What a great new medium. Isn’t it a shame what the guy’s first thought was when presented with this. The complete knowledge of man, and he’s focusing on ghastly home movies and twitter notes. Good grief!
he thought he was giving the world the computer for the Enterprise and its written up all about twits tweeting tweets
I agree with you here. There is a crying need for ENORMOUS size record storehouses that will archive the scientific data that we are gathering daily right now. Terabytes of photos and data from the Hubble Telescope and other space observations really ought to be archived forever, so we are able to more closely examine historical records of specific stars or galaxies or sections of the sky when something is noticed (supernova, comets, etc.). All the “basic science” data such as terabytes of data the world’s particle accelerators create daily should similarly be archived be available for continuing access. Weather/climate data are similarly voluminous, however in that case the value is much lower due to the measurement uncertainties. Of course, we would love to maintain such things as the classics of literature, motion pictures, etc., but that is small potatoes in the data industry compared to the importance of maintaining the other records I mentioned.
If this technology proves to be realizable and truly as permanent as it now seems, it would be a godsend to these and many other scientific endeavors. I would guess that such a capability would be worth over ten times the cost of current data retention techniques.