Silicon Investor (SI) -- The First Internet Community

STOCKTALK

We've detected that you're using an ad content blocking browser plug-in or feature. Ads provide a critical source of revenue to the continued operation of Silicon Investor. We ask that you disable ad blocking while on Silicon Investor in the best interests of our community. If you are not using an ad blocker but are still receiving this message, make sure your browser's tracking protection is set to the 'standard' level.

Politics : Sarah Palin For President 2012 -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: goldworldnet who wrote (1066)	10/16/2008 12:32:14 PM
From: ManyMoose	1 Recommendation Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1832

When I was in Alaska I found a book called "The Clock of the Long Now." Its premise is that the attention span of today's people is pathetically short, and as ephemeral as an old computer. They proposed building a clock that would tick once every ten thousand years, and design knowledge and records that would persist on that scale. longnow.org A good example is Mount Rushmore. The sculptor realized that someday somebody would come along and wonder who built it and how it was done. He had the entire story etched on indestructible plates and embedded in a vault hidden behind the heads. Even after a direct hit by a nuclear device, the record of how Mount Rushmore was built will survive. (The silly film "National Treasure Book of Secrets" used Rushmore as a setting and instead of the very real secret behind the monument, it featured a preposterous Aztec chamber.) I bought this book and sent it to my sister, who at the time was writing software for the National Archives. She really ran with it. She formed a relationship with the Long Now people, and was well along with a system that would allow knowledge in virtually any format to be linked together using something she calls 'semantic' database technology. So guess what: Her project was canceled and replaced by somebody who saw its value and couldn't stand the competition. It is pretty typical of government contracts. The government is entirely too willing to abandon excellence in pursuit of special interests. I'm afraid if Obama is elected we will see a terrible spate of this.