Our society is the first in the history of humanity to have the following property. When the archaeologists of tomorrow unearth our artifacts, they'll wince in horror because they're more than likely going to be hard drives full of midget porn and myspace pages. The profession will be filled with masochists whose sole task is to sift through blog entry after blog entry, trying and failing to understand our culture.

This depresses me. That is all.

Why would "archaeologists of tomorrow" unearth people's crap? What happened, we all got caught in a mudslide?

If this is depressing you, you may need help.

The Romans probably said the same thing

Except the whole world is wired and information is everywhere. Any event in news and culture is copied down billions of times. Unless you are talking about post-apocalyptic settings.

If future archaeologists are unearthing our stuff I'm assuming it's either in the distant future and we've all died out or there was some big natural disaster and we've all died out. Either way, I don't think most of our digital storage mediums would surive, at least not with their data. And even if they did, what are the odds they're going to be able to read any of it? There's a good chance the internet will disappear with mankind.

I'd be more concerned about our radio transmissions. We've been broadcasting TV for what, 50 years? I think that'd be more than enough time for any intelligent society on a distant planet to figure out how to watch it. I'm sure they'd be very "What the hell?" about it all.

I'd say about the same chance as watching our T.V. which you claimed would be no problem. Digital storage is not rocket science. They'd obviously know our alphabet and it wouldn't be hard to put two and two together once they figured out ASCII and unicode.

I didn't claim it would be no problem, I said I reckon 50 years would be enough to figure out how to watch it. I would think regular analog broadcast signals are a fair bit simpler than the data on a tape or hard drive. Especially when something like mySpace is comprised of encoded webpages with encrypted databases and compressed image formats. It's not like they'll be running Windows machines and can just plug it in.

Knowing our language is only going to be so much help when it comes to unraveling whatever data they find.

The over/under on us destroying our planet through Nuclear Holocaust is at 64%

i'm writing some sci-fi where the main character's job is to scan latent IO and delete junk data based on date and most recent access set out by the customer. he's a scanner.
storage may be cheap but there's a lot, A LOT, of crap taking up space needlessly out there.

BREAKING NEWS: Researchers Uncover the "API-etta Stone!"

It's more likely that storage mediums will grow way larger than we can actually use, and anything and everything will be left in an archival state for thousands of years, so anyone has access to the data, assuming they can find some way of actually reading it.

Is there some reason a program with heuristic algorithms couldn't do the same job, faster, and cheaper?

No there is no reason because that's how things work now. Good writers write about what they know

lol well maybe this sci-fi main character gets laid off because they outsourced some non-english speaking people $2 an hour to write that program.

yeah. there's two parts to sci-fi. you missed the second part. fi.

Yeah but you missed the first part, sci. Humans aren't even close to being as fast as a computer for the kind of task you're talking about. In fact, computers were *invented* for the kind of task you're talking about. There would be no computers storing useless data if computers were not needed to sort it in the first place. If humans were faster or even economical at the task we would still be using index cards and warehouses full of filing cabinets.

I'll put it this way to help you out.

My computer has 4 GB of RAM. That means it can store, in RAM, 4 billion letters. That's roughly 7 million complete novels. In RAM. At once. All 7 million novels can be loaded into memory and unloaded in around 2 seconds. I haven't met a person who can memorize and forget the contents of 7 million novels in 2 seconds.

With one hard drive I can do this 250 times. My hard drive has a data throughput of around 171,000 novels a second. So to fill my memory completely from the hard drive it would take about 41 seconds. I haven't met a person who could read 171,000 novels in one second.

Of course, this information is sweetened when you consider how a well-written algorithm would function. Would it have to read the entire contents of the file? No, the file would have to meet certain criteria first. A computer with an NTFS filesystem can assess the criteria of roughly 300,000 files a second. I don't know about you but I can't read and evaluate 300,000 file access timestamps a second.

A great thing about using a computer, though, is how parallel it is. I can have one thread reading metadata and evaluating the file for a later stage; if it passes the first thread, I can have one thread loading it into memory and another thread analysing the contents of the file simultaneously. The best part about it, though? You can have this program running constantly, 24/7, continually scanning the filesystem for files to archive or delete. It doesn't need to sleep. It doesn't need to take a break. It doesn't need a salary (or worse, hourly wages), and it doesn't need benefits. It's also literally millions, if not billions of times faster than a human doing the same task.

Also, honestly, if your story is ruined because the main character can't be a guy who sits around all day deleting stuff then it's going to be a pretty boring story.

Nice to meet you, I'm Grismath.