It’s the microfiche now. Looked at one way, it makes sense. Find Barack Obama’s birth certificate on historical microfiche copies of 1961 Hawaii birth records, near the Nordyke twins and case closed. Oh sorry, the case is already closed.
Maricopa County sheriff Joe Arpaio, talking to the New York Times, reveals a little of his posse’s investigative direction:
No one has talked about microfiche. The controversy has been over the birth certificate — maybe the numbers are not in sequence, or it’s been forged; I can go on and on. To help the president of the United States, let’s go to the microfiche.
No one, of course, has explained what business the Maricopa County, Arizona, Sheriff has getting involved in the birth details of Barack Obama. The Phoenix New Times explains the sheriff’s interest this way:
It should be noted that the folks who pushed for the “birther” investigation are Arpaio’s bread and butter when it comes to his support base in Maricopa County: far-right-wingers. And a politically savvy headline-hound like Arpaio wouldn’t want to cross them, regardless of how far-fetched, continuously disproved, or laughable their theories about Obama’s citizenship may be.
The sheriff says the birther posse’s report is expected early next year.
The birthers are going to be very disappointed with the posse’s report, I daresay. It won’t say President Obama is ‘cleared,’ but it won’t result in a subpoena or any criminal charges. It will say he refused to cooperate, but they’ll have no proof that they even asked him to cooperate. Can’t wait to read the headlines in WingNutDaily!
Doc, don’t you mean “sighted” rather than “cited”?
Is there a microfiche? Has anyone ever said there was?
I think betting on “Investigation stonewalled by Obama administration” is quite safe.
Birfers argue since the Nordyke twins’ BC’s are on microfiche, Obama’s must be as well. And it’s quite reasonable to assume they’re correct.
However I wonder about them taking one step back. The microfiche is already a copy, it is not the “original vault BC”. Unless of course Hawaii doesn’t keep originals but only microfiched versions, but I haven’t heard that claim yet.
So even if examination of the microfiche took place, it still allows birfers to say “the document that was microfiched may still be forged”, and indeed every forensic examiner will tell you that the microfiche cannot be used to determine whether the actual BC was untampered.
So with all the “show us the original”, why are they going back to “show us a copy”? Mind-boggling.
Fukino and Fuddy both say the original paper document is still in the binder. But now Orly wants the Ninth Circuit to order the military to seize both the binder and the microfiche and transport them to Schofield Barracks. So Corsi and Arpaio don’t get their grubby paws on them.
Is there an actual microfiche? Or is the Nordyke certificate a negative photostat?
The 2 alternatives look similar.
I don’t believe that the copy of Obama’s Long Form BC was made from microfiche.
It looks like it was copied out of a book.
Wasn’t the Nordyke Twin’s BC copy made in the ’60’s?
If it was made from microfilm or microfiche, what evidence is there that they retained such copies, when they went electronic? They have the original, they have the electronic info- what reason would they have to keep any microfilm or microfiche copies?
The Army or National Guard?
Posse Comitatus Act: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Posse_Comitatus_Act
She keeps forgetting she is no longer in Russia or Israel. Maybe it’s not forgetting, but early dementia onset. Whatever it is, she’s a real meshuggah.
Yiddish: משוגע
Of course they’re assuming that if such a microfilm exists, that it is indexed chronologically on the spools. While it is possible that it may be, it’s not a given, and not even necessarily the best way to key records for archival on microfilm. You might have to see two different spools and that would negate the whole arguement of “Obama’s BC should be right there next in line”.
Whether or not microfilm of Obama’s birth certificate exists, and, if it does, the order of the documents and the condition and appearance of the microfilm will all be interpreted by birfers to be evidence that Obama is not a natural born citizen. It makes absolutely no difference what the evidence shows. The conclusion is a given.
Interesting question. I really don’t thing either is right. I’ll change it to something.
I have not seen any published report that says Hawaiian birth records are on microfilm/fiche but based on my experience with the industry, I would consider it almost certain that they are. Given the legal importance of such records, they would make a backup copy.
I would expect the film to be in certificate number sequence.
That wouldn’t surprise me.
The New Times Quote:
That is exactly what I said when Orly trapped Arpaio into this whole ludicrous exercise.
The reporter is more succinct than I, but with all the problems Joe is having he can’t afford not to pander to the only constituency he has left.
One of the signs of a conspiracy theory is that the goalposts keep moving. Rather than asking questions about Obama, the Birthers want him out, and are willing to accept almost anything that they think would achieve that end. And I’m not sure about the almost.
Of course, right now what they ought to be doing is looking for a candidate who could get him out. I expect, incidentally, that many of them will be saying that he is going to annul the election results in 2012 and make himself dictator (to be honest, I already encountered people who said that). I also expect the same people to fail to apologise when he doesn’t.
I hear that same nonsense about Bush near the end of the last election…I won’t loose any sleep
I heard it about Bush as well, and requested that the idiots saying it apologise. Of course they didn’t, one who had said that Bush would stage a false flag attack saying “Obama is the false flag.” At which point I decided to ignore him. I feel sorry for them, really, living in a scary world of their own creation.
Sleep tight.
Yeah, I heard that nonsense too. Bush definitely had his screwups, but there was a whole level of BDS going on that was pretty unhinged and paranoid, just as the current ODS crowd is suffering from.
I think Pastor Charmley is onto something with some of the nuts out there. Some of them seem to just be anti-government paranoids -period. Regardless of party or who is in office. Some of the folks who suffered BDS now make the same claims about Obama and display clear ODS. Whenever you hear “false flag”, “suspend elections” or “FEMA Camps” and “black helicopters” stuff…you are often dealing with these nuts. Regardless of who is in office, they make the same crazy alarmist predictions that will never come true…
I’ve been following the 9/11 theories for years because I had fellow students bring them up when I was at Seminary. The Obama stuff came onto my radar with a person at a Church where I preached. In neither case was the person an extremist, they just had been reading only one side. Those are the people who can be helped.
Anyone remember this scene from The Abyss?
Bud: Hippy, you think everything is a conspiracy.
Hippy: Everything is.
Once upon a time ‘we’ used to put crazy people in detention centers that ‘we’ euphemistically called hospitals. Now ‘we’ have redefined what crazy means, and accept that society can survive a greater level of eccentricity in its midst than was once tolerated.
This is, in general, a good thing.
However, with this enlightenment comes the responsibility to understand that not everyone you meet is necessarily as intellectually and socially responsible as ourselves all of the time.
Machines were mice and men were lions, once upon a time,
But now that its the opposite, its twice upon a time.
Don’t you mean “think” instead of “thing” ? 😉
I wish you all the luck and hope you have some successes in helping those folks. I wish more could be helped…and that might only still be possible with such personal in person connections. Please let us know if and when you have successes!
Sadly, most of the ones that seem to still post online are the hardcore obsessives that seem to have crossed hopelessly over the deep end.
I actually doubt it is on microfiche; I even doubt it was every put on microfiche. But even if it was, I doubt it remains — I know one person found out in their state, they got rid of such microfiche years ago.
I think our “good” sheriff even knows this. And he will milk it: signs of conspiracy — documents have been destroyed! This seems to be why the change of the goal post on this one.
And of course the redefinition of ‘natural born citizen’ makes the certificate irrelevant, since it is common knowledge that Obama’s father was Kenyan.
You’d think one of the birthers obsessed with Hawaii UIPA requests would have asked about microfiche by now.
I used to have the entire listings for the IBM VM operating system on microfiche (DOS/VSE too I think). Then I got it on machine readable mag tape and discarded the fiche. No need to keep the fiche when the tape is much more accessible, cheaper, and easier to replace as it changes.
Anybody got a 2400bpi tape drive and a computer that can read it so I can copy my tapes onto a CD (ignoring IBM’s copyright)?
That’s the problem with the accelerating pace of technology. Today’s nice safe backup won’t be readable in 10 years. If I still had the fiche, and had brought it with me from the USA to Australia (ignoring export restrictions) I probably wouldn’t be able to find a fiche machine either. Some libraries still have microfiche spool readers for their old newspaper collections, but even the local Historical Society where I volunteer at got rid of their fiche machines long ago. And they have kept some really old and worthless stuff that is gathering dust.
I can conceive of the possibility that if Hawai’i ever did put their stuff on fiche, that after conversion to machine readable, they could have taken the extremely conservative step of sending a copy of the fiche to some out of state permanent store (with a reader of course); Hawai’i is after all subject to volcano’s and tsunami’s. Not sure what the point of that would be though, since the machine readable version would be much more transportable, cheaper to store, and have a much longer life.
A microfiche image is the steam engine era equivalent of a jpeg. What could it possibly prove? They need the original piece of paper (I know, that is beyond pointless too, but anyway).
Even Sheriff Joe’s posse realizes this, I think, but they are giving their audience a new will-o-the-wisp to follow.
Its a win-win for the Sheriff; while it looks like he has come up with something new for them to chase their tails over, he has really done absolutely nothing, and he looks like a hero to them for doing it.
Sure. Google will find data conversion services for you in seconds.
That’s myth. Physical degradation is a much bigger problem than obsolescence.
Forensic use of Microfilm/microfiche is well-established. Google the obvious terms.
The problem with the microfiche proposal is not that it wouldn’t answer the question — it would — it’s that the question has already been answered. We trust Hawaii’s records because a Hawaii is a state.
“Full Faith and Credit shall be given in each State to the public Acts, Records, and judicial Proceedings of every other State. And the Congress may by general Laws prescribe the Manner in which such Acts, Records and Proceedings shall be proved, and the Effect thereof.” — U.S. Constitution, Article IV, Section 1
Why do these Arizonians think they get to prescribe how state records are proved, when the Constitution explicitly assigns it to Congress?
Hey! Good Idea! Hadn’t thought of looking up a service for that. There is one that I have used before for a largish job of data transformation I had to do. I wasn’t aware they did media translation as well! Cool, they are only a couple of kilometers from me, and might be able to give me “mate’s rates” if they don’t have to do too much set up. I might check it out. I would like to recover my old macro library.
Fully agree that degradation is a much bigger problem, but obsolescence is a problem. There are some moon landing data tapes rediscovered a couple of years ago in Australia and it took them years to find a machine still operating that could read them. Actually, I’m not sure they ever did find one.
Yes. Preaching to the converted with that one.
Like I said before, they don’t really. It just allows them to look like they are doing something for their constituency.
Arizonans have a point, seeing as their own state laws are not given full faith and credit (Immigration law, Medical Marijuana Act, etc.)
That is because storing film can be very dangerous, it requires specialized storing facilities that regulate the internal atmosphere.
Storing data on CDs is much, much safer.
Tsunamis perhaps, but Oahu is in zero danger of a volcano eruption. The Big Island is where all the volcanic activity is. Apparently there’s a new island forming that could eventually connect with the current Big Island, which itself is made up of the volcanic output of five different volcanos. Besides that, Hawaii’s volcanos are rarely explosive and nobody in their right mind would archive records that close to Kilauea. Their volcanos tend to drool rather than spit. There’s always advance warning.
I know. That is proven every day by Orly Taitz.
Depends on the kind of CD. CD-Rs have been known to be unreadable in just a few years as the dye fades, although there are different dye types.
http://www.rense.com/general52/themythofthe100year.htm
Recordable DVD may be more stable, but I wouldn’t necessarily rely on one to be rock-solid stable.
Standard pressed optical media can be pretty stable. They’re made by burning pits into a sheet of plastic, followed by a deposition of a metal to make a reflective surface, and finally capping it in protective hard plastic. I’ve got 25 year old music CDs that are still functioning perfectly. Some pressing plants can even produce 24 gold reflective surfaces, which are supposed to resist oxidation, which can affect the standard aluminum coated CDs if the air-tight seal is compromised or with manufacturing defects allowing oxygen to reach the aluminum.
I would say that CD storage has an issue most people don’t know of. The read surface is covered with polycarbonate, which is durable. The label surface is simply coated with a soft spray-on plastic right onto the back of the recorded layer. On most CDs you can see the overspray on the edge of the disc. If you press a fingernail against the label surface, you can see the layer deform. It’s also very easy to scratch off the label side and even tear off a piece of the recorded layer. I’ve tried this on failed CD-Rs (affectionally known as “coasters”), but this holds true even for standard pressed CDs.
I would say DVDs are going to more durable because they’re made with the recording layer sandwiched between two durable polycarbonate layers.
DVD’s are already obsolete. What about Blu-Ray(tm) disks?
And what is the follow on to that?
I’ve got a Cobol compiler on a 5 and a quarter floppy disks and none of my computers even have 3.5 floppies anymore. I’ve got a drive somewhere that I could use, but motherboards don’t even have IDE ports anymore.
I was recently involved in a server recovery where the user had great backup protocols in place, even to the point of periodically testing the backup. Unfortunately, they had a multiple drive failure, and they couldn’t find drives to match the configuration of the 10 year old drives they had. The whole machine was basically cactus. It took two weeks to find drivers for the tape cassette unit so the data could be recovered. The opsys and webserver config was lost. It was expensive updating the application software that they had let drift off maintenance. Basically your major big time fkup. We did get the data though, so that is one good thing.
Yes, if I REALLY want to, I will be able to read anything (even my 2400bpi tapes). But many folks don’t think that their backup storage medium will ever go obsolete before their backups are needed.
Time marches on and waits for no one.
Oh, yeah, and what about the longevity of those cute little USB message stick thingies? Contrary to popular belief, they have a limited life too.
“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
No data storage medium can last forever. I’m a big proponent of LTO-4 tape. We took an LTO tape, unspooled it, laid it out in a hallway like a carpet, let people walk on it, spooled it back up, and got 100% recovery. I’ve been a fan ever since.
LTO-4 lifetime:
-> total end to end passes = 11200
-> entire tape read/writes = 200
LTO-4 lifetime assuming 1 entire tape written per month = 17 years
LTO-4 lifetime assuming 1 entire tape written per week = 4 years
Good info. Our policy is to write a monthly tape which is written once and stored for a year, together with five daily tapes which are rotated in a “towers of hanoi” fashion. Our policy gives us between 50 and 52 separate full backups stored offsite. When tapes are rotated out of offsite storage they are destroyed. Intentional destruction is also part of our security policy. It’s fun to shred things like disk drives and tape cartridges.
If I needed to keep something beyond a few years, the policy wouldn’t be about media specifics, it would be about procedures where the oldest data is always being retrieved and copied to fresh media. In the shop I’m referring to, backup and disaster recovery planning is a full time job for two employees. It a lot of places (like state offices and understaffed, underfunded small businesses) the idea of disaster recovery doesn’t get much more planning than “in which bar the owner is going to meet with the attorney and the accountant while the building burns.”
Paint on the wall of caves lasts for at least 30,000 years, provided you keep the cave sealed off.
This is a good point: If the information you want to preserve has approximately the amount of content of a drawing of a horse, the long-term storage problem is greatly simplified.
Now, we send about two terabytes of data offsite every month. That’s also stored in a cave… in a salt mine, literally 🙂
I don’t have the answers, but I will suggest that the entirety of a large city’s vital records data is a relatively small data warehousing problem.
And most things are a matter of perspective and the inherent value based on personal assessment and need. That could have been the most amazing horse of its time. Talented, good natured, hardworking and delicious.
LOL! Thank you for that.
Data that will keep you out of jail will probably fit on an index card.
Data that will protect your financial assets will probably fit on one or two typewritten pages.
Data that will represent the entirety of the interests of a corporation will fill any media size you’d care to provide.
The problem is, people try to do the latter, in order to protect the former, where the really important information gets lost in the noise. It’s an all-or-nothing approach to backups and archives, which can be as bad as, perhaps worse than having no process at all.
I insist that my clients do “data triage.” I put it in very blunt terms, as above (data that you’d go to prison if you lost it/lost control of it…). I also point out that they _can_ make backups of, oh, the sales people’s jukebox or people’s 20 gigabytes of junk email, but they shouldn’t think of this in the same tier of data as business continuity stuff.
On the other hand, I’m secure enough, fortunately, not to have to work for anyone who doesn’t get these concepts.
There are probably multi-tera molecules of paint in a drawing of a horse. The location of each molecule represents information, just as magnetic or electronic media does. There would have to be means to convert the electronic data into paint and then back again for retrieval, but that does not seem impossible.
I once visited one of the few caves in the Dordogne region of France`that still lets limited numbers of tourists into the actual cave, as opposed to a reproduction, which is what most of them do. It was the most awe-inspiring thing I have ever seen.
WOW! I’ll have to add having such a trip and experience to my bucket list…
G-The one I visited is Pech-Merle. It probably isn’t as fabulous as Lascaux, but Lascaux only lets you visit a reproduction, which, though beautifully done, is still a reproduction. Here is info http://www.pechmerle.com/english/introduction.html
i also recommend the recent movie, “Cave of Forgotten Dreams”, by the German director Werner Herzog. They got special access to the Chauvet cave, which is the oldest and most fantastic yet discovered.
You have a pretty good policy. I would add only that you need to plan for the technology to be periodically updated too. It might be holographic storage in a couple of years.
Been on mine for years. Only reason I’m remotely interested in going to France actually. (sorry Lupin)
THANKS!!! Also, loved the link, particularly the interactive “Visit the Cave” map… I’ve bookmarked it to play around with touring, once I can find some additional free time.
I lived in France and it is the best country to visit, bar none. No country has as much variety in a reasonably small area. Mountains, beaches, history, architecture, great food, great art from prehistoric to modern. Now, I know, what about the French? All I can say is that they are much nicer than they pretend to be. We had a great time there.