Sony's announcement of a 25 Gigabyte CD made partly of paper has to rank as the Moore's Law story of the year. (The image is from Sony's Press release, with special thanks to Lyle Clarke for pointing it out.)

This is a so-called Blu-Ray disc, using a blue laser beam which, because it's so short, doesn't read below the disc's surface, into its substrate. One way to translate that 25 GByte size, by the way, is to note that it's two hours of High Definition TV. Hi-def movies need Blu-Ray.

So the breakthrough here isn't just in the paper. Repeat, the breakthrough here isn't just in the paper.

In order to get 25 GBytes on to one layer of anything, the individual bits have to be much smaller than anything previously seen.

Of course, the use of paper is cool, too. You can destroy them with scissors, for one thing. They're more flexible. They should be easier to make.

Another important point. This great innovation is entirely Japanese. They're not all making comics and inventing new tofu recipes over there.