

Megaupload was our collective library Of Alexandria - brador
http://nerdr.com/megaupload-burning-the-library-of-alexandria/

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rauljara
Absurd. When the library of Alexandria burnt, knowledge and culture was lost,
never to be recovered.

When mega upload shut down, it just meant you had to switch which service you
used. I seriously doubt there was a single bit of knowledge or culture that
was on megaupload that still doesn't exist today on some hard drive somewhere.

Yeah, shutting down mega upload raises some pretty serious questions. But the
library of Alexandria it ain't.

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moe
_It also stored our collective culture of the last 2 DECADES._

Umm, no. I don't think MegaUpload was that big...

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brador
It had textfiles from the old BBS days together with SNES roms. Thats 2
decades if not more. Together with "old" movies (Ghostbusters 1 for example).
Trust me, that rabbit hole went deep.

~~~
mattdeboard
Yeah now that Megaupload's gone how will we ever watch Ghostbusters or play
SNES roms?

~~~
brador
They were of course, just examples.

Consider if Youtube were to shut down overnight. Yes we'd lose a lot of
generally available content (hop on Ebay for a copy of Ghostbusters), but we'd
also lose a lot of amazing content that you can't buy on Ebay or get anywhere
else. It's THAT stuff that's a sad loss.

Then the question is, if it's not commercially available, does it still have
any value at all? I argue yes. I've learnt more from free files and videos
some random user has uploaded than I have from commercial products. Once gone,
I can never access those resources ever again. Ever. Because it's bits and
bytes, once erased, it's gone forever.

~~~
moe
You're overestimating the size of MegaUpload.

Most people had never even heard of it, and if you want to store something
valuable permanently then it should be obvious to put it in multiple
locations.

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brador
Megaupload had 4% of world internet traffic...

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moe
No. It had a _reach_ of 4% which is quite a different thing.

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brador
Reach of 4%? What would that even mean?

~~~
moe
<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reach_(advertising)>

<http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Megaupload#Statistics>

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Metapony
I'm going to have to buy stock in kleenex tissues if this is how this
generation is going to whine. We'll be seeing shutdowns of fertile
environments a lot in the future.

------
kmfrk
And in more positive news, people might have learnt a valuable lesson about
redundant storage of valuable data.

