Three unrelated things

Using a high school pimp for at least some of his liaisons, a Chofu doctor named Toma Seizaburo has paid 70 schoolgirls for sex over the past six years.

"I'm glad I was arrested. I couldn't stop myself," officers quoted Toma as saying.

I'm a rabid archivist. I've copied stuff from floppies to hard drives to CDs to DVDs. And I've lost data. The New York Times feels my pain...

In the meantime, individual PC owners struggle in private. Desk drawers and den closets are filled with obsolete computers, stacks of Zip disks and 3?-inch diskettes, even the larger 5?-inch floppy disks from the 1980's. Short of a clear solution, experts recommend that people copy their materials, which were once on vinyl, film and paper, to CD's and other backup formats.

But backup mechanisms can also lose their integrity. Magnetic tape, CD's and hard drives are far from robust. The life span of data on a CD recorded with a CD burner, for instance, could be as little as five years if it is exposed to extremes in humidity or temperature.

And if a CD is scratched, Mr. Hite said, it can become unusable.

Meanwhile, a mysterious submarine has appeared near Okinawa.

Crewmembers of an MSDF P3C anti-submarine patrol aircraft spotted the submarine in seas off Miyako and Ishigaki islands, southwestern Okinawa Prefecture, early Wednesday morning. At 8:45 a.m., Defense Agency Director General Yoshinori Ono ordered the MSDF to chase the submarine after receiving approval from Prime Minister Junichiro Koizumi.

I told you the items were unrelated.

[Addendum]

"Some people are saying digital data will disappear not by being destroyed but by being lost," Dr. Rutenbeck said. "It's one thing to find the photo album of your trip to Hawaii 20 years ago. But what if those photos are all sitting in a subdirectory in your computer?"

Okay, people need to seriously organize their computer files. I don't understand how you can not have an intuitive directory structure in which you can find all your items easily. The "My Documents" folder, in fact, is fantastic, because you can just dump everything there, and then save everything in My Documents. It's not difficult, people. STOP THE MADNESS!