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We're In Danger of Losing Our Memories
Hugh Pickens writes "The chief executive of the British Library, Lynne Brindley, says that our cultural heritage is at risk as the Internet evolves and technologies become obsolete, and that historians and citizens face a 'black hole' in the knowledge base of the 21st century unless urgent action is taken to preserve websites and other digital records. For example, when Barack Obama was inaugurated as US president last week, all traces of George W. Bush disappeared from the White House website. There were more than 150 websites relating to the 2000 Olympics in Sydney that vanished instantly at the end of the games and are now stored only by the National Library of Australia. 'If websites continue to disappear in the same way as those on President Bush and the Sydney Olympics... the memory of the nation disappears too,' says Brindley. The library plans to create a comprehensive archive of material from the 8M .uk domain websites, and also is organizing a collecting and archiving project for the London 2012 Olympics. 'The task of capturing our online intellectual heritage and preserving it for the long term falls, quite rightly, to the same libraries and archives that have over centuries systematically collected books, periodicals, newspapers, and recordings...'" Over the years we've discussed various aspects of this archiving problem.
Well, for starters, I keep my memories in my head.. but if you're talking about records and history then I think copyright is a bigger culprit than digitization any day. Most of the culture of the 20th century is unavailable because the copyright holders have carte blanche to suppress it so it doesn't compete with their latest offerings.
How we know is more important than what we know.
People who don't like Bush -- ESPECIALLY people who don't like Bush -- should want all record of him preserved.
Because George Bush managed to fuck up the great economy Clinton left him with
And even if people accept that premise that relates to biased moderations in what way exactly?
because Obama is a visionary and has a fantastic platform
Get back to me in four years before you start spouting about fantastic his platform is. I'm rooting for his success (because we can't afford for him to fail) but I'm not going to call it a "fantastic platform" six days into his administration and I'm growing weary of the worship that surrounds him. And this is coming from someone who campaigned for him.
If you disagree that Bush is a worse president than Clinton was or Obama will be, then it is probably wiser to keep your mouth shut and let the world think you are intelligent rather than removing all doubt.
Translation: If you disagree with me then it is probably wiser to keep your mouth shut, lest I be exposed to competing points of view that might tax my brain and force me to actually think.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
The National Archives has versions up of all the Clinton White House pages. Here's one [nara.gov]. I'm sure they'll get around to doing the same for Bush eventually.
They're already ahead of you.
http://georgewbush-whitehouse.archives.gov/
but it's not suffering PTSD after being violently beaten up by greedy assholes.
So in which administration do you think passed a lot of the deregulation that enabled those 'greedy assholes'? Which administration passed the Telecommunications Act, the Communications Decency Act and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act?
Eventually the wet for Obama crowd is going to wake up and realize that the Democrats are just as big of a threat to our way of life as the Republicans are. Of course by the time that happens everybody will have forgotten about how badly the GOP fucked up and we'll start the whole cycle over again. Wash, rinse, repeat.
I want peace on earth and goodwill toward man.
We are the United States Government! We don't do that sort of thing.
Don't be so sure. One of an archaeologist's favourite places to dig is in the village rubbish tip. It's important because it tells us more about day-to-day life in a society than what people wrote down on papyrus, carved into stone, or otherwise saved for posterity.
In virtually every case, the stuff that rulers deem important doesn't bear much relation to the way everyday people live. Often enough, it's an outright lie. So if we want to understand a society with any depth of detail, we need to know the trivial and mundane as well as the monumental.
Crumb's Corollary: Never bring a knife to a bun fight.
Archive.org may not be willing to archive important sites (such as pr0n), and it only has a single mirror.
Don't worry I'm working on archiving all that porn locally. Eventually I'll combine every single file into one giant torrent and upload at least 99.9% of it before dropping offline ;)
You sir are a great humanitarian.
http://michaelsmith.id.au
Exactly, the idea that there will be LESS information surviving from our current torrent (hehe) of data is simply stupid. The fact is we have a limited view of history in the form of first person accounts because it was so expensive (both in terms of time and resources) to create a personal account of an event. Today we have say 10M blog entries about Obama's inauguration. Even if 1/10th of 1% of those are preserved that means we still have 10K accounts, how many surviving accounts of say FDR's inauguration do we have? My father has a handful of 8mm films from his childhood, my wife has boxes of VHS tapes and my kids will have hundreds of gigs of photos and movies of their childhood, each generation has more chances to save significant amounts of data because storing it is ever cheaper.
There are 4 boxes to use in the defense of liberty: soap, ballot, jury, ammo. Use in that order. Starting now.
You're seriously comparing the CDA and the DMCA to the likes of the Iraq War, badly handling Katrina, and staffing every position with hacks and cronies? Repubs are demonstrably worse for our country.
I don't buy this "Oh, they're all bad, Dems are just as bad" meme. It's just not factually true.
-- http://ninthagenda.com/