Stephen R. Donaldson posited in his "The Real Story" series that storage in the future would be virtually infinite. However, due to the distributed nature and structure of the data storage system, you could never delete any information. Of course, a character in the series figured out how to 'get around' this, but hey - it's his story, he can break all the rules he wants. :-)

I took a quick look at Price Watch and it looks like you could put together a terabyte RAID for under $5000 US. That completely floors this old computer hack who was terribly impressed with the 180 KB floppy he had on his Commodore 64.

These got me to wondering if there would be a push in the near future to force a large portion of the internet mirrored onto a distributed/infinite storage network. Up to now, storage costs made that idea unpractical. But it seems storage technology is finally keeping ahead of data storage needs.

So where am I going with this? Well, directly into the arms of another fiction story, of course! :) Neil Stephenson spent quite a bit of Cryptonomicon on the ethics of data storage. He came at it from the standpoint of data warehousing and foreign, off-shore data storage. Obviously, well funded criminal organizations would want to use it, but it also examined the idea that information could (should?) be entirely private and protected.

Being new to Perl Monks and programming in general, I wouldn't want to be presumptious. But I think Perl Monks as it is now is a good a balance between intellectual rights and the need to follow a thread.

In my short time here, I feel a sense of community. But I also feel a sense of accountability. Without having to 'programatically' enforce it, it seems most want to 'do the right thing'. I worry when systems try to put code in place of ethics. If overdone, it can portray a sense of "I don't trust you", and down that way darkness lies.

Sorry for the rambling - this thread just happened to coincide with some musings I have had recently.