... the fact that the original settlers of the lands now forming the United States were Christians...
Original settlers? I'm going to go all P.C. on you and make it original European settlers. Unless of course you're talking about the whacky mormon notion that Christianity got to the Americas centuries before Europeans did...:)
Be it paper or on platters, your information will always require effort to preserve.
Why do people forget the massive numbers of hours it has always taken to run libraries and mail-rooms? Even once you stop fire and flood, you still have to maintain catalogues and physically haul things around. And then when you want a local or remote copy, you have to laboriously feed paper through scanners and photocopiers, all for your imperfect n+1 generation copy.
With digital storage you still have to keep the fire and flood away, but instead of up-to-date librarians you need up-to-date hardware and some intelligent management procedures, but this is today already cheaper than librarians. In return, you have information you can instantly search, efficiently index, instantly and perfectly replicate to share it or back it up...
But I think we're all overlooking a much greater problem. How many of you are even capable of *properly* appreciating the nuances of text penned in your own language just a hundred years ago? The differences between Old, Middle, and Modern English are staggering -- over time periods that are sometimes very short.
You want your data 100 years from now? Better start saving up for the historian you're going to have to hire to explain:
What the fuck does that borg Bill Gates icon mean?
Did those YouTube things ever actually make any sense?
Why did young people spend so much time selecting red and blue pills to explore rabbit holes?
If the WTC really was hit in 2001, then why can I find so many references to "911" emergencies going back decades earlier?
If you're going to answer questions like that in 100 years, you'd better hope your dude isn't leafing through paper records and referring to a card file.
Slashdot Mirror
Be it paper or on platters, your information will always require effort to preserve.
Why do people forget the massive numbers of hours it has always taken to run libraries and mail-rooms? Even once you stop fire and flood, you still have to maintain catalogues and physically haul things around. And then when you want a local or remote copy, you have to laboriously feed paper through scanners and photocopiers, all for your imperfect n+1 generation copy.
With digital storage you still have to keep the fire and flood away, but instead of up-to-date librarians you need up-to-date hardware and some intelligent management procedures, but this is today already cheaper than librarians. In return, you have information you can instantly search, efficiently index, instantly and perfectly replicate to share it or back it up...
But I think we're all overlooking a much greater problem. How many of you are even capable of *properly* appreciating the nuances of text penned in your own language just a hundred years ago? The differences between Old, Middle, and Modern English are staggering -- over time periods that are sometimes very short.
You want your data 100 years from now? Better start saving up for the historian you're going to have to hire to explain:
If you're going to answer questions like that in 100 years, you'd better hope your dude isn't leafing through paper records and referring to a card file.