[ExI] we stand on the shoulders of giants

[spike]

> ...On Behalf Of Brian Manning Delaney
> Subject: Re: [ExI] we stand on the shoulders of giants
> 
> spike skrev:
> 
> > ...if our access to 
> > our external knowledge base were to be disrupted or 
> removed, basic survival itself is far from assured.
...
> 
> But I agree completely with your main point. And one 
> practical conclusion might be: we need good backups! (In 
> radically different
> media/forms.) --  Brian
> 

That's only part of it.  As I mentioned we entered a third wave, a phase
change, with electronic media.  If we made backups in the form of hard copy
on paper, it would likely be useless.  I can show you an archive of paper
reports, done by my own company, stretching back eight decades, stored in an
enormous warehouse.  They are useless, for no one has time to go thru the
inadequate indexes to try to find anything specific.  I tried once, looking
for a report that I knew existed, and I am pretty sure is in there
somewhere, but cannot be found.  That report is 404.  We must scan that
archive, or failing that, we might as well torch it.

We need to somehow make our backup searchable in some kind of electronic
format, in a form that is likely to survive a huge electromagnetic pulse.
Keep this in mind: if we are attacked by nuclear weapons, they are unlikely
to be in the form of the traditional mushroom cloud, but rather an EMP
weapon, for these are easier to deliver (because they are lighter) and cover
more area in which they don't actually slay the proles but rather they wreck
the electronics, which will result in large numbers of the proles expiring.

spike