Huh? Never had that problem with an actual camera, digital or film. Your problem is with phones and other devices pretending to be cameras, to greater or lesser degrees of success.
"No true camera..."
The category of "multifunction devices that just happen to have a functional camera included" didn't exist in the film days, outside of spy-catalog novelties that took pictures as bad as the ones you're lamenting. I don't think it's unreasonable to ask that you compare a dedicated film camera to a dedicated digital camera.
Also, I take far more pictures with a digital camera than I did with a film SLR, and I was pretty serious about it back in the film days. Back then, even when I could get my film processed free (which was doable, you just had to know the right people and not consume anything that could be inventoried), I still had to BUY the film. Now all I have to worry about is charging some batteries. I take an order of magnitude more pictures now than I did then, because they're damn near free. If I get one truly worth archiving, I could have it copied to archival film -- the same process I'd have to do if it STARTED on film, because even the photojournalist film I preferred doesn't last forever.
My "keeper rate" has gone down, probably to a third of what it was on film. But I'm taking ten times as many images overall, and have the economic freedom to bracket and otherwise screw with multiple settings in difficult circumstances. Plus, I can immediately look at the result to see if I got the shot, or if I need to try again. The end result is that I get a lot more keepers, at the expense of some charge cycles on my batteries. I haven't even burned out the 2 GB SD card I've had in the camera for the last eight years.
And VoIP has a built-in battery backup for this exact reason.
Uh are you arguing for parity with analogue landlines because anyone could potentially buy a UPS...?
I'm saying that one thing you're not going to get over a fiber-connected VoIP system is power, but the phone company took that into account and did something about it. If the problem is sufficiently severe that you can't restore power before the battery keels over, then there's a damn good chance your POTS line wouldn't be working either -- due to physical disconnection, or lack of power at the CO. Even though they have generators, they do eventually run out of fuel too.
Nope, they just spit out paper for you to lose, damage, or destroy instead. Incidentally, so do printers.
Oh please. I have stuff in the family that's 100+ years old and in perfectly readable condition and all I had to do was store it somewhere warm and dry. If one or two pieces of paper have had the ink fade, do you know how much that affects adjacent documents? Not at all. What will happen if I store a hard drive or optical media somewhere warm and dry for 100 years, please?
I'd rather have paper and a scanned copy that can be kept somewhere else. Without going digital, what are you going to do? Ask someone to store a safe full of photocopies in their attic for you? All I have to do currently is swap external drives with someone. I get to raid their media collection, they get to raid mine, and we BOTH get an offsite backup. Is it permanent? No. But neither is film, nor is most paper. Yes there are archival papers, and archival film stock, but those have to be specifically chosen. Ordinary consumer-grade celluloid falls apart in a matter of decades. And don't even start with fire, flooding, or E-flats.
Analog is "better" in the sense that it existed first, so much of what you want to document is analog. If it was created digitally, then a digital copy is "better" in the sense of being able to produce more precise reproductions.
Again, this depends on what it does. Try working split on a tube transceiver from the 1970s, and tell me with a straight face that things going solid-state in the 1980s wasn't a MASSIVE improvement. Reliability improved, ruggedness improved, feature set improved, and prices stayed about the same. Once the feature set started to level off, prices started to drop.
Err, solid state != digital.
No, not necessarily. But that's the way it went. Digital displays are MUCH easier to use when you need to know what frequency you're on to three decimal places. It's far better than analog dials. The equipment also got cheaper largely because of the capabilities gained by being able to cram a lot of transistors into the space previously occupied by a handful of tubes and crystals. Now we're in the software-defined radio era, which is inherently digital, and it's DEFINITELY a good thing. The inadequacy of the controls of many radios is a design problem. They suck because it was cheaper to make them suck. There are plenty of analog radios with shite control interfaces too.
That's because it can't tell you which way is north, only which direction the magnetic pole approximating north lies in. Depending on where you are, the two could be substantially different.
Indeed. A decade old compass+paper map always and immediately tells me near enough for all my navigational needs. A GPS system eventually locks when the weather's in the right mood and I have enough battery on my receiver and all the electronics are healthy and...
A paper map is great, if you have some idea where you are, and can dedicate the attention necessary to locate yourself on it. GPS is far from foolproof, and having the skill to read a map (and having one in the glove box) is certainly a wise precaution, but for the large majority of the time that it works just fine, GPS is so much easier. The problem isn't the technology, it's the ID10T's using it and forgetting how to read a map and use a compass.