Right. The physical structure and materials used for stamped vs "burned" DVD/BR media are completely different. The photosensitive "burned" media can't be considered to have any useful permanence.

However, the biggest problem we face with any of these discs, is what hardware we will use to gain access to the encoded data on them? PATA is effectively dead, yet not even 10 years since then we'd have some difficulty reading data from a PATA drive just because the connector is uncommon. What about in another 10 years? In 20 years will there be any mainstream computers using USB at all? What about in 50 years? If we need to keep weird ancient junk around just to extract data from disks or discs, then the plan has failed. Pretty much from the outset for mortal consumers, a do it yourself digital archive is a recipe for a data recovery project in the future.

This is asking too much for most people. For one, they aren't going to backup this consistently, especially off site. And then they are unlikely to turn backup drives into shelved archives once they're full, instead they tend to reformat them and reuse them. And that means any corrupt files on the source end up being replicated to all backups, eventually. So rather than considering one particular strategy as golden and spending too much time on it, multiple strategies is more effective.

I like the idea of printing photos, on acid free paper with pigment inks tested in combination for print permanence of course, and giving copies to family members possibly the best. It's a lot of material to create, store, move, protect, but its encoding is really simple, and requires no software, hardware, electricity, to decode.

For raid5/raid6 this is called scrub, or in md parlance writing either check or repair to md/sync_action for the md device. Check records mismatches, it doesn't fix them. Critically though, if there are drive read errors reported, the normal read error handling will cause the underlying sectors on the drive to be overwritten with rebuilt data.

But as for constantly doing a parity check, that's not how any RAID I'm aware of works because it would be as slow as running a degraded array. No optimizations for small file reads would be possible, it would always have to do full stripe reads, compute parity and then compare to the parity chunk on disk. And for RAID6 this would effectively bring the write performance penalty to reads.

For RAID1, normally different LBA requests are made for each device, which is why RAID1 reads are faster than single device. If instead the same LBAs are read and then compared, again this is slow. And so the correct way to do it is scheduled scrubs.

a.) Because the spec was poorly written making the command a non-queuing command, therefore file systems can't just spit out a series of TRIM commands every time a file is deleted because the queue has to be cleared first. This slows down everything, reads and writes. With multiple file systems per drive, a given file system doesn't necessarily know the drive is idle so some other process would need to do the delayed TRIM which is what Canonical is suggesting.

b.) Some manufacturers have implemented very aggressive erase cycles upon TRIM commands being received and that stalls the drive also. This is also not very smart.

OK OS X only supports it for Apple branded drives, it's disabled for most (maybe all) 3rd party SSDs. No doubt Apple found certain edge cases where it was causing a problem and instead of white or blacklisting piles of drives they decided not to let manufacturers use users as guinea pigs. Conversely, Microsoft decided it's probably better than not doing it and after all the manufacturer's and their industry trade association and standards body need to sort out this mess rather than being bailed out of it.

You don't seem to understand the basics of how SSD's work or you would haven't said this. Such secure file deletion doesn't actually work on SSDs. The LBA's overwritten with zeros or random data are written to different, already erased physical pages, while the original pages containing the data are simply flagged for erase. It isn't possible to directly overwrite SSD pages. They have to be erased first.

I think the biggest barrier is a quality user experience, not technical barriers. As you say the technical barriers are well understood, and not insurmountable. A huge effort, though, is required to get gmail like quality experience without using Google, on the desktop, and my phone, at all times, anywhere in the world. So that necessarily implies the user can opt into more than one hardware unit in order to ensure their data is replicated, and opt into distributed (and encrypted) copies that aren't in their home in case their singular network pipe goes down. I've been inclined to go with "more" cloud service than go it alone mainly because I have one nasty, but necessary, email account that garners so much spam that as a non-expert with spamassassin I just can't tolerate it. Whereas gmail's spam filtering is just so close to 100% correct. So I can appreciate the importance of this project, as well as the work that will be involved.

Especially a bug that the bug reporter has failed to provide developer quested information in the past 10 days, and was also using an older (in the context of btrfs anything older than 3.11 is old) kernel when the problem occurred? Especially uninteresting in my opinion.

Fortunately, neither you nor Slashdotters in this thread are making copyright law. Your proposal is not merely uncompelling, it's completely stupid, and therefore not a single author or artist has any incentive to agree to it. Apparently you prefer the approach to copyright in China which is: we the people without creativity or skills own every idea of every individual, we do not thank the creative individual for their imagination or ingenuity; authors and artists, GO FUCK YOURSELVES while we steal your awesome shit.

You don't want to pay $20 for a movie, album, or a book, let alone send $20 to a Congress critter suggesting an easier way to legally pillage from authors and artists. You're contributing nothing, yet demanding "GIMME!"

Now you''re coming around to my way of thinking in the first paragraph. Absolutely author's should have the right to so outprice their writings that they effectively stagnate, they make no money, and no one will know or care. But that wasn't your original position.

Every email you've written has copyright attached. It's illegal for anyone to copy and distribution without your permission. Consider it this way, using your prior rationalization (and others, I'm not just picking on you) your copyright on everything you've ever written, should expire and become public domain. All of your emails, documents, presentations, anything, would be fair game for data mining, duplicating intact, or even becoming the basis of a story that ends up selling a million copies of something - but you'd get nothing. And you'd have no control to prevent it once your copyright expires.

You've only exposed a great deficiency of capitalism's exploitation of workers. This is particularly exposed with a product that requires a lot of labor, and a product that also has a long life span. Syndicalism produces a more fair outcome in this case. But regardless you appear to recognize that the laborer has a right to demand X in exchange for Y, effectively without any limitation. And yet you don't extend that same right to define terms to authors and artists, you appear to want them to subsidize that entertainment artery as if it's your right to get free or cheap good entertainment. And I'm saying GFY.

What you propose incentivizes me as an author to not write anything anymore, but to choose another line of work. Already, in both fiction and non-fiction, the good authors are being squeezed out. There's increasing amounts of cheap crap, and there's expensive really good to excellent work. But there's decreasing amounts of just plain good. So good luck getting your fix off the cheap crap out there, while you pine away thinking of ways to screw over the really good to excellent work.

The author should have the right to define the licensing just like any labor worker should have the right to define the terms of their employment. If the person/company buying doesn't like the terms, simple, it's no deal. The labor worker or author can either reduce their price or otherwise soften the terms, or walk away to find another buyer. You're saying that there should be a fixed deal, no negotiation allowed, by taking the ideas of authors as if society has some right to them. Well it doesn't. Just like society doesn't have the right to tell a labor worker he can't negotiate for a raise, or walk.

It's common in art to have completely different selling prices for various members of an edition print. Typically the first ones are less expensive, and they get more expensive - for exactly the same copy of the limited edition run. Again, you're proposing that's crap, the artist has no such right, it should be a fixed price for each copy. And further you're proposing that that all artists should sell at the same price, only differing in how many pieces they sell - more popular artists sell more and thus make more. Well that isn't how that market works, at all.

And then you top it off by saying the author's possibly only source of income should be shut off based on an arbitrary length of time, possibly before they die. Yet someone with shares of stock can die and give those to their kids. You've basically arguing for pillaging the property rights of only authors and artists, while everyone else gets to collect interest for their whole life on savings and other assets, and dispose of them however they wish. You simply don't recognize copyrighted works as being property.

This and the prior comment are just patently absurd, not least of which is that it makes assertions without backing them up at all. The "only" thing that has come from copyright is recycling? There's nothing new or beneficial? It's objectively stupid, all you have to do is use scholar.google.com and you're see piles of new research - all of which is copyrighted. We've lost history due to copyright? What history? Provide examples. Provide evidence. Copyright doesn't apply to works published prior to 1923, so you're talking about lost history since 1923?

The argument for death + 70 years is that the copyright is a kind of property subject to inheritance. So the author can give a piece of the pie to his kids (or whomever).

Some people simply see copyright as an inhibitor to doing what they want, which is being entertained by or benefiting from other people's hard work without having to compensate them at all for it. There is a problem of orphan works that needs to be better dealt with. And technology still doesn't do a good job of preserving copyright and author metadata when content is converted to various formats (uploaded, downloaded, modified, reuploaded), especially with derivative works where multiple copyrights are attached. This is important because the original author has the right, and therefore should have an immutable ability, to unambiguously define the licensing.

They lack innovation because they lack imagination. Ballmer isn't a futurist. Until he, and the entire VP layer, are gone, we will not see innovation from Microsoft. "There's no chance that the iPhone is going to get any significant market share. No chance." That, in a world with craptastic cell phone UX. The typical houseplant knew it was a dead paradigm on life support, and anyone who came in to do a half way decent job would get significant market share. Microsoft desktop OS lifespan is 12+ years to the point most of it's users not only don't expect innovation, they don't want it. And then for the past ~4 years did the polar opposite with their mobile strategy by having zero legacy compatibility, to the degree hardware was being abandoned (no software updates) days after being announced.

You share public keys, not private keys. If you're sharing private keys, you're doing it wrong.