Day 67

1/8/2007

Good name in man and woman, dear my lord,
Is the immediate jewel of their souls:
Who steals my purse steals trash; ’t is something, nothing;
’T was mine, ’t is his, and has been slave to thousands;
But he that filches from me my good name
Robs me of that which not enriches him
And makes me poor indeed.

-- Shakespeare, Othello. Act iii. Sc. 3.

re.tro.tech Noun.

1. Term for technology limited to that available during the 
   nineteen-sixties and -seventies, which was re-embraced to 
   provide more widely-accepted, verifiable security, especially 
   for Human Identity Databases (HIDs), i.e. 80-column punch cards.

- 100 Words from the Great Society Divide, editors of the American Heritage Dictionaries.

If I feel I have to limit
What the info-base has in it
Then I make my case to trim it
To a eighty-column card.

If a fellow has a habit
Doesn't matter who was bad, it
Is a ditty or a chad-hit
On a eighty-column card.

- exerpt from the patter-song, The Analyst's Lament from the revue "Raised Floor Follies"

"And so it came to pass that Chief Judge Most Supreme Roberts beheld that the land was strewn with Chaos. With technology fighting technology, each advance in protection of one's name and honor was repelled with advances to attack and disarray. All the peoples were wary and fearsome that identity had become as fluid and fragile as sand in a Klein bottle. His Most Wise Eminence decreed that from then on, only machines that had existed a score years before the Third Millenium may mill Identity's grain. All such records, he ruled, shall remain on papyrus or other paper medium."

-- Bible of the New Millennium, Trimex III:1-8

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