Since apparently the music is streamed to the computer is un-DRM and then iTunes adds the DRM afterwards, Apple would have to include some sort of flag to determine which music iTunes should DRM and which not rather than all of it. That means it would be trivial to remove the DRM flag. The hymn program works only if you are authorized by having the correct key for your music. It then uses that key to remove the DRM which iTunes added.
Show me a court decision where the parties to a contract did not have to be unambigously identified. If it cannot be proven WHO clicked the mouse and that the clicker was legally qualified to enter a binding legal contract, then there IS NO enforceable contract.
If I click a mouse I have NOT agreed to anything, because there is NO way to prove who clicked that mouse. If I sign a piece of paper with MY signature on it, then I am identified and bound. A valid contract MUST identify the parties to that contract. The parties also must be of legal age to sign a binding contract.
...using a helicopter to storm the castle to listen your work is illega...
Actually it is the MAKER of the helicopter who violates the DMCA since he provided the means to storm the castle. Storming the castle with it is ok as such.
You mean that by clicking a mouse button I am making a legally binding agreement? How can anybody prove WHO clicked a mouse button? Most computers are used by more than one person,especially in a family with children.
I don't think that DRM ever has and ever will prevent anyone to be able to do what they really want with their music/video/software, it just makes it far less convenient. The lack of convenience will prevent some people from doing something with the material that they otherwise might and make them get new material from more convenient sources.
If suddenly something happened to Apple or the Internet infrastructure that prevented millions of ordinary users from suddenly using their DRMed fairly bought material, there would be such a huge outcry, that all DRM would get outlawed almost overnight. Can you imagine if every iPod owner suddenly could no longer listen to their music they bought and wrote a letter to their Congress rep? I think that eventually the content owners will figure out that the Internet is their friend just like the studios discovered the VCR and DVD as their main cash cow. They'll look at unpaid for copying the way most of us regard flies or ants or other pests, they can't be eliminated, but they can be kept to a level and place were we can coexist with them.
..or if those conditions will drive us to extinction...
Most life forms do MUCH better in a warmer climate. It is no accident that the internal body temperature of warm blooded creatures is from about 95degF to 105degF, for this is the temperature range in which the processes of life function at their best.
There is also evidence that the water level of the oceans was about 200 -300 feet LOWER at one time, but there is NO evidence that it was EVER significantly higher than it is today. We humans are singularly bad at foretelling the future and not too good sometimes at looking into the past. Our such self-important so called "scientists" can't even accurately predict tomorrow's weather and they presume to be able to predict what the climate will be like in a 100 years. Such arrogant pride of human beings, thinking they can materially affect what is happening on a global scale. Yes, cities do affect the local climate, but that is like saying someone can light a fire under a tub of water and make it warmer and therefore we can also make the oceans and the whole earth warmer by our piddling efforts, whether deliberate or accidental. Just study a little bit, some of the foolish ideas scientists of the past came up with and how the minority of some voices were ridiculed or worse. For example, it took over 50 years for the "eminent" scientsts of the day to accept the experimental evidence that the speed of light was finite, rather than infinitely fast, as was the dogma of that time. Highly educated and revered scientists of the past have made some astoundingly foolish pronouncements, especially of the "it can never happen" or if man does this or that the "end of the world" will come or "nothing more can be invented" variety.
Ages ago all that carbon, a small fraction of which we are now releasing to the atmosphere" was in the very warm atmosphere and abundant life forms converted it into hydrocarbons (fossil fuel). Some global cataclysm quicky buried most of these life forms, making fossils and fossil fuel. Today, no fossil fuels nor fossils are being made because when life forms die, they are normally recycled by microorganisms and oxydation. Lab experiments have confirmed that living matter can be converted into hydrocarbons relatively quickly by the application sufficient heat and pressure in the absence of oxygen.
It is a fact that there is slight global warming, but this warming is well inside the temperature range of historical cyclical climate variations with natural causes. There in NO evidence, but it is pure conjecture, that man's activities have anything to do with warming or cooling of the climate. There were also periods on Earth when it was much colder (ice ages?). Why is it so hard to accept that climate changes naturally and there is absolutely nothing any human can do to prevent or alter those variations?
...If Joe User were required to start by using Linux or BSD...
He/she'd throw the whole #$*&^ computer into the nearest trash can because they would not be able to do anything with it and go back to paper and pencil and just maybe a simple calculator. A tool that is too hard to use is worse than no tool at all. Just forget about trying to do the job the tool is SUPPOSED to do. People lived just fine thank you before computers were invented. The reason there are so many windows computers as compared to Linux or other geeky systems is that despite all their flaws, ordinary users can get some work done with Windows. I wonder how many Macs are among the million or so zombie computers?
...that make them popular, despite the unpopularity of the destruction they cause...
Actually, safety has never been as big a selling attraction as convenience and power. There is also the macho image thing of 4 wheel drive for example. Even in places where it never or rarely snows and freezes, such as Southern California, 4 wheel drive SUV and pickups are sold in large numbers.
The Prius hybrid is a good compromise. Its gas engine does not come on until the vehicle gets to about 40mph or if the battery is low. If they make some sort of home charger for this car to keep the battery full, the gas engine may only operate occasionally in city traffic, but be there for longer trips or when more power is needed for passing and hills. Ford also makes a hybrid SUV that gets better mileage than a normal SUV.
...Japanese companies which are making electric cars work...
All of these cars are HYBRIDS that still rely on gasoline for all of their energy. Ford also sells a hybrid SUV. Since hybrids can use various tricks, such as regenerative braking and stopping the engine at traffic lights, they do get significantly better milage. The Toyota Prius does not turn on the gas engine until the car gets up to about 40mph or the driver floors it.
If you are going to take a trip in a purely electrically powered car, you DO need to recharge a whole gas tank's worth of energy. Maybe for those who can afford to keep two cars, one electric for local commutes and shopping and another gas/hybrid for road trips, this might work. Fuel cells may make all electric vehicles practical if their cost can be brought down and the needed hydrogen infrastructure gets built. All Automakers will only build cars that people will actually BUY, regardless of what laws the politicians may pass. If nobody bought SUVs then they would not make them.
...it just takes a long time for those plants and animals to die, pile up, get buried and be slowly geothermally cooked into oil... Unfortunately that is not the way it works. The life forms that die decompose and are recycled, NOT turned into oil unless the burial is sudden and deep enough and/or with enough heat to kill all microorganisms and exclude oxygen. This implies some sort of sudden cataclysm that buries all those living creatures before decay can set in.
...utterly cooked ourselves to death on global warming...
That is a whole lot of BS. It is a FACT that in times past the Earth was warm enough to grow TROPICAL plants in areas now arctic cold and that all that oil we now burn from underneath the deserts of Arabia and the arctic tundra came from abundantly growing life forms that thrived there and were buried in some sort of cataclysm that prevented decay, but made oil, coal and gas instead. Even in human times, there were periods of great warmth. There were also ice ages of widespread cold. All this happened before there was any fossil fuel burning by mankind.
You don't get it do you! The whole reason GM scrapped the electric idea is because there is no way to store enough electric energy for a car. Even if a battery were made that could store as much energy as a tankful of gasoline, you'd need an enormous charger (megawatts) to recharge such a battery in the amount of time it takes to refill a gas tank. That is if the battery could even take such rapid recharging. Even in a home, it would need to get about 100Kwh of energy to put a tank's worth of energy into the battery over say 8 hours which means a 12.5Kw battery charger, a not exactly cheap device. If every house were drawing that amount of power each night, the grid could not supply it all.
..create a 1500MW fusion power plant by 2020 but it was scraped to cost's...
Cost was only one factor. Nobody yet knows how to make a fusion reactor on such a "small" scale. To make fusion a sustainable energy producer, requires a huge scale according to the technology we have to date. Even that is not a given for it to actually work. Nobody has yet built a fusion device that produces more power than it consumes. There is a perfectly fine fusion reactor about 93 million miles from here that we need to learn how to efficiently use its output. Some people are using it today to heat their water and make electric power for their household.
In 25+ years it is likely that problem will be solved. The main ingredient of them is silicon, which basically a form of sand, which is environmentally benign. Solar energy is already a viable use for many off grid homes even though it is still rather expensive, although not prohibitively so. The cost to connect a house in an isolated area to the grid is often equal or greater to a solar solution, especially in the more sunny western part of the USA. Once the installation cost is amortized, the electricity is almost free. Batteries are the most expensive maintenance item.
If you do a little calculation of exactly how small a percentage of all of mankind's energy use is, compared to the amount of energy that now falls on uninhabited deserts, you'd realize how absurd the idea of man's affecting the climate in any measurable way is. All the global warming BS ignores the fact that in times past the Earth was so warm, that tropical life forms abounded in the arctic lands and oceans of this planet. Proud humans like to give themselves airs about how they can affect the weather when they can't even reliably predict the same often not even a day in advance and certainly not long term.
...The total output of power that the earth gets is a known finite number....
Indeed it is finite, but huge! The energy the sun puts down on the deserts of the USA in one day, if it coud be used efficiently, would meet the total energy need of ALL mankind for years. Man's production and use of energy is MINUTE in comaprison to the amount of solar energy the earth receives each day. All energy that man has used in all of history is still way less than what the sun sends to our planet each and every day. We humans tend to get rather proud at times about our technological prowess, but if the sun went out, like a light bulb turned off, we'd all be frozen stiff in a few days, no matter how high we turned up our thermostats.
So for all practical purposes, if we learned how to use and store solar energy efficiently at reasonable cost, the energy supply of the sun is infinite.
Those were actual production cars and there is still a considerable number of them around, creating enough of a demand for third parties to fill. None of these EVs were ever sold to anyone, only leased.
...legal system is so far gone from any sense of sanity or morality...
A small change would fix a lot of it: Prevent the pay of a lawyer being in any way related to the outcome of the case or the amount of money at stake. Pay lawyers ONLY for their time actually worked, using a time clock, like millions of ordinary workers. It would cut down on frivolous litigation, but if someone with little or no money had a good case, their lawyer and the defendants lawyers would get their wages from the loser like any ordinary worker does for the documented time spent. No lawyer would pocket a huge percentage of the amount settled for or decreed by the courts.
Also, lawyers should be allowed to or even compelled to advertise their rates and compete with each other like other businesses. Of course since many, if not most legislators are in some way connected to the legal profession, legal reform will never take place as long as these polititians have anything to say about it. What the people may want is totally unimportant to those incumbents. A revolution at the ballot box may change the legal system. As long as we the people vote for these same, often bought and paid for elected politicians again and again, there will definitely be no reform.
Doing that is fine for many, but not everybody. We live 5 miles out of town. It is not too often that any of us would take a ten mile walk just to get the mail or some groceries, or even ride a bike. Ever try to take a 40lb sack of dog food on a 5 mile bike ride, especially uphill?
Until the majority of people have Internet connectivity approaching the data transfer speed of even the slowest hard drive, this idea will not work. When I want to open a 3Gig video file, I don't want to wait for it to get from some server thousands of miles away to where I can edit or play it. I believe that the "personal" of PC will not ever be replaced by some distant super computer or network and that we will NOT come back full circle to the mainframe type computing model.
Only if that anybody has LOTS of $$ to pay an army of lawyers bigger than Google's army of lawyers. I suspect that the economic cost of fighting the Google lawyer army is FAR greater then whatever benefit (if any) might accrue to the Google attacker to be able to force Google to stop caching whatever they want to. Besides, anyone who doesn't want their content cached can tell Google not to and that's the end of the problem.
That's what we do also. If the caller ID does not display a number we recognize, we let the answering machine take the call. The answering plays the first 10 seconds of the callers message (if they leave one) and if it is someone we want to talk to, we pick up the phone. Most junk callers never leave a message. If everybody used this or a a similar tactic, junk calls would not become a big plague.
I have two categories of e-mail: premanent important and temporary. The permanent is about 1%, usually personal stuff, the rest gets deleted along with the spam about once a week. In our litigious nation, *anybody* can get sued for almost anything, especially business related things. The less information you keep, the less ammunition the hungry, often crooked lawyers will have to use against you. The stuff I keep is converted to ordinary text files and backed up along with other backups from the hard drive onto CD's. CD's kept in the dark in a cool place are quite stable storage devices. If you wanto to keep something for your decendants a 100 years from now, laser printing it on acid free paper and storing it in a dry place is the surest way.
Slashdot Mirror
...your purchase is bound by a service agreement...
There is no legal agreement anywhere with my signature on it that binds me to NOT strip out the DRM. Mouse clicks don't count as a legal agreement.
...both DRM and DRM-free music...
Since apparently the music is streamed to the computer is un-DRM and then iTunes adds the DRM afterwards, Apple would have to include some sort of flag to determine which music iTunes should DRM and which not rather than all of it. That means it would be trivial to remove the DRM flag. The hymn program works only if you are authorized by having the correct key for your music. It then uses that key to remove the DRM which iTunes added.
...the courts disagree with...
Show me a court decision where the parties to a contract did not have to be unambigously identified. If it cannot be proven WHO clicked the mouse and that the clicker was legally qualified to enter a binding legal contract, then there IS NO enforceable contract.
...You agree that you will not attempt to......
If I click a mouse I have NOT agreed to anything, because there is NO way to prove who clicked that mouse. If I sign a piece of paper with MY signature on it, then I am identified and bound. A valid contract MUST identify the parties to that contract. The parties also must be of legal age to sign a binding contract.
...using a helicopter to storm the castle to listen your work is illega...
Actually it is the MAKER of the helicopter who violates the DMCA since he provided the means to storm the castle. Storming the castle with it is ok as such.
...Once this is ported to Linux though, I'll resume buying songs from iTunes...
Which flavor of Linux should Apple support? Will ONE version work with all versions of Linux currently out there?
...I'm saying that agreeing to do something...
You mean that by clicking a mouse button I am making a legally binding agreement? How can anybody prove WHO clicked a mouse button? Most computers are used by more than one person,especially in a family with children.
I don't think that DRM ever has and ever will prevent anyone to be able to do what they really want with their music/video/software, it just makes it far less convenient. The lack of convenience will prevent some people from doing something with the material that they otherwise might and make them get new material from more convenient sources.
If suddenly something happened to Apple or the Internet infrastructure that prevented millions of ordinary users from suddenly using their DRMed fairly bought material, there would be such a huge outcry, that all DRM would get outlawed almost overnight. Can you imagine if every iPod owner suddenly could no longer listen to their music they bought and wrote a letter to their Congress rep? I think that eventually the content owners will figure out that the Internet is their friend just like the studios discovered the VCR and DVD as their main cash cow. They'll look at unpaid for copying the way most of us regard flies or ants or other pests, they can't be eliminated, but they can be kept to a level and place were we can coexist with them.
..or if those conditions will drive us to extinction...
Most life forms do MUCH better in a warmer climate. It is no accident that the internal body temperature of warm blooded creatures is from about 95degF to 105degF, for this is the temperature range in which the processes of life function at their best.
There is also evidence that the water level of the oceans was about 200 -300 feet LOWER at one time, but there is NO evidence that it was EVER significantly higher than it is today. We humans are singularly bad at foretelling the future and not too good sometimes at looking into the past. Our such self-important so called "scientists" can't even accurately predict tomorrow's weather and they presume to be able to predict what the climate will be like in a 100 years. Such arrogant pride of human beings, thinking they can materially affect what is happening on a global scale. Yes, cities do affect the local climate, but that is like saying someone can light a fire under a tub of water and make it warmer and therefore we can also make the oceans and the whole earth warmer by our piddling efforts, whether deliberate or accidental. Just study a little bit, some of the foolish ideas scientists of the past came up with and how the minority of some voices were ridiculed or worse. For example, it took over 50 years for the "eminent" scientsts of the day to accept the experimental evidence that the speed of light was finite, rather than infinitely fast, as was the dogma of that time. Highly educated and revered scientists of the past have made some astoundingly foolish pronouncements, especially of the "it can never happen" or if man does this or that the "end of the world" will come or "nothing more can be invented" variety.
Ages ago all that carbon, a small fraction of which we are now releasing to the atmosphere" was in the very warm atmosphere and abundant life forms converted it into hydrocarbons (fossil fuel). Some global cataclysm quicky buried most of these life forms, making fossils and fossil fuel. Today, no fossil fuels nor fossils are being made because when life forms die, they are normally recycled by microorganisms and oxydation. Lab experiments have confirmed that living matter can be converted into hydrocarbons relatively quickly by the application sufficient heat and pressure in the absence of oxygen.
It is a fact that there is slight global warming, but this warming is well inside the temperature range of historical cyclical climate variations with natural causes. There in NO evidence, but it is pure conjecture, that man's activities have anything to do with warming or cooling of the climate. There were also periods on Earth when it was much colder (ice ages?). Why is it so hard to accept that climate changes naturally and there is absolutely nothing any human can do to prevent or alter those variations?
...If Joe User were required to start by using Linux or BSD...
He/she'd throw the whole #$*&^ computer into the nearest trash can because they would not be able to do anything with it and go back to paper and pencil and just maybe a simple calculator. A tool that is too hard to use is worse than no tool at all. Just forget about trying to do the job the tool is SUPPOSED to do. People lived just fine thank you before computers were invented. The reason there are so many windows computers as compared to Linux or other geeky systems is that despite all their flaws, ordinary users can get some work done with Windows. I wonder how many Macs are among the million or so zombie computers?
...that make them popular, despite the unpopularity of the destruction they cause...
Actually, safety has never been as big a selling attraction as convenience and power. There is also the macho image thing of 4 wheel drive for example. Even in places where it never or rarely snows and freezes, such as Southern California, 4 wheel drive SUV and pickups are sold in large numbers.
The Prius hybrid is a good compromise. Its gas engine does not come on until the vehicle gets to about 40mph or if the battery is low. If they make some sort of home charger for this car to keep the battery full, the gas engine may only operate occasionally in city traffic, but be there for longer trips or when more power is needed for passing and hills. Ford also makes a hybrid SUV that gets better mileage than a normal SUV.
...Japanese companies which are making electric cars work...
All of these cars are HYBRIDS that still rely on gasoline for all of their energy. Ford also sells a hybrid SUV. Since hybrids can use various tricks, such as regenerative braking and stopping the engine at traffic lights, they do get significantly better milage. The Toyota Prius does not turn on the gas engine until the car gets up to about 40mph or the driver floors it.
If you are going to take a trip in a purely electrically powered car, you DO need to recharge a whole gas tank's worth of energy. Maybe for those who can afford to keep two cars, one electric for local commutes and shopping and another gas/hybrid for road trips, this might work. Fuel cells may make all electric vehicles practical if their cost can be brought down and the needed hydrogen infrastructure gets built. All Automakers will only build cars that people will actually BUY, regardless of what laws the politicians may pass. If nobody bought SUVs then they would not make them.
...it just takes a long time for those plants and animals to die, pile up, get buried and be slowly geothermally cooked into oil. ..
Unfortunately that is not the way it works. The life forms that die decompose and are recycled, NOT turned into oil unless the burial is sudden and deep enough and/or with enough heat to kill all microorganisms and exclude oxygen. This implies some sort of sudden cataclysm that buries all those living creatures before decay can set in.
...utterly cooked ourselves to death on global warming...
That is a whole lot of BS. It is a FACT that in times past the Earth was warm enough to grow TROPICAL plants in areas now arctic cold and that all that oil we now burn from underneath the deserts of Arabia and the arctic tundra came from abundantly growing life forms that thrived there and were buried in some sort of cataclysm that prevented decay, but made oil, coal and gas instead. Even in human times, there were periods of great warmth. There were also ice ages of widespread cold. All this happened before there was any fossil fuel burning by mankind.
...By switching cars to electric...
You don't get it do you! The whole reason GM scrapped the electric idea is because there is no way to store enough electric energy for a car. Even if a battery were made that could store as much energy as a tankful of gasoline, you'd need an enormous charger (megawatts) to recharge such a battery in the amount of time it takes to refill a gas tank. That is if the battery could even take such rapid recharging. Even in a home, it would need to get about 100Kwh of energy to put a tank's worth of energy into the battery over say 8 hours which means a 12.5Kw battery charger, a not exactly cheap device. If every house were drawing that amount of power each night, the grid could not supply it all.
..create a 1500MW fusion power plant by 2020 but it was scraped to cost's...
Cost was only one factor. Nobody yet knows how to make a fusion reactor on such a "small" scale. To make fusion a sustainable energy producer, requires a huge scale according to the technology we have to date. Even that is not a given for it to actually work. Nobody has yet built a fusion device that produces more power than it consumes. There is a perfectly fine fusion reactor about 93 million miles from here that we need to learn how to efficiently use its output. Some people are using it today to heat their water and make electric power for their household.
...getting RID of a solar panel...
In 25+ years it is likely that problem will be solved. The main ingredient of them is silicon, which basically a form of sand, which is environmentally benign. Solar energy is already a viable use for many off grid homes even though it is still rather expensive, although not prohibitively so. The cost to connect a house in an isolated area to the grid is often equal or greater to a solar solution, especially in the more sunny western part of the USA. Once the installation cost is amortized, the electricity is almost free. Batteries are the most expensive maintenance item.
...using that energy on a large scale...
If you do a little calculation of exactly how small a percentage of all of mankind's energy use is, compared to the amount of energy that now falls on uninhabited deserts, you'd realize how absurd the idea of man's affecting the climate in any measurable way is. All the global warming BS ignores the fact that in times past the Earth was so warm, that tropical life forms abounded in the arctic lands and oceans of this planet. Proud humans like to give themselves airs about how they can affect the weather when they can't even reliably predict the same often not even a day in advance and certainly not long term.
...The total output of power that the earth gets is a known finite number. ...
Indeed it is finite, but huge! The energy the sun puts down on the deserts of the USA in one day, if it coud be used efficiently, would meet the total energy need of ALL mankind for years. Man's production and use of energy is MINUTE in comaprison to the amount of solar energy the earth receives each day. All energy that man has used in all of history is still way less than what the sun sends to our planet each and every day. We humans tend to get rather proud at times about our technological prowess, but if the sun went out, like a light bulb turned off, we'd all be frozen stiff in a few days, no matter how high we turned up our thermostats.
So for all practical purposes, if we learned how to use and store solar energy efficiently at reasonable cost, the energy supply of the sun is infinite.
...Ford is still making Model T...
Those were actual production cars and there is still a considerable number of them around, creating enough of a demand for third parties to fill. None of these EVs were ever sold to anyone, only leased.
...legal system is so far gone from any sense of sanity or morality...
A small change would fix a lot of it: Prevent the pay of a lawyer being in any way related to the outcome of the case or the amount of money at stake. Pay lawyers ONLY for their time actually worked, using a time clock, like millions of ordinary workers. It would cut down on frivolous litigation, but if someone with little or no money had a good case, their lawyer and the defendants lawyers would get their wages from the loser like any ordinary worker does for the documented time spent. No lawyer would pocket a huge percentage of the amount settled for or decreed by the courts.
Also, lawyers should be allowed to or even compelled to advertise their rates and compete with each other like other businesses. Of course since many, if not most legislators are in some way connected to the legal profession, legal reform will never take place as long as these polititians have anything to say about it. What the people may want is totally unimportant to those incumbents. A revolution at the ballot box may change the legal system. As long as we the people vote for these same, often bought and paid for elected politicians again and again, there will definitely be no reform.
...a little judicious walking and cycling...
Doing that is fine for many, but not everybody. We live 5 miles out of town. It is not too often that any of us would take a ten mile walk just to get the mail or some groceries, or even ride a bike. Ever try to take a 40lb sack of dog food on a 5 mile bike ride, especially uphill?
... Bandwidth and latency are big problems...
Until the majority of people have Internet connectivity approaching the data transfer speed of even the slowest hard drive, this idea will not work. When I want to open a 3Gig video file, I don't want to wait for it to get from some server thousands of miles away to where I can edit or play it. I believe that the "personal" of PC will not ever be replaced by some distant super computer or network and that we will NOT come back full circle to the mainframe type computing model.
... Pretty much anybody could at any time...
Only if that anybody has LOTS of $$ to pay an army of lawyers bigger than Google's army of lawyers. I suspect that the economic cost of fighting the Google lawyer army is FAR greater then whatever benefit (if any) might accrue to the Google attacker to be able to force Google to stop caching whatever they want to. Besides, anyone who doesn't want their content cached can tell Google not to and that's the end of the problem.
...the answering machine will get it...
That's what we do also. If the caller ID does not display a number we recognize, we let the answering machine take the call. The answering plays the first 10 seconds of the callers message (if they leave one) and if it is someone we want to talk to, we pick up the phone. Most junk callers never leave a message. If everybody used this or a a similar tactic, junk calls would not become a big plague.
...Once a email is read, it is deleted...
I have two categories of e-mail: premanent important and temporary. The permanent is about 1%, usually personal stuff, the rest gets deleted along with the spam about once a week. In our litigious nation, *anybody* can get sued for almost anything, especially business related things. The less information you keep, the less ammunition the hungry, often crooked lawyers will have to use against you. The stuff I keep is converted to ordinary text files and backed up along with other backups from the hard drive onto CD's. CD's kept in the dark in a cool place are quite stable storage devices. If you wanto to keep something for your decendants a 100 years from now, laser printing it on acid free paper and storing it in a dry place is the surest way.