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Backup Your Life on a DVD
matt20 writes "I've often wondered what it would take to condense the essence of my life and put it in a searchable format. Well, it looks like that may become a reality. Engineers are working on software to load every photo you take, every letter you write - in fact your every memory and experience - into a surrogate brain that never forgets anything. Here is the article found in New Scientist."
This gives "identity theft" a whole new meaning.
Sounds kinda redudant to me ... isn't this what the new dept. of homeland security is going to do?
Skiers and Riders -- http://www.snowjournal.com
Will it remember where I put my @#$!$ car keys?
They're called "books". And unless you burn them, they generally have a 0% failure rate.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
gadzooks - MS want your LIFE now!
Now I'll NEVER be able to forget my ex-girlfriend!
http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/technology/2495649.stm
do you really want to commit everything to a nice simple, searchable, disc that can be used as evidence against you?
Ok, so I fork over my money, I've got this shiny new DVD with the sum total of my existance on it. Aside from being horribly depressing, so what? What can I do with it? Store it for safekeeping in case of a terrible car accident which leaves me without my memory? No problem! A quick hard reboot with disc inserted (yuck) and I'm better?
Seriously though, aside from being incredibly cool, what's the use of this thing? To pass on to relatives after you're gone? Nefarious use in our legal system? Coaster ("Don't put your drink on the table, use Aunt Jenny instead...")?
What if I forget where I put the dvd?
It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco are aiming to build multimedia databases that chronicle people's life events and make them searchable.
Anyone want to take bets on how fast MyLifeBits will be selling off your personal info? True if you doubt Microsoft's dubious motivation and believe they're working for the greater good, this still brings a new meaning to 'single point of failure'.
--- What
Since I have no life, mine could probably fit into a 3.5" floppy
Engineers are working on software to load every photo you take, every letter you write - in fact your every memory and experience - into a surrogate brain that never forgets anything.
I presume you must have to add stuff to this 'archive' manually? What happens if you forget? I know I probably would.
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Moderator's essentials
Now I'll Never have to remember names again! thanks, umm...
When life gives you crap, Make Crapade.
Sluggy Freelance.
That's nice, if someone gets hold of my database they will know me better than I know myself.
Does this mean I'll be able to bring out extended special editions? Deleted scenes could be amusing... Out-takes and a gag reel! Woohoo!
I could get my folks to do Director's Commentary... ^_^
"I hate Cthulhu, Cthulhu hates me, I kill his cultists, He eats worlds for tea"
Not very useful for people like me who are lucky to take 1 photo a year.. I think I've got a grand total of a few dozen photos from when I was born to now (that's 22 years, no wise cracks please! :P).
Email might be a little better, but considering my best reply time is in the order of 2-4 weeks, I don't get a whole lot of that either..
Tell me when they can download my real memories, then I'll be impressed.
-Nutter
I hope I don't get a concussion from a car park sign before they download all of my memories. I also hope I don't use as much hair gel as Max Headroom.
I for one would read the licence agreement on such a thing really, really carefully...
Imagine... All the information submitted to the system becomes copyright of Organization X...
Or am I just being paranoid?
.: Max Romantschuk
It's called encyclopidiac memory, all they need is a way to give everyone what some of us have naturally, and it's done. :-)
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
No doubt with this being a microsoft driven development they will plant false memories of Windows 95 being a stable and enjoyable OS to use.
Oh and probably that billg invented the internet.
Where did you want to go to yesterday?
just when I will start to depend on it, some script kiddie will cause a buffer overflow and my memory will be replaced with super bowl commercials from the last several years.
How long after this becomes avaliable will the first supeona for full access be issued - for example in a divorce court, patent dispute antitrust case...
Umm....Why do I feel that was one sarcastic comment in the article???
"Do something man. Right now."
i think it was arther c clarke that came up with this, apart from the cool ness factor what on earth would be the point, i suppose you could use it to download yourself into a robot /cyborg thing, and if you died in a road acidnet they could "download" you into a new body, but it just seems to be a bit of a gimic at the moment, whoo lookat me i'm on a dvd sorta thing.
dybia felly dwi a hampster (i think therefore i am a hampster)
There was a night in Tijuana I wouldn't choose to remember at gunpoint. Last thing I want is a surround-sound, THX enhanced f'ing DVD of it.
Knunov
Why do users with IDs under 100,000 or over 700,000 usually have the most worthwhile comments?
I already rely way too much on search engines for my computer life, now I'll be able to do it in real life, too? Pretty soon I won't remember anything anymore, I'll just know how to look it up...
Material costs are high, and duplication and storage is a bitch.
They deteriorate if exposed to sunlight, water, or any number of bacteria, insects, and even mamals, that enjoy the taste of paper.
If I'm storing my data around goats, I'll take CDs over paper any day. For the same price as thousands of books, I can have inumerable CD copies.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
Dear God, I can just imagine my wife going back four months to pick out the exact wording of something I misspoke, and then playing it back. Men of the world unite, we must stop this now! *g*
Just kidding. This looks like some really interesting technology, but I can't help think that the investment of time you'd have to make outweighs the benefit.
What if someone steals my DVD? Ack!
--even a broken watch is correct twice a day.
...would this "image" of my brain remember for me that I had an "image" of my brain taken in case I forget that I did it and defeat its own purpose?
Other than the fact this is being developed by Microsoft, there is something else that doesn't quite make sense to me. The article talks a lot about storing video and audio of every day events so that you can "remember" them later. That's all well and good, but how exactly are you getting this data into the digital world to start with? Am I supposed to be carrying a video camera, digital camera and audio recording device around with me all the time? Yeah.. that's handy. Thanks Microsoft.
visit my free wallpaper collection, wp.erasei.com
WOW! A microsoft solution capable of recording all our actions for a year!
We all knew it was going to happen someday, Microsoft would own our memories. Can you imagine the DCMA violations trying to break the compy protect to view your own memories? What type of lawsuits are we going to get into when we just claim to remember doing it, and no we didn't reference the MyLifeBits database?
The media would have fun with this. We could have "Truman Shows" playing back the MyLifeBits database files 24x7. Imagine the pirated copies of the next serial killer, or thrill seeker.
Don't you love technology.
Gator/Claria is Spyware.
You can't fit all of alt.binaries on a DVD. Who are they kidding?
-- Thou hast strayed far from the path of the Avatar.
If they can do that, I should searching all the pr0n quickly. And guess how many copies of the same pr0n will be available, don't have to search web anymore, just borrow neighbor's DVD :p
The letter combination DVD isn't to be found anywhere in the article.
/. in a while...
There's talk about 1000gb harddiscs, but not DVDs.
One of the stupidest headlines on
As to the idea it self: why? I don't need to excatly what or how I said something to my friends or family. In fact I dont want to...
One good idea, that they don't mention, would be automatic transscription of the audio conversations, thrus making them searchable. Now, that would be nice...
TC - My Photos..
Are we entering a new era?
"I'm sorry officer, I don't remember. My memory crashed."
Be sure to check out todays Tom Toles.. Funny stuff. Here.
This seems kind of useless to me. I mean, if it works then great, but will whatever the de facto data backup technology be at the time be backward compatible with DVDs by the time I'm old enough to really care about going back through them?
It'd suck for my essence to be obsolete.
Hmm... I guess someone smoked a bit too much cannabis thinking about this one. They need to invent a DVD medium that won't rot. Sometimes CDROMS and DVDs get a fungus that renderes them unreadable. I've got a DVD with my family photo albums, even mpeg2 movies, and a backup of my resume and my wife's. But.. you need a backup of that because I had a cdrw disk rot on me.
- [...] engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab [...]
For those who can't be bothered to read the article (my advice: don't), a short summary: in a couple of years (like, five) 1-TB hard drives will cost ~USD300. A new trademark, "MyLifeBits", which is basically a (gasp) *searchable* database can be filled with everyPhotoYouEverTake, everySoundYouEverHear, everyTextYouEverRead (yadda yadda) as a kind of, er, diary. (For the yougsters: a "diary" is a private, dead-tree blog).No word on how you are supposed to get the information in there
What is this? MS anti-FUD?
(no, actually I'm having a *great* day)
yes, we have no bananas
Seriously?
Do the guys at Microsoft seriously consider the PC to be a most reliable of entities? Man, you think after years of running Windows you'd know better.
As for the database, that sounds like it would be an enormous amount of work to keep up, and wouldn't be that useful day to day unless you were carrying it with you. I forget to take pictures, how am I going to remember to upload the pictures I actually take? And has anyone ever gone back and reread their old email...BORING... unless you're narsisistic who cares what you posted on
This thing sounds good in theory, but in practice people just are not taking that many pictures or writing that many memorable letters. This will be a product for the vain, the famous and the rich who don't know what else to spend their money on.
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In his book 3001, the main character (whose name I won't give away for those who haven't read it) is introduced to an implant with, roughly, a petabyte of memory -- it acts as the "everything that's happened in your life" repository. Frankly, given the fact that it was supposedly occuring 999 years in the future, I think it wasn't nearly miniaturized enough -- hasn't he heard of Moore's Law?
Oh... it's bad for them! Since they already know what they know (and have it recorded), and they now know what you know, they'll need about double the storage. Double, that is, if you haven't been through somebody's "memories" too!
Maybe I should invest in a storage technology company.
After reading the article (I know; not normal practice on Slashdot) it seems that the developers think that the interpretation of memories and events is unnecessary colouring.
Just the facts, mam
Let me put more words in their mouths by saying that they think they can improve by creating some search function whereby every piece of info will be examined. Now, I don't know about you, but isn't one of the most useful abilities of the brain its tendency to grade info from useful to useless and quietly discard the useless stuff by simply forgetting it. Even better, this runs as a background process. No intervention necessary.However, I think this project is a great idea. I just wonder if they can really develop something this complete.
Engineers are working on software to load every photo you take, every letter you write ......
And the damn hard-drive crashes. Duh!
What running M$ software, get real, hang it I can't remember my name my MyLifeBits server just blue screened.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
It's also more than a little worrying in the context of Microsoft's recent moves towards greater involvement in our private lives and data.
And I might forget not to destroy this DVD if I ever do anything that could interest the FBI.
This is yet another step towards people letting their brains rot rather than trying to think. Besides, much creativity may arise from mispercieved events. i.e. every murder mystery ever written.
Remember 3001, with the diamond devices that stored your every memory and experience, just kind of backing up your brain. I am so there if we see this in my lifetime.
But instead can claim "I think so, let me do a find." Like PDAs, no need to remember, because you got it digitally!
Anyone else have that problem? Started using a PDA and couldn't remember squat?
Blessed be he who reads this post, Cursed be he who tells my boss.
I can't even keep my checkbook balanced, and I'm supposed to catalog everything I do during the day? This is too time consuming, and not very useful. There is the ability to link your pictures, video, etc to other events/"Memories" but who the hell has time to do that? It would be popular as a hobby for some people, just like making a family tree, but not mainstream.
I think you've been smoking too much cannabis.
DVD's last 50+ years, depending on dye quality.
And DVD's contain digital information, which means the information can be transferred onto a newer storage format easily.
A CDROM/DVD fungus? Maybe you should change your name to MrJerryAtrick. They don't exist outside of labs.
I'd personally be more interested in a device that reliably and irrevocably deletes bad memories.
-Stephen
I've already done this. I have a CD (which friends refer to as "the football") on which I have backed up scanned images of my birth certificate, medical records, school records, every photo I have (2000+), every development project I've worked on, every short story/paper I've ever written, and a database in which I store daily entries of my activities.
Yes, it sounds obsessive compulsive, and maybe it is. I do it because I like to have my life backed up in case of household disaster. Also, I've found that having that data with me all the time is very helpful--I carry a floppy with it so I can open anything I'm working on and save it.
Another reason I do it (especially the log/database) is that I don't like the idea of not knowing about my own life. I found the days going by in a blur before I kept track of things.
The only drawback is that I'm relying more and more on this CD instead of memory, which may be reducing it.
Protect your life disk with CSS and use the DMCA to per^H^Hrosecute the living daylights out of anyone who accesses it without your authorization.
Simple.
The living have better things to do than to continue hating the dead.
...two minutes of blank screen and a lot of ads for the rest of the show. No thanks, it's already enough to have it in real life.
I'm sorry Bill we know your lying we've been looking at your MyLifeBits DB.
in my life God comes first.... but Linux is pretty high after that
Francis Smit
In the compliance lab I work in, anything we do needs to be documented to prove that it happened. We always joked that we need miner's helmets with little cameras attached that always film what we do. That's what this looks like...
Would it record reality or my distorted perception thereof?
On the otherhand, if you are an existentialist and believe people are the sumb of their experience, then recording every waking moment would be equivalent to capturing you. But then again, I doubt the engineers are thinking of these philosphical issues.
Not the 'net version of DIVX...the ORIGINAL DIVX..so that I can only see my memories if I pay a "rental" fee and they will timeout after 48 hours and I can pay a fee to get some more time...but I cant lend them to my friends or play them on anyone elses player...but then, they would probably just disable the pay to play feature after a year anyways making it plain DVD... ;)
--"The revolution will be simulcast..."--
When are they going to build a computer that keeps all that data intact for longer then the average human life span? Given how computers are cycled through every year or so this may not be so reliable because of backup failures, upgrades, and acts of god. I won't even go in to the ability of Microsoft developers to make something so precious and valuable safe, secure, and free from marketing exploitation. :D
~~ Behold the flying cow with a rail gun! ~~
I use The Brain. It's the only way I've ever found of organizing all of my thoughts, emails, bookmarks, files, pictures, programs, etc. into a cohesive, useable unit. In my opinion, it's really how personal computers were meant to be used. I recommend everybody with a ton of bookmarks, sticky notes all over the place, and a ton of flagged emails to take a look at it and play with it for at least 10 minutes. What it does is really amazing.
Is it just me, or does this seem like an article you'd read in The Onion? It's obviously impractical at this juncture; one terabyte or two or three isn't nearly enough to fit a whole life's worth of information. It'd be interesting ot have all your personal data and stuff in one place, and being able to index-search your gradeschool papers might be fun for an afternoon... but what about when I'm trying to remember what that girl smelled like or how I felt when...
This seems akin to the article about President Bush wanting the Army to use Windows XP so we could have flying soldiers. Plus, as it's been mentioned before in this thread, isn't the Dept. of Homeland Security alread doing this for us? Should these DVDs be available as a tax-benefit? I'm in the military, does this mean that mine will be classified?
"He's more machine now than man, twisted and evil."
They also want to make it easier for Echelon to find this information. They have satallite dvd readers and recorders. Your data goes up and it comes down into their collossal database.
Analytic & algebraic topology of locally Euclidean meterization of infinitely differentiable Riemmanian manifold
OK, so they have some database, that can store various files and you can search it - AFTER you tag it.
And that's the problem: adding meaningful comments to all the little tidbits.
I have bought a digicam a little more than a year ago: I have taken approx 2000 pictures since that. I could put together some little scripts that search the JPEG's EXIF tags for comments but I can not be bothered to type it in. No way, that's not something I want to do. Easing/automatating this process is the thing that should be addressed (which is, I do realise, is far from trivial), but it's not dealt with.
Then I have all the emails I have ever sent or received (minus SPAM). Grepping it is something that is useful but it can be frustrating to remembering the exact words, then realizing that a synonym was used or there was a typo: so there is also space for improvement, but this project does not seems to address this problem.
So, to have the obligatory SP reference, this project seems to be supposed work like this:
1. Throw all the stuff you have into a database
2. ???
3. Have your whole life easily searchable
Real life is overrated.
I mean, I've been doing this for years, on CD's though. It's called incremental backups, and I do one every few months. All my recent documents, pics, etc, go to CD (now DVD-R since I got a burner). The nice thing is, I keep what I only keep what I need, or what I know is "clean". I wonder how bad it would be if some nasty letter you wrote but never sent gets archived. What happens later if someone gets a hold of your "memories" and other data?
For reference I have most of my college career backed up on CD. I can go back and read class papers and read up on all the other stupid stuff I did over the years. As of now I already plan to sort through all those CD's and condense them all down to DVD. So, why is this software useful to those of us who already make use of such methods?
Sometimes I doubt your commitment to Sparkle Motion.
Uh oh...is Microsoft going to make it stop working every few years unless I upgrade to 'New! Brain 95!'. And what about hackers? I don't want brain hackers...
War with East Asia
New bootlaces
War with East Asia
Rations down 3%
War with Eurasia
War with Eurasia
Rations up 1.2%
We have always been at war with...wait, no we haven't...
It's 10 PM. Do you know if you're un-American?
CRC error - Press any key to continue. Partition table damaged.
Ligaguinggligagiggagoogoogwillgo
Based on what I understood from the article they seem to think you could record someone's life by just recording everything he outputs or sees. Then, consider hundred million people who experience exactly similar events in their life and accidentally happen to output also the same content. Is their life similar? Not in my opinion. To my map someones life you should also be able to for example know what he/she feels like, etc and that may not be reflected in the output - atleast not in a form understandable for anyone else but the person him/herself. Stupid title.
M$ and personal info = BAAAAD!
it should be M$ and deceitful.
They couldn't have gone for the mega-pun and called it MyLifeMegabytes? Really, consider the people who'll actually go for this shite...
M$ developing a way to keep all our memories into storable media. Given M$ recent invasions in privacy and end-user rights, I would never store my memories, especially my more illegal ones, on their products.
Scruff McGruff sez --- "Help me take a bite out of M$ crime"
I think it would be a lot cooler, albeit impractical with current technology, to actually record *everything*, i.e. everything you see, everything you hear, etc, from when you're born. You'd need a huge ammount of storage though:
Quick approximate calculations just for recording what you see at PAL resolution (720x576@25fps):
1 frame of PAL = 1.2MB
25 x 1.2MB = 30MB = 1 second
30MB x 60 = 1.8GB = 1 minute
1.8GB x 60 = 108GB = 1 hour
108GB x 24 = 2.6TB = 1 day
2.6TB x 7 = 18.2TB = 1 week
18.2TB x 4 = 72.8TB = 1 month
72TB x 12 = 873.6TB = 1 year
873.6TB x 70 = 61,152 Terrabytes (61.2 Petabytes)
Damn, that's a lot of storage!
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Moderator's essentials
Well, at least slashdot will keep a record of it!
will it also record me buying his DVD? ... KZZZT
and if I view it will I see a picture of me viewing a picture of me viewing a picture of me viewing a picture of me
Stack Overflow.
you think a goat wouldn't chew a few CDs? think again.. and it doesn't have to digest em, either. a few tooth-holes will kill a CD just as fast as goat-slobber will kill a book.
in fact, a goat could do more damage to your hypothetical archive by busting only one CD, than it could do by gorging itself on a dozen books. or even two dozen.
but one also has to wonder why you'd be storing your data near a goat to begin with =)
They will have access to an infinite(if they keep me alive forever) source of porno movies. Petabytes and Petabytes of porn. To pay for my survival, they could always connect me to the internet and sell what I think.
Now some punk from Microsoft is trying to suggest that some windowsified version of iPhoto is better for my own interpretation of my past?
My polite indignation knows no bounds.
***Foucault is watching you..***
"You are what you do. A man is defined by his actions, not his memory."
Or perhaps this quote is more familiar
"Sorry, Doug. Your whole life was just a dream"
Taken, of course, from Total Recall.
So rise up, all ye lost ones, as one, we'll claw the clouds.
I will _never_ allow MS to fiddle around with _MY_ bits...
The best weapon of a dictatorship is secrecy, but the best weapon of a democracy should be the weapon of openness.
after seeing what goats can do to *any* media, i shudder at the thought of data on cds around goats instead of in books. at least with books you'll have more of a chance to rescue the media before the goats destroy it beyond recovery.
Factoid could remember every place that you went, every person you saw, where you put your car keys... This could hit hard storage for you. Never again would your recall of "what was a I doing on that day?" or "have I ever met this person before?" be an issue.
People with broadband connections would be able to go to the RateMyLife website, and on a scoring of 1-10 rank how a person's life is compared with others. Remember size of life entry does not imply boring. I could see how a short life entry could be very exciting - especially if it involved amateur rocketry and animal husbandry (don't go visual).
Others which are longer could be even more pathetic than mine: Day 1 - got up, didn't kill self in shower, went to work, came home, watched mindless thrumb, passed out. Day 2... Day N (last entry) - going to take up high-endurance running after a sedentary lifestyle of reading slashdot, watching friends on my DVD player, and eating Ding-Dongs...
I stick to walls...
That sounds like I nightmare you could never recover from. Sorry, our software munged your database, just upgrade to the latest version for $499 and you can have your life back. I do this already with gallery. It doesn't keep the documents, but if there is text worth keeping (like an email announcing the birth of my new nephews), I paste it in the description. Its searchable, sharable, open source, and it just plain ROCKS. Luckily my wife is a photojournalist and everything I do gets documented with photos.
Does Slashdot have to post something about every oddball story that involves technology, no matter how far-fetched it is? No shit, this website is turning into Popular Science.
One problem with this might be the amount of time that the media will store the data without error. This seems to reduce as the density of the media increases. We can still read stuff the Greeks carved into stone, but the lifetime for data on a RWCD is probably 10years (according to the manufactures). If the density increases even further (as they are speculating) the lifetime could drop even further. Not much good if I can't look up what happened 5 years ago.
Sig (appended to the end of comments you post, 120 chars)
...but in your case I'll make a file deletion"
-- Groucho Marx, circa 2120.
I backed up my life on a perishable dvd. Damn you Atlantic, Damn you all to hell!!!
The Right Reverend K. Reid Wightman,
That means I can remember every pr0n movie on one disk! That will save me tons of HD space!
Oh, 30 seconds, but I want it now! - Homer Jay Simpson
--Should work--
Just think of all the amateur porn that will be available!
Remember, You are unique...just like everyone else.
While analysing the pacing of internal-monologs in Joyce's Ulysses, I calculated that 70 years of transcribed thoughts should fit in 37 gigabytes.
Microsoft only needs to stop and see it's life passing before its very eyes. Now that'll be a show worth watching. Especially those early 80's hairdo's
It all smells of target marketing to me, call me a cynic if u like. Build a complete profile of your consumer, then sell it to the corporate marketing dweebs for a "tailored solution".
This may seem rather old-fashioned, but doesn't it seem kind of dehumanizing to transfer all of our lives onto electronic records. Memories, being the foggy and phantasmic things that they are, have a special mysterious quality which is wonderful. Think about it.....ever smell a hint of perfume on the air and feel a tiny rush of emotion as your mind pulls you back to the feelings of an evening walking with a girl who you felt stringly for? Maybe you can't recall which evening or the particulars. But you have the feelings yet. There's a mystery in the way this all works. And something you simply cannot replace with a electronic record. Especially one labeled MyLife (Copyright Microsoft) ;-p
Cuthalion
How long before Bush is pushing for some law that requires the gov't to be given a copy of every one of those made?
This has been a test. Had this been a real emergency, we would have fled in terror and you would not have been informed.
There is a very good reason why we forget things. How on earth are we supposed to live a normal life whilst being forever remined of our greatest gaffs?
Amnesia and repression are two of the most usefull tactics that humans have ever come up with.
Why don't we just let microsoft implant our memories as well. Why bother going through all that life stuff, just download it to your brain from the M$ website, everyone gets all fluffy about Bill Gates, who then goes on to rule the world and starts handing out Soma to his faithful subjects.
Gee that's what I thought my Wife did, ;)
she never lets me forget ANYTHING
Everyone talks of a court subpoena as though this device would only serve to incriminate one. Could it not also hold evidence to exonerate one? Furthermore, if I can photoshop A's head onto B's body and such, whats to say these memories are genuine. According to this article you only need someone, say CowboyNeal for example, to testify that, "Oh yea your honor, thats a real cat man. Big huh?" and it's admissable. Given the gigs of fake britney nudes on an average geeks hardrive I don't think lawyers would be so quick to assume the validity of a slashdotters personal digital "history".
First of all, this seems like a multimedia digital diary. Neat idea, but how many people actually keep a diary or journal and keep it up to date? Next, the article makes it sound simple when they talk about recording your "every memory and experience" as if you just plug into something like in the movie "Brainstorm". How do they accomplish this one? If this technology existed I am sure we would have heard something about it (at least here on /.)!
Well, can they?
"Engineers are working on software to load every photo you take, every letter you write - in fact your every memory and experience - into a surrogate brain that never forgets anything"
So what, they're writing DVD burning softwatre? Really, how is this something that I coudn't just do myself? Seems to me they are just gonna slap all your personal files together on one disc and call it your life.
Everyone is entitled to their own opinion. It's just that yours is stupid.
Acces Denied, to view your live Insert Coin..
if I'm silent while driving, I'm not sulking (I'm concentrating on driving)
Sounds familiar. My girlfriend insists on having conversations in the car while I'm driving. That is terribly distracting.
Even worse are the "alarm signals". Ever had someone sitting next to you yell "STOP!" or "WATCH OUT!"? It gets to you. (Most of the time, there's no danger at all. And when there is something really dangerous, I saw it and I don't need someone to scream about it.)
I'm looking forward to the day she has her driver's licence, then I can let her drive and feel for herself how difficult it is. (My mother has the same kind of reactions, and her husband always lets her drive.)
WWTTD?
"I'm sorry, but access to your life record has been suspended. Your yearly subscription to Micro$oft has not been paid. Have a nice day"
But, but, you can't lock me out of my life!!!
"I'm sorry Dave, I 'can' do that"
That's what Pointdexter's about to discover. These guy too. That my brain can store a 100 terabytes of data is almost immaterial if its all undifferentiated.
Running a Google search engine on an ever growing mass of data data is not enough.
The data has to be corelated. The engine has to understand, (read that word again, understand, an AI problem,) what its looking at and the appropriate level of granularity to use when parsing the data when extracting the memes it contains.
Our computers are damn near deaf, dumb, blind and stupider than cockroackes and we're having systemic, Korzibskian semantic anomalies and pattern recognition failures as it is.
I'd be happy when one has the information processing capacity of an annoying Pomeranian. It'll be about as useful too but I'd be happy.
MSBPodcast.com The opinions expressed here are my own. If you don't like 'em... Think up your own stuff.
sorry, i don't have the homework assignment because last night my life crashed...
...I have 5 freeken' servers to backup and now you want me to backup my brain as well. And of course I've got to test the backups, so now I've got to find time to go get a lobotomy so I can reload from backup.
Slashdot, home of supporters of free software, free music, and free speech.Except for Moderators that disagree with you.
I think this may be just a ploy to sell us larger hard drives.
There are three fundamental requirements for this to work:
- Capture
- Storage
- Retrieval
Assuming we store all the things mentioned in the article, the storage requirement really becomes indexing.MIT's media lab have been working on a retrieval system called The Remembrance Agent. At version 2.11, it's pretty mature. I guess you'd have to call it a prototype since it works by watching what you do in emacs or xemacs and suggesting related documents. The Remembrance Agent is GPL'd, BTW.
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
I could use one of those. Never lose anything you saw on the net.
But, imagine getting a scratch on this. If you think it sucks when your favorite CD skips, or your LotR jumps because of a scratch; think about what happens when your memory skips.
On second thought, it'd be like getting drunk and forgetting what happened, only much cheaper! Bring on the memory DVD!
Overrated / Underrated : Moderation
Books don't forget, but they don't record everything. Our experiences and knowledge are condensed and filtered before they are written down. Old books which have become irrelevant are thrown away, only important books are kept for hundreds or thousands of years. Books mimic life itself: In a sense, life is all about selecting and forgetting. There are people who can't throw anything away - a socially isolating disorder. These people are called "messies" and a never-forgetting all-recording computer could be seen as the digital equivalent.
A system like MyLifeBits was first suggested in 1945, when presidential technology adviser Vannevar Bush hatched the then farsighted idea of an infinite personal archive based on the emerging digital computer.
Hmmm, sounds like the Farleyfile.
(copied from Jerry Pournelle's page): Big Jim Farley was a New York Tammany Hall politician whose success was partly due to the "Farleyfile": a collection of facts about everyone he ever met. If you went to see Big Jim, by the time you got into his office he knew your name, your birthday, the names of your spouse and children, and what you liked for lunch. It was all on file.
Also, there's a program (Lifesigns?) that's based around a chronological history of data (there's a PC version, and there was a Newton version). You don't go searching for "Letter about Enron", you remember that it was 7 or 8 months ago, and look at email then. Clever premise, loved by all the people who adopted it. Never could get the hang of it myself.
"Sometimes a woman is a kind of religion, she can save your soul & set you free from all your sins" - Bad Examples
the perfect recipe for insanity.
They're called "books". And unless you burn them, they generally have a 0% failure rate.
Did you write this post to slashdot on a book or a computer?
Understand?
"And like that
Before you die, you have to worry about all the bad things you did in your life. Now I can look at my backup and ask for forgivness on everything bad. :-)
I hope they don't forget to add my spank bank memories!
When all else fails, piss on it. At least you will feel better in some kind of way.
I'm just wondering how they are working on a system to archive memories and experiences when the neurobiologists still only have inklings as to how and where the very, very simplest things are learned (I'm talking classical conditioning learning), and have NO idea how or where things like memories (as most of us know them) are stored.
But I guess technology must be moving faster than the underlying science.
Wasn't British Telecom working on a similar project a few years ago, with the help of their "futurologist" Ian Pearson? They were working on downloading the contents of a human brain to a digital data storage medium as a backup system... It might sound mad, but if you search around with Google and find his 1997 Predictive Calendar, you'll see he's got quite a few things right in the past 5 years...
def nostalgize(node):
if is_old(node):
foreach assoc in node.associations():
if is_negative(assoc):
node.del_association(assoc)
--
bachiatari na torisetsu o yome!
"Users will eventually be able to keep every document they read, every picture they view, all the audio they hear and a good portion of what they see," says Gemmell.
imagine the hay-day that various companies would have with people storing everything they see. "i'm sorry you'll have to delete your life from age 11 through 12 because you don't have access to the copyright to that TV show. oh, and bill gates would like to confiscate every memory of any Ansel Adams picture you've ever seen.... thanks you can deposit those memories in the trash can as you leave...."
There is NO WAY that you could EVER store your life into a database. The DHS (department of homeland security) idea of doing this for everyone is obviously just a big joke.
.
.
It would require such huge databases just to store one person's life. .
and to do it on a single DVD is just rediculous.
Someone is going to sell a lot of storage equipment. People will get rich. But the idea will not work.
If you think you should save your life on a DVD you don't have a life (mixed methaphors).
I have boxes of tapes from the past that are practice sessions of me on the quitar. They will not fit on a single DVD. I have software that will generate animated sequences of bitmaps based upon complex mathematics (liquid fractals). The problem is that when I run it it very quickly fills up my harddrive. SO. .
With a DVD I could get, maybe, a few hours of this at 30 frames a second. So how could it all be stored if I run it all day everyday on my LINUX box and throw away the frames. IT CAN'T BE.
If anyone feels paranoid about the DHS plans, then get over it. It is more about laundering tax money into storage vendors pockets before the level-heads in congress realize that the whole idea is one big stack overrun. They will get a couple billion out of the treasury before the concept gets shot down.
Seriously, the essence of your life on a DVD!
What a joke.
I'm watching you watching me. . . IT is one big hall of mirrors.
Quick, let us get a close up of the hair as it falls to the floor during his haircut when he was three years old. . . It might be a SECRET MESSAGE to Al Qaida.
Security comes in many forms. None of them have to do with over-bearing paranoia. Over-bearing paranoia is INSECURITY as ACTION.
Well, if you store video, you'll run out of space real soon.
I'm not impressed until they get it to run on one of these. I'll call it...mini me...
My wife! She forgets NOTHING!
While this seems like a great(?) thing for packrats like myself who can't bear to throw anything away, my question is how is all this information going to be digitized?
Right now in my closet I have 2 boxes of photos and another 10 loaded down with papers? So now I would have to spend a few months of free time endlessly scanning in all this junk? It just seems easier to sort through all the stuff.
Personally I would rather see a software package with decent OCR, is smart enough to realign pages that are tilted, and can automatically take the text and categorize it. Just my 10b cents...
Romeo & Juliet for 1337 hax0rz! http://www.redcoat.net/pics/romjul.swf
Understand?
I don't. What are you trying to say here? The article is about a database that Microsoft engineers are working on in which they hope to store all of life's experience. As the previous poster pointed out, books, admittedly in a more limited form, already perform that function.
Did you write your post using a database? I doubt it. So, if you're going to try making some sort of comparison between books and databases as storage media, at least do it properly.
There's a big difference between a database and the computer used to access it, in much the same way as there's a difference between the substance of a book and the paper that it's written on. Yes, you can also use a computer to post to slashdot, but paper has other uses too.
To recap, what was the point you were trying to make? It's not exactly obvious.
There was an article here a few years ago about a BT researcher who estimated you'd need 15 petabytes to store your life's experiences. For some reason I can't figure out how to get the search engine to show me anything older than a year... maybe somebody can find a link to it.
My God, it's Full of Source!
OUTSIDE_IP=$(dig +short my.ip @outsideip.net)
The writeup makes you think they are sucking memories out of the brain and capturing them to disk. Simply not true. There is nothing at all revolutionary about what they are doing. They are basically designing a sort of journal or ultimate blog. Non-computer related experiences must be fed in and probably commented on (photos, etc). Some computer experiences may be captured automatically (this wasn't very clear, the article was more hype than substance), but nothing too difficult. The 'revolutionary' part they are claiming is the organization and search engine, and maybe some of the computer-auto-capture stuff (again, I can't tell if this is a claim or just an example..). This is not worthy of a Slashdot story, its just another blog...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us: experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing of events and simply forget stuff.
Yes. Now Microsoft can make us 'remember' things as they 'really' are. Remember that trial that we THOUGHT was against Microsoft for monopolistic practices? Well, it was ACTUALLY against Linux for being commie bastards. See how our memories decieved us?
Oh. And your brain is now covered by the DMCA and digital rights management. Don't try to remember anything without paying for it first.
'These people we're stealing the music, replaying it in their MINDS! Clearly, this theft must be stopped so I...I mean artists...can get the money they deserve. See, these people have in their back-up brain. Artists need compensation.' - RIAA, coming soon!
This is so weird. Last night I checked out Lifestreams by David Gelernter. This is it! They may not be using his OS, but it is the same idea.
The best write up that I found on Lifestreams was an old Wired story. After a few pages his points started making sense. To make it work, you would need to draw a line between your public and private life. No one really wants a complete record of their private life, agreed? But having an accurate record of your public life, contracts, and work submitted in a form that all parties and an arbitrator could recognize and trust would be useful.
Similarly, this makes sense for chronicling projects, particularly highly sensitive projects. Do must of your work informally. Then, when you know what you're doing, go into record mode and do the job for real and for posterity.
This a eastern philosophical concept that every action and thought of a sentient creature is recorded (where?). This record is then used for karmic "justice" in future lives. This idea is not unlike Christian Judgement Day where your entire history is replayed instantly in God's mind when he decides to admit you heaven or condemn you hell. A talented psychic can supposed "read" the akashic record.
An variation of the "akashic record" is that "time" is an illusion of material reality. In an alternative reality all events are simultaneous. Therefore all events relating to soul's incarnations are operating together. This hypothesis bypasses the issue what is the cosmic "recording media". Interestingly, some western physicists don't believe in the independent existance of "time" too.
Got to love how the articles says:
'...says Gordon Bell, one of the developers.'
He has quite a history: http://research.microsoft.com/~gbell/bio.htm
Bell believes that for some people, especially those with memory problems, MyLifeBits will become a surrogate memory that is able to recall past experiences in a way not possible with the familiar but disparate records like photo albums and scrapbooks. "You'll begin to rely on it more and more," he believes.
Ok, Now everybody is going to forget everything. why should I remember when and how something important happened if I can see it in this private google again. And then somebody clever enough will change something and you gonna believe, cause you rely on this device more and more...
Not ? People already dont know how to multiply / divide large numbers in head. Cause everybody can use calculator.
If that dude in "Memento" had something like this then... er.... it would have been really helpful, but the film would have sucked because he would have always known what was going on.
graspee
Why do so many people spend so much more time documenting their life than living it? Your memory will always be much more vivid (or at least emotionally charged) than anything recorded. You are going to slowly forget things, so just go do more things.
While I have no life to speak of, I have done some "really cool things" on occasion. I have a roll or two of film to cover them. Compare to my mother or sister, who come back from a weekend in Bakersfield with 5 rolls. Nobody wants to see your vacation photos, why would anyone want to see your life? I missed my sister's wedding because I was looking through a video camera instead of my eyes (I agreed to video it, so I can't really complain.)
The only people who would want this are those that keep every email and fast food receipt they ever got because they're just that anal. They need to lighten up anyway.
where you left someone else's Stradivarius
The description "surrogate brain that never forgets anything" strikes me as overblown. It's more a big personal library. It's not remembering anything, just storing and retrieving information in response to human input. Of course, I'm sure that the hyperbole isn't hurting news coverage of this project -- and probably helped the story make it into /.
It's Rudy Rucker's Lifebox! See "Saucer Wisdom" for Rucker's prediction-- people backing up their brain stuff on a box similar to this.
yes a very "profound" "comment" this one. because "books" can automatically make "records" of all the communications i ever make in "text", "audio" and "video" format. and my entire collection of "books" are easily "queried" and "searchable".
Will really busy people get a two-disc collectors' edition, possibly with commentary from their mother and ex-significant others?
"Understand you're having a little Jimmy Page trouble."
anyone think of the rom construct in the gibson story when they read this?
However,
If a book gets scratched, ripped, written on, dirty, etc. You can still read it. Good luck doing that on an optical media without losing data.
Many of the problems with books are solved by microfiche. Storage space dwindles, and the medium is no longer paper.
THIS IS MY RIFLE. There are many like it but this one is mine.
My rifle is my best friend.
It is my life.
I must master it as I master my life.
My rifle, without me is useless.
Without my rifle, I am useless.
I must fire my rifle true.
I must shoot straighter than any enemy who is trying to kill me.
I must shoot him before he shoots me.
I will....
My rifle and myself know that what counts in this war is not the rounds we fire, the noise of or burst, nor the smoke we make.
We know that it is the hits that count.
We will hit....
My rifle is human, even as I, because it is my life.
Thus, I will learn it as a brother.
I will learn its weakness, its strength, its parts, its accessories, its sights and its barrel.
I will keep my rifle clean and ready, even as I am clean and ready.
We will become part of each other.
We will...
Before God I swear this creed.
My rifle and myself are the defenders of my country.
We are the masters of our enemy. We are the saviors of my life.
So be it, until victory is America's and there is no enemy, but Peace.
I have the DVD that has a Fungus on it. The fungus grows in between the plastic. It's real.
The most reliable of entities, the PC!?
(begin sarcasm)
Well, as long as the app doesn't fault, and the disc doesn't EVER get damaged, I should be fine. Wait, what was I saying? Hang on, I have to load disc 2.
(end sarcasm)
There's +s and -s for recording my life, but what I want is editing power. I'd like to forget the stupid comments I made in meetings. I'd like to forget that 1800 number from an ad in the 1980s! Most of all I'd like to delete/edit out all the negative comments in my life.
Of course the possible abuses of this kind of tech are too numberous to mention. Why would we need prisons if we could edit the criminal mind?
"Only one thing, is impossible for god: to find any sense in any copyright law on the planet." Mark Twain
Hah.. remeber Laserdisks? they were supposed to last
over 50 years too.. I've got an Indiana Jones LaserDisk that also has THE FUNGUS!
You should search th internet, this fungus is real.
A DVD will not last for 50 years.. If there's scratches on the top of the DVD, it will not read.
I've repaired DVDs and CDROMS with scratches on the
top by applying white tape to the top of the disk.
I live in New England. And in New England it does get humid and damp. I don't have any fungus or anything like that growing in my house, but I can tell you CDs and DVDs do not last for ever, every now and then you get a disk that's prone to rot.
"That was close honey, that chick's butt looks just like yours."
At least generally I can tell which one is her, by the three orbiting satellites.. (children)
"I can't give you a brain, so I'll give you a diploma" - The Great Oz (blatently stolen sig)
It is part of a curious venture dubbed the MyLifeBits project, in which engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab in San Francisco ....
:)
and...
The motivation? Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us: experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing of events and simply forget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC.
Since when was a Microsoft product more reliable than a human mind? I have an uptime of 21 years, 11 months, 21 days, and counting. Not a single blue screen
no comment
Hopefully the interface to this will be kept private, or someone will write a Brain Googlism program. I can see it now..
My boss is an insensitive clod.
My wife is a skanky nagging whore.
My secretery is not.
Josh Woodward
This sounds kinda familiar...
Ascalante: Your bride is over 3,000 years old.
Kull: She told me she was 19!
...well except for the photos.
It's called a 'Newton'
Cake or Death? Cake Please!
I take it that the middle of the dvd will be "now" and the chapter after that will be "soon"
So if I skip to the "soon" chapter, will I find out what's going to be on my solid states final?
Is anyone else thinking, "Some day, users will be *unable to avoid* backing up every photo, conversation, etc."
t 4N0th3RC0GinD4mAch1N3
Yeah, I think that makes it official. Bill wants to [Brain]take over the world[/Brain], including every soul in it. Imagine being handed a certificate at the hospital, "Thank you for expanding our Microsoft Global Community by the birth of your child. Your child has been registered will all appropriate authorities, and every moment of his/her life, from the pre-birth registration to the present, will be securely available at http://people.microsoft.com/mylife?sid=Ag49xURju5
Try my nuts to your fist style!
I was saving my memories on the PC. And it was like, "bleepbleepbleepbleepbleep", and like HALF
of my memories were gone. And I was like, "...unh?"
They were really good memories.
And I thought it was Al Gore who took credit for it!
But you will need a second drive because M$ Windows XXX-P will certainly fill the first one.
She did a sequence of short stories (not too many) focusing on a group of sysadmins in training to admin huge data banks of a central computer, where everyone, regardless of age, class, etc., could access the computer and keep diaries, notes, etc. It's been a couple of decades since I read them, but as I remember much of the stories focused on ethical responsibilities of the admins similar to lawyer-client confidentiality or the sanctity of the confessional.
I'm kindof a digital freak (I've scanned all of my photos and I'm making DVDs out of my home movies, etc.) but this is just wrong. What exactly do you have to show for your life when you spent most of it scanning, editing, and OCRing your life to put on this DVD? I know at least a few people who would rather live life than remember it though a computer.
And I think you all remember when Microsoft said you would get more control over personal information if you gave it all to them...
This is an academic excersise in memory systems. Useful in improving databasing technology, but not practical to use. Even for those that would want to use it... Beware. It's like bolting the front door and leaving the back door open. If anyone gets access to the DB, anything you put in there is wide open.
I have not seen a DVD with more that 4 hours of video yet. I live at least 24 hours per day.
I dont know what they are talking about, but they will never come close to the storage capacity of THE BRAIN.
I can almost hear God laughing.
Ah, but the real question with this is... when looking back on the disc of one of your relatives, will it use a blue screen to signify their death?
One floppy should be enough for everybody.
-- Cheers!
... until we are all REQUIRED by law to use this system, and regularly submit our updates to the Office of Homeland Security.
No problem, right? Surely you have nothing to hide?
"Do you remember the Americans,
where did they go"
- Steve
Ah yes, the pathological skeptic spices up yet another discussion.
In other news, man does the guy next to smell. Fucking bastard.
Google Returned no results.
If even Google couldn't find them, I'm REALLY SCREWED.
Yo Grark
- Canadian Bred with American Buttering
From what I remember some older guy had his whole "being" put in a computer and the hero of the book/movie carried him around with him. The computer was pretty depressed all the time because it was stuck between alive and dead. I'm thinking either William Gibson, Phil K. Dick, or perhaps even Neil Stephenson.
Hollow words will burn and hollow men will burn.
use the DMCA to per^H^Hrosecute the living daylights out of anyone who accesses it without your authorization
That won't stop law enforcement. From 17 USC 1201:
Will I retire or break 10K?
This idea reminded me of the sci-fi detective novel "Gun with Occational Music" by Jonathan Lethem which is set in a time when everyone regulates their emotions as well as their memory through specifically designed drugs such as "forgettol and acceptol." In order to remember the important aspects of their mental lives that they are continuously erasing through drug use everyone carries around personal memory units much like this stupid device which they query for answers to question like "who is this guy right in front of me? Do I like him?"
I say let memory fail; it's half the fun of reality anyway.
If we apply a good zip program maybe we can put all the dat on a little floppy disk. Cheaper and more green friend. :-)
------I can please only one person per day. Today is not your day. Tomorrow isn't looking good either.------
The motivation? Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us: experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing of events and simply forget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC.
Yes, it's called BEING HUMAN. Through the years, pain fades from memory, the irritating things that lost loved ones did are forgotten, fun times seem more fun than they really were, memory of past loves becomes mellow and sweet, most of us geeks almost totally forget high school, etc.
So how is this bad? We want to remember every idiotic thing that ever happened to us WHY?
I want to do this about as much as I want to live forever. It sounds to me like the work of a group of people obsessed with mortality.
And I shall remember these words exactly for the rest of my life
you can already backup a lot of your life to DVD, provided you have a camcorder of course, I mean, I've seen the ads for these new dvd-recorders. They are for backing up your home-movies taken with your camcorder, so that you dont have to lug around a whole bunch of tapes everywhere you need to go... and if that's too complicated, there are even some cameras that record direct to DVD.
But, e-mail to DVD? I can see it now... people will have stacks of DVDs labeled "SPAM". This is just ridiculous.
Putting some representation of your whole life online,or just storing it electronically, seems like a cool idea to me, if it gives meaning to your life. That's the critical issue: Does having your old credit card transactions, emails, love letters and photos give you a life enhancing perspective on your self or your life? I think it could.
Privacy is greatly over-rated as a virtue. It is, really, a very olde fashioned sort of notion.
In my experience, people value privacy because they feel threatened... by the government, by individuals. But why treat the threats as immutable, and conform our attitudes toward information to THEM? Why not reverse that, and address the existing dangers to the individual that occur when we have less privacy, as we inevitably will.
The era in which privacy was possible is over. We need to focus on reducing the harms that come from living in a world in which information about everyone is freely available. Denying oneself information about one's own past (or denying that information to others) is still ultimately about impoverishing the information stock and knowledge of the world. Information destruction can't be a good thing.
We should be working to enhance the available information about everything and everyone. This is a path to greater social justice, to the advancement of scientific knowledge, and so on.
As you can see, I live what I speak: http://www.documentedlife.com
Has anyone done studies on the capacity of the brain in terms of digital storage? Is it even possible?
I'm no specialist in the area, but it seems like the brain uses some funky compression and associative data structures. It's awefully good at recognizing patterns and searching for data based on association, but isn't really good at storing certain types of data (which is why witnesses to crimes are so darn unreliable).
Storing letters and pictures is one thing, but memory? I'm skeptical on this one.
---
Open Source Shirts
..as it failed to be recognized as an original work, so you can't copyright it and DMCA don't ally ;)
Kjella
Live today, because you never know what tomorrow brings
Well - I dont spend to much time around goats, however here on slashdot you may be frequently exposed to goatse.cx - in which case I want to keep my brain, dvd or otherwise, as shielded as possible.
excerpt:
It's paramount to silly.
...
"The motivation? Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us: experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing of events and simply forget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC."
Yes, let's junk our minds and rely on computers instead! After all, we all know that computers are exactly like human brains only better! Haha, I will now power up and defeat you with my powerfull... hands!..
I have no idea why I just said that.
Likewise, I have no idea why this is inovative or impressive. People have been doing this for years.. with photos, diarys, letters and such. This, much as the artical says, is just a large database.
And frankly, I completely disagree with their premiss that having such accurate data on our past will give us a more true picture of what we were. We can only see the world through our own eyes, even if we have a perfect time line of what we *did* it still isn't likey to change how we'll think about our actions. We're still tainted by our own predjuices and momentary feelings and everything else, that relationship one had a year ago is still going to seem like a silly thing, and we're still going to say "oh, I wasn't really in love with her" even if we can see exactly what we did...
Besides, for the important things (well, what I consider important anyways, I'm sure as hell not going to suggest any of you need believe what I do) there's somthing to be said for just a memory. Sometimes a remembered smile between friends during a metor shower is more special than a video tape of the whole night.
Interesting that you brought this up.
I was talking to this guy who was a highway patrol officer - and had been one since the early sixties.
He was telling me about our records - and how they are "cleared" after a certain amount of time. Some things go away after you meet court stipulations, others after 3 years, others 7 & 10.
But that regardless of any "clearing" everything about you is permanently held in a NCIC (National Crime Information Center) Database. And this thing holds a ton of info on you. I was asking about acessing your own personal records. He said "No Way. This data is *only* available to federal law enforcment. There is no way for the public to get their records."
I think this is BS. I think that there must be some way you should be able to get to these records to ensure 1) they are correct 2) they dont contain data that isn't pertinent to actual law enforcment....
anyway - if anyone knows how to get this info (like can you hire a PI to get it for you?) let me know.
Slashdot postings passing by my eyes! Who wouldn't want to back that up in a video format?
You only have to pay $500,000 to sequence it...
"I've often wondered what it would take to condense the essence of my life and put it in a searchable format..."
Why?
Sheesh. I thought it was our last DEMOCRATIC candidate that invented the internet... now it turns out that it was a Bush.
Karma: NaN
Thought so too (regarding your last point) - although this sounds kind of cool, it'd probably be a disaster. Forgetting is incredibly important, obviously, and while diaries can be interesting, a full record doesn't seem too desirable. There actually was an article about forgetting in New Scientist a couple of months ago - but guess what, I can't remember any details.
i) human memory is not a fixed capacity. it varies with how much you make use of it.
ii) also, there is a QUALITATIVE difference between events AS WE HAVE EXPERIENCED THEM, and as they are recorded on a videostream. the *experience* you recall when someone snapped a photo of you (it was hot, and uncomfortable), is not the thing that is recorded in the photograph. the external image and the inner experience are qualitatively different - one is full of MEANING, and one is a DIGITIZATION - so no database of this type could really be a replacement for the type of experiential memories that we inherently contain.
iii) memory is like a muscle - the more you force yourself to remember all the stuff, the better your memory gets - and the more you rely on exeternal gadgets to 'remember' stuff for you - the more your inherent memory power Atrophies.
so if you want to have a bad memory - rely on external devices to remember things FOR YOU - you'll end up dependent on them, because you will have given-up your inherent abilities to do so. than you will be royally screwed if your external device gets the screen of death - you won't even know what you lost!
cheers!!
john
Besides, who needs moments of quiet introspection when we can just use grep to find the patterns in our life?
Rober Sawyer's Hominids has an interesting exploration of the impact automatic searchable 'memory' might have on a society. The Neanderthal society calls these 'alibi archives' -- everyone is implanted at birth with an AI helper that, among other things, records all their conversations, activities, etc. to a cube in a centralized storage area, where they are available to the individual concerned and to judicial review after a subpoena-like process. I'm not commenting on the technology involved in this, but it is interesting to explore a society where such a thing has been implemented in at least one possible way. Not that I'd necessarily want to live there, mind ...
I think they're being overly pessimistic here. A 250GB drive is already $300. Expecting only a 4x increase in GB/$ in 5 years is certainly pessimistic. I'd expect it in 2 years, max.
I don't even own a DVD-R drive yet (Santa's coming though) and already it's looking small.
Anyone else feel a bit unnerved that Microsoft is the one doing the research behind this?
Holy customer database, Batman! Apparently a bug is already out, where a compromised Microsoft signed Active-X control would be able to re-write your memories... oh wait. Wrong thread.
Hello, My name is Dixie Flatline...
Spot on. Why is no one discussing the social aspects of things like this? Everything you have ever done/said/had done to you, catalogued and searchable. Sorry but that is more terrifying than inspiring.
But the annoying parts are the security considerations. Obviously, I don't want anyone but myself to access it. And requiring huge storage, and being to important to lose, it would need to stay somewhere safe (probably in a fire-proof cabinet at home, or at some other secure location).
To communicate with it, I would need encryption. Not such a big deal, it could be a really secure private key system, and you could carry around a personal encryption device to communicate with it. The encryption device would need some way to authenticate me as a user (a fingerprint scanner combined with a password would probably do the trick).
The carry-around gadget would need some really nifty acquisition devices. Ideally, those would be whatever you sense, but that is probably too hard. So the device I carry with me would need a high-definition camera and audio recorder. Ideally, it should record at all times, but I would be willing to accept something that would only record when I told it to. And it must be small enough and invisible enough to not bother me (or other people I communicate with) It should also be possible to plug it into any computer system I use. And it would need some decent amount of temporary storage (for at least a week), since it can't possibly be connected to the real storage at all times.
The carry-around device would also need a way to show me the data it stores. Since any information there is potentially sensitive, I should not be forced to show even fragments of them unencrypted on the computer system I happen to use, unless that is what I want. So I should be able to browse the memory-bank in fully encrypted mode, and extract only the pieces I need.
For searching to be effective, it would need at least rudimentary voice-recognition and OCR capabilities (it doesn't need to be perfect, but good enough for searching to be possible). Simply going through days of video to find what I want wouldn't be much fun.
Ideally, such a device should also be tamper-free (again, some type of encryption is needed, but this time to protect it from it's owner). That means that one could extract bits from it and use it in the court as valid evidence. Of course, such evidence must be provided by the owner (if the courts could order it, nobody would want such a device). But it would be really useful to be able to show live video of the guy mugging you.
I'm sure you could build something much less ambitious that would still be useful. But damnit, this would be the ultimate PDA. And I want that! (Anyone take a guess as to how long it takes before we can find this in the stores? 20 years perhaps?)
It's a journal. And it's searchable. Am I missing something, or is this just not all that interesting? The way I see it, the real problems that need to be addressed for this type of application to be interesting are:
1) Security. No one in their right mind would place the sum of all of their thoughts into such a corruption-friendly repository without absolute knowledge of it's security.
2) Ease/Automation of data gathering. The article brushes past this issue a bit, but doesn't really cover it. Auto gathering of email and other net communications is easy - what would be interesting are items such as a tool that automatically adds your digital photos and video to this archive when you connect the camera to your USB/FireWire port, or better yet, wirelessly.
3) Ubiquitous input access. For this to really work, you have to be at the point where you have a seamless enough PDA/Cellphone that you are using it for *ALL* notetaking and communications. If instead you are still using (even part of the time) scraps of paper for notetaking, other peoples phones for making calls, etc than all of this generated data will not be included in the database, and the data set will be less useful. The more data functions that you can centralize in this one PDA type device (such as photography and digital video) , the better as you only have to worry about building integration hooks to one device instead of separate devices for each data type.
Looks to me that this will not be truly viable until some work is done in the surrounding technologies.
\/\/oobie
Back up your harddrive and you hsve 'Every letter you write' (emails) 'Every photo' (digital camera) not to mention video (also digital camara) for me at least, the majority of my convosations (instant messanging) and ofcourse, web favorites.
Theres my entire essence on my HDD.
And what if we put this disc into one of those better-than-brain computers IBM is making?
1984 Indeed. This stuff is happening so fast lately that it's hard to even know which battle to fight, let alone fight it. The world will either wake up and heal itself, or become a very, very scary place so fast that we'll all be watched 24/7 with the constitution burning in effigy on CNN before we know what's going on. Be very careful you don't buy into the hype - try to see the bigger picture. Being paranoid? Possibly. But that path is easy to see. Ever wonder why? Ignorance is often mistaken for morals. Intelligence is paranoia. Connect the dots...
Some day I'm going to be seen as some crazy old man, I can see it now.
The definite advantage of our brains over these databases is that our brain is able to abstract what is really important to us and forget everything we don't need to remember. And yes, it is good for us if we lose unpleasant memories.
where's all that Karma?
Since when is forgetting a bad thing? Imagine what life would be like if we couldn't forget its ample unpleasantness- one long, intense, never ending, rickety emotional rollercoaster. Ever stop to think why people don't have absolute control over their bodies regarding stuff like breathing, blinking, bowels, and all the other unseen, internal processes that magically keep them running? It's because the body is protecting itself from the person! People are sooooo stupid and lazy that they're willing to let their bladders explode waiting for a commerical during a Friends rerun! If we actually could control all the stuff we don't even think/know about concerning our bodies, the world would be one big dysfunctional planet (alright, alright it already is but it could be worse). A person would die from suffocation trying to sleep, would go blind from not blinking, and poison himself by not relieving himself. Just as these physical regulatory processes keep the body physically helathy, Similarly forgetting events, people, things, etc. regulates a person's mental health i.e. keeps him/her from going insane. The mechanism for forgetting is a gift people! It keeps us alive in hopes of a better future and decouples us from the misfortunes and dark emotions of the past. Without forgetfulness life wouldn't be worth living...
I use a Wiki at home to keep all my thoughts and work organised. It's a bit like a simplified and far better version of Outlook. Let's see - I've been using it for about a month, and the MySQL tables currently stand at... 319Kb! Shows you how many good ideas and thoughts I've had recently.
It's quite a blow when the average porno JPEG takes up more HDD space than all your ideas for the previous month.
catch (HumourFailureException e) { e.user.send("You, sir, are a humourless idiot."); }
I think he's more likely to go with the soft chewy paper.
To copy a book takes a good deal of effort, but you can copy a CD for a quarter a piece. If equal ammounts are spent on preserving & making copies of books as are spent on making copies of CDs, those CDs will make AOL cds look like a minor annoyance.
Just pulled an unpredictible disaster waiting to happen where the property damage would be the sole concern.
Slashdot gets worse every day... Pipedot: News for nerds, without the corporate slant
You haven't been paying attention, have you? :-)
So now's the time to buy all that *ahem* questionable stuff from those *ahem* anonymous sources, right? That is, before they start archiving...
La de daa..
bluHatter
Outtakes:
- School recitals (you sang off key when you were 7, and you still do at 27...)
- Freshmen year in college (remember how you used duct tape in the bed of your pickup, filled it with bubbles and hot water and drove account campus *attempting* to pick up chicks with a portable hottub as bait)
- Failed $p3ll1ng T3StS (having Taco as a tutor was not the brightest of ideas)
We don't need an "overrated" so much as we need a "you completely missed the parent's point, dumbass..."
It would be very easy to set up a pc to record every phone conversation you have at your home, but is there any type of automatic transcribing software available? I'm thinking of an OCR but for audio. Additionally, you could record to 32kbs so as to not take up much space. Emails would be very easy to add along with documents so after the transcribing system goes into place, video would be the only hurdle.
...if your brain would only need the capacity of a DVD to back it up :)
this is hilarious
i read about a similar idea a few years back. there was an article in psychology today i believe it was. i have a vague recollection of it mentioning that scientists are working on mapping the functions and meanings of the placement and structure of each cell within the human brain in order to create a virtual brain solely by mapping the cell placement of your own. in this case, your brain would be scanned cell by cell, this would be loaded into a program that could decode this map into an actual virtual functioning model of you. it would contain all of your personality traits and all of your memories. there was some suggestion of keeping nanobots and nanotransmitters pulsing through your brain to map changes and transmit such changes to a database. the use of this would be so that if you were to be killed in some accident, there would be an immediate uplink of your last memories and sights which could then be read from the database. it's a bit frightening. i wish i could find that article again.
-"Hey, Baby. It's not a rash, it's textured love."
dunno if anyone catched it but mr. bell was on the screensavers tonight talking about his project. he's a fascinating (though anassuming) person...
Large print giveth, and the small print taketh away
I do this myself, I have put all old photographs from scans and documents like birth certificates, school diplomas, ect along with bank statements and financial data onto CD-R. Everything sensitive is encrypted on the file level.
I give these 'life CDs' as I call them to my close friends and relatives along with the decryption codes and keys according to the level of need and trust.
I've been in house fires, earthquakes (7.2 Richter in Silicon Valley in 1989), police SWAT raids (Campbell CAlifornia 1991 - had local cops hold load assault rifles at my head as they tore apart the house looking for 'condoms and condom wrappers'. Since my landlady was a recent Chinese immigrant and didn't trust US banks, she kept about $100,000 hidden in the wall of her home office. The Campbell CA police found the money, gave her a receipt for half of it, pocketted the rest for themselves, and deported her... plus ca change, plus ca meme chose).
Anyway, the point of putting your life on easily replacable media like CD-R and DVD-R is that it is easy to lose everything that is in paper form after a fire, earthquake, or home invasion. You of course backup your computer files so why would it be so unusual to accept that all of life's paper records and photos should be widely back-uped also?
I can't even fit my files on a DVD, let alone my entire life!!
lol I'd have thought it was called 'alcahol'
;)
Oh well each to his own then!
BTW: I know a really good neurosurgon....
-it's complex... -But with a little sticky tape and some kleenex...
Scientists were preparing an experiment to ask the ultimate question.
They had worked for months gathering one each of every computer that was
built. Finally the big day was at hand. All the computers were linked
together. They asked the question, "Is there a God?". Lights started
blinking, flashing and blinking some more. Suddenly, there was a loud
crash, and a bolt of lightning came down from the sky, struck the
computers, and welded all the connections permanently together. "There
is now", came the reply.
- this post brought to you by the Automated Last Post Generator...