A question about burning USB stick

[Doug]

On 01/08/2011 11:48 PM, Basil Chupin wrote:
> On 08/01/2011 20:38, Nils Kassube wrote:
>> Colin Law wrote:
        /snip/
>>>> stick". One burns a DVD or a CD but not a flash drive.
>>> I do not understand what you really mean by doing a "burn to a USB
>> Basil, you don't really "burn" a CD / DVD either or do you set it on
>> fire? (SCNR)
       /snip/

As I understand it, you actually _do_ burn a CD or a DVD--or at least the
little laser diode in the drive does.  I believe that it burns off an 
extremely
tiny bit of the coating on a layer of the disk, so that it imitates the tiny
dimple or pit that a commercial CD or DVD has in the track.

Over time, depending on the quality of the disk, that coating tends to
migrate back and fill up the hole, making the disk have an error at
that point.  This is the reason that governments are still seeking a way
to create high-density permanent records. (The only thing that seems
fairly permanent is chiselling in stone!  Phonograph records work pretty
well too. Like the record we sent to the stars on one of the probes
which will leave the solar system. Only neither format is high-density.)

--doug