A Burlingame, California, entrepreneur has filed a patent for hollow headstones fitted with flat LCD touch panels that will allow the deceased to play messages to visitors from beyond the grave (Reader Bradley Davidson, who submitted this story, dubbed it the ‘DIEpod.’) Before death — which makes you look ten pounds lighter on camera, at least — clients would record messages for their family, then load them into tombstones that would be powered from cemetery lighting systems. It’s not a bad idea, exactly, but I wonder about the maintenance issues. Carved marble stone lasts, what, a couple of hundred years, at best? How long would a flat-screen television, recorded media, and a set of wireless headphones stay operable? Would you like to go to your loved one’s grave and spend ten minutes trying to reboot the headstone? What about hackers?
It would be fitting, though, if someone could outfit my grave with a MAME cabinet.
Read – High-tech messages from the grave [NewScientist]
