Re: Deep Rescue: Will a shuttle float?

On Mon, 22 May 2006 17:10:57 -0500, Pat Flannery <flanner@xxxxxxxxxx>
wrote:

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.

I'd be rich, rich, rich. I've got thousands of books, everything from
introductory engineering to advanced knitting. Even a first-edition
paperback of "Dune" (it cost 95 cents).

Welding, airborne radar, bread making, jet aircraft manuals, SF,
fantasy, mystery, true crime, military history, aircraft, history,
biography, autobiography, biology, paleontology, etymology,
entomology, economics, general fiction, cosmology, physics, string
theory, art, mathematics, evolution, archeology, pathology,
anthropology, forensics, neurology, chemistry, beading, jewelry,
cooking, ethnic cooking, literature, and a bunch of other stuff. And
that's just what I can see in this room.

Mary "Eclectic taste in reading material"
--
Mary Shafer Retired aerospace research engineer
We didn't just do weird stuff at Dryden, we wrote reports about it.
reunite.gondwana@xxxxxxxxx or miliff@xxxxxxxx
.

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