Backup Your Life on a DVD 336
matt20 writes "I've often wondered what it would take to condense the essence of my life and put it in a searchable format. Well, it looks like that may become a reality. Engineers are working on software to load every photo you take, every letter you write - in fact your every memory and experience - into a surrogate brain that never forgets anything. Here is the article found in New Scientist."
redundant (Score:5, Funny)
Re:redundant (Score:4, Interesting)
Re:redundant (Score:3, Insightful)
There will never be criminals in the US ever again. What a country!
Re:redundant (Score:3, Interesting)
Correction.
There will never be innocents in the US ever again.
With this kind of information at their disposal anyone can be made to appear to be guilty of just about anything. Add secret trials and a general terror-hysteria to the mix and you get an environment that makes Orwell's vision almost pleasant by comparison.
Re:redundant (Score:5, Funny)
My car keys? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:My car keys? (Score:3, Funny)
Re:My car keys? (Score:5, Funny)
Results 1 - 10 of about 651,000. Search took 0.37 seconds.
Which one is it?
We've had these "surrogate brains" for millenia. (Score:2, Interesting)
Re:We've had these "surrogate brains" for millenia (Score:3, Interesting)
They deteriorate if exposed to sunlight, water, or any number of bacteria, insects, and even mamals, that enjoy the taste of paper.
If I'm storing my data around goats, I'll take CDs over paper any day. For the same price as thousands of books, I can have inumerable CD copies.
Re:We've had these "surrogate brains" for millenia (Score:2)
Did you write this post to slashdot on a book or a computer?
Understand?
Oh no (Score:4, Funny)
may be a crazy idea (Score:5, Insightful)
Just "protect" it with the DMCA (Score:3, Funny)
Simple.
Re:Just "protect" it with the DMCA (Score:3, Insightful)
DMCA doesn't apply to law enforcement (Score:2)
use the DMCA to per^H^Hrosecute the living daylights out of anyone who accesses it without your authorization
That won't stop law enforcement. From 17 USC 1201 [cornell.edu]:
Re:may be a crazy idea (Score:2)
I am also quite happy in the knowledge that my descendants will not be able to browse through my life after I am dead.
Re:may be a crazy idea (Score:2)
Re:may be a crazy idea (Score:2, Offtopic)
And I do what with it? (Score:5, Interesting)
Seriously though, aside from being incredibly cool, what's the use of this thing? To pass on to relatives after you're gone? Nefarious use in our legal system? Coaster ("Don't put your drink on the table, use Aunt Jenny instead...")?
Re:And I do what with it? (Score:2, Interesting)
In effect, it would extend ones memory. This could only be a good thing.
Re:And I do what with it? (Score:2, Insightful)
And with all my phone conversations in storage, it would only take one court order for some secret government anti-terrorist unit hell-bent on administering some starchambered justice on a mere hint of suspicion to go through all my calls.
Oh, when the Homeland Security Office kicks in they probably won't need even court orders anymore.
Just go through all the populace. We're bound to find a few terrorists in there.
Re:And I do what with it? (Score:3, Funny)
Yeah, right, and I drink becase of all the good memories beer enhances...
Re:And I do what with it? (Score:2)
What about historians? Imagine if we had a version of this that belonged to Stalin, Hitler, Truman, Eisenhower, Kennedy, etc?
Not necessarily for public consumption at the time, but everything that person had ever lived through. It would be fascinating.
-- james
Re:And I do what with it? (Score:5, Funny)
(Where X was the last thing I would ever say/admit/believe.)
Be warned, women in high places will never alow this technology to be used by men, there is a potential for blokes in arguments to be proven right!
Re:And I do what with it? (Score:3, Funny)
Any male who gathers evidence preemptively to use against a female (unless she's an adversary) is just digging his own grave. Just roll over like you're supposed to; you'll be happier. You can know you're right all you want, just don't try to prove it.
Re:And I do what with it? (Score:2)
Re:And I do what with it? (Score:2, Interesting)
But. (Score:5, Funny)
Included in the title should be who is running it (Score:4, Insightful)
Anyone want to take bets on how fast MyLifeBits will be selling off your personal info? True if you doubt Microsoft's dubious motivation and believe they're working for the greater good, this still brings a new meaning to 'single point of failure'.
What do you need a DVD for? (Score:5, Funny)
Re:What do you need a DVD for? (Score:2)
Hmmm... (Score:2, Insightful)
I presume you must have to add stuff to this 'archive' manually? What happens if you forget? I know I probably would.
Heres a product i could use! (Score:2, Funny)
Woohoo! (Score:4, Funny)
I could get my folks to do Director's Commentary... ^_^
project is called MyLifeBits (Score:3, Informative)
Re:project is called MyLifeBits (Score:5, Funny)
That's cool. I'm about to start my own project, called MyLifeBites. It'll be a focus group helping nerdy Slashdotters come to grips with the fact that there's nothing in their lives worth backing up.
Well it sounds nice and all, but... (Score:2, Interesting)
Read the EULA (Score:5, Interesting)
Imagine... All the information submitted to the system becomes copyright of Organization X...
Or am I just being paranoid?
Re:Read the EULA (Score:2)
If everything I see or hear is perfectly copied and recorded for playback will they try to place restrictions on what is recorded, on what is played back, or even on what I can see or hear? What if I start to rely on the digital memories or they even become somehow melded with my own biological brain? Where will they draw between a digital copy and my own thoughts? Will songs and movies and such be blacked out or made fuzzy? Who owns and controls (and polices) the copyright on the items in an augmented mind?
And what are the implications for advertising and product placement? Perhaps to waive costs, companies will mark items or use intelligent software to change or update ads or brands stored in your digital memory database (the billboards, commercials, and products you've driven by, seen, or used and recorded to "memory") or worse, they may try to insert ads in your video memories that never existed ("Buy Widgets Now" plastered on the wall of your dining room).
By necessity, such scenarios would either be outlawed, cause the end of copyright as we know it, or create the beginning of the thought police era.
But I've aready got that. (Score:2, Interesting)
It's called encyclopidiac memory, all they need is a way to give everyone what some of us have naturally, and it's done. :-)
Microsoft Memories (Score:2, Funny)
Oh and probably that billg invented the internet.
Where did you want to go to yesterday?
The lawyers will love this... (Score:5, Interesting)
The most reliable one! (Score:5, Funny)
Umm....Why do I feel that was one sarcastic comment in the article???
the idea's been around for a while (Score:2, Interesting)
Screw That (Score:3, Funny)
Knunov
Ugh... (Score:2)
Appeal to the Female User (And a serious post) (Score:2, Funny)
Just kidding. This looks like some really interesting technology, but I can't help think that the investment of time you'd have to make outweighs the benefit.
Security risk? (Score:2, Interesting)
Someday is today, Microsoft owns our thoughts (Score:3, Funny)
We all knew it was going to happen someday, Microsoft would own our memories. Can you imagine the DCMA violations trying to break the compy protect to view your own memories? What type of lawsuits are we going to get into when we just claim to remember doing it, and no we didn't reference the MyLifeBits database?
The media would have fun with this. We could have "Truman Shows" playing back the MyLifeBits database files 24x7. Imagine the pirated copies of the next serial killer, or thrill seeker.
Don't you love technology.
Wait a minute (Score:2)
DVD not mentioned in article. (Score:4, Informative)
There's talk about 1000gb harddiscs, but not DVDs.
One of the stupidest headlines on
As to the idea it self: why? I don't need to excatly what or how I said something to my friends or family. In fact I dont want to...
One good idea, that they don't mention, would be automatic transscription of the audio conversations, thrus making them searchable. Now, that would be nice...
15 Petabytes (Score:2)
..in a related story (Score:2)
Be sure to check out todays Tom Toles.. Funny stuff. Here. [yahoo.com]
DVDs do not last for ever, and not original idea! (Score:2, Interesting)
Microsoft ... (Score:3, Informative)
- [...] engineers at Microsoft's Media Presence lab [...]
For those who can't be bothered to read the article (my advice: don't), a short summary: in a couple of years (like, five) 1-TB hard drives will cost ~USD300. A new trademark, "MyLifeBits", which is basically a (gasp) *searchable* database can be filled with everyPhotoYouEverTake, everySoundYouEverHear, everyTextYouEverRead (yadda yadda) as a kind of, er, diary. (For the yougsters: a "diary" is a private, dead-tree blog).No word on how you are supposed to get the information in there
What is this? MS anti-FUD?
(no, actually I'm having a *great* day)
Sorry but.... (Score:4, Funny)
Seriously?
Do the guys at Microsoft seriously consider the PC to be a most reliable of entities? Man, you think after years of running Windows you'd know better.
As for the database, that sounds like it would be an enormous amount of work to keep up, and wouldn't be that useful day to day unless you were carrying it with you. I forget to take pictures, how am I going to remember to upload the pictures I actually take? And has anyone ever gone back and reread their old email...BORING... unless you're narsisistic who cares what you posted on
This thing sounds good in theory, but in practice people just are not taking that many pictures or writing that many memorable letters. This will be a product for the vain, the famous and the rich who don't know what else to spend their money on.
------
Re:Sorry but.... (Score:3, Funny)
It would be self-limiting. Once you started on this project, you wouldn't be able to do more than a set amount per day, or it would take too long to enter into the database.
Monday - went to swell party after dinner, but had to leave at 10PM so I'd have time to enter into my database what a good time I was having before I left.
In the end, only people with no life would have time to put in their life.
Re: (Score:2, Funny)
Already done (Score:3, Interesting)
Yes, it sounds obsessive compulsive, and maybe it is. I do it because I like to have my life backed up in case of household disaster. Also, I've found that having that data with me all the time is very helpful--I carry a floppy with it so I can open anything I'm working on and save it.
Another reason I do it (especially the log/database) is that I don't like the idea of not knowing about my own life. I found the days going by in a blur before I kept track of things.
The only drawback is that I'm relying more and more on this CD instead of memory, which may be reducing it.
Cameras and Miner's Hats... (Score:4, Interesting)
In the compliance lab I work in, anything we do needs to be documented to prove that it happened. We always joked that we need miner's helmets with little cameras attached that always film what we do. That's what this looks like...
Comment removed (Score:4, Insightful)
what if you're not an existentialist? (Score:2, Interesting)
On the otherhand, if you are an existentialist and believe people are the sumb of their experience, then recording every waking moment would be equivalent to capturing you. But then again, I doubt the engineers are thinking of these philosphical issues.
Will this is nifty but.... (Score:2, Interesting)
I already have an extra brain... (Score:2)
Is this a joke? (Score:2)
This seems akin to the article about President Bush wanting the Army to use Windows XP so we could have flying soldiers. Plus, as it's been mentioned before in this thread, isn't the Dept. of Homeland Security alread doing this for us? Should these DVDs be available as a tax-benefit? I'm in the military, does this mean that mine will be classified?
Attacking the wrong problem (Score:3, Insightful)
And that's the problem: adding meaningful comments to all the little tidbits.
I have bought a digicam a little more than a year ago: I have taken approx 2000 pictures since that. I could put together some little scripts that search the JPEG's EXIF tags for comments but I can not be bothered to type it in. No way, that's not something I want to do. Easing/automatating this process is the thing that should be addressed (which is, I do realise, is far from trivial), but it's not dealt with.
Then I have all the emails I have ever sent or received (minus SPAM). Grepping it is something that is useful but it can be frustrating to remembering the exact words, then realizing that a synonym was used or there was a typo: so there is also space for improvement, but this project does not seems to address this problem.
So, to have the obligatory SP reference, this project seems to be supposed work like this:
1. Throw all the stuff you have into a database
2. ???
3. Have your whole life easily searchable
Re:Attacking the wrong problem (Score:2)
Text recognition helps just a little, personally I find typing easier.
Fuzzy world searching in itselfs is an interesting problem if you consider an agglutinating languages (like my mother tongue), and since they did not say anything about it I would presume that they did not do it.
Don't some of us do this already? (Score:2)
For reference I have most of my college career backed up on CD. I can go back and read class papers and read up on all the other stupid stuff I did over the years. As of now I already plan to sort through all those CD's and condense them all down to DVD. So, why is this software useful to those of us who already make use of such methods?
Your life == your output? (Score:2)
Another idea... (Score:2, Interesting)
Quick approximate calculations just for recording what you see at PAL resolution (720x576@25fps):
1 frame of PAL = 1.2MB
25 x 1.2MB = 30MB = 1 second
30MB x 60 = 1.8GB = 1 minute
1.8GB x 60 = 108GB = 1 hour
108GB x 24 = 2.6TB = 1 day
2.6TB x 7 = 18.2TB = 1 week
18.2TB x 4 = 72.8TB = 1 month
72TB x 12 = 873.6TB = 1 year
873.6TB x 70 = 61,152 Terrabytes (61.2 Petabytes)
Damn, that's a lot of storage!
Re:Another idea... (Score:4, Interesting)
1400*60=100320kbit/min
*60=6,019,200 kbit/hour
*24=144,460,800kbit/day
*365.25=52,76
*60=3,165,858,000,000kbit
=~360 TB
So to record 60 years of concious, non-blinking time at 1400kbps, you just need 1024 disk arrays like I have at my house...
Re:Another idea... (Score:2)
They should combine this with "factoid" (Score:2)
D'oh! (Score:2)
37Gb for a lifetime of internal monologs (Score:2)
Pentagon (Score:3, Funny)
Dear diary (Score:3, Interesting)
Storage is easy, retrieval's a bitch. (Score:3)
Running a Google search engine on an ever growing mass of data data is not enough.
The data has to be corelated. The engine has to understand, (read that word again, understand, an AI problem,) what its looking at and the appropriate level of granularity to use when parsing the data when extracting the memes it contains.
Our computers are damn near deaf, dumb, blind and stupider than cockroackes and we're having systemic, Korzibskian semantic anomalies and pattern recognition failures as it is.
I'd be happy when one has the information processing capacity of an annoying Pomeranian. It'll be about as useful too but I'd be happy.
I know DVD isn't mentioned in the article itself (Score:2)
But, imagine getting a scratch on this. If you think it sucks when your favorite CD skips, or your LotR jumps because of a scratch; think about what happens when your memory skips.
On second thought, it'd be like getting drunk and forgetting what happened, only much cheaper! Bring on the memory DVD!
Farleyfile and Lifesigns (Score:4, Informative)
Hmmm, sounds like the Farleyfile.
(copied from Jerry Pournelle's page [jerrypournelle.com]): Big Jim Farley was a New York Tammany Hall politician whose success was partly due to the "Farleyfile": a collection of facts about everyone he ever met. If you went to see Big Jim, by the time you got into his office he knew your name, your birthday, the names of your spouse and children, and what you liked for lunch. It was all on file.
Also, there's a program (Lifesigns?) that's based around a chronological history of data (there's a PC version, and there was a Newton version). You don't go searching for "Letter about Enron", you remember that it was 7 or 8 months ago, and look at email then. Clever premise, loved by all the people who adopted it. Never could get the hang of it myself.
Wow, technology has really advanced (Score:2)
But I guess technology must be moving faster than the underlying science.
Read the article before repeating the hype... (Score:5, Insightful)
Wait...the EULA said they own my BRAIN?!?!? (Score:2, Funny)
Yes. Now Microsoft can make us 'remember' things as they 'really' are. Remember that trial that we THOUGHT was against Microsoft for monopolistic practices? Well, it was ACTUALLY against Linux for being commie bastards. See how our memories decieved us?
Oh. And your brain is now covered by the DMCA and digital rights management. Don't try to remember anything without paying for it first.
'These people we're stealing the music, replaying it in their MINDS! Clearly, this theft must be stopped so I...I mean artists...can get the money they deserve. See, these people have in their back-up brain. Artists need compensation.' - RIAA, coming soon!
computer "akashic record" (Score:2)
An variation of the "akashic record" is that "time" is an illusion of material reality. In an alternative reality all events are simultaneous. Therefore all events relating to soul's incarnations are operating together. This hypothesis bypasses the issue what is the cosmic "recording media". Interestingly, some western physicists don't believe in the independent existance of "time" too.
surrogate brain? (Score:2, Insightful)
As predicted by Sci-Fi (Score:2)
Collectors' Edition? (Score:2)
Will really busy people get a two-disc collectors' edition, possibly with commentary from their mother and ex-significant others?
editing (Score:2)
Of course the possible abuses of this kind of tech are too numberous to mention. Why would we need prisons if we could edit the criminal mind?
EXCELLENT For Husbands! Is it portable? (Score:3, Funny)
"That was close honey, that chick's butt looks just like yours."
At least generally I can tell which one is her, by the three orbiting satellites.. (children)
Brain Googlism (Score:2)
My boss is an insensitive clod.
My wife is a skanky nagging whore.
My secretery is not.
Dude, Where can I score some replay? (Score:2)
Anne McCaffrey wrote about this... (Score:2)
I think... (Score:3, Funny)
Just wait... (Score:2)
No problem, right? Surely you have nothing to hide?
"Do you remember the Americans,
where did they go"
- Steve
This reminds me of the scrapbook UCB episode... (Score:3, Insightful)
"The motivation? Microsoft argues that our memories often deceive us: experiences get exaggerated, we muddle the timing of events and simply forget stuff. Much better, says the firm, to junk such unreliable interpretations and instead build a faithful memory on that most reliable of entities, the PC."
Yes, let's junk our minds and rely on computers instead! After all, we all know that computers are exactly like human brains only better! Haha, I will now power up and defeat you with my powerfull... hands!..
I have no idea why I just said that.
Likewise, I have no idea why this is inovative or impressive. People have been doing this for years.. with photos, diarys, letters and such. This, much as the artical says, is just a large database.
And frankly, I completely disagree with their premiss that having such accurate data on our past will give us a more true picture of what we were. We can only see the world through our own eyes, even if we have a perfect time line of what we *did* it still isn't likey to change how we'll think about our actions. We're still tainted by our own predjuices and momentary feelings and everything else, that relationship one had a year ago is still going to seem like a silly thing, and we're still going to say "oh, I wasn't really in love with her" even if we can see exactly what we did...
Besides, for the important things (well, what I consider important anyways, I'm sure as hell not going to suggest any of you need believe what I do) there's somthing to be said for just a memory. Sometimes a remembered smile between friends during a metor shower is more special than a video tape of the whole night.
Brain BSOD? (Score:2, Funny)
"I'm sorry officer, I don't remember. My memory crashed."
Alternative article title (Score:2, Interesting)
After reading the article (I know; not normal practice on Slashdot) it seems that the developers think that the interpretation of memories and events is unnecessary colouring.
Just the facts, mam
Let me put more words in their mouths by saying that they think they can improve by creating some search function whereby every piece of info will be examined. Now, I don't know about you, but isn't one of the most useful abilities of the brain its tendency to grade info from useful to useless and quietly discard the useless stuff by simply forgetting it. Even better, this runs as a background process. No intervention necessary.However, I think this project is a great idea. I just wonder if they can really develop something this complete.
Re:You must have the data. (Score:2)
Re:definitions (Score:2)
-- james