  The Flexible Image Transport System (FITS) standard has been a great boon to
astronomy, allowing observatories, scientists and the public to exchange
astronomical information easily. The FITS standard is, however, showing its
age. Developed in the late 1970s the FITS authors made a number of
implementation choices for the format that, while common at the time, are now
seen to limit its utility with modern data. The authors of the FITS standard
could not appreciate the challenges which we would be facing today in
astronomical computing. Difficulties we now face include, but are not limited
to, having to address the need to handle an expanded range of specialized data
product types (data models), being more conducive to the networked exchange and
storage of data, handling very large datasets and the need to capture
significantly more complex metadata and data relationships.
  There are members of the community today who find some (or all) of these
limitations unworkable, and have decided to move ahead with storing data in
other formats. This reaction should be taken as a wakeup call to the FITS
community to make changes in the FITS standard, or to see its usage fall. In
this paper we detail some selected important problems which exist within the
FITS standard today. It is not our intention to prescribe specific remedies to
these issues; rather, we hope to call attention of the FITS and greater
astronomical computing communities to these issues in the hopes that it will
spur action to address them.
