I'd say the people in 40 years who discover old media with contents of potential cultural or even economic interest would... maybe they won't expect to just pop it in their PC at the time, but they may be willing to bear the burden of building/locating suitable reader hardware assuming the media itself is reasonably intact (reading a CD-R isn't actually so complicated - not so different from vinyl records - and could be done with homebrewed hardware much as folks are doing audio recovery from vinyl and other formats using optical scanning techniques!).
So I would hope for a greater emphasis on longevity of standard media, with fewer excuses based on the expected lack of working readers in the future... afterall, we're still decoding lost languages on tablets and other media for which the reader has been lost, but the media is intact. I'd bet in 40 years (heck, today) a reasonably motivated high school student could build a reader for CD-R from the ground up.
-R
>>> Daniel Noonan <[log in to unmask]> 03/31/05 05:45AM >>>
I have completed the survey and agree labeling would be great. But who
really expect to pull an optical disk off the shelf 40 years from now
(let alone 20, the minimum choice in the survey) and actually have a
device that reads it? My 2¢ worth
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