A spindle of 100 CDRs takes an area about six inches tall, and about five inches in diameter.

You can't commit to .07 cubic feet for something that you intend to store for decades in a read-only fashion, then I don't know what to tell you.

Besides, you commit to archive that which is important, not that which is fleeting or trivial. For most people that will be pictures. For some it will be video, and CD probably isn't the best format for video, admittedly.

I don't expect any media that requires a specific bus to be workable 40 years from now. That eliminates all hard disk drives right off the batt; who has an MFM or RLL controller? Who has an ISA bus to plug it into? Who even has traditional SCSI left working and how much longer will the standard 32-bit PCI interface be around? Good ol' fashioned 40-pin IDE is defunct, and I don't expect SATA and SAS to live any longer than it did. USB 3 is pinned differently than 1.1/2, so it's not inconceivable that future USB revisions might break backward compatibility with older revisions. Thunderbolt is based on a video connector that could sunset in much the same way that Firewire is basically gone now too.

Then you look at your solid-state media, the kind that require a reader. Several early formats like Smart Media and Memorystick are completely dead, XD is essentially dead, and only Compact Flash and SD-variants are strong at the moment. Thing is, both of those have had format revisions over the years, so it's also possible that early CF and SD won't work in later readers too. CF will be more dramatic since the early standards were based on the set of standards governing IDE and PCMCIA, and newer standards have changed that so they might not even interface. SD is less dramatic but filesystem changes through the years will pose problems even if there's a reader that can accept the unit and plug into a then-modern computer.

I don't even want to get into tape. Trying to find a Travan drive is already hard, and DAT is getting icky.

That leaves us to look at what's so popular as to likely never be completely inaccessible, aka the Compact Disc.

Relax, at least part of Star Trek fell into public domain...

...guess I'll still have to keep service with those COX for awhile longer...

I don't think that's the question at all.

I think that the question is, what medium will still be around and functional decades from now?

And I think the best predicable answer is Compact Disc, mainly due to the ubiquity of music CDs, which while not as popular as they once were, are still extremely common and will probably continue to be common. 12cm optical readers may eventually stop reading video formats like DVD, or Blu-ray, or other shorter-lived formats once new formats replace them, but there really hasn't been another digital music format with a physical component to it with the longevity and widespread popularity that CD has enjoyed.

Yes, computers are increasingly doing without optical drives, however there are still lots and lots of options for new external optical drives, and every new bus and connector has had a CD-reading drive made for it. SCSI, Parallel, MKE-Panasonic, IDE, USB1/1.1/2.0, Firewire, SATA, eSATA, Thunderbolt, and USB3.0 all have CD-capable optical drives available, and I expect that future buses will also get CD-capable optical drives.

Eventually the CD might not be supported, but there should be plenty of time to figure out what format will replace it and to do the conversion. After all, we still find 5.25" floppy drives at the Goodwill; there will be drives available to read the media.

I don't know, both the French and the Germans attempted to conquer a frozen Russia/Soviet Union and ultimately failed. the Soviet Union attempted to conquer an even more frozen Finland and failed. From the climate perspective it wouldn't be terribly easy to invade and conquer as a lot of armchair chickenhawks like to think.

And even if Canada were successfully invaded and occupied, and if somehow the British Crown didn't object and rally all of the other Commonwealth Realms to make war, there's the issue of the shared language and similar cultures making it extremely easy for Canadians to blend-in to commit acts of insurgency inside of the United States. Think of the issues that the UK had with Irish insurgency during The Troubles, where appearances were similar even though accents were vastly different, and now dampen down how much difference can be quickly profiled through speech, and one would have a really big problem.

Don't get me wrong, the United States could probably still do it, but it wouldn't be a simple walk in the park either.

That way, a vehicle telling cars to "slam brakes, veer hard left" while everything else around is giving an "all clear" can be ignored or weighted negatively (thank SpamAssassin), with other vehicles passing the "dude, this car over here is on crack; ignore it" messages to others around.

That may not work out well; if a car has declared an emergency then it's more likely to be an actual emergency than it is erroneous crap, and that may be the first or only car to discover that it's an emergency. You can't discard its input solely based on its singularity. It's not like e-mail where you have time to sift, or where your e-mail server may be processing mail for thousands of accounts and the pattern-matching between received messages for multiple accounts at the same time will allow one to find things. You have to react to the first declaration of emergency or else you yourself may be involved in that emergency.

"Start" is at least short. On my Linux box at work, I renamed the XFCE "Applications Menu" to "Xfce" so that it wouldn't take up unnecessary space on the panel.

I wish they would have named it something like "Fn Menu" for Function Menu- when I did phone support it would have been fun telling users to go to the effin' menu on the bottom left corner of the screen...

When I was in my late teens I moved out of my parents' house and lived in a city whose police felt predatory, somewhat during the day, but especially after dark. Simple traffic stops would result in at least two units showing up half the time, and at night they were constantly racing around on the main streets, but never could be found in the actual neighborhoods. I've never been into drugs, never driven drunk, and at the time my vehicle was only six years old and in fairly good repair, but it felt like the police were actively looking for an excuse to pull me over. Literally within five miles were three other cities, and I never felt anywhere near as uncomfortable in those cities than I did in the one I lived in at the time.

I now live one city over, and there's a major state university here, but even with all of the youth hijinks and the college dropout slums a few miles from the school it still doesn't feel as predatory. Only time I was pulled over in this city I deserved it, and the officer was professional and civil even if he was firm in issuing me a citation. When pulled over in the previous city it always felt like the officers were just looking for excuses to get tough.

The choice of name of the Start button was poor, but the idea that a single button on one corner of the screen would give the user access to nearly every kind of function on the computer was not a bad one. Apple did it with the Apple menu. When the Start Menu was created, Microsoft's Windows Logo was not obviously a window, it was so stylized, so simply putting the icon by itself on the button wouldn't have helped those doing tech support explain to users how to get to that menu.

Those commercials for adult charm-bracelets, very-much overpriced mass-produced jewelry that husbands are supposed to purchase so their kids can give it to mom, are what I think of.

That, and the Irish serial killer from one of the Austin Powers movies...

Heh. It's actually fairly common to cook something one way until it's mostly done, then finish it another way so that it takes on the character of that second way of cooking. It can be a bit difficult to cook fowl on a grille without drying it out, so it's often baked and then finished in the grille to change the characteristics of the skin and to put the marks on.

Sounds like the grille at the KFC wasn't hot, so all you got was the carbon-buildup rubbed on to the outside of the already-cooked meat.

Yeah, the reflective raised markers are an evolution of the Botts design if I remember correctly. The actual round dots are pretty much obsolete now.

I'm actually not so worried about terrorism as I am people attempting to give themselves priority. In some cities there are already problems with non-emergency vehicles activating the sensors that change the traffic lights so that emergency vehicles get the right-of-way, I don't want people tricking self-driving cars into merging right or waiting. That's a matter of hacking your own car, not even theirs. I'm also worried about such means being used as vectors for car theft- root a car in-motion that you later want to steal, then find it after the driver has parked it and make it self-drive away to a collection point. Get a whole bunch of cars to meet there, load them on a trailer, then disable them so they don't report position and drive them away.

Yeah, they don't use the above-pavement versions in the northeast and other cold places, but a similar system could be packaged multiple different ways, including plow-friendly ones. It'd be harder to replace them or rearrange them, but since they have to cut grooves into the asphalt for the embedded ones anyway then it still wouldn't be harder to install them than the status-quo anyway.

I've been thinking about this for a long time. Early on I thought about embedding a cable in the road in the center of the lane for the cars to follow or in-between lanes, but those aren't easy to modify. using the lane markers themselves as ways to transmit information seems a lot more practical. One could even build similar RFID tech into portable construction barriers, with codes to override what's picked up from the normal lane markers when the area is rearranged for road construction. Could also create codes for emergency responders for traffic cones kept in police cars and fire trucks, so that they can route traffic around with an even higher priority than the construction ones.

I don't think you're legitimate. You didn't say, "...blizzid heah." Too many uses of the letter R.

I blame the newest distributions and projects. Older project, when the UNIX mentality was still in force, seemed to be named, to an extent, based on what the thing did. Early Linux distributions modeled themselves on commercial UNIX and followed suit for a long time. Also for a long time, code-names for distributions (like Lenny, Squeeze, Sid, etc) were short and simple, and not really necessary to know when there were other terms (unstable, testing, stable) to be used too.

Somehow the use of the code-name as something much more important has happened though, and I'm not entirely sure why. It doesn't make a whole lot of sense and just confuses the point. To an extent I blame Ubuntu, they seem to be pretty bad with it, but a lot of other projects and distros are suffering the same thing.