Quarter-sized CD's?

Anonymous Coward writes: "The Denver Post is running an interesting story about Dataplay, Inc. This Boulder, Colorado based company aims to supplant the 20-year-old CD with a quarter-sized (1.5" x 1.25") optical disc that can hold 500 Mb of data. Players and media (already supported by 4 major record labels) are scheduled to launched 'the latter part of first quarter 2002'." They're cute, but considering that Sony's minidiscs never took off and this format is heavily restricted, my guess is that this will fail.

Comments

Re:Pretty big quarters

[Reality Master 101]

However, WWII could have been avoided altogether without bloodshed if the US and European nations had been less selfish and vindictive decades earlier.

Well, you can "coulda shoulda woulda" any war in hindsite and see how to prevent it. It's worth pointing out that Germany brought it on itself by starting WW/I.

Something analogous is true now: WTC and the bombing of Afghanistan are the long-term consequences of massive failures of US foreign policy,

I agree with you that there are parallels between Germany back then and now. You can definitely make an argument that Germany got screwed in the years after WW/I which led to Hitler's rise.

However, there are also difference. You have to give the Middle East some responsibility for their own problems. I thought this series of Newsweek articles was an excellent discussion of the issues. The US has some responsibility for the current problems, but it's not true that it's solely our fault.

the US is already laying the groundwork for future wars and terrorism in their alliances with Pakistan and other undemocratic forces.

I somewhat agree with this, although not completely. Someone could have made the same statement about WW/II: "We shouldn't kill Nazis; that will just create more of them". It might or might not be true, but that's irrelevent: The aggresors set the rules. They have attacked our freedom and liberty, and I for one believe that freedom and liberty must be defended at all costs.

On the other hand, there is no doubt that we are not exactly aligning with believers of freedom. But let's face it. The middle east is at least 50-100 years away from being democracies. We can either align with "lesser evils", or we can withdraw completely. If we withdraw completely, we risk a Hitler type taking over the entire middle east, and then we really do have WW/III on our hands -- for real. The only thing that keeps that from happening is the good ol' USA.

It's a complicated situation, and there is no end of simple solutions that are dead wrong. There is no doubt the US has made some mistakes, but not as many as the US-haters would like everyone to believe.