<html> <body> I think calling this a "publicity stunt" is being too kind. They seem to be claiming that they have created some unique physical artifact, which must be kept secret and stored safely away untouched by human hands, as if it's some kind of digital Rosetta Stone awaiting a future Champollion to discover it and magically bring enlightenment. What bosh. If they really wanted to help "future generations to read data stored using defunct technology", they'd collect the information publicly, and store replicas of it all over the world (e.g., the Internet). I mean, even granting that they might be smart people, what if they forgot something? Surely would be better to find that out sooner, rather than when the "time capsule" gets opened decades hence. One of the great things about digital data, and about paper, too, is the ease with which it can be replicated. We've learned a bit in the last few thousand years, and one of those things is that carving marks in stone tablets--while certainly durable--had some disadvantages. Another is that open, collective models tend to preserve and maintain information better than secret ones. I'd be sore disappointed if it had been my 15 million Euros spent on this. And does anyone really believe that formats like the CD won't be readily readable 25 years hence? The Yellow Book CD-ROM standard is already 25 years old, and billions of data CDs are sold every year, all of which are instantly readable by billions of devices across the globe. It may lose popularity, but it's not going away. The media may deteriorate, sure, and that's a serious issue, but if the media is gone, some magic box of instructions for reading the format won't help. Furthermore, is the guy who's complaining about not being able to read his thesis actually serious? He seems to have received his Ph.D. in 1993, so it's not likely his data is stored on 7-track magtape or something actually difficult like that. If he used a PC (or a Mac), I'll bet that if he could FIND the diskettes or CDs on which he stored it, he wouldn't have much trouble reading them with any modern version of Word or WordPerfect, because they have converters for old formats built in. And if he used LaTeX on some Unix system, well, that hasn't exactly disappeared, either. His case might be bad luck--perhaps all his backups are on some wacky QIC tape cartridge format--but even there, it's not hard to find specialists to read that media today. And if there aren't any backups? Well, that's always a sad story, but knowing how to interpret the format the backups should have been in is cold comfort indeed. Stunts like this distract from the very real problems of organizing and cataloging valuable information, of devising tools for maintaining format compatibility, of developing truly durable and inexpensive storage media, and of ensuring reliable, survivable, accessible storage.  -- Olin Sibert At 03:08 AM 5/20/2010, Peter Capek wrote: <blockquote type=cite class=cite cite="">There seems not to be anything very serious or very detailed.  There is a web site which took some effort to find with a bit more information:  <a href="http://www.planets-project.eu/"> http://www.planets-project.eu/</a> The effort seems to be a part of the PLANETS project, a cooperative effort among 16 organizations, of which 2 got the credit for putting the box in the mountain. It seems to me as much as anything to have been a publicity stunt. Peter Capek</blockquote></body> </html>