Re: Deep Rescue: Will a shuttle float?



Andre Lieven wrote:

No, but the reader can get busted pretty easily. I've dropped a lot
of books on the floor, over the decades...

And, I dare say that I treat my books well enough that no hardcover
copies of mine have had that problem.


In the case of my books, that's a badge of honor, along with the cheese oil and peanut butter stains on the pages.
This means the book has been read out of many, many times, and is like some old soldier returning from battle without one of his legs, but covered in medals.
That, and the fact that it has been really difficult to find decent binding on book for the past few decades.


In our town the library is quite small, and the ability to find what you are interested in quite limited.



Thats an issue of small townness, not the greater suitability of
on line sources.



I still think that they go the way of the dodo inside of thirty years due to advancing technology.
....and that spooks me, as one nice thing about books is that they are self-contained once printed and don't rely on any fragile technology to use.
Our society hinges on the use of sophisticated interlocked technology, and if it ever fails we are going to be in a great deal of trouble.
Imagine if they had grounded all the commercial aircraft on 9/11... and they had been forced to stay grounded ever after...that's the scenario that worries me about something really wreaking havoc with the internet on a global scale.
Somebody comes up with the ultimate computer virus that spreads worldwide in a few hours, and destroys the data in pretty much all of the world's computers in such a way that once gone, you can't ever restart the computer, as the only thing left in it is the virus, and it will deny you the ability to reboot or erase it other than by magnetically scrubbing the hard drive and erasing everything in the RAM.
So, you have to rebuild all of the world's computer memory pretty much from scratch, and then use entirely new-build OS's, as all of the current ones are susceptible to the virus at a fundamental level, and you'll get infected again the moment you go online.
The world would be in complete economic collapse inside of a week.
This stuff would be the Butlerian Jihad in digital form.





The real advantage is speed- I can look up pretty much anything I want on the web in a mater of a couple of minutes at most, which is a lot faster than driving down to the library, checking the catalog, and then trying to find the info I'm after in the books I find.



Sure. Whats the reliability rates ? The big problem of the web is that
stuff can be put up without peer review, without fact checking, and
without editing.



Ever read "Intercept-But Don't Shoot" by Renato Vesco? It's about the Nazi flying saucers. :-D
Of all the books and articles published in a year in printed versions, what percentage ever get peer reviewed?
The internet is the same way- always check up on the reliability of your source.


Brad Guth is a good case study in what the web can offer... <g>



YOU BROWN-NOSING INCEST CLONED BORG SPOOK! How dare you say that!
Somehow, I think Brad's website is going to become one of the classics of internet history, right up there with dancing babies and http://tech2.nytimes.com/mem/technology/techreview.html?res=940DE4D61531F937A35754C0A9649C8B63
Although they are becoming pretty repetitive now, the first time I read one of Brad's postings, it was like seeing the written equivalent of a Hieronymous Bosch paiting...why the hell does that owl have green snakes where the legs should be, and a ocarina for a beak? Huh?
Nowadays it's more like this: http://www.schizophrenia.org/artist.html
Dig it, cat!

Pat
.