encoded notions

Anyway, this little tale of woe is all just a roundabout way of getting to my Laws of Computational Metaphysics. I used to have one, now I have two. I’m sure someone has stated these laws before, but here’s my formulation:

1. Information that resides only on a single hard drive doesn’t exist. This one is the most important, since this one bites both geeks and non-computer geeks all the time. (Computer geeks: raise your hand if you’re older than 22 and you’ve never lost data.) Among non-computer geeks, only very very very smart people like my kid sister and my mother can be made to understand this problem. So for everyone else my default advice is not, “Get yourself a good backup system,” but, “Don’t store anything important on the computer, ever.”
2. Permalinks that contain an anchor don’t exist. Law #2 has a narrower scope, but I think that amongst the web nerd set, it’s underappreciated.

Source: Laws of Computational Metaphysics (goer.org)