Vint Cerf Warns About the Perishability Of Human Knowledge (vice.com) 348
Vint Cerf "worries about the decreasing longevity of our media, and, thus, about our ability as a civilization to self-document -- to have a historical record that one day far in the future might be remarked upon and learned from." An anonymous Slashdot reader quotes Motherboard:
Magnetic films do not quite have the staying power as clay tablets. Clay tablets are more resilient than papyrus manuscripts are more resilient than parchment are more resilient than printed photographs are more resilient than digital photographs. At stake, according to Cerf, is "the possibility that the centuries well before ours will be better known than ours will be unless we are persistent about preserving digital content.
"The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity while modern media from the 1800s forward seem to have shrinking lifetimes. Just as the monks and Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media, won't we need to do the same for our modern content...? Unless we face this challenge in a direct way, the truly impressive knowledge we have collectively produced in the past 100 years or so may simply evaporate with time."
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software. Do we need to start carving our web pages into clay tablets?
"The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity while modern media from the 1800s forward seem to have shrinking lifetimes. Just as the monks and Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media, won't we need to do the same for our modern content...? Unless we face this challenge in a direct way, the truly impressive knowledge we have collectively produced in the past 100 years or so may simply evaporate with time."
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software. Do we need to start carving our web pages into clay tablets?
Anything important will be preserved (Score:5, Interesting)
The vast majority of things that are worth knowing will always be remembered and preserved. If the few that forgotten become necessary, they will be reinvented.
The world will continue spinning. No need for alarm.
The best way to preserved knowledge is to disseminate it widely. Or, to paraphrase Linus Torvalds, someone somewhere will mirror all the really important stuff.
Re:Anything important will be preserved (Score:5, Interesting)
The vast majority of things that are worth knowing will always be remembered and preserved. If the few that forgotten become necessary, they will be reinvented. The world will continue spinning. No need for alarm.
I think so too, the sheer mass of data generated is so absurdly much higher that even if 0.1% survives it'd be more than a century ago. That said, say you have a global WWII-class war with 6 years of fighting, rationing, power failures, shortages of parts and maybe a decade or two until industry production recovers and people got time to prioritize their history we'd lose a lot of data. It doesn't have to be post-apocalyptic wasteland bad either, but you don't produce TB-size HDDs in your average workshop. That said, at some point you have to just accept that advanced civilization depends on
advanced civilization.
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and if that 0.1% of data that survives is justin beiber videos and the kardashians? how the fuck will that help future apocalypse-surviving society?
Those that discover it will likely decide that the human race is not worth being a part of and kill themselves, leaving more resources for others? Sorry, that's the best I could come up with for the scenario you gave.
the problem isn't that stuff isn't being saved.. it's that *everything* is being saved. the signal to noise ratio is worse than even a comcast cable connection.
Agreed. The amount of data produced today when compared to 100 years ago is staggering. However are Kardashinan videos, grumpy cat images, and Facebook really things that need to be be remembered forever?
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The Old Greeks already had foundations of integration theory. This was lost for 1.5 millennia (see e.g. the "Archimedex Codex"). Likewise, Einsteins General Relativity (I am not speaking about the Special one, that was already in the air) may have not been found for a long time - Hilbert's alternative approach is not a counterargument, as he was in discussion with Einstein, and it is hard to disentangle how much he was influenced by him.
Some discoveries are pretty much foregone conclusion, but with others I
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As long as everyone doesn't think like that...
Comment removed (Score:5, Interesting)
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Re:Anything important will be preserved (Score:4, Informative)
Unfortunately that is not the case. Actually, it has never been. We know precious little of various important aspects of the past, simply because nobody bothered to write "common knowledge" down.
For example, nobody knows how crucifixion really worked. Yes, that thing that's a central element of one of the major religions on the planet is a big mystery. I mean, yes, we know, it's been a painful way of killing people, but we lack the details? Where did they put the nails? For the longest time people thought it was through the hands, until we learned that this could not have been the case for it would simply have torn them off. Did they nail the feet next to each other or across each other? How common were some of the forms, did they actually use the "cross" form in Palestine? Are Christians wearing the wrong symbol around their necks and they should be wearing a T-shaped pendant instead?
The same applies to Hanging, Drawing and Quartering. We have a general idea what it entails, but the details are elusive. Especially considering the "drawing" part.
Especially when it comes to things of everyday use and customs we have often very few documents with details, mostly because the authors could sensibly assume that their contemporaries are well used to what these things mean. So while we might mirror various outrageous facts and facets of our lives and that of celebrities, with a detail never seen before, future generations will certainly wonder about the meaning of certain memes and references to them. We needn't explain to anyone what "All your Base" means or what a Rickroll is.
In 200 years, we most likely would have to.
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The vast majority of things that are worth knowing will always be remembered and preserved. If the few that forgotten become necessary, they will be reinvented.
I'm surprised nobody has raised the specter of copyright in this discussion yet.
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The vast majority of things that are worth knowing will always be remembered and preserved. If the few that forgotten become necessary, they will be reinvented.
The world will continue spinning. No need for alarm.
The best way to preserved knowledge is to disseminate it widely. Or, to paraphrase Linus Torvalds, someone somewhere will mirror all the really important stuff.
Things will only be reinvented if there is a financial incentive to do it. If a complex mathematical proof is lost, who is going to recreate it? There is neither glory or money in it.
The linux kernel is used by billions of devices. An important theorem which would only be useful decades down the road might not be preserved. I've seen very useful math textbooks written by professors go out of print and then the only copies are poor xerox copies floating around with grad students. Scanning and put it somewh
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I like to fuck goats in the ass. I like to fuck sheep pussy. I like to lick sheep and goat ass. I like to felch out fluids from goats and sheeps. I like to rub my baals on goat hair. I like to rub my dick on sheep skin. I dream of fucking goats in the goat-ass.
vakuona. you sound like a fake planet name from that gay fuck game On Man's Lie aka Gay Man's Lie aka NMS.
Your post is shit. Vacuous shit. Fuck you.
This will be preserved .... and presented to your employer in your next job inteview
In some ways (Score:3)
On the other hand, most of the clay tablets didn't preserve photographs or anything else other than something deemed "important". There is a lot of past that we cannot learn from clay tablets. The other issue is that not all clay tablets are readable at all! There are still clay tablets written in languages that we cannot translate, so this is similar to "digital documents can't be viewed without software". We simply cannot read them. So that's not a new problem. Therefore I don't agree with "The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity". Sure there's a bunch of squiggles carved into the clay but that doesn't help much if we cannot understand what the squiggles mean.
I agree that longevity issue is something that needs to be addressed somehow and I often thought about the same issue. Even with my personal data/information/photos I worry about longevity. It's a difficult problem.
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Then engrave a set of illustrated children's books and a basic dictionary. These should bootstrap the language for future archaeologists.
DRM will protect it (Score:3)
BWAHAHAAHHAHAA HA HA HA!
This age will be known as the "Stupid Era" because it will look like we achieved nothing.
The futarmen won't be entirely wrong on that point.
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I love the idea of an advanced civilization coming along and discovering that we've made a modern Rosetta stone out of the collected works of Dr. Seuss.
Graduate studies courses in ancient human civilization discuss how we destroyed our climate, and how we had now-extinct creatures who would speak for the trees, and so on.
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This is certainly true, we know almost nothing about the everyday life of "unimportant" people of ancient times. We know next to nothing about the people who built the pyramids, and until very recently we might have reports about people of little importance, but no reports from them. We have only the word of their "betters" and ... well, be honest, would you want to have your life, your believes, your motivations and your outlook on life recorded by someone like Kim Kardashian?
Solution, the Internet Archive !!!! (Score:5, Insightful)
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He's Right (Score:5, Insightful)
I've discussed this many times before. The loss is a much nearer term than thousands of years, too.
In the not so distant past, when Grandma passed on, the family went through and maintained all sorts of memorabilia. Pictures, letters, deeds, records/tapes/CDs, and other papers. Now, it's all digital. Facebook and possibly an external USB drive full of pictures that no one will ever know is there or find, music collections on laptops or iPods. All these things, and the records that they hold will wind up lost or in the trash and the information is lost forever.
Thanks to the digital age, the vast majority of people on this Earth will leave far less of a mark than the tiny feint scratches left by those before them. Sure, 'data live on forever' and records might exists somewhere, but data doesn't last unless someone is maintaining it and even then, it doesn;t mean that anyone will know the data is there or where to find it.
Re:He's Right (Score:5, Interesting)
Contrariwise... my family has left an immense amount of information. Boxes and boxes of pictures, some films (!), postcards, letters, college studies... I am planning to digitize all of it. In physical form, it takes an immense amount of room, can only be held by one person, and is not backed up. It will be much more flexible, useful, and safe as computer data.
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Digitize them soon. My family has photos from my grandparents' childhoods, and firstly, no one can remember who the people are, and secondly, they are fading to the point that they appear gray on gray. Contrast stretching can almost fix the graying of the old photos, but the old relatives who could have recognized the people in them (or even the locations) have and are dying before we can get them annotated. Likewise, we have the same problems with pencil writing (yes, even on important documents).
On the
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And fall off after the adhesive dries, in thirty or so years.
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So, is this really necessary information? Do we need to know that awimalich the Assyrian took an orange crap and sold 20 loaves of bread? Do we need to preserve my Grandparent's love letters? Not
mind-blowing ubiquity weathers the pulse (Score:3)
JPEG and PNG images stored on a USB thumb drive in a FAT data partition aren't going away anytime soon, short of the mother of all EMP events. And even then, there will be thumb drives someone tossed into a large jar of loose change that miraculously survived the pulse.
USB flash drives market to reach annual volume sales of 561 million units by 2018 [mynewsdesk.com] — article text completely worthless (bold word my addition; you know you've worked in marketing too long if you've never actually seen a denominator writt
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Anathem (Score:2)
The historical record has always had big gaps (Score:5, Insightful)
Vint Cerf "worries about the decreasing longevity of our media, and, thus, about our ability as a civilization to self-document -- to have a historical record that one day far in the future might be remarked upon and learned from."
I find it curious how often people forget how little of the knowledge of previous generations ever made it into written form. The vast majority of all human knowledge was never written down for most of human history and much of what was written has been long since lost. Today is no different. Furthermore people seem to forget that a tremendous amount of documents get printed so there are hard copy records of very substantial portions of the historical record. Thanks to modern printers FAR more than was ever available in previous generations and that will remain so. We should expect to lost substantial swaths of data over time. We're not going to be likely to be able to keep everything.
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software.
Umm, I'd say 100% of digital documents cannot be viewed without software. If they could be viewed without software they wouldn't be digital documents.
Re:The historical record has always had big gaps (Score:5, Informative)
He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software.
Umm, I'd say 100% of digital documents cannot be viewed without software. If they could be viewed without software they wouldn't be digital documents.
I think what's more relevant is that they can't be viewed without special hardware. That's one reason why we're always chasing some kind of optical storage. If you have a sufficiently advanced optical reader, you can adapt it to read other kinds of optical storage... so long as their resolution is lower than your scanner.
What he actually said was "That many of the digital objects to be preserved will require executable software for their rendering is also inescapable." What that seems to say [to me, anyhow] is that without knowledge of the formats, getting meaningful data out will be nigh-impossible.
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He points out that much of this century's digital documents can't be viewed without software.
Umm, I'd say 100% of digital documents cannot be viewed without software. If they could be viewed without software they wouldn't be digital documents.
I think what's more relevant is that they can't be viewed without special hardware. That's one reason why we're always chasing some kind of optical storage. If you have a sufficiently advanced optical reader, you can adapt it to read other kinds of optical storage... so long as their resolution is lower than your scanner.
What he actually said was "That many of the digital objects to be preserved will require executable software for their rendering is also inescapable." What that seems to say [to me, anyhow] is that without knowledge of the formats, getting meaningful data out will be nigh-impossible.
You guys have good points, but are missing the fact that professional archivists have already been debating and discussing this problem for decades. Vint Cerf may have just stumbled upon the idea, or maybe he is just trying to "spread the word". I agree that more people being aware of how easy it is experience data loss is only a good thing, but mostly just to individuals for family history reasons. The "really important" stuff such as collected scholarly knowledge, research, etc. - essentially the billi
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It's like he has never even read Slashdot.. Optical only human readable devices for archival purposes have been covered many many times.
It's like he's living in the real world, where such devices are drastically in the minority as they are grossly more expensive today than phase-change or magnetic media. Most of our data never gets written to optical archival media.
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If we think analogue media,
Nothing new (Score:3)
The fact is that we're producing now a lot of digital data that is in a really perishable form, so you could have a lot of difficult to read media where maybe there's some interesting information to save.
Of course you will have interesting data that we are going to lose. We've always had that and probably always will. Some of the losses are going to be tragic.
I'm not saying it isn't a real problem but I dispute the notion that our ability to preserve the historical record is any more fragile that it ever has been. If anything I'd argue that it's better today in many ways because we have the ability to easily and quickly transfer data to new formats in many cases. Plus we can generate hard copies of a lo
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While true, the contemporary problem is a different one. In ancient times, a fraction of what happened actually got recorded. I'm fairly confident to say that everything written before the year 0 that we know of (let alone that survived until today) is less than what has been written only this year.
There was little that was created. But what was created was created to last.
Our contemporary medium is VERY transitive. Very little of what we create today is written on lasting media. And when you are looking at
Durability vs. Storage density (Score:5, Interesting)
Re:Durability vs. Storage density (Score:4, Interesting)
A simple solution with a good balance would be microfiche embedded in amber/plastic/glass. It would last indefinitely and would require only a simple microscope to read. No digital to decode and analog can even take some degradation and still be readable.
With all due respect to Vint . . . (Score:5, Informative)
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Newsreels (Score:5, Informative)
It is happening as we speak.
Mid-20th century newsreels--an important history of the time--are sitting on shelves in film canisters, quietly disintegrating.
There are people who would like to copy them forward onto durable media, but they can't because the newsreels are copyrighted, but the copyright holders either can't be located or aren't interested in preserving them.
They will be dust long before they enter the public domain.
Re:Newsreels (Score:5, Insightful)
Re:Newsreels (Score:5, Insightful)
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OP was talking about analog reels made decades before digital film and the DMCA. Yes, the DMCA effectively castrates fair use and other provisions of copyright law when dealing with digital media that has anti-circumvention mechanisms in place but that has nothing to do with the topic at hand.
The more pressing issue is much of this media is physically controlled by entities that have zero incentive to digitize or distribute it. The rel
The Oral Tradition (Score:2)
What is interesting is in some ways we are moving towards (back to) a more oral tradition. As our machines get better and better at understanding us we will inevitably do more talking and listening than writing (just look at how people are starting to dictate their text messages). I recently had a conversation with someone who postulated that our ability to write would disappear entirely. I don't think so, certainly not in the next 200 years or so. Our ability (and need) to express ideas through writing
Virtual machines for the win! (Score:5, Interesting)
We had this exact problem at a former place of employment, i.e. we had contract requirements to provide access to original oil field data for the 25-year lifetime of the field, the problem was that most of this data was in the form of seismic data locked into a specific version of the exploration sw.
The solution we came up with depended on making a virtual machine image of everything needed to run the original application & data, including license files and user databases, and then freeze the system clock: This way we could restart that image at any point in the future and as far as the sw would know it was still 2005.
We would still need regular maintenance, to make sure that newer versions of the virtualization platform could still run the original image. In the worst case we expected to have to add an additional virtualization layer, i.e. so we could run the 2005 sw inside a 2015 virtual machine which would run inside a 2030 VM host.
This approach has of course been used to good effect in order to save classic games.
Terje
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XKCD as always... (Score:2)
Thanks Randall.
https://xkcd.com/1683/ [xkcd.com]
Too many not too few (Score:5, Interesting)
The issue isn't just that the media will decay, it's that the media is too cheap. There is no incentive to curate our documents, and we will end up with so many still in existence, no-one in future ages will have the inclination to wade through the rubbish.
When people had paper photographs, they soon accumulated boxes of albums, and by 1990, those holiday snaps from 1970 were kind of dusty and not worth keeping. So people chucked them out. But of course they looked through them first and kept a couple of photos, maybe even got those framed. All of which means that when they died in 2010, their kids had only maybe 100 photos to look through, and decide what was worth holding on to.
Now, our holiday snaps are uploaded to the cloud. They aren't a nuisance, and we never get rid of any. When we die, maybe our kids will be able to get a drive or an account key, or something, with 20,000 photos on. Do you really think they will do more than look at a few random ones, before adding them to their own 5,000 photos?
Same with our emails, our whatsapp messages, our blog posts.
The total amount of media from our age will still be significant - the sheer quantity produced ensures that much will remain. But what remains intact won't do so because of its significance to our age. We don't bury our most valuable items in the ground for safety, or lock them in huge chests, or keep them in safes.
uploaded to the cloud (Score:3)
This is the biggest problem. People want to upload everything to the cloud, but have no idea what the "cloud" really is. There are servers and storage media/devices even in the cloud. When it no longer serves the needs of the cloud provider, all of that data can and will just disappear. Even paid services close up shop sometimes. Users will be given a short window to get their data somewhere else, then it will all be gone. You have no guarantee your pictures/data will be there tomorrow with the free se
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> by 1990, those holiday snaps from 1970 were kind of dusty and not worth keeping. So people chucked them out
Are you *serious*? I have elementary & middle school photos that were in boxes that got soaked by Hurricane Andrew (the baby pictures were mostly safe). Three days after Andrew tore the roofs off of every house within 20 miles, I talked my dad into driving 80 miles to buy a small chest-type freezer and enough dry ice to keep it frozen for at least two weeks, double-bagged all the photos in Zip
so what? (Score:2)
The amount of information that is being generated is growing at an ever faster rate. A lot of it is still printed or archived in other ways. In the end, there is probably still a lot more information being archived, even per capita, than there used to be. Furthermore, most of that "information" is likely meaningless outside its cultural, social, and technological context. The amount of "timeless" information, information that will still be useful in a thousand years, is likely fairly modest in size.
Another Advantage (Score:3, Insightful)
Perhaps the biggest advantage of clay tablet is there was no autostart videos on them.
understanding quantity (Score:5, Insightful)
we switched to modern media not because it lasts longer. It's more reliable because it's more easily copied/produced. You never had the option to use stone tablets for current knowledge -- there's too much knowledge now.
I grew up with my mother suggesting something very interesting: in 1925, if archeologists had dug up a microchip, would they have known what it was? Or just thought it was junk, or a toy, and moved on?
If we want to "document" knowledge, in an ever-lasting way, it's the same game as it's always been: you can't do it with language at all. Sorry. Language doesn't survive. Cave wall drawings are meaningless. Hieroglyphics are useless without culture. Dialects, subtleties, and context are required to interpret language. "bread crumbs" means nothing without a house made of gingerbread.
So how do we "document" knowledge? That's easy: reference objects. For example, the knowledge of how to build a telescope is best "documented" by building a telescope specifically for future generations to study -- maybe bigger, maybe with more obvious design decisions, maybe with more understandable materials, maybe with easily disassembling parts.
Reference builds. I'll say it now. Distant generations learn from objects, not from documentation. We dig up old pottery, and understand what sorts of tools were used. We don't dig up blueprints for pots. Take a reference telescope, and study it for a week. You'll learn everything you need to know about how it works, how it's used, what it can do.
Objects.
Academics are, well, merely academic. We've lost the concept of learning from observation. Remember grade-9 science's how-to-read-a-fish? Most of my friends can't read their own dog.
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OK, how do you read a dog, then? I assume you mean in greater detail than "if it bites you, you have annoyed it" or the like.
Re:understanding quantity (Score:5, Interesting)
Oh, heavily abbreviated (I'm Canadian, by the way):
if the mouth points down, it's a bottom-feeder, if it points up, it's a surface feeder, if it points straight, it's carnivorous.
if it has a dorsal fin, if it has thin fins, if it has big flippers, denotes its relative speed.
vertical tail fin, it lives in reeds, horizontal tail fin, it doesn't.
scales vs no-scales, eyes on the sides vs the on the top, big eyes vs small eyes.
belly-colour vs dorsal colour.
so really basic observations can give you a pretty good idea of whether or not it can attack, defend, move through tall plants or narrow coral, is often seen from underneath or is often seen from above, lives in darkness deep waters or shallow, moves fast or slow. Put it all together, and you've can come pretty close to exactly what it is and where it lives.
And if you're in Mr. Mawson's class, there was a quiz ten minutes after the lesson, just to prove that you weren't really paying any attention, so everyone failed every time, and knew exactly what they needed to study in time for the test next week.
Archives (Score:2)
I once did a stint working for govt, in the dept of Education. Interestingly, that department also had responsibility for libraries and archives.
We had an effort underway to in the 1990s to copy records form 8" disks to 3.5 inch floppies in order to ensure their viability. It was non-trivial to find a working 8" floppy, but fortunately most of the data was in flat text which made it easier then dealing with proprietary formats.
Min
Current copy right laws are a big problem. (Score:4, Insightful)
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It was a tough fight, but the courts have confirmed that happy birthday is in the public domain now: https://yro.slashdot.org/story... [slashdot.org]
Still I think that the current term of 70 years is far too long. 50 was sort of okay.
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How is even 50 ok? The whole point behind copyright isn't to establish ownership of a "product". It exists to incentivize creators by providing a protected window of opportunity for them to profit from their works before the general public can do with it as they please. Just 5 to MAYBE 10 years is PLENTY of time to recoup costs and turn a hefty profit from a work. I don't see any reason why it should last longer. Sure, 100 years ago thing moved slower, and the profitability of a work may have had reaso
Re:Current copy right laws are a big problem. (Score:4, Interesting)
I like your logic there. I'd even say they should be able to extend the protection by paying the difference and even include the first 5 years a freely implied protection on anything.
0-5 years is free and implied on any work.
Before the 5 years expire, you need to pay $10.24 and it's registration is extended to 10 years (very minor investment if you foresee your work becoming profitable)
Before the 10 years expire, you need to pay $317.44 and it's registration is extended to 15 years
Before the 15 years expire, you need to pay $10,158.08 and it's registration is extended to 20 years
Before the 20 years expire, you need to pay $325,058.56 and it's registration is extended to 25 years
Before the 25 years expire, you need to pay $10,401,873.92 and it's registration is extended to 30 years
I can't think of many works that would still be worth 10 million after 25 years. Perhaps a book to movie deal like LOTR, but I have to imagine with 150 million copies of the book being sold, it's fair to say Tolkien was already more than fairly rewarded for his work and it should have long since been put into the public domain by that point.
Same story different era (Score:2)
They have a point, but I'd say that 99.99% of what is digitally recorded is probably not worth saving. Most important things just need to be re-saved in a modern equivalent every so often. Trying to save it all in
Human knowledge.. isn't that big. (Score:2)
Relative to the exponential growth of storage, I'm not worried about this in the least. In my own personal collection I have dozens of lifetimes of information stored. Soon this can be carried in my pocket, offline, if I desire.
A better question is what to do with the petabytes of collected information we're amassing... aside from training our replacements via AI.
copying to new media (Score:2)
The earlier media seem to have a kind of timeless longevity while modern media from the 1800s forward seem to have shrinking lifetimes. Just as the monks and Muslims of the Middle Ages preserved content by copying into new media, won't we need to do the same for our modern content...?
Well, I don't know about Vint Cerf, but every time I upgrade my hard drive, the old one gets copied to a subdirectory of the new one. It's "C:\OLD_C_DRIVE\..." all the way down!
Optical Media (Score:2)
Something like the Rosetta Project? (Score:2)
Answer is easy, but nobody wants to fund it. Simply print your stuff on something like the Rosetta Project (http://rosettaproject.org/disk/concept/) every once in a while. I guess we could technically do a backup of wikipedia every once in a while.
I disagree (Score:2)
With all due respect, this statement is just wrong:
"Clay tablets are more resilient than papyrus manuscripts are more resilient than parchment are more resilient than printed photographs are more resilient than digital photographs."
Digital photographs are infinitely resilient, because they can be infinitely copied with perfect accuracy. Analog mediums do not have this feature.
It may indeed be harder to erase a clay tablet, but because it is so difficult to produce, there's only ever one. Analog photography
Perpetual Archive (Score:2)
My wife did her Thesis on this topic. It's Entitled:
E-Ternally Yours: The case for the development of a reliable repository for the preservation of personal digital objects.
The PDF can be read at the link below
http://explorer.cyberstreet.co... [cyberstreet.com]
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You can also see a slide show she used in her thesis defence below. Much shorter read.
http://slideplayer.com/slide/4... [slideplayer.com]
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When I'm dead, why should I care what happens to future people?
Careful, take that attitude and people aren't going to care about you in particular while you're alive. You'll be seen more as a leech, a parasite.
Re: Who cares (Score:4, Funny)
(lightbulb) Now I see why one "surfs" the Internet!
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I suspect he means 'specialized' software, ie. things being saved in file types that aren't well documented in how to be read.
A .txt document will be easy to reverse engineer if you get the hard drive to spin up, a Word document moderately harder but far from impossible, but a .rar archive for example? Good luck with that if the knowledge has been lost and no copies of WinRAR remain!
That said, however. People are saving all their documents and photos in the cloud, where massive companies fight tooth and nai
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A .txt document will be easy to reverse engineer if you get the hard drive to spin up, a Word document moderately harder but far from impossible, but a .rar archive for example? Good luck with that if the knowledge has been lost and no copies of WinRAR remain!
Thing is though, say our society is long gone and a new one is up, to find those documents in the first place they would have to have found a computer and more than likely got it working so chances are they would have the software they need. Unless they figure out which bit is the hard drive and hook it up to whatever computers they may or may not have and copy it's contents bit by bit they would be hard pressed to even tell what data is from what files. Either that or they'll think we all spoke like old sc
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The ironic thing is that of all the archive formats I've used, .rar has been quite reliable. I managed to recover some files from a ten year old set of CD-Rs that were in WinRAR segments, even though one of the disks was bad, because when I burned the disks, I had a few .rev files in place, so I used that in place of the bad CD, and got everything back.
Barring a mass extinction event, computers will be around, so we will have some method of reading optical media (just because optical drives are so prevalen
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But isn't that just a high-tech version of understanding ancient Sumerian?
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Even if WinRAR.exe was delivered with the file, then one would have to understand the format of an EXE program, and the Windows version it was written for. One could deliver a full Linux distro that will be able to output the image on the screen, but will future computer understand the x86 and VESA standard? Would they have to build an x86 machine, as well as a machine that can interpret VESA to whatever display tech they'll have?
Quite a stack of turtles...
You're asking these questions as if we haven't been basking in the awesome reality of virtual machines for the last 20 years.
It's not especially hard today to preserve and emulate a 20-year old Windows environment and run it on today's technology. We can even emulate within browsers today, which also demonstrates our ability to preserve older environments within newer technology. It likely won't be a difficult challenge to emulate the environments we may need in the future.
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will future computer understand the x86 and VESA standard?
The former can be handled by using MIPS (a patent-free RISC ISA) instead of patented, complex modern x86, and by including an in-own-words description of the entire MIPS architecture, along with enough of a Rosetta stone to document the human language in which MIPS is described. Video can be handled as if it were a dumb frame buffer, also described in-own-words.
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Well, they developed coffee, something many slash-dotters rely on. They invented modern Cryptology during that time period, something many slash-dotters rely on.
They invented the "modern" windmill, something that has been adapted to provide power for the computer you use in modern days. They developed disinfectants and many medicinal advancements.
They invented the modern guitar that no doubt plays on your music station.
During that period of time they pretty much kept science and literature alive when much
Re: Middle Ages preserved content (Score:5, Insightful)
And a few hundred years later Christians committed xenocide in the Americas, subjugated Africa, Indian Subcontinent, forced drugs on China.
People suck. The difference is though, Muslim nations allowed freedom of religion long before Western nations even knew what that meant. Sure, the West leads on that front now, and many Islamic nations are far from free or tolerant. However, in the time frame that you are attacking them, the middle ages, they WERE the most enlightened people on the planet.
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That is a myth. Islam was a major reason for centuries of the dark ages in Europe as Islam carried on a war on Europe for centuries burning over 90% of all written knowledge because only the Koran mattered.
You know, Fox isn't a very good source of historical knowledge. Hysterical perhaps, but that's a different topic.
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No, they weren't fine, upstanding God Fearing Christians (who were busily destroying the rest of the Indoeuropean continent). They were nasty, bad smelling, violent, backstabbing lying bastards.
Just like the rest of humanity.
Get used to it.
'Onward Christian soldiers, marching on to war .....'
welcome to Aurora (Score:2)
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Totally wrong. Everything we know about the greece is thanks to the muslims preserving it over the middle ages. In europe, the old greek philosophers and mathematicians were all considered heathens and therefore not worth the parchment their writings were written on.
The term "Algebra" comes from a book about mathematics written by a muslim: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/... [wikipedia.org]
Its sad how development continued, and europe had the period of enlightenment while the muslim world is pursuing wahabism and worse ideo
muzzy lies (Score:2)
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Thanks for the link, didn't know that!
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So, you're saying we need a Crusade level genocidal event every couple of hundred years to keep human civilization from losing ancient knowledge?
Lovely.
Maybe we should encourage the Vogons to build that expressway.
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Maths... Science... Astronomy...
They retained, and expanded and improved upon the knowledge learned by the classical civilizations. In the middle ages they were an enlightened and advanced civilization compared to the people to their west. Obviously, all civilizations had their problems, theirs did too; but, the middle ages was their golden age.
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Well, according to yourself, they preserved technical documents. But then again, since when has logic mattered to bigots?
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Well, I'm having a terrible time reading Shakespeare's "Love's Labour Won" and "Cardenio". All that's now known about these plays are the titles and that he wrote them. The rest is silence.
So we know they weren't good enough for people to copy them into the modern day.
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So we know they weren't good enough for people to copy them into the modern day.
Shakespeare wrote a number of quite mediocre plays, ones that are virtually never performed anymore because nobody likes them. We know this, because they still exist.
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Speaking of lasting knowledge, perhaps that Arctic seed vault should have accompanying knowledge vault
Or some sort of "Library of Congress."
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Better than stone tablets (Score:2)
Even stone can wear over time. Might I suggest talking rings [youtube.com]? Or perhaps "photonics" [youtube.com]?
Offset by Number of Copies (Score:3)
Even stone can wear over time.
Exactly - what matters for data retention is the data volume times the decay rate not just the decay rate itself. In the current information age we have far, far more of our lives and knowledge documented many, many times over. While a good deal of that data is on far more ephemeral media not all of it is. For example if we consider carved inscriptions on buildings and other stone memorials we still probably save more data this way than ancient civilizations did. We tend to neglect it as trivial compared t
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Do you happen to have a stone writer with a SCSI-2 Interface I could buy? I will settle for 1600bpi PE if it has read-after-write and full documentation in Latin and English.
Seriously, has anyone tried writing digital data onto clay using a Scully disk cutter? Bake the clay, and you will have a good few millenia of data life!
Re:First (Score:5, Funny)
Intellectual exchanges like this^ need to be preserved that for posterity.
Obligatory XKCD: https://xkcd.com/1683/ [xkcd.com]
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I had I good chuckle when I read the mouseover text on that one...
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That's why Elon Musk wants to go to Mars, to have enough surface space to enscribe Wikipedia on it. Slashdot is going to be scribed into the surface of Pluto, although the news will be a little old by the time it reaches that far.