Ebook opinion

Digital information
will last forever because there's the web and millions upon millions
of continually-refreshed archives on media owned by individuals and
organizations.

That assumes continuity of the society doing the refreshing. There was a
time when nobody could read ancient Egyptian, but the records remained in
spite of the loss of continuity in the ability to read them. In time the
ability was regained and the records could be read again.

A hundred years from now an opressive world government could pull the plug
on the Internet, and the a hundred years later, when freedom returns, those
"continually refreshed" records would be lost because the refresh cycle was
briefly broken. The Dead Sea Scrolls remained unread for a very long time.
Imagine what would have happened if their survival had depended on continual
refreshing.

Society is not as stable and dependable as we would like to believe it is,
and while we optimistically hope for continuity of our culture in the
future, history teaches us that such continuity is far from guaranteed.

--gary

sez:

Don't ask me how I came about getting the text for them. Maybe you can
ask your neighborhood hacker kid.

But the point is, this stuff works.

Why should we take the word of an admitted thief?



"The problem with defending the purity of the English language is that
English is about as pure as a cribhouse whore. We don't just borrow
words; on occasion, English has pursued other languages down alleyways
to beat them unconscious and rifle their pockets for new vocabulary."
--James D. Nicoll