...and why should it be?

Whoever wants to keep the originals can - at their own expense or by fundraising. This means that those of historical importance will be kept and paid for by the government (ultimately us then).

The digital copies should be held in a primary location on secure and unalterable media (yaay, bring PROMs back - what capacity would they be now?) and also on other widely separated sites as backups.

When a document is requested from the primary site it can be comparatively authenticated from multiple sites.

Regular comparative audits can be used to check storage integrity, any anomalies would be either tampering or hardware failure and a trace would sort out which and indicate what action to take.

TL:DR - the government sticks everything in a 4MB DX2-66 box running DOS 4 and Telnet with everything on a crate of old Deathstars found in a closet. You know how it ends.

... and immediately thought of Enya. Funny how the brain works, sometimes. Or in my case, works sometimes.

Having seen this just after an article elsewhere showing the results of a TikTok "challenge" - a man in a wheelchair due to having his spine wrecked - I can only consider banning it to be a win. So many stupid challenges and so many people sucked into taking part because, hey, it's only a bit of harmless fun, right?

Plenty have suffered injury up to now, how many more will as the stupidity envelope is pushed further & further towards people dieing as a
matter of course? How long before you get deliberately crafted challenges (if that's not already happening) - "eat a random forest mushroom", perhaps, or "poke a pit-bull"? Ooh, I know, "down a cup of table salt" for TikTok kudos - that'll be cool, right?

I suppose I should say this in case anyone reading this is gullible beyond reason - DON'T do any of the patently dangerous things I've written above.

And long term zero gravity is where you *don't* want people. People are more fragile than some people think they are, and zero or reduced gravity can play havoc with a person's bones, muscle & pretty much everything else. Some changes can revert fairly quickly when back in a 1G* environment, some take longer and some may be permanent.

I'd settle for artificial gravity or rotating station and a zero G section for appropriate experiments.

*Let's not get sidetracked by the 5G issue here... [chortle]

Why are we putting thousands of pieces of future debris in space when we have the capability to run cable (copper or optical), construct microwave links & such? It won't get in the way of astronomers, won't be a risk to spacecraft going up or in orbit and should easily be cheaper. Or is it about the bragging rights of how many thousands of spacecraft you can have up there?

Trying to prevent people seems to be a generally good idea at the moment. We seem to breeding them stupid and it's not going to end well.

Agree on the citation. If it's a lone citation from the Daily Fail but it piques my curiosity, I tend to look around for other sources. Otherwise - meh, ignored.

He can't do that - Bobby's the man from Atlantis :)

Here, have a jelly baby...

"It relays to the enemy that U.S. retaliation would be so awful, it had better not attack in the first place"

Any nation willing to take on a nuclear armed superpower already has a contingency plan in case of retaliation - protect the people they consider the elites and let the rest burn. They think they can rebuild their country from the ashes with selected brood mares and their extra special genes.

"able to kill hundreds of thousands of people in a single shot" means it's not a deterrent, just another mass killing tool. Saddam might have used all his WMDs on the Kurds but the USA just wants more & more & others want to join this nasty little club.

Speaking of tools, put the people who want these in a room with the people they consider the enemy, give them knives and make it a pay-per-view event. War would come to an end real fast.

That's the first time I've seen anyone use the term "enlightened self interest" outside of a EE 'doc' Smith novel or a Wiki entry. If only more people thought that way.

If I had mod points to give, they'd be yours...

It may not have been dead when the person last visited so there's no need to go off on one just because it doesn't work now. Is it *really* that hard to type "SIT tone" into Google?

"ManyÂMicrosoftÂemployees don't believe that what we build should be used for waging war."

A bit hypocritical when you consider they have absolutely no problem waging war against their customers. From Clippy to Windows 'telemetry', among many things. Next up: "Renting Windows 10 For Beginners" and "Recovering Lost Data After Windows Update - A Guide For The Consumer".

Procrastinators of the world unite...

Sometime.

I wish I had mod points to give so you'll just have to settle for a thank you. Makes a pleasant change to read something that doesn't look like it fell off a LiveLeak thread.