• mrbn@lemmy.ca
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    2 days ago

    How many bits of data can a Starling “carry” and is it faster to have a starling fly data across the country to deliver data than it is for the data to be downloaded?

    • SpaceNoodle@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      It’s no station wagon full of tapes, but we can probably get there. It’ll be like Johnny Mnemonic but with birds.

    • phobiac@lemmy.world
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      2 days ago

      He does a quick calculation in the video and concludes that in this case it was ~176KB of uncompressed information, working out to about 2 MiB/s of bandwidth given that time it took to sing out the data.

    • panda_abyss@lemmy.ca
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      2 days ago

      Ideally you can teach the starlings as a group and get distributed storage with a high replication factor for free.

      Just make sure to store your data with an error correcting coding.

      And if the birds continue to propagate your data to their young, that’s even better security.

      Someone should teach Starlings those DeCSS numbers.