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I was thinking about how every time I read something I wrote a long time ago, remember virtually nothing about, and how I think: "what, the, fuck?" every time I read something I wrote a long time ago.
That got me thinking about that "letter to yourself" I missed making in the 5th grade, and then I
think about maybe, one day writing a letter to myself. And I think about how I have a programming class now, and how I could write a program for my computer that pops up with a letter written to me that I wrote in the past, 2 years from now. I doubted that I would ever write a letter anyway, due to my horrible laziness, and I became pretty sure my computer would be: A. replaced B. obsolete (even more so than it is now) or C. reformatted (Again). I thought about an article I read or something, that a guy in the 19-1800's wrote a archive of some sort, which all kinds of anonmyous information and random tid bits, that were incredibly helpful to historians and just people who wanted to read about what it was like Back In The Day.
This virtual time capsule, is a website, sort of, that is filled with tons of information from one time, that will appear on the internet (if something better hasn't replaced it by then...) for everyone to read. Possibly it could be made and added to like everything2's site. After a set period, the 'creation time' ends and the site becomes invisible to search engine for the next oh... 50 years.
Baked.
http://www.futureme.org/
Allows you to send an email to yourself in the future. Pretty much the same thing. [dbmag9, Jan 27 2006]
[link]
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Sounds a lot like the usenet. |
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There is something nice about this idea - websites to the future. The web is an ever changing beast with only things like the WayBack Machine (is there anything else like the WayBack Machine?) in place to preserve the tinyest shred of history. It worries me sometimes how impermanent a great many of our endeavours are these days (or mine anyway, most of them being a matter of altering the arrangement of a set of bits on various computers in various places) and that should it all come tumbling down, how invisible our lives, our work, and everything we've learnt will become. So letters to the future I like, but can we do it so that they get automatically printed off, stuffed into an envelope and posted somewhere physically? |
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Doesn't Google Cache do something like this? |
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To be subliminal, it could flicker briefly across the screen, like those scary faces in The Exorcist. Except these images would be of cars with fins and other old stuff. |
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The trouble with saving files for 10 or more years is that
the programs they were created on have been upgraded
and may not be able to read the format or the program
doesn't exist anymore because the company the company
was bought out by Microsoft. You could convert it to pure
text but that's too much work and you would lose all the
fun stuff like Flash files and web pages. |
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So when you buy a new computer, just unplug the old one
and stick it in closet. If you don't replace the monitor with
it when you do put it in the closet too. Don't forget that
SCSI cable. There is your virtual time capsule intact
waiting for you to plug it in and see if you remember how
to open a file in WriteNow 2.5. |
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