Coaster-B-Gone - Back when the technology was young, a good percentage of the CD copies you tried to make would fail, leaving you with an unplayable plastic disc that wasn't even suitable, frankly, as a drink-holder. Then CD burners became more reliable, the computers that housed got more capable, and the price of discs plummeted. Now I no longer care about trashing a CD copy when it becomes scratched, because I know I can always make another.

Not so with DVD copies, where the technology is currently at approximately the same stage where CD burners were in the late 1990s. Never fear, though, as help is on the way! This article describes how TDK has patented a scratch-proof polymer coating for their writable "Armor Plated" DVD-Rs. Another example of better living brought to you through chemistry.