Hermes: They have phones in booths now? Finally! I don't have to lug this cell phone around.
"Fatal Inspection", Season 7, Futurama

Of such ironies, "progress" and "convenience" are made.

Speaking of those old black Bakelite phones, they were really solid because the monopolist phone company rented them out to you and didn't want to have to spend a penny on repairs or replacing them. You could throw them against the wall and the wall would be damaged but the phone would be OK. Try that with a cellphone--it'll shatter into tiny pieces and you'll have to pay $600 or more for a new one.

And speaking of obsolete recordings, I have started to catalogue my VHS, DVD and Bluray collections. I'm over 1,700 and haven't tackled the milk crates yet, let alone all of the boxes.

Mock me as an out-of-it old man who hasn't totally switched to downloads and streaming, but the damned downloads and streaming are taking me hours and interrupting my web activities, while it would cost well over $17,000 to replace the movies and TV shows I merely had to pay for--at rates from $1.00 to $200 or so, average probably around $6.99. Just think of DVDs in terms of pre-recorded backup and imagine the time and bandwidth you save.

$17,000, kids. I ain't spending it.

Nor am I spending the $25,000 or so it would cost to virtualize everything in my video collection, let alone my thousands of books, my music, my magazines, my newspapers, my comics, etc.

Reading comics on a screen is a bit more awkward than reading them on paper and the bandwidth requirements for streaming two or three channels* at once (text, video, audio) is currently prohibitive unless you are paying upwards of $100 a month for genuine high speed unlimited downloads.

*I like to read when I'm watching TV or a movie. It fills in the dull bits in both the book and the show.

Progress. Humph! One step forward, two steps backwards and side step the issues.

Aidan: First off, it's called a bong charge.

That's not what my buddy with the dreds told me a bong charge was...