World: r3wp

indeed, some languages use feature labels, rather than actual design.

We have continuous daylight savings time here in the Netherlands, 
too, since Hitler synced us to Berlin time, instead of GMT

Isn't it the greatest achievement of a politician to be able to change 
time?

And the reason it persisted .. it makes sense??

Pity Hitler didn't enforce swatch time ...

Depends on if you trade more with Germany or with England. I suppose 
that changed through the war

Are wooden shoes more popular in Germany or England?

We only export those to tourists

Quick scan .. nope , nothing made by Philips in my house

But I've got a book signed by Max Euwe ...

Look in your hospital. They've refocused on medical equipment

worth anything?

Probably, if you bring it here :-)

He signed it for me when he toured NZ .. sadly I lost

What did you expect? :-)

To win of course .. it was a simul

So? :-)

Those GMs cheat though ...

Instead of moving to the next player .. they will sit one on one 
to grind you down in tricky positions

http://www.stuff.co.nz/world/asia/japan-earthquake/4857821/Tsunami-hit-towns-forgot-warnings-from-ancestors


Interesting ... the Japanese had been for centuries creating stone 
tablets warning people not to build below certain points .. and these 
were serving as coastal warnings.  But in modern times they were 
in many cases ignored.

Old technology ... but it did save some who paid heed and built on 
ground above the tablets

Such a lady was on TV. Her house was saved, but she lost all her 
neighbours

And the neighbours had built below the line?

Yes, and her family. I suppose. The tablet story wasn't mentioned, 
but she specifically built her house higher up

I suppose the next generations will leave stone tablets with nuclear 
warning signs...

LOL

Better would be solar powered Geiger-Muller counters embedded in 
concrete posts

NZ suffered a lot as a result of its anti-nuclear stance ...

What use if your children's children are going to ignore them, anyway?

I thought it was a modern Dutch disease to forget about the power 
of the sea, but apparently our fish eating cousins on the opposite 
of the earth have fallen to the same folly

Ah .. just create a new religion that observes the tablets .. there 
are other examples of tablet based religions

Christianity, Mac

All religions are based on such warnings. Problem is, we've forgotten 
what they mean

These tablets were pretty explicit .. warning of tsunamis after earthquakes 
yet people still went home to secure possessions, and died in the 
following tsunamis

Edmund Burke (1729-1797)  "Those who don't know history are destined 
to repeat it."

It doesn't say anything about knowing and ignoring :-/

Burke was a politician ... their statements are always lack clarity

:-)

It takes about three generations for people to forget. Those that 
experience the disaster themselves pass it to their children and 
their grandchildren, but then the memory fades

It would seem we're still living in the oral age of prehistory

There was a TV documentary produced in the 1980s I think that talked 
what would happen to Christchurch in a major quake

It's now on youtube and close to 100% of the predictions came true

Institutional memory and its failings are common problems in many 
spheresl and once an institution starts making a mistake, it tends 
to repeat it every institutional generation or so.
  Military examples: http://hnn.us/articles/45305.html

   college fundraising examples: http://cooldata.wordpress.com/2011/02/22/data-disasters-courtesy-of-mordac/

Decades ago there was an article I think in Byte magazine about a 
method of backing up by printing it in some type of dense data format 
.. and you could purchase a scanner for about $300 to scan it back 
in again.  Anyone remember this?

I guess  it was like some type of continuous 2D bar code if you think 
in terms of today's technology

No. But for e.g. PDF format allows you to have a 2D "barcode", which 
can hold cca 64KB of data, or so I remember ....

64Kb?  the largest I've seen is about 2kb

The bar codes that you can get from Acrobat Pro are the same as used 
for online air tickets

I think it was in the mid 80s

I think Byte did distribute some software that needed a bar code 
to scan in .. perhaps Compute! did as well.  Bit too long ago to 
remember this now