Backing Up Your Brain 204
couch_warrior writes "Microsoft is now working on a system that will back up the contents of your brain.
The pilot project lacks a direct brain interface, but "MyLifeBits" will provide a simulacrum of actual memories.
No mention is made as to whether Microsoft will claim to own the digital rights to the content of your life, or what license fees you will have to pay to access your own memories." Honestly this looks like a bunch of hooey to me, but I figured others would be better suited to say.
Requested Patch for Slashdot (Score:5, Insightful)
So instead of going on a tyrranical rant about this and bringing CmdrTaco's mother into it, let's look at how we could avoid this in the future.
I don't know what the administrative interface looks like for Slashdot, hell, I haven't even been given mod points yet despite regular meta moderation. But I'll bet that if you plugged the domain restriction plus the title of the proposed article into your favorite search engine, you could avoid 75% of all dupes. So in Google, this article would be:
Putting Your Brain into A Computer [slashdot.org]
But what if it was possible for the admin to select keywords/phrases from the submission and have that generate search links to the search engine. Two obvious ones would be Gordon Bell [google.com] and the de facto dupe finding token MyLifeBits [site].
And with that last one, we come up with Backup Your Life on a DVD [slashdot.org] and Recording Your Entire Life [slashdot.org]. Two very similar articles to the subject at hand (the Gordon Bell search has no dearth of articles either). A few minutes of linking this to Vannevar Bush and you find Your Life On a Hard Drive [slashdot.org].
If this is an update piece and you want to update us on the project, at least link to the plethora of articles related to it! My god, how many times must we discuss this man's dreams to do this? Where are the results already? I swear every single time this comes up, it's mere speculation. The editor even says so after the summary!
Oh Lots of fun (Score:4, Insightful)
Can of Worms (Score:5, Insightful)
You're right... (Score:4, Insightful)
Movies and music (Score:3, Insightful)
Shoulda called it "MyLifeBytes" (Score:2, Insightful)
You just don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
Slashdot, like most media, has to attract eyeballs. If they printed on the frontpage "no news today" they wouldn't be making any money. So the slashdot editors have the task of keeping a steady stream of stories on the frontpage. So that when you visit it, you get some new story to read.
But not yet any story will do, it needs to be a story that people will react to. So that they post comments, so that it looks like an active site.
A slashdot story where ALL you needed to know was in the headline and had no room for discussion, well, you could just get that from the RSS feed, no page load, no ad load, no eyeballs.
You posted a comment to this story, I posted a comment to you. Mission accomplished. All you have shown is that the story attracted eyeballs.
In Terry Pratchets discworld book "The Truth" the patrician (local ruler) makes an observation about a newspaper. "Ain't it nice how there is always just enough news to fit the page, no spaces left open or anything".
The newspaper needs to be full, it needs to get read. That is a newspapers mission.
If you really want to tell the editors to stop doing this. STOP REPLYING.
Oh, and there is another thing to consider, slashdot is NOT a news site. It is an intresting things site. Nobody ever claimed that intresting things have to be new.
Re:You just don't get it (Score:5, Insightful)
In particular, the GP wasn't saying that Slashdot should be a news site, or even saying that dupes are an egregious sin. Instead, he was providing possible ways for making such stories useful instead of aggravating. It is indeed aggravating to read something only to discover that it's more-or-less the same thing you've already read, but much less so if you're forewarned about how this fits in with previous stories. Slashdot has made some progress in this department (with the "Related Stories" links), but more work needs to be done. A "dupe" isn't necessarily bad if it is framed properly (e.g. "here's an update on X" or "it's been awhile since we've heard about X" or "for those of you who missed the last story on X, here's another one"). I'm pretty sure that people will still load Slashdot, still join the discussion, and so forth. What we are asking for is not that every article be totally fresh and original, but that summaries are accurate and useful, which means pointing out how the current news/article differs from previous news/articles on the same subject (if it's a dupe, just say so!).
For those of us who like Slashdot and read many of the stories, unlabeled dupes are annoying... and we want to help fix the situation. An upgrade to the Slashdot admin interface (which tries to auto-detect dupes or related links) is one solution. Another one, which would exploit the collective memory (and detail-oriented nature) of Slashdot readership would be to allow people to add "related links" to articles (preferably at the firehose stage). If enough people add the same link (maybe weighted by karma), it is probably not linkspam and can be promoted automatically to be displayed. This would give editors information on related stories, and allow them to better judge the novelty of a submission.
restoring (Score:4, Insightful)
Summary is brain-dead (Score:3, Insightful)
It is not "hooey" either, as the web really is a memory extender just try Google. Or ask Ted Nelson, whose work on Xanadu hypertext for example is tracable to his own faulty memory which he overcame by carrying ring-bound cards on his belt.
The only problem with this of course is that Microsoft is involved. They are inevitably going to spread their smarmy-feely corporate crap all over it. And you know what's going to happen, you will see people buy other people's lives (as a 100GB file download of multimedia clips indexed by time and location) and act all superior and shit.
They always describe these things in glowing terms that make you think of your Mom scanning in family photos to email her kids but in the end they end up owning your ass. That part of it wasn't hooey.
Now an open source version of this would be cool. I wouldn't have to write stuff down, just surf back a la Time Machine or if anyone has tried it, Gelernter's Mirror Worlds which was an interesting Java desktop demo that puts you in mind of the Internet Archive's Wayback Machine. If someone tagged bits of their lives meaningfully it might be useful, even restaurants might get better service.
Re:You just don't get it (Score:3, Insightful)