> ...but never forget that what we gain is the tremendous ability to copy perfectly. Yeah, all except the first one. I'm not gonna argue with the gushing passi

> ...but never forget that what we gain is the tremendous ability to copy perfectly. Yeah, all except the first one. I'm not gonna argue with the gushing passion for all things digital in the rest of your comment, but I will first of all, point out that putting your photos, music, and videos in the cloud is absolutely not an exact copy--cloud providers don't have ToS that cover the compression that they apply to your media. There's no telling how badly they'll compress it to make room for the newest stuff years from now. Since you offered such an untempered view of digital media as the ultimate achievement of human civilization, I'd like to offer an alternative viewpoint that recognizes that digital copies reduce very deep, meaningful experiences down to very meaningless bits. That's great for newspaper articles, but it's no way to live life. Just yesterday I was sitting in the park under a tree. The winds were blowing, thousands of leaves dancing above, and distantly a church bell began tolling, it's bang-clang rolling and washing through and around the boughs, being buffeted by the wind itself. The boughs are laden with leaves and seeds, and the sound waves are muffled at a turn, coming through at a turn, as this branch shakes and wags between the bells and me. The sun is filtered and flickered, I see the veins of leaves through. The insects buzz. One shield-like bug, as thin as a blade and about the size of a fingernail, lands and waddles around my blanket, its six legs hyper-optimized by evolution. There are perhaps 10,000 such creatures in this field. A trillion generations to produce it. It starts, its wings buzzing a thousand times a second. The hundreds of thousands of blades of grass wag in waves like grain, like carpet, like kelp in a fishtank, and they too, rustle. Could digital media capture this? I move my head to the side, angle it up, cup my ears, and I sense this field...I am absolutely surrounded by information. The amount information is incredible. I could hear the scrapes of the leaves against each other and the audio shadows of them as they blow around in front of this bell! I can hear the bells harmonics, and in my mind I see the sound waves racing round its circumference, overlaid with other harmonics making it jiggle like a waterballoon. The information there is 10^30...10^40. We can't even imagine. And yet, we are told that VR and digital media will usher us into a wonderful world of entertainment. Pah! Lossless copies. Pah! We cannot even capture a millionth of something like that.