Sigh. Actually, what we recommend is robot exclusion. If you have those in your WWW pages, they won't be crawled and will never make it in to the Internet Archive to begin with. We do honor requests to have particular pages removed after the fact. -Megan, interning at the Internet Archive
True enough, but hardware limitations prevent providing completely open access at this time. Most of our hardware resources are devoted to simply storing the data; we can't support millions of users as well. (yet) We're a small operation. Also, recall that we are storing snapshots over time, and standard HTTP protocol has nothing in it to let a user specify "I want the index.html from June 1996, please". So access to our collections is not performed through any standard mechanism at present.
The creators have thought of the problem you point out, and dealt with it. At the outer rim of the 10K Rosetta disk will be human-readable words, in all the various languages, spiralling inward and shrinking as they do so. By extension, a bright mind encountering one of these disks a thousand years from now should be able to figure out that if they magnify the center part, the yet smaller text will be visible. The clear top half of the disk is, effectively, a magnifying glass, to better get the point across. Yes, the data _could_ be stored digitally. But which format can you _guarantee_ to survive 10K years? And who is to guarantee that there will be power sources running at the correct voltage? At least English/Yiddish/Latin/whatever have survived a few hundred years. No digital format has yet managed to survive more than a few decades. It won't sit in a capsule or clean room; they'll make many of them and let them pass down through families, like a Family Bible or whatnot. There is little hole in the center where one can insert a scroll on which one records each owner's name. I like the little Rosetta disks!
Slashdot Mirror
Sigh. Actually, what we recommend is robot exclusion. If you have those in your WWW pages, they won't be crawled and will never make it in to the Internet Archive to begin with. We do honor requests to have particular pages removed after the fact. -Megan, interning at the Internet Archive
True enough, but hardware limitations prevent providing completely open access at this time. Most of our hardware resources are devoted to simply storing the data; we can't support millions of users as well. (yet) We're a small operation. Also, recall that we are storing snapshots over time, and standard HTTP protocol has nothing in it to let a user specify "I want the index.html from June 1996, please". So access to our collections is not performed through any standard mechanism at present.
The creators have thought of the problem you point out, and dealt with it. At the outer rim of the 10K Rosetta disk will be human-readable words, in all the various languages, spiralling inward and shrinking as they do so. By extension, a bright mind encountering one of these disks a thousand years from now should be able to figure out that if they magnify the center part, the yet smaller text will be visible. The clear top half of the disk is, effectively, a magnifying glass, to better get the point across. Yes, the data _could_ be stored digitally. But which format can you _guarantee_ to survive 10K years? And who is to guarantee that there will be power sources running at the correct voltage? At least English/Yiddish/Latin/whatever have survived a few hundred years. No digital format has yet managed to survive more than a few decades. It won't sit in a capsule or clean room; they'll make many of them and let them pass down through families, like a Family Bible or whatnot. There is little hole in the center where one can insert a scroll on which one records each owner's name. I like the little Rosetta disks!