Watching Star Wars 28 Years Later – Slide 4

by Marshall Brain

The princess is… pushing buttons!

You would think that buttons would not be necessary in the age of hyperdrives. Wouldn’t you simply talk to all of your appliances and tell them what to do, rather than needing to push buttons? But here she is pushing buttons, and…

she is putting a disk or some other memory card into R2-D2’s card slot. Now this is entirely too much. Within 10 to 20 years, humans will no longer have CDs, DVDs, memory cards or any other form of physical media. Instead, everything will be stored on the Internet, and the notion of “physical media” will have died.

We see this already with the advent of MP3 files in the music industry. No one needs CDs anymore. CDs are a dying technology. The same will soon be true of DVDs, as high-speed network connections become ubiquitous. If R2-D2 needed a copy of the plans, he would get them wirelessly from the network.

But why even put the plans “into” R2? What the rebels would have done, the instant they had the plans, is strip off the DRM encoding and then dump the plans onto a P2P network. That way a million copies would be spawned and spread throughout the galaxy for millions of rebel sympathizers to analyse for flaws.

But in the movie this is not what happens because the movie is mired in anachronisms. So Darth has the ship searched for the plans…

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