a better idea

PC magazine producers (the ones with disks on the front covers) could take note of the green wave and replace their read-only media with re-writeable media. Granted, margins are no doubt tight in most print publications, so for this idea to be a goer we'd either have to have differential taxing on the blank media (tax the WORMs more than the re-usable media) or the mag would have to parlay the green goodwill into a premium for advertisers and/or readers to pay. To encourage readers to actually erase the discs, I imagine a piece of software to copy the CD to disk and manage the library from there could be included so users know it's safe to nuke old CDs and re-use them. This library management system could also take care to only archive one copy of repeatedly-occurring content to cut down on disk space. The system might need some safeguards to prevent someone modifying the disk before it reaches the user, but a simple system that asks the internet for an MD5/SHA checksum of a random sampling of disk areas along with a full-disk/package-by-package check would probably suffice.

Oh, and the differential taxing mightn't be a bad idea to kill all those "free" CDs that advertisers slip between the covers, which invariably end up being tossed without ever seeing the inside of a CD drive. (*cough* AOL *cough*)

Tux, because you can have this idea for free.