Bandwidth.

What if I could hand you the totality of Netflix, iTunes, etc.? Not wait for it to download, but transfer large chunks of the Internet in seconds? and no longer have to hope that, say, Netflix won't lose vast sections of their library for contractual reasons (as it has done of late)?

Backups: permanent archiving of everything you have all on one disc.

It makes vast swaths of data yours, in your hand, under your control, in a ridiculously compact & cheap media. No more hoping that you can get X in time, or that it will be there some time hence.

I've seen profound transformations in computing when cheap fast storage increased by an order of magnitude of orders of magnitude. This will bring that about again, to similarly disruptive and amazing results.

"Never underestimate the bandwidth of a station wagon full of tapes hurtling down the highway." —Tanenbaum, Andrew S.

Netflix would put the entire catalog in your home, encrypted, and the only data they would have to transfer would be for the control plane (billing, recommendations, etc) and encryption keys to auth you.

Totally side-steps last mile monopolies as well. Don't want to work with us? We'll drop an LTE chipset in as well for the admin stuff. Redbox In Your Home.

This is how Doom/Quake was distributed on CD - first episode free, call iD for the unlock code.

That would remove their ability to take content away from consumers when contracts expire though wouldn't it?

The encryption keys would be time limited (monthly basis, certain titles, etc). If you don't top up monthly, you key expires, the underlying data is re-encrypted with another key, etc.

How do you re-encrypt a read only storage medium like a disk though?

You could have a master-key (or set of master keys) on a read-write medium, which you could encrypt/decrypt as many times as needed? You'd be vulnerable to someone scraping the master key from memory, but no more than someone just passing the video to a recording device.

To be fair, they don't have that ability in the first place against a determined attacker. (Ie once they show you the content, you can grab it.)

Yeah that's true, but I would say the majority of people aren't ripping Netflix streams in case Netflix's content licences expire. If they are given a master disk with everything on it, anyone with that disk has the data on it in perpetuity (barring storage failure)

If you mail a single disk (nevermind a box full of discs) to your friend, and it arrives in 3 days, you have achieved about 31.6 Gbps. If you mail a USPS flat rate box with 100 discs, you have achieved 3160 Gbps.

You cannot buy a three thousand Gbps internet connection.

you have to read the data off the disk though, and that won't be 3160 Gbps

What other medium are you going to store the data on? What are you reading it onto?

You would read from that plastic disc just like a CD or DVD, i.e. as you consume the content. This makes the throughput of any link in this chain irrelevant. (I guess except the read speed of the plastic disc)

"the internet" is a more fragile medium than a disk, that's why. High-density, cheap, persistent data storage is critical to make sure that most of the cultural expressions of the last few generations don't vanish into a black hole sooner than later. It's our version of ancient Babylon's cuneiforms etched in wet clay. Just imagine how much crap Jason Scott could fit into a storage container with these. A lot of crap. A loooot of crap.

I'm skeptical that this won't be extremely fragile, physically. With details that small, the slightest scratch could erase large swaths of data.

Multiple copies on the disk, or multiple disks could take care of that? Surely, some kind of error correction is possible to take that into account.

http://www.mdisc.com/ or similar. There are tons of options for archival quality backup media. If the data is very important make a few copies and leave them in airtight cases if you'd like in different geographical locations.

Sure you could use an entirely different storage medium for backups, that's not my point. I'm saying that if someone happens to drop the disc on a carpet, that could be enough to erase big portions of data. It's not about losing whats on the disc, it's about the fragility of the media itself. I don't know much about the tech being used, but I could see it bordering on volatile if they're embedding that much information, and volatile storage isn't very useful unless its extremely fast.

Who's going to store data on something that will erase portions of itself when dropped? Consumers won't, because they won't know what to do when their 50,000 movies suddenly start skipping ten minute chunks. Scientists won't use it because they want strong guarantees on retrievability, and won't want to bother with stringent protocols on handling the media when other options exist. Logging systems might have a use for it, if they can stand potentially losing big chunks of data.

Yeah, taking it into space or mining (WiMPs) would wreck plenty. You have to like the ECC you're on. you're on. you're on...

How often were you going to swap discs? When you got SESSION COUNT EXCEEDED, or UDF timeouts? Every time you give contact info...'and here is a capsule intelligence of things you may wish to contact me about in the next 15 years...but just call.'

Skip most of the spinning and size, put it in a fat SIM card, and have recovery pipelines (cleanroom et al) for failures. If you throw down for the 8TB (not really 8TiB) multiplatter +9 Fondleslab Of Regret maybe you can throw in the service premium to go visit the one retailer the future holds for us, do key exchanges, and have them print out a scan of peak versions of your besties, or let you write Abnormal_brain on the top with a marker?

sometimes the lack of imagination on Hacker News is a sight to behold

That's because it's often really "startup news" =-(

It used to be Startup News.

Huh, didn't know that was the original name. I personally prefer the Hacker New moniker. I imagine 'Startup News' was just a working title for the project as it was only kept for ~7 months.

I reckon there was only so much you can read about startups on the web before it gets boring. (I certainly had that impression at the end of that phase.)