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Politics : Formerly About Advanced Micro Devices -- Ignore unavailable to you. Want to Upgrade?

To: tejek who wrote (259833)	11/13/2005 10:49:13 PM
From: combjelly	Read Replies (1) \| Respond to of 1572172

"First I don't believe all the books explaining the processes needed to extract these resources will be destroyed completely no matter the catastrophe." That's not the problem. Our technology infrastructure is very highly tuned, and no one place has all of it. So if something breaks up the interdependencies, then all of it goes. And more and more of our technology requires the ability to manipulate things on the near atomic level, both directly and indirectly. It is the whole Differential Engine problem that Babbage ran into. It was the first programmable computer, complete with a keyboard equivalent and a printer. But the tolerances required to build it, made it impossible to build in Victorian England. It was a completely possible design, they recently built one from the plans and there were only a couple of errors that needed to be corrected. This is why I labeled terrorism as the single largest problem that our society faced, well before 9/11. Because if terrorists target infrastructure and communications, then governments will react by making things like travel more difficult and the infrastructure more cumbersome. And that leads to shortages and trade barriers and hoops that have to be jumped through, gumming the system up. And that is the problem with synergistic systems. When you pass certain thresholds, this work disproportionately better. When you fall below those thresholds, things fall apart quicker than you expect.