Have we just all become googlets. Or something? How does a person get hard copies of stuff for science and other things for a fiscal year? I can further explain if need be.
its easier to upload to a database where its easily accesible, physical copies might be things of the past.
If I understand correctly, the information you’re talking about is basically raw data, right? What would you be doing with it that a hard copy makes more sense than digital data?
My thing is digital information is easy to change and quickly. But a hard copy book cannot be.
You can download the data. You can keep multiple copies in different places and also hashes to make sure you can catch it if anything changes.
You had me going until hashes no clue what that is. But without using a ton of ink how do i do multiple copies in different places? Especially dealing with the government info?
I have an array of 8TB hard drives, and cycling 1TB drives that are rotated through a safe deposit box.
These use a file system that has built in encryption and integrity protection, as well as rollback functionality.
That means that I know immediately if some data has changed unintentionally, and can compare the file hashes (MD5, SHA1, SHA256 or all of the above) across devices to see if the files match. Since I always have at least 3 copies, if someone modified one of them, I’d know which one changed.
8TB is around 4.4 billion pages of typed text.
Assuming each hardback contains 10,000 pages (just to be generous), that’s 440,000 hardbacks stored in triplicate, fully and (relatively) instantly searchable.
It takes the same amount of ink to print regardless of whether you do it yourself or if someone else does it. You can also just store it in its original digital form. Put it on your hard drive, or an external drive, or on magnetic tape, or on the cloud, or anywhere else.
A hash is any kind of mapping from the raw data into a fixed length piece of data. This is usually preferable when you don’t want to store the actual data but you want to be able to verify with some degree of certainty that the data hasn’t changed. As an example, for tabular data, you can hash each column by computing the mean. If the data changes, then that mean will likely change too.
It’s a lot cheaper to manage data digitally than physically. If you want a hard copy of something, you are welcome to print it.
They are almost extinct because it’s now easier than ever to get information actually
Yea but nothing against it like Wikipedia. People can go in there in seconds and change shit fast. So basically if you use it for court or thesis someone could have already changed it and your/my point is moot. Because they edited it. Almost seems like you have get a screen grab of what your looking at then and there with clock showing. Otherwise any fact can be questioned unfairly.
Bad examples, I think. Wikipedia is an encyclopedia. It’s cooperative and online, but it’s still just an encyclopedia. It’s not even a suitable source for a high school paper, much less anything more substantial.
Others have already noted the edit history. I think your concern about people making bogus changes is overblown. Malicious edits tend to get reversed pretty quickly (but again, double check for anything more important than a Lemmy comment).
Wikipedia has an edit history. You can cite a specific revision if you need to. But you shouldn’t be doing that for court cases or theses, unless it’s about Wikipedia itself.
But the same is true for other sites, they can change without notice too. You’d have to archive a copy.
But then, even in paper reference documents, what’s stopping someone from going to city hall and replacing pages in a binder? Or merely going into court and lying, saying “no THIS is the contract we signed”?
The largest library in my town has an archive of city/county/state public records available to view on microfilm and hardback, you just can’t leave with it (welcome to take photos and scan though, depending)
The Digital Dark Age is here.
nod
