This is an interesting thread. One man's reaction:
1. Human nature is fixed. Some way needs to be found to protect the creators of valuable property from casual piracy. Until we kill off all the bad guys I guess we are stuck with CDs in the drives, eh? I believe some utopian societies were set up last century to fix this but they did not turn out so good (they killed the wrong people). I also hate to have to lock and unlock my home and to set and clear the alarm system not to mention the monthly alarm charges. It's all part of the same deal, isn't it?
2. I don't like keeping CDs in the drives either because the game I want to play right now is always the one that is not in the drive.
3. I have purchased by now three copies of D2 because of mechanical damage to the discs (mostly caused by me slamming the drawer too fast) but D2 now only costs (at most)$20 so not really a big deal.
4. I just read how DVDs can get "rot" just like Laser Discs did. Rot on optical media looks like flashing white speckles in video. For music, I believe the correction routines paper over most of the flaws. For programs there must be some kind of error correcting routine. The only unplayable CDs I have seen are visibly damaged -- you can see the scratch. Rot, on the other hand is invisible and is caused by oxygen trapped in the plastic during manufacturing or seeping through porous plastic eating at the aluminum. Rot just gets worse over time whether or not the disk is played -- nothing can be done except to buy a new disc and too bad if it is an out of print Laser. There are some (expensive) music CDs that use gold foil instead of aluminum that are immune to rot because unlike cheap aluminum, gold will never tarnish.
5. I had a lot of trouble installing BD on my system until I "removed" the CD drives (using Windows Device Manager) and letting Windows re-install the drivers automatically on restart. CD drivers do not normally come with the drives -- they usually come with and are installed by Windows. Now that I have the game installed, the disk check only takes a few seconds the same as, for example, D2 -- on my four year old P3 system. But the BD (Hip) user interface is a little misleading in that it shows a five inch bar but only a quarter of the bar is covered when the check completes. I find D2s spinning disk icon easier to understand and wait for.
