Those of us who are highly adept at understanding technology find it hard to believe that there are people out there who are light years away from us in their thinking.

I know people--plenty of them--who don't understand their tech at all. I'm betting the owners or inheritors of those machines didn't really grok that they had to remove a tape. It worked and they weren't sure how, but they were content with that. Their heirs or the next people to own the machines may not have thought through the tech any better than the original owners. After all, even the thrift shop didn't think through all the implications the way a creative guy like you did until they came to realize what you and others were doing.

It's hard to imagine what harm two seconds can do, I know, but I can recognize my family and friends' voices in way under two seconds, so who knows?

I guess I'm a major advocate of personal privacy and I hate to see it violated even when the violation is relatively benign, just because the person being violated didn't know any better than to protect his/her communications.

Smashing my machine? Merely hyperbole. Actually, I, too, hate my digital machine. When I won a Fulbright and later when I was on the final ballot for the Nebula, I took the tapes full of congratulations from friends out and saved them. I can't do that with a digital machine.