyars".

 

21 hours ago, hkmaly said:

How long the media itself will last could easily be irrelevant ; digital data can be copied extremely easily. If there wouldn't be any major catastrophe, huge "cloud" databases of data could survive by being automatically copied from old media to new ones for centuries because either someone decided it might be worth presenting ... or forgot to set automatic delete policy.

Remember that it can takes weeks of manhours to catalogize gigabyte of text, but just few seconds to give command to copy all of it.

And, well ... depending on exact laws, it may be illegal (against copyright law) to remove history of wikipedia for example.

You are in my current occupational wheelhouse, and your view of the ease of transcribing digital media is a bit naive; not the first time I've heard this song and dance, generally from a customer that has no clue what (s)he is asking for. It may take mere seconds to kick off a process, but the transfers can take a long while. Obviously, it depends on the amount of data. But it is often the case that you can achieve a greater bandwidth by sending media or even shipping the servers than by sending electronically, if you have a massive amount to move. (See Sneakernet). But copying the data wasn't the issue, it was longevity and permanence.

Media is not permanent. Oxide layers age, and will eventually flake off. Hard drives fail for various reasons. CDs and DVDs are subject to various degradation; humidity, heat; you'd think being encased in plastic, they would be fairly robust, but I've heard of stacks of them going bad while sitting in a garage or basement; apparently the humidity gets into the tellurium. Lithographed or fused link ROMs are more permanent, but you aren't going to do a lithographic run for volatile data, and fused link ROMs have limited storage. Charge programmable ROMs are subject to leakage.

On the other hand, I have books that are nearly a hundred years old that I can read. Then again, I have some that are a few decades old, that are in bad shape. It really depends on the paper.

Vinyl recordings are having a niche resurgence, at least in part because if you are willing to tolerate the degradation from the needle wear, it is a fairly robust media. Back in the day, there was a design for a laser record reader that could even eliminate the needle wear. (Bad timing and cost killed it, I think. Maybe someone is marketing one. Yep.)

"Cloud" is not permanent. Stuff routinely vanishes from the Web. So far, commercial Cloud services have a good track record, but give it time. The servers of a small player in Texas were seized by the FBI for forensic analysis base on one miscreant customer; 50+ other customers' records were unavailable for the duration. Both the host service and the plethora if innocent customers had to wait the months it took for the feds to do their analysis. There are no boundaries to where your Cloud storage happens. What if your host site is hit with a hurricane or tsunami? Hopefully, they have backups that were not co-located. What happens when they go belly-up? Saying it's illegal to shut data service X down is meaningless when there is no funding to keep it going, no hardware, and no one to hold accountable (and even if you could, throwing the staff in prison does not recover your data.)

Friend, our brave new digital world is a house of cards. (That idiom makes sens, right?)

 

 

Edited by Darth Fluffy
Fix typos

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13 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Elizabeth Bathory, however, was bat shit crazy.

Assuming the allegations against her were true; there is some debate on that point.

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6 hours ago, ChronosCat said:

Assuming the allegations against her were true; there is some debate on that point.

 

I suppose it is a little late to question the witnesses.

 

Further reading convinces me that you are correct, she could well have been framed for her wealth.

Edited by Darth Fluffy
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4 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

I suppose it is a little late to question the witnesses.

Not with out a really good speak with dead caster any way.

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41 minutes ago, mlooney said:

Not with out a really good speak with dead caster any way.

My friend Finn played a chaotic neutral cleric once. He had a nasty vindictive streak as well as an off-colour sense of humour. This one time we got attacked for no good reason by some haughty nobleman. After we'd won the fight we decided we wanted to find out just why they wanted to make trouble for us to begin with.

His first question to the dead noble was, "Well, don't you feel stupid now?" :demonicduck:

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58 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

My friend Finn played a chaotic neutral cleric once. He had a nasty vindictive streak as well as an off-colour sense of humour. This one time we got attacked for no good reason by some haughty nobleman. After we'd won the fight we decided we wanted to find out just why they wanted to make trouble for us to begin with.

His first question to the dead noble was, "Well, don't you feel stupid now?" :demonicduck:

 

"Did you need something?"

 

"How can I help you?"

 

image.png

 

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21 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Dracul means Dragon, which is not an atypical kind of title for the era, not particularly sinister. His cruelty does not appear to be cruelty for cruelty's sake, rather to send a message, albeit harsh by our standards. As you say, he impaled Saxons; after he was invaded by the Saxons. And he learned it while captive of and serving under the Ottomans. (Under the Ottomans? There's not enough room!)

And it seems that people he was sending that message to wouldn't understand anything less cruel.

21 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

So, being 'mercan, I'm kind of out of touch with the significance of ranks of nobility, but a boyar seems roughly equivalent to a baron, true? We have a brand of canned Italian pasta products called Chef Boyardi, named after the founder, who was an Italian chef, surname Boyardi. Boyardi looks like it means "From a family line of boyars".

I don't think Europeans are more likely to have those ranks memorized than americans, at least nowadays ... however, according to wikipedia, boyar is actually closer to Marquess, which is few levels more than Baron.

21 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

You are in my current occupational wheelhouse, and your view of the ease of transcribing digital media is a bit naive; not the first time I've heard this song and dance, generally from a customer that has no clue what (s)he is asking for. It may take mere seconds to kick off a process, but the transfers can take a long while. Obviously, it depends on the amount of data. But it is often the case that you can achieve a greater bandwidth by sending media or even shipping the servers than by sending electronically, if you have a massive amount to move. (See Sneakernet).

I was specifically talking about how long it takes to HUMAN. It's irrelevant how long it takes to computer, as the human can do something else meanwhile. Computer time is cheap.

21 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

Media is not permanent.

Of course not.

21 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

"Cloud" is not permanent. Stuff routinely vanishes from the Web. So far, commercial Cloud services have a good track record, but give it time. The servers of a small player in Texas were seized by the FBI for forensic analysis base on one miscreant customer; 50+ other customers' records were unavailable for the duration. Both the host service and the plethora if innocent customers had to wait the months it took for the feds to do their analysis. There are no boundaries to where your Cloud storage happens. What if your host site is hit with a hurricane or tsunami? Hopefully, they have backups that were not co-located. What happens when they go belly-up? Saying it's illegal to shut data service X down is meaningless when there is no funding to keep it going, no hardware, and no one to hold accountable (and even if you could, throwing the staff in prison does not recover your data.)

You are thinking in terms of how long specific record may survive. But when considering future digital archeology, it's not about specific record. There is no way to ensure that YOUR record will survive, but there is also no way to ensure all instances of particular meme were destroyed. Remember 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0? It was declared illegal and DMCA takedown notices were send to everyone posting it .... then they realized they are making it worse. People started putting this number everywhere. Now ... do you think it will disappear? Maybe the importance of this number will be forgotten, but google currently shows 2800000 results with it and that's just tip of iceberg, only public pages. It will require major catastrophe, something with global reach, to remove all of them.

Sure, it IS possible such catastrophe will came. However, it is debatable if there will be any human archeologists any time afterwards.

3 hours ago, mlooney said:
8 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

I suppose it is a little late to question the witnesses.

Not with out a really good speak with dead caster any way.

Yeah. Or, like, I suppose it could be found out by seer. I mean, ordinary kind of seer, someone like Dominic Deegan, not Tedd.

 

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59 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

You are thinking in terms of how long specific record may survive. But when considering future digital archeology, it's not about specific record.

OK, that's fair. Even carved into stone, very little survives, but we are still able to recover a fair amount of detail.

 

59 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

I was specifically talking about how long it takes to HUMAN. It's irrelevant how long it takes to computer, as the human can do something else meanwhile. Computer time is cheap.

I'm guessing you don't do IT. Personal computer time is cheap. I guess university computer time is cheap; you are largely responsible for your own data and code. Professional computer time involving customer records is not cheap, tends to have a huge support staff to ensure data integrity and proper system operation. Ones that don't, it shows. They tend to be less than fun for customers.

Bandwidth is not cheap either. We operate across a leased WAN, and large data moves tend to impact our customer, so generally happen after hours. Multiple terabytes (12 zeros, American Trillion) takes a while, as you well know. For me, it will be a few commands and a lot of monitoring.

We've already been through phase one of this, and it provided full time employment for over a year for several people. There was some format conversion involved. I'd estimate they've blown at least a million USD (6 zeros, we don't diverge until thousand million).

 

59 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

And it seems that people he was sending that message to wouldn't understand anything less cruel.

Basically, but I doubt the message got across. I think he wanted to send a message, but the people that got the message were not the ones who wanted to fight him. Peasants suffered, doubtful that royalty shed a tear. 

 

59 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

I don't think Europeans are more likely to have those ranks memorized than americans, at least nowadays ... however, according to wikipedia, boyar is actually closer to Marquess, which is few levels more than Baron.

My God, it's full of ranks! Oh, yeah, baron is really low, huh? I guess I'll go back to ignoring that.

 

59 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Remember 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0? It was declared illegal ...

Actually, no. What was the issue? Do you have a relatively safe link? It looks like the kind of thing Googling for could get you on someone's radar.

I do remember 867-5309.

 

59 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

 .... then they realized they are making it worse.

Streisand effect

 

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46 minutes ago, Darth Fluffy said:

My God, it's full of ranks! Oh, yeah, baron is really low, huh? I guess I'll go back to ignoring that.

 

Actually, no. What was the issue? Do you have a relatively safe link? It looks like the kind of thing Googling for could get you on someone's radar.

 

Baron was the lowest rank in which the nobleman himself was not expected to go out and risk his own life fighting for his overlord, but instead could send his subordinates.

The issue with 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is that it was the key for decrypting the DVD regional lockout. Publishing the key (or even extracting it) was officially a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

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4 minutes ago, ijuin said:

Publishing the key (or even extracting it) was officially a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Darn millennials. Everything that has gone wrong since they started getting born must clearly be their fault. :danshiftyeyes:

I mean, that was what they used to say of us Gen X'ers, so it must be true in their case too, right? :icon_eek:

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1 hour ago, Darth Fluffy said:
2 hours ago, hkmaly said:

I was specifically talking about how long it takes to HUMAN. It's irrelevant how long it takes to computer, as the human can do something else meanwhile. Computer time is cheap.

I'm guessing you don't do IT. Personal computer time is cheap. I guess university computer time is cheap; you are largely responsible for your own data and code. Professional computer time involving customer records is not cheap, tends to have a huge support staff to ensure data integrity and proper system operation. Ones that don't, it shows. They tend to be less than fun for customers.

Bandwidth is not cheap either. We operate across a leased WAN, and large data moves tend to impact our customer, so generally happen after hours. Multiple terabytes (12 zeros, American Trillion) takes a while, as you well know. For me, it will be a few commands and a lot of monitoring.

We've already been through phase one of this, and it provided full time employment for over a year for several people. There was some format conversion involved. I'd estimate they've blown at least a million USD (6 zeros, we don't diverge until thousand million).

You are guessing wrong. I do work in IT, although it's true that I don't deal with anything bigger than hundreds of gigabytes. And I guess our customers would prefer bigger staff. Not huge, though - after all, they choose us because we are cheaper than our competitors.

The thing which is costly is not copying: copying is easy, raid controller can do that by itself. It's format conversions. Low level copy of database to different disk can, with raid-based tools like LVM, be done in full operation without any oversight. Transfer of records to different database cluster with higher version of software requires custom copy program, lot of attention and can easily introduce data integrity issues ... because it's NOT JUST copy.

1 hour ago, Darth Fluffy said:
3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

And it seems that people he was sending that message to wouldn't understand anything less cruel.

Basically, but I doubt the message got across. I think he wanted to send a message, but the people that got the message were not the ones who wanted to fight him. Peasants suffered, doubtful that royalty shed a tear. 

Royalty, maybe not. However, in today's terms, he successfully destroyed separatist terroristic organization. At least that's I think happened.

1 hour ago, Darth Fluffy said:
3 hours ago, hkmaly said:

Remember 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0? It was declared illegal ...

Actually, no. What was the issue? Do you have a relatively safe link? It looks like the kind of thing Googling for could get you on someone's radar.

I do remember 867-5309.

Coward :)https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/AACS_encryption_key_controversy

29 minutes ago, ijuin said:

The issue with 09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0 is that it was the key for decrypting the DVD regional lockout. Publishing the key (or even extracting it) was officially a violation of the Digital Millennium Copyright Act.

Not regional lockout and not DVD. It was about HD-DVD and Blu-ray. It's true that the controversy about the DeCSS code, allowing playing of DVD on alternative operation system without licensed players, was similar, but without the additional fun of the "illegal" number being this small.

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18 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Coward :)

Heh. I live where the NSA scarfs everything and stores it forever. I think I have good reason to be paranoid. Or, as they say, "You're not paranoid if they really are out to get you."

 

18 minutes ago, hkmaly said:

Not regional lockout and not DVD. It was about HD-DVD and Blu-ray. It's true that the controversy about the DeCSS code, allowing playing of DVD on alternative operation system without licensed players, was similar, but without the additional fun of the "illegal" number being this small.

What does Digital Millennium Copyright Act mean outside the US? Does it even matter to you?

 

 

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6 hours ago, Darth Fluffy said:

What does Digital Millennium Copyright Act mean outside the US? Does it even matter to you?

Just as an aside.

In general, everything the US does casts a long shadow across the world. It used to be that most Western countries tended to look in the direction of the US before deciding what to do on any particular new or potentially fraught issue. For example, Denmark still had being transgender classified as a mental illness until the DSM was updated in 2013. When the US makes a copyright law everybody sits up and takes notice because it affects trade. We didn't always decide the same way as the US but we always paid attention.

It was the same thing with the DMCA. Like it or not, it affected us because we trade a lot of movies and entertainment with the US. (Yeah, the occasional Danish entertainment makes it to the US, often in the form of remakes but still.)

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7 minutes ago, The Old Hack said:

Just as an aside.

In general, everything the US does casts a long shadow across the world. It used to be that most Western countries tended to look in the direction of the US before deciding what to do on any particular new or potentially fraught issue. For example, Denmark still had being transgender classified as a mental illness until the DSM was updated in 2013. When the US makes a copyright law everybody sits up and takes notice because it affects trade. We didn't always decide the same way as the US but we always paid attention.

It was the same thing with the DMCA. Like it or not, it affected us because we trade a lot of movies and entertainment with the US. (Yeah, the occasional Danish entertainment makes it to the US, often in the form of remakes but still.)

Now I'm just sad.

 

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