You need to understand the trade offs between preservation and fidelity. I can put my film in a vault and without any additional work but to maintain the physical space, I can view my documents in a hundred years with nothing more than a candle and a magnifying glass. Can you say the same for digital? How much support equipment must you include? Do you have the proper power source? How many instructions on how to even operate it (in 50 years if someone found a perfectly preserved and operational mainframe with card input system and data on reel to reel tape, could they even use it?)? Candle and magnifying glass my friend. It's kind of like Blade Runner. You can have your high fidelity but at the cost of short lifespan. Anyway, my comment was just anecdotal until you choose to attack it as somehow not valid.

My first thought was along a similar line. Who is going to pay $123 for an ebook!? Especially if you can't sell it back for beer money when you realize you're failing the class.

It's not just the security aspect. When a company provides a cell phone it has tax consequences and there are specific reporting requirements where all personal calls must be identified and repaid to the company. Given the free and unlimited minutes, as well as the volume of calls someone would make, this is a major PITA to deal with. My employer requires that all calls on the work phone be work calls, period. Unfortunately, even though the IRS knows this is bad and wants to fix it, they have to ask Congress to do it, and hope that Congress does what they ask. Here's a good link with the related legislation: http://www.taxgirl.com/irs-reverses-course-on-cell-phone-tax-asks-congress-for-repeal/

Ten years ago my old company used to advocate that for individuals who wanted to convert paper to digital, they first put them on microfilm and then scan them. That way when their digital media got damaged or lost they could always recreate it. Film last for a long long time when stored correctly. Unfortunately that still seems the be the best advice, at least if you are starting from an analog original.

Awesome! I'm completely mediocre and therefore perfect for Google to hire. I mean, you can't let the rest of the world have all the average people can you? It wouldn't be balanced. Google needs me!

Right on the top of that page it says: "Mobile Broadband Plans for USB Modems, PC Cards, ExpressCards, MiFi 2200, Notebooks or Netbooks". Those plans do not apply to phone data.

Do you have some solution to the "attachment problem"?

Is it necessary for me to have a solution to a problem in order to note that it's a problem? Not in my book. If no one can question something unless they can fully replace it, then we'll make zero progress, ever. Brainstorming is exactly what needs to be done, to get all ideas good and bad out on the table and find what will truly work. I really hate the "if you can't fix it, don't complain" attitude. It serves no purpose.

I agree that email is not a *good* storage medium, but how is it not valid?

It's not valid from a business standpoint for any reasonably organized office structure. That's plain to see in multiple areas such as: searching; backups; organized storage structure; multi-user access; reduction of redundant storage; effective sharing; version control; audit trails; etc. These are all mostly solvable using local solutions, the big issue is that there is no good universal system that handles this transparently. There are dropbox related services that are getting there but they aren't transparent enough to replace the current ease of just attaching a file and hitting send. I'll agree that unless a system is universally supported, it isn't going to be effectively used.

(where do the attachments go?)

Attachments can go to hell, that's were they can go. We need to setup our communication methods correctly such that the message does not become the storage medium! I spend way too much time, effort and money trying to deal with people keeping files in their email and email archives as if it were a valid storage location. It just wasn't designed for that. So, I'm all for anything that makes it impossible to keep attachments directly with the message!

Since the time e-paper was invented, I've always thought that someone should create an e-paper book, say with 20 pages or so it in. That would give you the tactile page flip, it could allow for scrawled notes, highlights and drawings with a special stylus, heck, you could even insert entire pages of notes and hyperlinks to other documents. Just don't dog ear it!

True as well, but even Blackberry seems to get more love than Windows Mobile.

You know what, I don't care if it's open source or not, because it does the job I want it to do. Plus, MS couldn't turn it off without disabling all network access for all apps. The tethering is an app just like a browser, a mail client or any of a thousand other OPEN SOURCE pieces of software written for Windows Mobile. Simply because they aren't all available in a handy little App Store doesn't mean they don't exist. You just actually have to do a Google search or two to find them.

The real problem is that electronic signatures are trying to make an inherently non-secure or verifiable process into something that is secure are verifiable. In truth, written signatures are meaningless, constantly forged and not reliable at all. It's a huge effort to take the office business processes currently in place and actually make them secure enough that a digital signature can work. Take the most basic example where a secretary signs the boss's name. Multiply that by a hundred other exceptions that happen all day, every day in an office. You have to completely undo all the bad habits and/or create complex delegation systems in order to avoid having to change how entire departments work.

Um, I've been doing that for a long time now on Windows Mobile using home brew ROMs. I really hate hearing about all these awesome innovations by Palm and Apple that I've been using for years, but nobody cares because it's Windows Mobile! I'm also on Verizon, so I've had faster and more widespread network coverage as well (at least everywhere that I need my phone to work in the US).