LPW 20: Last Plodder Wins

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Nicholas

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Dave said:
So you have proof that can be peer reviewed? Isn't there a huge reward for submitting verifiable proof of supernatural activities?
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Do you mean the $1 million from James Randi? No longer available I've heard.
/Tries to contact Jimmy using a [Parker Brother-approved] Ouija board.
 
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Nicholas

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Work has been less productive this week than it was the last.

Decades ago I wondered why, if we did persist in some invisible form after death, none of the deceased were able to send some form of signal to the living to reassure them of the existence of an afterlife. Was there an impermeable barrier between us? What were ghosts? Were they the attempt at communication I was wondering about? If ghosts were remnants of dead human beings, and those who died violently were supposed to linger at the site of their deaths, why weren't the battlefields of World War One and Two seething with ghosts? If were to visit the site of the Battle of Cannae, could I expect to observe the spectral forms of tens of thousands of Roman legionaries massed together? If I didn't was it because they faded over time?

Why had I not spotted any ghosts?
 
Tribs

Tribs

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Nicholas said:
Work has been less productive this week than it was the last.

Decades ago I wondered why, if we did persist in some invisible form after death, none of the deceased were able to send some form of signal to the living to reassure them of the existence of an afterlife. Was there an impermeable barrier between us? What were ghosts? Were they the attempt at communication I was wondering about? If ghosts were remnants of dead human beings, and those who died violently were supposed to linger at the site of their deaths, why weren't the battlefields of World War One and Two seething with ghosts? If were to visit the site of the Battle of Cannae, could I expect to observe the spectral forms of tens of thousands of Roman legionaries massed together? If I didn't was it because they faded over time?

Why had I not spotted any ghosts?
Click to expand...
They say that often ghosts do not know they are dead - and that is why they hang around. Who knows?!
 
Johnatan56

Johnatan56

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Jings said:
When electronic data is deleted, is it still there?
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I'm going to take this a little more literally/extreme than you probably intended, just because a lot of people get this a bit wrong.

Yes and no, depending on your definition of deleted.

For example, say you have an account at a store and made a purchase, then you want to close/delete your account as you don't want it anymore. If I were to delete it, who would the transaction you made belong to? I can't get rid of it for record keeping, and probably not for the next 5-10 years, so if you delete the account, 95% of the time it will just be a flag in the database that will be "Am I deleted" that's set to enabled, and your account for most intents and purposes is now deleted, but we don't lose/orphan those transactions.

Now lets take something like a post on this forum, deleting that, that technically doesn't matter if I delete it since there should be no associations to it, so could hard delete it, but what happens if someone replies? So can either soft delete, keep the information and flip the flag, or hard delete and have it so the system handles information not existing, there it's a choice. Usually I'd do both since would want to keep history for a week and then let it get cleaned up at a later stage.

Now lets say that data only ever existed in memory, e.g. you open notepad, type some text in there and then close without removing, assuming it never memory dumped or anything, that information will only have existed in something volatile like RAM, so it's pretty much gone. If you ever saved and deleted in non-volatile memory, a piece of it could probably live on as depending on how the system works, e.g. NTFS for Windows, it's just flagged as being gone and once you need space you change the bits to be the new file. You could also check based on patterns left etc. what the data that was there is.

Overall though, eventually it will be gone, but deletion is rarely truly deletion in most modern systems, and especially not so for business systems where transactions must be stored for record keeping.
 
Jings

Jings

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Johnatan56 said:
I'm going to take this a little more literally/extreme than you probably intended, just because a lot of people get this a bit wrong.

Yes and no, depending on your definition of deleted.

For example, say you have an account at a store and made a purchase, then you want to close/delete your account as you don't want it anymore. If I were to delete it, who would the transaction you made belong to? I can't get rid of it for record keeping, and probably not for the next 5-10 years, so if you delete the account, 95% of the time it will just be a flag in the database that will be "Am I deleted" that's set to enabled, and your account for most intents and purposes is now deleted, but we don't lose/orphan those transactions.

Now lets take something like a post on this forum, deleting that, that technically doesn't matter if I delete it since there should be no associations to it, so could hard delete it, but what happens if someone replies? So can either soft delete, keep the information and flip the flag, or hard delete and have it so the system handles information not existing, there it's a choice. Usually I'd do both since would want to keep history for a week and then let it get cleaned up at a later stage.

Now lets say that data only ever existed in memory, e.g. you open notepad, type some text in there and then close without removing, assuming it never memory dumped or anything, that information will only have existed in something volatile like RAM, so it's pretty much gone. If you ever saved and deleted in non-volatile memory, a piece of it could probably live on as depending on how the system works, e.g. NTFS for Windows, it's just flagged as being gone and once you need space you change the bits to be the new file. You could also check based on patterns left etc. what the data that was there is.

Overall though, eventually it will be gone, but deletion is rarely truly deletion in most modern systems, and especially not so for business systems where transactions must be stored for record keeping.
Click to expand...

Thank you for the very decent and informative post.

The process of deletion as you've explained is how I feel about ghosts - people deleted in non-volatile memory live on in some form or another, with consciousness intact.

Seriousness aside - maybe that's the real reason why Christians say they've been saved and that Jesus saves.
 
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