"Eventually the CD might not be supported,"

welcome to the 21st century where music is listened to on phones. devices that are obsolete in 2 years but can store all your music on a tiny bitty chip unless you've been torrenting the best music of the past 100,000 years.

as to 'not supported' there are chinese firms still selling 8 track tape playing devices, despite the fact that all of the remaining tapes should have deteriorated now. they also sell vhs decks which the local wal-mart actually has a model on the shelf. blu-ray playback is not going away anytime soon. i have 2 bluray writers, one for the desktop and one usb powered one for the laptop(s). reel to reel tape decks may now be considered obsolete but there are people who still use them in the industry.

there will be pushes to make new fancier stuff, yes. it is called marketing. the vast majority of my cd-rs are still readable and only some of them have bitrot. but i wasn't organized with my cd-rs so i have a considerable number of discs i don't really know if i still have the data or not. most of the data isn't really mission critical and despite losing my music collection about 4 times now (from windows formatted hard drives) the back ups cd-rs and dvds and now 1 bluray, i have only lost 1 song to bitrot 1 song and it was all because i had backups that survived longer than hard drives.

i recommend HDDs and BD-R discs for backup. BD-R while subject to bitrot are still the lowest energy overhead per GB in the consumer space. HDDs are the cheapest per GB but if left running so as to automate backups draws more power and powering off a HDD in the consumer space means you have to be there to power it on for archival use. though there will at some point be a 'smartphone' app to remotely put them to standby via software. this can already be done with a NAS and Wake-on-LAN and a little scripting. but then the energy requirements are significantly higher on a NAS than on a usb hdd. anyways using both media HDD and Blu-ray offers a better chance of not losing everything. flash memory is nice but i wouldn't expect it to last forever, my compact flash devices suffered from an issue where the memory would take more and more power from devices until the cameras running them couldn't power them from fresh batteries, could have been the camera but it is hard to say but i wouldn't consider any flash memory as reliable when compared to hdds and bluray devices.

my second computer was an 80286. it had 1MB of ram, and we had i believe EGA graphics and a serial mouse for gaming and word perfect. for dos word perfect 5.22, think vi and emacs having a child it is what wordperfect for dos behaved like. it had an extensive array of command line abilities (my teacher had a rolodex with all the commands she used) and yes she needed a rolodex to sort the functionality. but it supported a mouse too and had menus, often triggered by the function keys and/or the mouse. but yes even dos apps had mouse support. and the sad thing is, while *bsd supports mouses and multiple mice automatically (or did lat i used it) linux doesn't do this without modifying configuration files, people like in ubuntu don't worry about the tty's anymore but i loved using copy/paste and scroll lock in FreeBSD when i used it... cause i always did all my root work in the ttys instead of x windows. well once i learned that running x as root is bad... somewhere i learned about su, but i know whenever i was setting up freebsd it was from the ttys most of the time...

You have no idea what you're talking about. A passing car is louder than a small, well-tuned quad with quality balanced rotors at ground level. 30' in the air? Barely audible. There are noisier ones. I work with a 25-pound octo that sounds completely horrifying, and I know when and where to operate it. But thanks for speaking out of ignorance - it helps to put all of this stuff in perspective.

Or, you are yourself a toxic seed planted by The Man in order to foment FUD and make good people not want to be part of these projects. Or something like that. Give it a rest with the absurd conspiracy crap.

The problem is that the incoming drone could easily be flying below tree-top height. Like, 20 feet off the ground. Laser counter measures would be shooting at a target that would have large office buildings and other structures directly behind it.

Yeah, but it would probably ruin your drone. I don't think anyone would be interested in that.

That's not really a system of thought, though, because it doesn't define a system. It describes the way that some people may, out of pure irrationality, imagine the world to work in their childish fantasies. When you get a bunch of people together and decide (look, a group decision!) that there will be no group decisions (?) forming any sort of authority or formal structure governing how they all interact, you're basically walking away from civilization. At best, you're setting up for medieval feudalism. True, you don't have to fear abuse from an authority you establish ... instead, you have to fear abuse from anyone who feels like using force to abuse you, and you've got no recourse because you've already decided that recourse beyond your own ability to withstand the use of force against by one or a thousand or a million other people is too organized and authoritative for your taste. By not establishing authority, one cedes authority to anyone else who feels like claiming it. So, people espousing that point of view are basically twits.

Beyond the fact that I was obviously referring to Slashdot calling it a "mini-internet", the article said no such thing. They said that they can't keep it secret. Not that they "do not wish" to keep it secret.

AP Headline: "Cuban youth build secret computer network despite Wi-Fi ban "

Slashdot: "Young Cubans Set Up Mini-Internet".

"Mini-Internet" huh, Slashdot. My how far this site has degraded, when the mass media's headline are more accurate and less pandering.

Really? So, you'd be in favor of the government making sure they know who is and who isn't gay in order properly run skewed elections and referenda? How about simply having a clause in your constitution that says (as ours does) that everyone is treated equally under the law? Isn't that simpler than getting the government involved in keeping lists of who is on which part of a given spectrum of sexual orientation or skin color, etc?