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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."
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...")?
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
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...
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
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...
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.
Of course, that is assuming you are just treating the data as still frames, not taking advantage of using the similarities between frames to save space. Also, a great deal of time is spent sleeping, and unless you are recording dreams (which can be too abstract for video to record), that time can be cut, as well as blinking. Let's assume 1400 kbit/s (Mpeg4 coding looks acceptable to me at this rate for everything, on average would preserve more than you can remember at any rate...
4 ,300,000kbit/yr
1400*60=100320kbit/min
*60=6,019,200 kbit/hour
*24=144,460,800kbit/day
*365.25=52,76
*60=3,165,858,000,000kbit
=~360 TB
So to record 60 years of concious, non-blinking time at 1400kbps, you just need 1024 disk arrays like I have at my house...
XML is like violence. If it doesn't solve the problem, use more.
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 /.)!
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