Ever read any non-fiction by Jerry Pournelle? The guy has written some top-notch science-fiction, but in real life he's the biggest tech-idiot to ever get published. That article was the first non-fiction (or at least not intentionally fiction) thing I've read from Bruce Sterling. His best science-fiction tops Pournelle's - but now I have to wonder about his understanding of real life technology.

DVD's have better error correction than CD's - neither are indestructible but in terms of the correctable errors, DVDs have somewhere around 9 times better error recovery than CDs for the same amount of data. So, if CDs are robust enough for you, DVDs will be too.

As for forced commercials, FBI notices and what-not. That option is part of the DVD spec and the occasional DVD does use it, Disney is infamous for forcing people to watch trailers for other films before letting you watch the real movie. But that kind of abuse is becoming rarer - the FBI warnings are usually put after the credits instead of before the movie. For every dvd that I've watched this year with the FBI warning before the film, not only could you fast-forward through it, you could chapter-skip and immediately jump past it. Also, if that kind of thing really bugs you, many DVD players have unofficial "back-doors" that let you disable the forced-to-watch mode, as well as all the other restrictive "features." Ironically, the cheaper the DVD player, the more likely it is to have such a backdoor.

You don't need an HDTV to appreciate the better picture quality - as long as you have reasonable eye-sight and at least a medicore quality regular television set, you will see an appreciable difference with any mainstream title (there are plenty of poorly mastered DVDs out there, but they are compartively rare with the occasional glaring exception like the Godfather series which got a crummy transfer two years ago and is due for a re-issue). FWIW, DVD is only equal to the lowest quality level of HDTV, a real HDTV signal can be more than 6x the resolution of DVD.

So, don't let a luddite science-fiction author keep you from the benefits of DVD, just make sure you shop on price - MSRP on a lot of discs is $25-$30 but if you shop smart, you can find them for $15 or less. I myself buy a ton of used discs during SALES at BlockBuster and Hollywood Video for $10 or less (moviegallery generally has a sale once per quarter where I average $5-$6 per dvd).