OT: cd's again... one last question....

[John Esak]

> >
> > I mean, it takes 3 minutes!!!!  A pair of scissors and two or three cuts
> > and not even the fictional CSI guys could put that data back together.
>
> While a normal reader won't be able to do anything with it, I would
> suspect that special hardware could still read the >99% of the data
> that has been untouched by the "two or three cuts".  Think of it as
> breaking an LP in several pieces -- the "data" is still nearly all
> there, even if your standard turntable can't "read" it.

Hmmm, I'm not sure this holds water... or bytes.  :-)  I was always under
the impression that data written to a CD or DVD was laid down in relatively
the same way as on a hard disk. Which, if true, would make reading what was
left on a shard of a disk extremely difficult wouldn't it?  How would you
know which second and third level indirect blocks to *jump* to without a
super block and all of its inode information?  Yes, perhaps, you could read
along one cylinder for the length of the piece, but then you would be out of
luck. Wouldn't gathering all these individual snippets of information be a
nearly impossible task... even assuming this miraculous special hardware?
:-)  Now, imagine that the data is a movie of you, the currently elected
Senator having a fling with your illegal immigrant housekeeper...
reorganizing the frames of a compressed data stream with this kind of a
recovery model makes the task a zillion times harder doesn't it?  And I use
the fictitious word zillion purposely because technology that could do *any*
of this would be very special hardware indeed.   I'm doubting your opponent
would have much luck in turning you out of office based on these hopes.  :-)
:-)

Whereas, I do agree that the actually "not very analogous at all" tracks of
an LP would play back tiny bits of the sound there on in perfect fidelity.
But, oh, by the way, this all presupposes that I was making the cuts in my
CD radially from the outside to the center... but I wasn't... :-)  I was
making them transversely in whacky zig-zag lines... didn't I mention that?
It leaves the CD's in little jagged edged strips.  :-)  Okay, now you have
to jump about 300 more years into the future to even posit that "special"
hardware you mentioned.  :-)

Do I finally win a debate with you on this, or what?  :-) :-)

john