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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."
They're called "books". And unless you burn them, they generally have a 0% failure rate.
Honey, I shrunk the Cygwin
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...")?
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 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
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...
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)
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
What if someone steals my DVD? Ack!
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.
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?
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.
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.
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...
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.
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 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
Not to get off-topic, but I heard on the radio this morning that they (dept. of homeland security) are going to create a database of every purchase by every American in their effort to fight terrrorist. scary.
Anonymous Cowards suck.
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 /.)!
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...
There will never be criminals in the US ever again. What a country!
Correction.
There will never be innocents in the US ever again.
With this kind of information at their disposal anyone can be made to appear to be guilty of just about anything. Add secret trials and a general terror-hysteria to the mix and you get an environment that makes Orwell's vision almost pleasant by comparison.
The Future of Human Evolution: Autonomy