Slashdot Mirror
Backing Up Your Brain
couch_warrior writes "Microsoft is now working on a system that will back up the contents of your brain.
The pilot project lacks a direct brain interface, but "MyLifeBits" will provide a simulacrum of actual memories.
No mention is made as to whether Microsoft will claim to own the digital rights to the content of your life, or what license fees you will have to pay to access your own memories." Honestly this looks like a bunch of hooey to me, but I figured others would be better suited to say.
So instead of going on a tyrranical rant about this and bringing CmdrTaco's mother into it, let's look at how we could avoid this in the future.
I don't know what the administrative interface looks like for Slashdot, hell, I haven't even been given mod points yet despite regular meta moderation. But I'll bet that if you plugged the domain restriction plus the title of the proposed article into your favorite search engine, you could avoid 75% of all dupes. So in Google, this article would be: site:slashdot.org Backing Up Your Brain And here's the link if you're lazy which results in some pretty good hits: Download Your Brain
Putting Your Brain into A Computer So two very relevant articles, maybe they're dupes, maybe they're not.
But what if it was possible for the admin to select keywords/phrases from the submission and have that generate search links to the search engine. Two obvious ones would be Gordon Bell and the de facto dupe finding token MyLifeBits.
And with that last one, we come up with Backup Your Life on a DVD and Recording Your Entire Life. Two very similar articles to the subject at hand (the Gordon Bell search has no dearth of articles either). A few minutes of linking this to Vannevar Bush and you find Your Life On a Hard Drive.
If this is an update piece and you want to update us on the project, at least link to the plethora of articles related to it! My god, how many times must we discuss this man's dreams to do this? Where are the results already? I swear every single time this comes up, it's mere speculation. The editor even says so after the summary!
My work here is dung.
Lets make up rediculous products, claim a company is working on, and then slag of the company for their behaviour managing the non-existant product that hasn't even been developed.
Yeah, nice idea. No really. But imagine the conflict with copyright laws... or even wiretapping! Any time you take part in a private conversation would you have to get permission to record or distribute - what about recalling a concert you went to?
Argh.
This is definitely hooey. The article does the worst job of 'advertising' a technology that is nothing more than a glorified data collection device.
because after digitizing your life you'll probably realize how much it sucks
Slashdot, like most media, has to attract eyeballs. If they printed on the frontpage "no news today" they wouldn't be making any money. So the slashdot editors have the task of keeping a steady stream of stories on the frontpage. So that when you visit it, you get some new story to read.
But not yet any story will do, it needs to be a story that people will react to. So that they post comments, so that it looks like an active site.
A slashdot story where ALL you needed to know was in the headline and had no room for discussion, well, you could just get that from the RSS feed, no page load, no ad load, no eyeballs.
You posted a comment to this story, I posted a comment to you. Mission accomplished. All you have shown is that the story attracted eyeballs.
In Terry Pratchets discworld book "The Truth" the patrician (local ruler) makes an observation about a newspaper. "Ain't it nice how there is always just enough news to fit the page, no spaces left open or anything".
The newspaper needs to be full, it needs to get read. That is a newspapers mission.
If you really want to tell the editors to stop doing this. STOP REPLYING.
Oh, and there is another thing to consider, slashdot is NOT a news site. It is an intresting things site. Nobody ever claimed that intresting things have to be new.
MMO Quests are like orgasms:
You may solo them, I prefer them in a group.
Backing up is easy, it's the restoring part that's hard.
TFA does not in any part of it say "backing up your brain". It does not say it gives you "a simulacrum of your memories". It does give some clear explanation of research they are doing, which is not new.
It is not "hooey" either, as the web really is a memory extender just try Google. Or ask Ted Nelson, whose work on Xanadu hypertext for example is tracable to his own faulty memory which he overcame by carrying ring-bound cards on his belt.
The only problem with this of course is that Microsoft is involved. They are inevitably going to spread their smarmy-feely corporate crap all over it. And you know what's going to happen, you will see people buy other people's lives (as a 100GB file download of multimedia clips indexed by time and location) and act all superior and shit.
They always describe these things in glowing terms that make you think of your Mom scanning in family photos to email her kids but in the end they end up owning your ass. That part of it wasn't hooey.
Now an open source version of this would be cool. I wouldn't have to write stuff down, just surf back a la Time Machine or if anyone has tried it, Gelernter's Mirror Worlds which was an interesting Java desktop demo that puts you in mind of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. If someone tagged bits of their lives meaningfully it might be useful, even restaurants might get better service.