...it won't have a single thing I need.

So, desktop apps. What's the difference now?

The correct analogy would be: do you like tofu? No? Well, here's a coupon for free tofu anyway. If you like it, pick it up at the store. If not, don't. Either way. Free tofu.

I wonder if there would be a way with https to store an encrypted mail

Short answer: No.
Long answer: SSL makes use of a temporary session key that is calculated between the client and the server at the time of the connection. Once the connection is over that key is (ideally) destroyed. If the email was encrypted with my session key when I sent it to the server (and somehow not decrypted by the server at this point) your session key that you create when you connect to the server won't do the job.

This is what S/MIME is for. The email body (and optionally some headers) is encrypted with a session key which is encrypted with your public key (rather than the server's key). Then it is sent through regular email channels. You receive the email and decrypt the session key with your private key, and use it to decrypt the message.

Stop. Apple just adds the album to the list of music you have access to. Everything else you describe flows from your incorrect understanding of this key point.

They absolutely do not in any way make you listen to it.

That's basically what they did. They gave everyone access to it, so you now have a link to download the music by clicking one of the songs and tapping "play.

Or he doesn't live in Super Mario World.

It calculated that I had a 45% chance of survival. Sarah only had an 11% chance.

No, it's about someone starting a U2 radio station that you don't have to tune into unless you want to, but now it's there if you want to hear it.

I swear to God, if my kids whined as much as the Internet has about me giving them a copy of an album I like, I'd ground their ungrateful asses until their iPods decayed into lead.

Is that irony or coincidence?

So just to be clear, then:

Ice Forms: global warming
Ice Melts: global warming
Dog crapped on my sidewalk: global warming
My shoe is untied: global warming

Any medium will ultimately fail, over long enough spans of time.
Further, just the transcribing process itself has chances of introducing errors.

Personally:
- back them up to the cloud. That's about the closest thing you're going to get to "permanent" storage, as you're outsourcing your (individual) chance of hardware failure to some online entity that (at least allegedly) backs up things redundantly across multiple methods, and/or
- just stop being OCD about it. At a certain point, trying to 'preserve' things forever just becomes silly. If you have the only unique recording of some substantial historical event, that's one thing. If it's your child's first steps, understand that while that might be important to you and maybe even to them, nobody else cares about it. Really. While losing it would be sad, it wouldn't be tragic. After all, there are billions of person-years of lives that have vanished, unrecorded, and life goes on.

The best part is hearing the lamentations of software patent attorneys and rejoicing in the sounds of their despair.

I can imagine plenty of uses for this in automated systems such as video system or other data gatherer. And even if it's to be used to record manually-triggered output, there's much to be said for the concept of "so much freaking storage that I can pay for this once and never have to think about it again over the lifetime of the equipment I'm using it with".

Were you dropped on your head as a child? Quoth the wiki:

In 1848 Lord Kelvin (William Thomson), wrote in his paper, On an Absolute Thermometric Scale, of the need for a scale whereby "infinite cold" (absolute zero) was the scale's null point, and which used the degree Celsius for its unit increment.

Celsius degrees came before Kelvin units.