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Dissident Sound | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 why do "printed books" matter ?

i thought we were past physical medium of exchange of value and information.
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L 0 K 1 | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 Old school stuff for in case electricity fails. We are still waiting for another carrington event, it is inevitable that sooner or later the sun will burp out a burst that wipes out half the planet's grids,  and fries all the circuits permanently.

Otherwise it could end up being a long road back to where we are.
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Dissident Sound | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 unless that burp also kills every engineer on the planet it would only take them about a month to write down 90% of all the relevant knowledge from memory
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L 0 K 1 | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 I'm sure that this kind of confidence existed in the general population several times before. I bet the people of Pompeii never thought they'd be in the path of the lava too.

Sure, I could probably work backwards from what I can remember to recover a lot of technologies but I'd rather not leave it to chance.

Nostalgia is another benefit of keeping old tech around, especially when the old tech carries the information about how to build the new tech. I mean, transistors... I could probably figure out how to make them out of valves, given a few years and endless resources but a manual on how to print at least 1980s era ICs would be a hell of a lot more useful.
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Dissident Sound | 1 years ago (raw) | root | parent | reply | flag 
 dig a hole a mile deep in the ground and put some nuclear powered backup system in there.  library of congress is 15 TB.  this is ONE hard drive.  i haven't ordered anything in physical paper since the Kindle came out 15 years ago.