[Beowulf] how Google warps your brain

[Hearns, John]

As usual, a highly insightful post from RGB.



>  a) Multiple copies.  Passenger pigeons may be robust, but once the
number of copies drops below a critical point, they are gone.  E. Coli
we will always have 
> with us (possibly in a constantly changing form) because there are so
very many copies, so very widely spread.

I probably shouldn't mention Wikileaks here...

> 
> At the moment, the internet has if anything VASTLY INCREASED a, b and
c
> for every single document in the public domain that has been ported
to,
> e.g. Project Gutenberg.
> 
> Right now, I'm sitting on a cache of "Saint" books, by Leslie
Charteris
> (who was a great favorite of mine growing up and still is).  
> 
> Nobody is going to reprint the Saint stories.  They are a gay fantasy
> from another time, 

Simon Templar? Gay? Cough.

Next you will be telling me that there are gay undertones in Top Gun,
the film with the sexiest astrophysicist ever.


> might well last to the end of civilization.  Replicate them a few
> million times, PERPETUATE them from generation to generation by
> renewing
> the copies, and backing them up, and recopying them in formats where
> they are still useful.

The cloud backup providers will be keeping copies of data on
geographically spread sites.
However, we should at this stage be asking what are the mechanisms for
cloud storage companies
for
*) living wills - what happens when the company goes bust

*) what are the strategies for migrating the data onto new storage
formats 


> 
> Or, to put it differently, suppose every single human on the planet
had
> access to the modern equivalent of Diophantus's Arithmetica on their
> computer, their Kindle, their Ipad 
I believe that was the original intent for the Web. Still under
development!


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