Digitize everything!
Foolscap is romantic and pleasing to the senses, but paper as a medium of the historical record is slowly dying of deterioration and handling. All information will be digital and the paper history of civilization will be collectors' items while the content will be available online. I'm sure there's something very satisfying in researching and handling the musty records of days gone by, but the era will end in the next few decades.
Digitizing everything makes the notion and technology of search so profoundly important to the Googles, Yahoos and Microsofts of this era, and, of course, to all of us who are online.
What a tempting terrorist target! Yet the Internet architecture was designed first and foremost for survivability against nuclear attack in the Cold War. Let's hope the diffuse and distributed architecture will remain reliable against the attempts to cripple it by the hackers and terrorists of tomorrow.
Note to myself: read the 9/11 Commission's report on the digital infrastructure.
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