That's pretty funny. You see, this is exactly my area of expertise. I used to work for a company which tries to develop new technologies for memory devices. They are focused on the very early stage so whatever we were working on has still a long way to mass production. Anyway, I can assure you that similar experiments are performed world-wide and 360TB is a very modest value. I've seen prototypes with much, much higher capacity but of course there are a lot of catches there: for example the device degenerate within a month or has to be kept at the liquid helium temperature (~-269C/-452F). I know it sounds silly but those experiments are necessary. Over the time scientists may be able to adjust everything so that it would work on normal conditions.

And what's funny about it? Those kind of articles tends to randomly pop up from time to time and a lot of people get overexcited about it. Because those articles somehow always lack the most important information: how far from the mass production are we there? Instead we are given some random big numbers that are playing with our imagination. The product mention in this article is actually not that far from the mass production but still it has a few drawbacks that have to be overcome yet (at least one of them is rather serious). However, nothing is mentioned in this article. I always found it amusing how that those articles are rather sensational and less informative.

Wow that's a lot of hentai uh i mean Vacation photos and stuff.

Of course. They even link to the old article in the new one. The news is that they've upped the storage capacity sevenfold (or seven thousandfold, but I'm choosing to believe that's a result of a clueless/lazy journalist) since the first article was written.

I can't think of a single reason why should I keep anything on any kind of compact disc today.

Today's HDDs are smaller in size and have better speeds and can be overwritten many times without hassle.

That depends what would you like to know ;)

My biggest concern is that the producers of memory devices are very dishonest and all they want is to get your money. We, as a scientists, are selling the technology to them and they are producing various types of memory devices. We always include a short and easy to understand list how to deal with the device. But I've never ever seen it printed and included with any device you can buy in any store! For example: do you know that USB sticks should be used only as a convenient way to transfer your data form one computer to another or as a backup device? And yet I've seen a lot of times that people are opening the file which is located on the USB stick, editing it and finally saving. It's a completely unnecessary strain to the device. The biggest drawback of the flash technology is a very limited number of cycles that unit can bear before breaking down. Simpler words: every time you read or write any byte of the device it's lifespan is reduced. So if you are working on the file which is located on the stick you are constantly performing reading/writing operations on it (think about autosaving!) which drastically decrease the durability of the device. But I don't blame people for it! Have you ever seen an instruction how to operate your USB stick? And it would be just one line: copy your file to HDD before working on it and after you finish copy it back to USB stick. Is it that hard? No, but that would increase the lifetime of you device and hence decrease the profit of a company.

I know that the cost of USB stick is very low now but it wasn't ten years ago and yet nobody mentioned how to work with it. Nowadays we have similar problems. Have you ever seen an instruction how to safely operate SSD or Li-ion batteries? No. You can find a lot of self-made instructions over the Internet but they contradict each other and some of them are really bull$hit. And I promise, those instructions would take half a page! If you followed it your device would break after eight, maybe even ten years of using. Without it - not even half of that. So by not including those instructions companies are basically doubling their profit. A$$holes, aren't they?

Truth is, this can be extrapolated to any other area of research (hence mass production in many cases) that affect directly of indirectly peoples' lives.
Car industry, clothing, footgear, food, home electronics: just take your pick - all are based solely on increasing profit without any regards to healthcare, what people want, etc.

Anyway, you are indeed correct: I'm yet to be given a detailed instruction as to how can I use a device correctly. Probably last time I saw this was before 1989 (thus back in communist regime): you were given almost a handbook even when you bought a TV!

Well, an article from 2011 is hardly new anyway.

That's the worse part. For just one thing that you are expert on there are probably hundreds where you are not so they can easily cheat you. The same with the media. After crisis in Fukushima I was trying to find a reliable information what actually happened there. You have no idea how mad I was because of it. I tried several types of media and from different countries. In every single one of them they were talking nonsense. For example they used nuclear meltdown and nuclear explosion as synonyms. Absolute garbage. And then I realized then whenever media talks about anything else than physics they are most probably talking nonsense too, with the only difference that I cannot see it because I'm not into that stuff. Sad.

Pffft, didn't Superman's father use that technology already? He probably wrote the data to the crystals with his laser eyes.

What if the disc get's scratched? You might lose a lot of gigabytes of information. =P

Ive always felt that plain good old stone tablets are the most authenic way to go.

Anyways for those concerned about data on computers, didnt the early computers work with those papers slips that had holes? ...now we only need to make a computer that can access stone tablets... :)

All the smart guys go to Southampton Uni... :)

Haha, that movie was great! I never realised it was a documentary though...

Yes, that is scary. Seeing the bullshit most media publish about physics/cosmology and history (areas where I have some knowledge to evaluate their articles), I think that it is quite justified to assume that most of the stories on medicine, biology ... and basically anything ... are bullshit too.

But on the other hand you can use the articles on a topic with which you are familiar as a benchmark for the quality of the news source. For example the science articles in the Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung are usually fairly well researched and are careful not to publish pre-mature facts. If something is just a theory, they tend to write just that (unlike other newspaper who make a new, sensational discovery out of every crackpot hypothesis). So the FAZ is one of the few newspapers whom I would deem as mostly trustworthy (the other one would be Die Zeit).