It helps describe the contents and context of specific data files.

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Jacob Kohnstamm, president of the country's data protection agency, believes the decision about the contents of the tape should not be made by people directly connected with a police investigating team.

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On Monday, Cisco announced the development of the Nexus 7000, a network switch that's capable of routing 15 terabits of data per second--the equivalent of moving the entire contents of Wikipedia in a hundredth of a second, or downloading every movie available on Netflix (nasdaq: NFLX - news - people ) in about 40 seconds.

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Dr Douglas-Hamilton's collars, however, simply record their data in memory chips until those chips are prompted to regurgitate their contents to a receiver on board an aircraft that flies over the study area once every few months.

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Each says it has detailed information on more than 100 million U.S. households, though contents of their databases vary as do their rules related to data use.

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Ministers were well aware that the latest official statistics on England's house-building were due for release yesterday morning and their contents but, rather than contrive to coincide with the most recent data, the prime minister and his deputy invited the cameras to watch them plod through the mud of a housing development precisely 24 hours earlier.

BBC: Building trust in building statistics