notes
Sunday, 2 February 2003And here is where the space station with the three astronauts is right now:
2nd Shuttle gone.
CNN: "The space shuttle Columbia, carrying a crew of seven, broke up Saturday morning 200,000 feet above Texas." [Scripting News] [Ross Mayfield's Weblog] An image is worth a 200,000 words. [Marc's Voice] [Adam Curry: Adam Curry's Weblog]
Columbia collectibles soar on eBay. Within hours of the Columbia tragedy, hundreds of items featuring the space shuttle are listed for sale as prices climb. By Scott Ard, Staff Writer, CNET News.com. [CNet News.com]
Comprehensive coverage from Dave at Scripting News
Time-lapse animation of debris dispersion. Here's an eery time-lapse animation of the dispersion of debris from Columbia as shown on NOAA radar. Link Discuss (via Interesting People) [Boing Boing Blog]
A mnemonic for a tragic date. Nick Denton points out that today's scientific-notation date is 03.02.01. Link Discuss [Boing Boing Blog]
DVDs rot over time. DVD media is susceptible to decay, which rots the disc over time and makes it unplayable. In order to make a backup of your disc (either to VHS or DVD/CDR or DivX file), you have to break the law, because the DMCA makes it illegal to circumvent the access-control systems that prevent this. It's also illegal to distribute tools that do this.
During the Betamax wars, when the VCR was ultimately legalized, Hollywood proposed replacing VCRs with something called a "Discovision," whose media was prone to decay and couldn't be written to. The idea was to force purchasers of prerecorded movies to buy the same films over and over again. Apparently, Hollywood got its wish: the DVD player, as crippled by license agreements and the DMCA.
Among those worst affected are video rental stores, which buy millions of DVDs per year.Link Discuss (via /.) [Boing Boing Blog]"Some stores have reported they only get two or three rentals from a DVD before it's unplayable," said Ross Walden, director of the Australian Video Retailers Association.
Distributors "are washing their hands of it", he said. "Once a DVD has been rented out [distributors] will not take them back."