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Message: <blockquote data-quote="Jeremy Ackerman-Yost" data-source="post: 5029313" data-attributes="member: 4720">Heh.  The battery issue does bug me.  Luckily, they're putting money into that tech in a few countries, so improvements are coming down the pipeline quickly.  Batteries that can be recharged over and over again forever are theoretically quite possible.  We'll see how they do and if they're permitted to bring them to market.One thing about batteries, though... people know that some types are bad news, and there are recycling technologies that do a reasonable job of containing the waste.  People don't even realize how nasty paper is for the environment.  They assume it kills trees and that's about it.The computer virus and EMP thing just doesn't worry me.  If we have enough EMPs occurring that they take out a meaningful number of computers and other storage devices, there won't be enough paper left to transmit culture, either.And I don't really buy the permanence argument.  History has proven that stone, wood, and metal don't really last if someone wants to get rid of them.  We've misplaced entire civilizations under the Indian Ocean.  Cultural artifacts have been deliberately annihilated by the victors in war or subsequent cultures who wanted to re-write history.  One-of-a-kind items are a great thing, and I want people to keep making them, but I also want a copy in a digital format that I can re-copy and distribute all over the world with a click of a button, making them truly impervious to any one act of suppression or destruction or any one accident.Before they put copies of them on the internet, one accident in a single location is all it would have taken to destroy all of Leonardo da Vinci's surviving notes.  Now, even if that accident occurs, even if someone decides to destroy them deliberately, there will still be a copy somewhere, because multiple servers scattered in many places have redundant, instant, effectively free copies.  Not exactly the same thing, from a visceral, tactile perspective, but the raw information is still there, which is at least something.</blockquote>

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