On: What is DOTS?

[pathless]

I watched the whole thing so you don't have to:

1. A DOTS reader looks sort of like an external DVD/tape/floppy drive

2. Data is recoverable not via just a DOTS reader, but with a normal camera/microscope if need be. Imagine a mixture of QR codes and logos, like a business card might have.

3. Instructions on reading DOTS data and building an actual DOTS reader can be "drawn" on the medium itself in a human interpretable form (see: Voyager record)

4. DOTS media is essentially a piece of durable metal that takes precise and dense impressions from a laser, which makes it mostly immune to things like EMP blasts, chemicals, extreme temperatures, etc

5. No price is listed, but the media block shown was 1.2TB

[entropicdrifter → pathless]

Over a TB is pretty impressive for truly shelf-stable storage

[kazinator → pathless]

I think you could read a CD-ROM with a microscope, in theory.

[wmf → kazinator]

Not without a copy of the Yellow Book. A cool feature of DOTS and Piql is that documentation is stored on every tape.

[guestbest → kazinator]

Ah, but do you have a white paper?