Though I too suspect the NSA must be using some form of dense, long-lifetime data-in-solid storage technology that we haven't been told of. I can believe them storing 'all comms' in real time using hard disks, but I find it hard to believe they'd be anticipating refreshing the entire archive onto new media every 10 years of so. Which they'd have to do with hard disks or DVD equivalents. And I flatly refuse to believe they'd be prepared to just let it go.
There was an announcement back in 1999 from Keele University in UK, of having succeeded with using NMR to store and retrieve data in solids. The lead researcher was Prof. Ted Williams, who led development of the nuclear magnetic resonance scanner.
Then suddenly... nothing more was heard of that.
There's just something about this idea that sounds extremely likely. That not only is the NSA spying on everyone, but also maybe keeping to themselves a revolutionary storage technology that would change everything. So far I haven't heard anything at all about _how_ the NSA is storing all that data, have you?
We should be building eternal, public archives of all the cultural and scientific knowledge of humankind. Instead we're building vast secret archives of everyone's tweets, lunch appointments and credit card transactions.
It's well known that several hundred patents a year get swept up under a "secrecy order" and disappear. But most of these are from a) defense contractors working on military systems and b) nuclear research.
Occasionally (maybe 20 per year), an inventor unaffiliated with the government will attempt to get a patent, and have it get swept up under a secrecy order.
But a new type of data storage? I would surely think the government would let this get developed and refined in the private arena.
Cutting edge development is a sinkhole for massive amounts of money. Just think how many hard drives a billion dollars could buy? I don't think it makes sense economically, when there is a commonly available alternative.
What worries me more is the possibility that the oil industry has spies with control over this "secrecy order". The fabled "200 mile per gallon carburetor" type stuff.
It is quite easy for me to believe that a trillion dollar industry would attempt to protect itself by any means possible.
>What worries me more is the possibility that the oil industry has spies with control over this "secrecy order". The fabled "200 mile per gallon carburetor" type stuff.
>It is quite easy for me to believe that a trillion dollar industry would attempt to protect itself by any means possible.
all the engineering calculations for a car you can make yourself starting from the first principles, like
They probably filter out most of the data. They're building a huge new datacenter; why would they do that if they have the capacity to store all that data already?
Though I too suspect the NSA must be using some form of dense, long-lifetime data-in-solid storage technology that we haven't been told of. I can believe them storing 'all comms' in real time using hard disks, but I find it hard to believe they'd be anticipating refreshing the entire archive onto new media every 10 years of so. Which they'd have to do with hard disks or DVD equivalents. And I flatly refuse to believe they'd be prepared to just let it go.
There was an announcement back in 1999 from Keele University in UK, of having succeeded with using NMR to store and retrieve data in solids. The lead researcher was Prof. Ted Williams, who led development of the nuclear magnetic resonance scanner.
Then suddenly... nothing more was heard of that.
There's just something about this idea that sounds extremely likely. That not only is the NSA spying on everyone, but also maybe keeping to themselves a revolutionary storage technology that would change everything. So far I haven't heard anything at all about _how_ the NSA is storing all that data, have you?
We should be building eternal, public archives of all the cultural and scientific knowledge of humankind. Instead we're building vast secret archives of everyone's tweets, lunch appointments and credit card transactions.