Lucas123 writes "A start-up launched a new DVD archive product this week: a disc that it says will hold its data for 1,000 years. The company, Cranberry, says its DiamonDisc product, which can be used in any standard DVD player, is not subject to deterioration from heat, UV rays or material rot due to humidity or other elements because it has no dyes, adhesives or reflective materials like standard DVD discs, and its discs are made from a vastly more durable synthetic stone. Data is laid down on the platter much in the same way as a standard DVD disc, but with DiamonDisc the burner etches much deeper pits. Cranberry said it is also working on producing a Blu-ray version of its 1,000-year disc."
Edmund: No, you see, the thing about Heaven, is that Heaven is for people who like the sort of things that go on in Heaven, like, uh, well, singing, talking to God, watering pot plants... Whereas Hell, on the other hand, is for people who like the other sorts of things: adultery, pillage, torture -- those areas.
According to the Christian beliefs I was taught growing up, there is not in between - it's truly a black and white issue. That said, it's also not really linked to "good" or "bad" when it comes to going to either - it's based in salvation. In the eyes of my congregation (a Southern Baptist church - views can differ between groups though) a serial killer that repents of his sins and "accepts Jesus as his savior" right before he is executed will go to heaven, whilst an atheist who devotes their life to char
The concept of hell is fascinating because its origins are not really biblical at all. There are literally only a handful of passages in the entire Bible on which we pin this whole concept of eternal damnation, and their interpretation is questionable at best.
Hell comes from the blending of Roman and Greek understandings of the afterlife into Christianity theology/mythology i.e. post-Constantine. It makes sense: culture shouldn't change just because the state suddenly changes religion. The problem is that a
Hell is not a punishment but the state that people who refuse the ultimate good.
And the great majority of people who are atheist do not declare themselves in any way opposed to or refusing of the ultimate good.
They are looking at the bible and those who believe it and resolving that this religion and the book its founded on does not represent in any way, an ultimate good.
or think courtroom justice: you were caught breaking a law, God is the judge... who is your advocate? If you accept Jesus as your advocate, he stands before the judge and says "he's guilty, but I volunteer to pay the penalty in his stead." The judge then metes out justice, but Jesus stands in your place, taking the punishment of death, while you remain free
This is scapegoating, not justice. If a human judge allowed the punishment of an innocent "in the stead" of a guilty party, we would not call him fair, just or wise. But your cosmic super-judge (who by any logic should be held to higher standards of ethical practice) can do exactly that?
The underlying message here is that your god is unable to forgive even the slightest transgression, has to demand mortal punishment, and yet isn't too picky about who exactly gets punished. Thinking a little further, surely
You know, when CDs and DVDs came out, they claimed they would last 50 years. I have yet to find one that lasts longer than 5. So I'd say, 1,000 years translates to about a hundred years, tops. Also, it may not be vulnerable to humidity in a controlled environment, but in the outdoors, a few seasons of freezing/melting and it'll be shot. Water beats rock every time.
I have CDs from the mid 80s. What most people fail to notice is that the thickness of those old CDs did allow one to skip them on the road and be able to put them back into the player and read correctly. They are thicker than today's CDs. Like all stuff in technology they hook you at a reasonable price, jack you up on costs later and cheapen the product so it fails sooner, rather than later.
My stepfather has an extensive collection of CDs he bought in the mid-to-late 80s that play as well today as they did back when he bought them. I ripped a Cars album without need for any cdparanoia correction. The resulting file played fine.
Also, it may not be vulnerable to humidity in a controlled environment, but in the outdoors, a few seasons of freezing/melting and it'll be shot. Water beats rock every time.
I really don't care if my archival storage can stand being left outside for several years, because I don't intend to do that. I'd be quite happy if it were at least as durable as a book, which if well made and with reasonable care can last at least a couple hundred years, possibly over 1000 under ideal conditions. So what if it can get ruined if it's left in the rain? If I care enough about the data, I just make a few copies and put them in different places and hopefully if I've chosen well at least one will survive. Right now it's not at all clear that typical CD's and DVD's are even as durable as cheap pulp paperbacks.
I find it all depends on which part of the floor I leave the CD. Near the middle are worst, but surprisingly the ones next to the wall are almost as bad. The ones close the wall, but less near the center seem to survive the best.
In summary, 1) left near doorway = rating 1 star 2) left center of room = rating 1 star 3) left around center or room = rating 3 stars 4) perimeter of room = rating 4 stars 5) left at wall of room = rating 2 stars 6) other (case, desk, special CD container) = rating 2-4 stars
Presumably all DVD readers made for the next 1000 years will be backward compatible. Have you tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk lately? And they're only three decades old!
When the equipment for reading these starts to become museum pieces people will migrate the data to whatever the state of the art is at the time. Then these stone DVD's will last a long time in the landfill.
It does raise some fun things to speculate about though.
There are some ancient writings which no one knows how to read anymore. Will future archaeologists wonder what the microscopic pits in our coasters with holes in them are all about?
Will they suffer from data overload?
What will future archaeologists, with PhD's, think when they read what you, personally, wrote in a forum? Now that's scary.
Presumably all DVD readers made for the next 1000 years will be backward compatible. Have you tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk lately? And they're only three decades old!
The nice thing about he optical disc form factor is that it decouples the encoding and retrieval technology from the moving parts involves in loading, unloading, and spinning the disc. It's very easy to support additional optical media formats by simply including another kind of laser in the read head.
On the other hand, an eight-inch floppy needs a custom loading mechanism that isn't cost-effective to build anymore, so of course we don't have anything that's backward compatible.
As long as we have optical media at all (and I don't see the idea fading any time soon), the readers will be backwards-compatible all the way back to Red Book audio. I would be amazed if we couldn't read CDs in 100 years, and only moderately surprised if we couldn't read them in 1,000.
Presumably all DVD readers made for the next 1000 years will be backward compatible. Have you tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk lately? And they're only three decades old!
The nice thing about he optical disc form factor is that it decouples the encoding and retrieval technology from the moving parts involves in loading, unloading, and spinning the disc.
The read/write head moves too - otherwise you wouldn't be able to read anything but the small portion of the disk directly above the read/write head. The
Assuming anybody in the future cares more than a tiny bit, I'd strongly suspect that the file formats(and possibly the disk layout) will be a bigger challenge than the lack of compatible drives.
The surface details on DVDs just aren't all that small, since they have to be easily accessible to ~$50 worth of cheap, mass-market optics, even after some kid gets greasy fingerprints all over them. Unless the future belongs to degenerate savages and murderous rat-men, rigging up a spindle, an optical microscope,
There are some ancient writings which no one knows how to read anymore. Will future archaeologists wonder what the microscopic pits in our coasters with holes in them are all about?
That's an interesting thought experiment. Let's say civilization fell and rose again, and that future archaeologists came across some of our optical discs. They wouldn't need much beyond 19th-century technology and mathematics to decipher them.
Once cleaned, 1,000-year-old discs would still shimmer the way they do today. Under a microscope (well-developed by the 19th century), pits and lands would be visible. A pit [freepatentsonline.com] is approximately the same size as a bacterial cell [wikipedia.org], after all. The pits and lands would form a recognizable pattern. That pattern looks nothing like binary, being a clocked encoding [wikipedia.org] of it. But it's obvious that a CD would spin, so eventually someone clever will realize that information is encoded at clock boundaries.
That having been figured out, these future archaeologists will see repeating patterns of eight units. Presuming that our language came down intact (much like Latin has to us), 19th century cryptanalytical [wikipedia.org] techniques could determine the correspondence of the mysterious 8-pit repeating units to letters. (After all, what is ASCII except a simple substitution cipher?)
ECC information would be gibberish, but it could be ignored. (And once even one Wikipedia backup were deciphered, the ECC information would be understood.)
Of course, there's a huge amount of information on each disc. It'd take a long time to go over even part of one by hand, but it could be done. After all, even in the 17th century, huge logarithm table [wikipedia.org] books were produced.
Once technology advanced a bit, it'd be possible to build an electromechanical system to read and print the contents of CDs. Even Babbage had a workable printer design [bbc.co.uk], and printing telegraph machines emerged by 1910. The hardest part for our future archaeologists would be reading the discs at high speed, for which (I think) they'd need a laser. But maybe the problem would stimulate them, and they'd build lasers before we got around to discovering the things.
Of course, this is just idle speculation, but it's fun!
CDs aren't encoded in a straightforward manner. Data is stored as a composition of Reed-Solomon codes and 10-8 codes, and the RS encoded bits are interleaved. Without detailed knowledge of the encoding, it might as well be encrypted. You're expecting to see plain data interleaved with parit. You'll see nothing of the sort.
Jeeez, it took long enough to come up with a practical alternative to hieroglyphics carved in stone. So far, that was the best technology for millennial storage. I just want to be certain that I get that 1000 year warranty, in case its just a bunch of empty promises. I don't want to be disappointed 800 years down the road.
TFA quotes temperature resistance of 176 degrees. Fahrenheit. For a "synthetic stone" product that is supposed to be super durable, that is chickenshit. It's barely warmer than parked-car-in-summer-sun.
I have to wonder, did some journalist fail at accuracy, or are these things actually pretty painfully unexciting in terms of temperature resistance?
How is the Cranberry Disc(TM) different from regular DVDs?... Instead [of organic dyes], the Cranberry Disc's data layer is composed of rocklike materials known to last for centuries. The Cranberry Writer(TM) etches the Cranberry Disc's rocklike layer creating a permanent physical data record that is immune to data rot.
What temperature can the Cranberry Disc withstand? The Cranberry Discs can withstand temperatures of 176F indefinitely with no effect to the data or the readability of the data in a standard DVD drive.
Can the Cranberry Disc withstand UV rays and prolonged exposure to the sun? Cranberry Discs can withstand the full spectrum of the sun, including UV rays, indefinitely with no effect to the data or the readability of the data in a standard DVD drive.
The data layer is their synthetic material. Presumably, they still sandwich it between plastics that are vulnerable to heat.
When the outside temperature hits 115 degrees with full on sun, the inside can hit 150+ within 10 minutes or so. Make it nice and black inside, and surfaces will probably be hitting 160. Soooo.... yeah. Don't leave stuff inside the car in Arizona or Death Valley.
I'd recommend going straight to the company Cranberry is licensing from, Millenniata [http]. It looks like you can purchase identical products for about 1/3 the price. Cranberry's got one heck of a mark-up.
The Library of Congress cares, which is who spurred the research into this media. And you should, too, if you want any portion of our culture preserved for future generations.
The widespread contempt for creating anything of lasting value I see almost everywhere today speaks volumes about both this generation's shortsightedness and its selfishness.
What the bets the first release will be... (Score:5, Funny)
It's the 2 (Synthetic) Stone DVD Version...
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Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What the bets the first release will be... (Score:5, Funny)
Hopefully in 1000 years it will be appropriately categorized as "fiction."
It's not as if that's written in stone!
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Parent
Re:What the bets the first release will be... (Score:5, Funny)
Then you have to spend eternity in North Dakota.
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Parent
Nonono... Blackadder explained it all (Score:5, Funny)
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Parent
Re:Nonono... Blackadder explained it all (Score:5, Insightful)
Anyone who hasn't seen Blackadder, I recommend you find a way to do so.
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Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
According to the Christian beliefs I was taught growing up, there is not in between - it's truly a black and white issue. That said, it's also not really linked to "good" or "bad" when it comes to going to either - it's based in salvation. In the eyes of my congregation (a Southern Baptist church - views can differ between groups though) a serial killer that repents of his sins and "accepts Jesus as his savior" right before he is executed will go to heaven, whilst an atheist who devotes their life to char
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The concept of hell is fascinating because its origins are not really biblical at all. There are literally only a handful of passages in the entire Bible on which we pin this whole concept of eternal damnation, and their interpretation is questionable at best.
Hell comes from the blending of Roman and Greek understandings of the afterlife into Christianity theology/mythology i.e. post-Constantine. It makes sense: culture shouldn't change just because the state suddenly changes religion. The problem is that a
Re: (Score:3, Informative)
The concept that you're referring to is a recent addition too, for that matter.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Do not presume upon the mercy of God.
I certainly wouldn't (if he existed) - by all accounts he's clearly a psycopath.
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
Hell is not a punishment but the state that people who refuse the ultimate good.
And the great majority of people who are atheist do not declare themselves in any way opposed to or refusing of the ultimate good.
They are looking at the bible and those who believe it and resolving that this religion and the book its founded on does not represent in any way, an ultimate good.
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
or think courtroom justice: you were caught breaking a law, God is the judge... who is your advocate? If you accept Jesus as your advocate, he stands before the judge and says "he's guilty, but I volunteer to pay the penalty in his stead." The judge then metes out justice, but Jesus stands in your place, taking the punishment of death, while you remain free
This is scapegoating, not justice. If a human judge allowed the punishment of an innocent "in the stead" of a guilty party, we would not call him fair, just or wise. But your cosmic super-judge (who by any logic should be held to higher standards of ethical practice) can do exactly that?
The underlying message here is that your god is unable to forgive even the slightest transgression, has to demand mortal punishment, and yet isn't too picky about who exactly gets punished. Thinking a little further, surely
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Re:What the bets the first release will be... (Score:4, Funny)
And commandment 666 says that Satan can read and write everything, but isn't allowed execute privileges.
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Parent
1,000 years? (Score:5, Interesting)
You know, when CDs and DVDs came out, they claimed they would last 50 years. I have yet to find one that lasts longer than 5. So I'd say, 1,000 years translates to about a hundred years, tops. Also, it may not be vulnerable to humidity in a controlled environment, but in the outdoors, a few seasons of freezing/melting and it'll be shot. Water beats rock every time.
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Re:1,000 years? (Score:5, Informative)
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Parent
I Hate ROCK Music (Score:5, Funny)
What are they recording?
The Rolling Stones?
The Stone Roses?
The Stone Temple Pilots?
Rainy Day Women # 12 & 35?
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Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
Re:1,000 years? (Score:5, Informative)
Burned or stamped?
My stepfather has an extensive collection of CDs he bought in the mid-to-late 80s that play as well today as they did back when he bought them. I ripped a Cars album without need for any cdparanoia correction. The resulting file played fine.
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Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
*Currently playing an 8 year old burned CD with no issues*
Re:1,000 years? (Score:5, Funny)
Water beats rock every time.
No, paper beats rock. There's no water in the game.
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Parent
Re:1,000 years? (Score:4, Funny)
No, paper beats rock. There's no water in the game.
Spock [youtube.com] also beats rock.
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Parent
Re:1,000 years? (Score:5, Insightful)
Also, it may not be vulnerable to humidity in a controlled environment, but in the outdoors, a few seasons of freezing/melting and it'll be shot. Water beats rock every time.
I really don't care if my archival storage can stand being left outside for several years, because I don't intend to do that. I'd be quite happy if it were at least as durable as a book, which if well made and with reasonable care can last at least a couple hundred years, possibly over 1000 under ideal conditions. So what if it can get ruined if it's left in the rain? If I care enough about the data, I just make a few copies and put them in different places and hopefully if I've chosen well at least one will survive. Right now it's not at all clear that typical CD's and DVD's are even as durable as cheap pulp paperbacks.
Reply to This
Parent
Re:1,000 years? (Score:5, Funny)
I find it all depends on which part of the floor I leave the CD. Near the middle are worst, but surprisingly the ones next to the wall are almost as bad. The ones close the wall, but less near the center seem to survive the best.
In summary,
1) left near doorway = rating 1 star
2) left center of room = rating 1 star
3) left around center or room = rating 3 stars
4) perimeter of room = rating 4 stars
5) left at wall of room = rating 2 stars
6) other (case, desk, special CD container) = rating 2-4 stars
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Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Then let's make the DVDs out of water! Oh wait...
I was going to suggest dihydrogen monoxide, but that stuff is probably too toxic [dhmo.org] for consumer use.
First Prior Art (Score:3, Interesting)
Wonder if they applied for a patent before April 22, 2004 ?
http://www.halfbakery.com/idea/Ever-Disk [halfbakery.com]
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Presumably... (Score:5, Insightful)
... they also make a DVD player that lasts 1000 years?
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Re:Presumably... (Score:5, Funny)
... they also make a DVD player that lasts 1000 years?
At $4995 for the burner it better last 1K years too.
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Parent
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
Tightwad. You can afford to buy a new burner once a century.
Re:Presumably... (Score:5, Interesting)
Presumably all DVD readers made for the next 1000 years will be backward compatible. Have you tried to read an 8-inch floppy disk lately? And they're only three decades old!
When the equipment for reading these starts to become museum pieces people will migrate the data to whatever the state of the art is at the time. Then these stone DVD's will last a long time in the landfill.
It does raise some fun things to speculate about though.
There are some ancient writings which no one knows how to read anymore. Will future archaeologists wonder what the microscopic pits in our coasters with holes in them are all about?
Will they suffer from data overload?
What will future archaeologists, with PhD's, think when they read what you, personally, wrote in a forum? Now that's scary.
Reply to This
Parent
Re:Presumably... (Score:5, Interesting)
The nice thing about he optical disc form factor is that it decouples the encoding and retrieval technology from the moving parts involves in loading, unloading, and spinning the disc. It's very easy to support additional optical media formats by simply including another kind of laser in the read head.
On the other hand, an eight-inch floppy needs a custom loading mechanism that isn't cost-effective to build anymore, so of course we don't have anything that's backward compatible.
As long as we have optical media at all (and I don't see the idea fading any time soon), the readers will be backwards-compatible all the way back to Red Book audio. I would be amazed if we couldn't read CDs in 100 years, and only moderately surprised if we couldn't read them in 1,000.
Reply to This
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
The read/write head moves too - otherwise you wouldn't be able to read anything but the small portion of the disk directly above the read/write head. The
Re: (Score:3, Funny)
The surface details on DVDs just aren't all that small, since they have to be easily accessible to ~$50 worth of cheap, mass-market optics, even after some kid gets greasy fingerprints all over them. Unless the future belongs to degenerate savages and murderous rat-men, rigging up a spindle, an optical microscope,
Re:Presumably... (Score:5, Interesting)
That's an interesting thought experiment. Let's say civilization fell and rose again, and that future archaeologists came across some of our optical discs. They wouldn't need much beyond 19th-century technology and mathematics to decipher them.
Once cleaned, 1,000-year-old discs would still shimmer the way they do today. Under a microscope (well-developed by the 19th century), pits and lands would be visible. A pit [freepatentsonline.com] is approximately the same size as a bacterial cell [wikipedia.org], after all. The pits and lands would form a recognizable pattern. That pattern looks nothing like binary, being a clocked encoding [wikipedia.org] of it. But it's obvious that a CD would spin, so eventually someone clever will realize that information is encoded at clock boundaries.
That having been figured out, these future archaeologists will see repeating patterns of eight units. Presuming that our language came down intact (much like Latin has to us), 19th century cryptanalytical [wikipedia.org] techniques could determine the correspondence of the mysterious 8-pit repeating units to letters. (After all, what is ASCII except a simple substitution cipher?)
ECC information would be gibberish, but it could be ignored. (And once even one Wikipedia backup were deciphered, the ECC information would be understood.)
Of course, there's a huge amount of information on each disc. It'd take a long time to go over even part of one by hand, but it could be done. After all, even in the 17th century, huge logarithm table [wikipedia.org] books were produced.
Once technology advanced a bit, it'd be possible to build an electromechanical system to read and print the contents of CDs. Even Babbage had a workable printer design [bbc.co.uk], and printing telegraph machines emerged by 1910. The hardest part for our future archaeologists would be reading the discs at high speed, for which (I think) they'd need a laser. But maybe the problem would stimulate them, and they'd build lasers before we got around to discovering the things.
Of course, this is just idle speculation, but it's fun!
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Parent
Re:Presumably... (Score:5, Insightful)
By the way: if you think this is an interesting thought experiment, you'll love A Canticle for Leibowitz [barnesandnoble.com] by Walter Miller.
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Parent
Re: (Score:3, Interesting)
CDs aren't encoded in a straightforward manner. Data is stored as a composition of Reed-Solomon codes and 10-8 codes, and the RS encoded bits are interleaved. Without detailed knowledge of the encoding, it might as well be encrypted. You're expecting to see plain data interleaved with parit. You'll see nothing of the sort.
Fun with ceramics (Score:3, Funny)
Coasters have come full circle now.
I remember my mom's ceramic coasters (bone china she called it, which as a 5 year old, creeped me out).
They were pretty durable, and lasted my mom all here adult life. The writing on the bottom was still readable after all those years.
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Finally, a convenient alternative to pyramids... (Score:5, Funny)
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1000 years? (Score:3, Funny)
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This new archival format from Cranberry... (Score:4, Funny)
... seems to have been designed to linger.
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Stone DVDs? (Score:4, Funny)
They'll come in several varieties:
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Curious... (Score:5, Insightful)
I have to wonder, did some journalist fail at accuracy, or are these things actually pretty painfully unexciting in terms of temperature resistance?
Reply to This
Re:Curious... (Score:5, Informative)
http://cranberry.com/faqs.php [cranberry.com]
How is the Cranberry Disc(TM) different from regular DVDs? ... Instead [of organic dyes], the Cranberry Disc's data layer is composed of rocklike materials known to last for centuries. The Cranberry Writer(TM) etches the Cranberry Disc's rocklike layer creating a permanent physical data record that is immune to data rot.
What temperature can the Cranberry Disc withstand?
The Cranberry Discs can withstand temperatures of 176F indefinitely with no effect to the data or the readability of the data in a standard DVD drive.
Can the Cranberry Disc withstand UV rays and prolonged exposure to the sun?
Cranberry Discs can withstand the full spectrum of the sun, including UV rays, indefinitely with no effect to the data or the readability of the data in a standard DVD drive.
The data layer is their synthetic material.
Presumably, they still sandwich it between plastics that are vulnerable to heat.
Reply to This
Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
When the outside temperature hits 115 degrees with full on sun, the inside can hit 150+ within 10 minutes or so. Make it nice and black inside, and surfaces will probably be hitting 160. Soooo.... yeah. Don't leave stuff inside the car in Arizona or Death Valley.
they can sell it in Germany as (Score:4, Funny)
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If you're actually interested in buying these... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:Interesting pricing scheme (Score:4, Interesting)
I read that as being $5000 for the burner and the discs.
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Parent
Re: (Score:3, Insightful)
The Library of Congress cares, which is who spurred the research into this media. And you should, too, if you want any portion of our culture preserved for future generations.
The widespread contempt for creating anything of lasting value I see almost everywhere today speaks volumes about both this generation's shortsightedness and its selfishness.