Stephan:   I think about the permanency of digital data a lot. I've even had dreams about it. In 1980 and, again in 1981, I ran an international nonlocal consciousness study in OMNI Magazine in both Japan and the U.S. There was no personal computer that could do this, so I went to the UCLA Biometrics Laboratory, and contracted with them to process the data. Everything was fine for several years, but when we went to them, because it was now possible to put the data on one of Mobius'  Macintosh computers, the language in which it was written was no longer used, and the magnetic tapes on which it was stored were deteriorating, and the data was lost. Only fragments of human knowledge come down to us. The early Christians burnt the Library in Alexandria thinking its knowledge pagan and useless, if not outright Satanic; it cut us off from a wealth of poetry, and drama, philosophy, and science. It takes commitment for knowledge to survive long. When I see an illustration from a book printed in 1490 I am always amazed that this piece of paper survived while trillions of pages since that time have not. You may remember the story I ran recently about the new technology for reading incinerated scrolls, which may introduce us to unknown classical literature. The possibility of the loss of vast swaths of digital information is not being properly addressed.