Yanek Martinson basically says that the information that comes over the netnews right now is small enough that you could archive a couple weeks' worth on a gigabyte disk and put the rest on four DAT tapes per year. True, but that's only the current rate of this particular channel. Plus, most of the time I'd have to go back to tape. But the real problem here is that I haven't explained what I want instead. I want all the archives of all the information in all media that have ever been published and stored electronically (including on video and audio tape) available at a second's notice. That's the volume and access-time part of it. The other part is, how do I find what I want? Yanek responds to me:

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...I don't trust computer filters much.

So how would you expect to know to "fetch" it?

Because I read one thing, and it says "in response to your article number so-and-so," or, "Hey, folks, there's a great book on this over here." In other words, following mentions in other things I see--things written mostly by humans, at least at this point, but also published indexes (manual or automatic) and guides. That plus maybe a couple of low-bandwidth subscription setups like magazines, and maybe one or two discussion groups like this one that I would give full time attention to.

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...support distributed redundant archives,

That's the current setup.

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preferably with cross-checking.

What exactly do you mean by this?

That when I requested something, automatically a couple of storage sites would be asked for its MD5 checksum, and my machine would check them against each other and the actual data I got.

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It would be even nicer if information could be stored, with storage cost charged to the owner and/or readers,

I don't think this would work too well. Just because I answer someone's question on a newsgroup, I would not want to receive a bill for the storage.

The DAT system you describe has all the potential readers pay for the storage. If they want to, then fine, but if not, and you don't want to either, that's fine, let your answer evaporate. Someone always *is* paying.

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and the rigamarole over creating new groups, and whether all the machines between you and the center of the universe get all the groups, etc.

Then get Len Rose's satellite dish (I did) and you can be pretty sure you get all the newsgroups.

What's that cost, including electronics, modem, etc? Also, you didn't answer about the difficulty of creating groups. -fnerd store me now and quote me later fnerd@smds.com (FutureNerd Steve Witham)