I don't know who your average slashdotter is, but I guess compared to most of you all I'm a regular joe, and my backup method of choice is to have a whole second computer. Who doesn't have one kicking around? And if not, even so the price of a second drive is what it is, and then you can go to the pawn shop and choose between a USB bridge for it, or some ancient, probably hot laptop with a standard drive bay in it?

This is good Foucauldian history. The author has an excellent point about a nearly invisible way that choice is structured in our age. The fact that the word 'default' has a long etymology, like all words do is natural enough - and even that the technology had a predecessor in the way that NY subway trains were routed in the 1930s only serves to reinforce the author's point. Nothing is ever born out of nothing: it evolves - repetition with a difference. What the author has identified is a really important aspect of the management of knowledge in our age (all the more clearly so because it appears so 'basic' to us), and I think it's really insightful.

To the contrary! I feel optimistic about it. Take what he says at face value: this is one of the first acts of the new guy stepping up to lead Hungary, equivalent to Obama's closing of Guantanamo, and it's meant to send a message. And the language he uses is that the move is intended to "foster competition" in the marketplace, and to "encourage the growth of free thinking" (to render the second paragraph of the article Charles Dodgson posted above). It's beautiful talk coming from any government, no?

Also, note that the budget concretely will be 12 billion Forint for "Microsoft/Novell" and the same amount for FOSS. Whether or not that's including Novell's OSS products, it's a nice fat wad of cash in Hungary, let me tell you - it will mean rivers of money for programmers in an open source community which is already strong, and it will strengthen interest in open source among Hungarian programming students, PC repair folks, power users, etc. I really can see it making a difference culturally.

Rocks DO need backing up. Scribes in Sumer maintained traditions over thousands of years of recopying clay tablets to preserve them. Even the ancient Persian conquerors of Babylon constructed museums of the already very ancient objects they found there. The same was true of later scribal traditions on leather and parchment which preserved classical documents for us, and the ways of reading them. In fact, if it weren't for the far superior concern for posterity the middle ages showed, we would not have the smattering of knowledge about the classical world we have managed to hold on to.

I am a linguist who studies clay tablets and ancient writing systems, and let me tell you, I lose sleep over this problem every day. What will happen (and note that I don't say would, because it is inconceivable that the "cloud" will last a thousand years, let alone five thousand) when they don't know what kind of electricity we used? Where will the remains of our civilization be? There is a basic point here which the "wayback machine" doesn't go far enough to answer. Where will they find our information stored, and how will they ever, ever, devise a way to read it? Bear in mind that we have trouble deciphering the earliest and most primitive writing systems ever devised even now. There are still dozens of these we can't read, and many more we haven't even rediscovered yet.

And, it turns out, a lot of what has happened to survive for us to read from all that time ago really is about as exciting as server logs - receipts for tithes, buying and selling grain, etc. And those tell us so many surprising and extraordinarily valuable things about the way the people who produced them lived, which the documents they intentionally preserved (such as king lists, prayers, mythologies) would never have thought to mention. So don't underestimate the value of the information you think is worthless! A thousand years from now they will regard you as a deluded primitive, but they will be interested in your internet traffic and your credit card records. But of course, don't forget to preserve the art too.

Cowards can be right sometimes too!

This is really a problem that keeps me awake at night, and archive.org doesn't make me feel any better. Look back ten years and see what storage media the world was using. In 300 years or 1000 years, will they even know what voltage of AC electricity to feed to the machines we used? If they are lucky enough to have some physical exemplar of these, it certainly won't be working, and the "cloud" will of course be long dissipated. What's worse, the storage media we have are not all that well-equipped to survive that long.

Because with more wives, the cooking is better.