That question can't really be answered on its own. If you live in the United States Spanish is probably a solid choice for you. If you live in Finland not so much...

What "powers that be" do you suppose there are who have the wherewithal to move the entire human race to a single language? What do you do with the multitude of words that can't neatly be translated? Words that carry a special meaning for the underlying culture? Your desired future sounds oppressive, monolithic, and dull. And I say that as a native English speaker...

That depends on what breed of dog and how you define 'complex'. Border Collies are well known for their grasp of vocabulary; we could give our BC commands along the lines of "Go into Steve's room and get the red toy." and she'd do it. That sentence is complicated enough to place it out of reach for many humans who have only limited English abilities.

If you seriously pay tax on all of your income you're either lying or insanely anal retentive. Do you pay taxes on lottery winnings <$600? That's income, so if you didn't you're stealing. What about odd jobs you do for friends? Are you going to claim with a straight face that you keep track of such monies to the penny and claim them on your State and Federal taxes? I doubt it very much.

Few people would try to earn a living without paying any taxes whatsoever. But nearly everyone is going to accept cash in lieu of a check when the opportunity presents itself; why should I pay taxes on some extra cash I earned helping the neighbor with their PC? Or watching their kid for them when they were in a jam? You may be retentive enough to track such money to the penny but you're squarely in the minority there my friend.

That's only because you mumble.

I speak (and read and write) both Mandarin and Spanish.

Spanish is a lot easier for an English-speaker to learn.

But Mandarin is, at least IMHO, much more interesting. I enjoy the characters, preferring the traditional ones, coping with the simplified ones.

The most difficult problem I had learning Chinese is that the dominant system of romanization, pinyin, is wholly non-intuitive and conflicting to me as a reader of English. It's frustrating because there are *very* few sounds in Chinese that really couldn't be well-approximated with normal English character order and usage. The exceptions, like the pinyin 'r' sound, could be marked another way (for instance, as the Spanish Ñ.) So learning how to say a word without a native speaker turned out to be a real problem. I got a heck of a boost when a real Chinese restaurant opened in our little town. :)

Provided there's still anyone who cares about the data after 100 years, I'd say the odds of it surviving completely intact are fairly good, especially if you use the space recovered through digital compression to store error-correcting codes. It's unlikely that we'd forget how to decode popular formats like MP3, FLAC or JPEG in such a short time, absent a global catastrophe of sufficient order to drive the entire human race back into the stone age.

I'll admit that analogue still images do have digital beat in one area, ease of access. For all its faults, at least film doesn't need a complicated decoder; just shine some light on it (or through it). Of course, that only works because you're not operating anywhere near the limits of your storage medium. How many analog images do you think you can fit in 15x11mm? My comparatively cheap 32GB micro-SD card can hold around 3,000 8MP raws (~10MB each), which is pushing the limits of consumer optics. With reasonable compression you could easily double that. At that scale I think you'd need a bit more than just a magnifying glass to see the individual images.

My response was really to this line, however:

Any "modern analog technology" can be exploited for the storage of digital data, and thus benefits digital at least as much as analog. Analog is never going to "blow digital out of the water". It has its niche areas, like archival film for ease of access, and loses to digital everywhere else regardless of the recording technology.

Gosh-o-gosh. Techies on slashdot? What's the world coming to?!?!

You wanted me to just say "iPhoto", right?

lol...

The "paying the babysitter" scenario was the one I conceded was easier in the EU than the States. It would be nice to have such functionality here but I hardly feel like I'm living the dark ages for not having it. It goes one of two ways:

1) She gets cash. This is usually the preference in the States for such transactions because it's tax free income. I certainly prefer cash for the various side gigs I have.
2) She gets a check. Funds are available next business day 99% of the time.

As I said, it's not as sexy, but it gets the job done. Person-to-person payments are pretty low on the list of things I'd fix with regards to the American financial system. And yes, there are problems with paper checks, and they should go away, but on balance there's not a lot of fraud being committed with them. The bigger fraud issue is cloned credit cards, which I did point out. :)

With the exception of the person-to-person transfer I can do everything you just outlined with the app from my podunk small town community bank. None of what you've discussed is news to people living the States. We've had bill payer services for quite some time. Most venders will be paid electronically and those few that aren't configured for electronic payments will be mailed a physical check by the bill payer service.

Person-to-person transfers aren't quite as seamless in the States but they're not exactly rocket science either. I so choose I can likewise avoid the physical bank; our silly paper checks have been able to be remotely deposited for some time now. I usually choose to walk them down to the bank, since it's an excuse to get out of the house and be sociable, but I can just as easily deposit them with my phone and the funds are available on the same schedule (next business day 99.9% of the time) as they would be if I presented the check in person.

You could use those same materials to store digital versions of the media far more compactly, with equivalent quality. Even lossless audio compression (FLAC) would reduce the amount of material required by 40-50%; the benefits are greater for video, much less something like a hologram. (Yes, you can store holograms digitally.)

Raw signals contain a lot of redundancy. Any real-world signal can be converted losslessly between analog and digital; a prime advantage of the digital representation is that it can be processed to remove that redundancy. Also, near-ideal filters can be implemented much more easily as DSP programs than as networks of analog components.

I've never done business with a bank large or small that didn't offer an overdraft line of credit if you asked for it. Overdraft fees are simply a tax on stupidity. Balance your checking account properly and you'll never have one. Get a LOC for those few circumstances that may lie outside your control, like your employer messing up your payroll deposit or some such.

I've had a checking account for 17 years and I've never paid a single overdraft fee....

Was the "dark ages" slam really necessary? I lived in Finland for a spell so I'm familiar with these payment systems. There was nothing I could do over there that I can't do in the States. ACH payments from my US account are processed within 24-48 business hours. That's good enough for recurring monthly bills. ACH deposits are processed on the same business day. That's good enough for my payroll. My debit card transfers money instantly at point-of-sale. That's good enough for day to day retail transactions.

The only thing I kind of miss from Suomi was the ability to quickly transfer money to/from friends for odd jobs but that happens very infrequently; maybe once or twice a month. In the US we do such transfers with a paper check or (gasp) cash, which may not be as sexy, but it gets the job done. If I choose I can deposit the paper check with my smartphone and don't even need to visit the bank; funds are available the next business day.

If you want to slam the US financial system for something that's actually noteworthy hit us for the fact that chip and pin cards are still the minority. Ripping someone off really needs to be more complicated than cloning a magnetic stripe. If the banks or consumers were on the hook for such losses we would have had chip and pin cards decades ago; for better or worse the practice in the US is to stick the merchant with the loss in the scenario of a stolen or cloned card.

That was all software, you know. Free, too.