Digital Data is the most fluid data storage system ever created. If information is truly important it will transverse from storage system to storage system as the systems change. When I got a computer I typed my documents on word processors and stored them on floppies. When hard drives came out I copied the floppies to the hard drive. When cd's came out i burned my harddrive files to cds. When DVD's come out I burned the CD's to DVD. The rate of growth of the storage medium is great enough that no data need be lost. If its extremely important....have backups...duh.... And as far as people dying. Since when does being dead make your password unhackable???.... With the future of storage medium heading towards holograms and other futuristic storage mediums I don't forsee a loss of any truly important data. And there's a lot of data that doesn't truly need to be kept....just like my garage acumulates junk I no longer need.....
Heh, I remember when I first Subscribed to Nintendo Power, it was one year for $15 and they included a free game, Dragon Warrior. Excellent game imho. I still play it occasionally. I probably would have bought more games without having it but it definitely didn't hurt.
Since when is this robbing society of future discoveries. Think of all the people who will create art and invention from software they couldn't afford to buy but wanted to play with. Or will become insipired to listen to different music then mainstream and come up with new styles of music. I'm not saying piracy is good....its an element of society and will always be so...and i'd rather have someone rip off my MP3s then my stereo anyday
If you can get decent quality 1-2" LCD screens, why not just rig them up on a pair of glasses, run the hardware off either a cable or a short range video transmitter and watch a seemingly immense screen with no noise, no bulbs...granted this is only good for one person...
Shrug
The only reason we haven't seen a shuttle replacement already is the fact that 1,000's of jobs depend on the clunky and labor intensive prep and launch of the existing space shuttle program. I believe the plans and protoype for a spaceplane that could take off from an airport and reach LEO already exist. I guess they just need to find a way to make it a bit more expensive before they finish the project.
BTW Stephen Baxter has some great hard sci-fi reading about alternate near futures...Titan is a great one about the collapse of NASA and a very technical description of a pieced together trip to Saturn's moon Titan, great read.
Pluto is what, a few miles across and thousands of AU's out....I think i have seen pictures of pluto but they amount to a small smear. And what ever happened to Planet X, can't remember now, did it turn out to be pluto's moon or something?
Dark Matter is said to make of 99% of universe's mass. I think the spacing between galaxies is pretty much equal and we are a well stirred glass of galaxies. Seeing more galaxies then expected would just mean that the size of the universe, and thus its expansion rate and approximate date of the "big bang" may be off. I don't think a few more galaxies will make up the supposed 99% mass. Since dark matter is believed to exist due to the velocity of galaxies being higher then expected...then this could point to there being even more dark matter than before as per density.
Does anyone think humans will ever get this right or will we go on refining our guesses ad infinitum
"not that there's anything wrong with that"
I'm not sure I feel about having a public repository for private information, at least not until cryptography/system design has reached a level where hacking into the data becomes impossible without destruction of the data (i.e. quantum crypto). There are already a lot of "Online Harddrive Space" websites out there and for users who don't care about who sees whats on there thats fine.
I think it would be the the earth's best interest to create a distributed but moderated and indexed galactic encylopaedia where information from astrophysics, zoology, political structures, history the whole shabang was to be found from one place. I know google is close, but structure would be nice.
Slashdot Mirror
Digital Data is the most fluid data storage system ever created. If information is truly important it will transverse from storage system to storage system as the systems change. When I got a computer I typed my documents on word processors and stored them on floppies. When hard drives came out I copied the floppies to the hard drive. When cd's came out i burned my harddrive files to cds. When DVD's come out I burned the CD's to DVD. The rate of growth of the storage medium is great enough that no data need be lost. If its extremely important....have backups...duh.... And as far as people dying. Since when does being dead make your password unhackable???.... With the future of storage medium heading towards holograms and other futuristic storage mediums I don't forsee a loss of any truly important data. And there's a lot of data that doesn't truly need to be kept....just like my garage acumulates junk I no longer need.....
Heh, I remember when I first Subscribed to Nintendo Power, it was one year for $15 and they included a free game, Dragon Warrior. Excellent game imho. I still play it occasionally. I probably would have bought more games without having it but it definitely didn't hurt.
Since when is this robbing society of future discoveries. Think of all the people who will create art and invention from software they couldn't afford to buy but wanted to play with. Or will become insipired to listen to different music then mainstream and come up with new styles of music. I'm not saying piracy is good....its an element of society and will always be so...and i'd rather have someone rip off my MP3s then my stereo anyday
If you can get decent quality 1-2" LCD screens, why not just rig them up on a pair of glasses, run the hardware off either a cable or a short range video transmitter and watch a seemingly immense screen with no noise, no bulbs...granted this is only good for one person... Shrug
The only reason we haven't seen a shuttle replacement already is the fact that 1,000's of jobs depend on the clunky and labor intensive prep and launch of the existing space shuttle program. I believe the plans and protoype for a spaceplane that could take off from an airport and reach LEO already exist. I guess they just need to find a way to make it a bit more expensive before they finish the project. BTW Stephen Baxter has some great hard sci-fi reading about alternate near futures...Titan is a great one about the collapse of NASA and a very technical description of a pieced together trip to Saturn's moon Titan, great read.
Pluto is what, a few miles across and thousands of AU's out....I think i have seen pictures of pluto but they amount to a small smear. And what ever happened to Planet X, can't remember now, did it turn out to be pluto's moon or something?
Dark Matter is said to make of 99% of universe's mass. I think the spacing between galaxies is pretty much equal and we are a well stirred glass of galaxies. Seeing more galaxies then expected would just mean that the size of the universe, and thus its expansion rate and approximate date of the "big bang" may be off. I don't think a few more galaxies will make up the supposed 99% mass. Since dark matter is believed to exist due to the velocity of galaxies being higher then expected...then this could point to there being even more dark matter than before as per density. Does anyone think humans will ever get this right or will we go on refining our guesses ad infinitum "not that there's anything wrong with that"
At some point private storage is going to be impractical. Hence the point of uber encryptions.
I'm not sure I feel about having a public repository for private information, at least not until cryptography/system design has reached a level where hacking into the data becomes impossible without destruction of the data (i.e. quantum crypto). There are already a lot of "Online Harddrive Space" websites out there and for users who don't care about who sees whats on there thats fine.
I think it would be the the earth's best interest to create a distributed but moderated and indexed galactic encylopaedia where information from astrophysics, zoology, political structures, history the whole shabang was to be found from one place. I know google is close, but structure would be nice.