While flipping through Unicode Demystified last night at Barnes & Noble (which I'd highly recommend from what I read of it), I noticed it referenced the W3C's Character Model for the World Wide Web. It's a good read if you're interested in this kind of stuff.
Also see the IETF's Policy on Character Sets and Languages (RFC 2277).
Here's a great article from Answers in Genesis that says exactly what I've been saying:
I have often debated with evolutionists, or Christians who believe in millions of years, on various radio programs. Sometimes the interviewer has made statements like, 'Well, today we have a creationist who believes he has evidence for creation, and on the other side is an evolutionist who believes he has evidence to support evolution.'
I then stop the interviewer and state, 'I want to get something straight here, I actually have the same evidence the evolutionist has -- the battle is not about the evidence or facts, as they are all the same. We live on the same earth, in the same universe, with the same plants and animals, the same fossils. The facts are all the same.'
Then the evolutionist says, 'But you're on about the Bible -- this is religion. As an evolutionist I'm involved in real science.'
I then respond, 'Actually, as a creationist, I have no problem with your science; it's the same science I understand and trust. The argument is not about science or about facts -- ultimately, the argument is about how you interpret the facts—and this depends upon your belief about history. The real difference is that we have different "histories" (accounts about what happened in the past), which we use to interpret the science and facts of the present.'
I then give an example. 'Let's consider the science of genetics and natural selection. Evolutionists believe in natural selection -- that is real science, as you observe it happening. Well, creationists also believe in natural selection. Evolutionists accept the science of genetics -- well, so do creationists.
'However, here is the difference: Evolutionists believe that, over millions of years, one kind of animal has changed into a totally different kind. However, creationists, based on the Bible's account of origins, believe that God created separate kinds of animals and plants to reproduce their own kind -- therefore one kind will not turn into a totally different kind.
'Now this can be tested in the present. The scientific observations support the creationist interpretation that the changes we see are not creating new information. The changes are all within the originally created pool of information of that kind; sorting, shuffling or degrading it. The creationist account of history, based on the Bible, provides the correct basis to interpret the evidence of the present -- and real science confirms the interpretation.'
Very well put. I hope this will clarify things a little, since maybe I wasn't as clear as this during the recent debate on evolution here.
When my computer died before (through no fault of my own) I promised myself that I'd use that for the impetus to start keeping backups. I haven't done it yet, and the night before last I dreamed that my computer died because of the massive blackout we had, and I even chided myself in my dream for not doing what I said I'd do with backups.
So last night I left my computer backing up all night... I wanted to see how much I could expect my data to compress so I could see how much work I had to do to make it fit on a CD-RW. I had wanted to use tar.bzip2, but for whatever reason 7-zip's bzip support is broken, and I was too lazy to download the executables for tar and bzip and learn their command line arguments. I had decided I wanted a format which worked like tar.gz where it concatenates all your files together and then compresses them, so I tried out 7zip's own format since it can create "solid archives" which do just that.
It took a little over 2:15 to compress my whole 1.9 gigs of data in my c:\keith folder ("My Documents") onto a different drive (which probably significantly sped it up compared to what it would have been had I compressed it onto the same drive), and using 7-zip it compressed down to 731 megs.
I woke up during the night after it had finished, so I decided to see what that would have been with zip compression. Obviously it's not a fair comparison because zip doesn't group the files together before compressing, but I wanted to see how much of a difference it made. Plus, since I was going back to sleep, it took essentially no time 
7-zip's zip compression compressed it down to 1.19 gigs in a little over 1:15.
For reference, I'm using a 700 mhz computer with 384 megs of RAM backing up from a 7200 RPM 20 gig drive to a 5400 RPM 40 gig drive.
Now I have to try out tar.gz and tar.bzip2 to see how much of a difference there is. I'd obviously rather use more standard formats (rather than 7-zip) for backup.
Saturday, August 16, 2003
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new⇒Calif. Supreme Court to take up gay marriage ban
I would argue the point is notdefinitional. While the wordmarriage is su...
Justin: Nov 20, 4:37pm