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800 Megs of Data Per Person Last Year?

Ant writes "Growing net, computer and phone use is driving a huge rise in the amount of information people generate and use. US researchers estimate that every year 800MB of information is produced for every person on the planet. Their study found that information stored on paper, film, magnetic and optical disks has doubled since 1999. Paper is still proving popular though. The amount of information stored in books, journals and other documents has grown 43% in three years."

4 of 177 comments (clear)

  1. Re:Excess... by ceejayoz · · Score: 2, Insightful

    Are you an idiot, or just trying to be funny?

    Ethopian refugees are counted in the "total number of people in the world", yet they probably don't own a hard drive.

  2. This would be more interesting by mcc · · Score: 5, Insightful

    If in generating the average they could discount the extremes.

    Some of us go through a truly silly amount of data. There's a nontrivial number of people reading this discussion who exhaust their dorm's 1 GB bandwidth cap every day.

    On the other hand there's somewhere a barefoot palestinian refugee child for whom not so much as a piece of paperwork was generated since he was born.

    These two extremes would probably tend to distort things. It would be interesting to find out if the study was based on usage of storage data as it appears and these extremes were included in the study, or if they just (being Americans) couldn't be bothered when compiling their study to talk to geeks and starving african children. If the former, i'd be curious how their results would change if they could somehow just like chop off the ends of the bell curve.

  3. Re:Makes you feel... by Chordonblue · · Score: 3, Insightful

    What is it about a 'slippery slope' that you don't understand?

    You're a great example of who I mean. No consideration at all...

    --
    "...Well, there's egg and bacon; egg sausage and bacon; egg and spam; egg bacon and spam; egg bacon sausage and spam..."
  4. Re:Makes you feel... by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Insightful

    I reckon you don't understand the "fallacy" part.