UK Judge Rules That Selling Consumers Cheaper CDs Is Illegal [Techdirt]
This is the kind of kafka-esque weirdness that always baffled me about my homeland. A British judge has ruled it illegal to buy CDs from a foreign market if they are cheaper than the same item locally, making it unlawful to try and get around geographical price-fixing. Specifically, it targets music imports, fining British music importer CD-Wow the difference between the CDs they bought legally abroad and the price as fixed in the UK market by the music companies. Universally, it means that it's now iffy in Britain to circumvent arbitrage at all.
In effect, the ruling establishes that the exchange value of a commodity can be determined by the original seller even after they no longer own it, as a kind of general prinicple that goes rather beyond stopping piracy or banning Asian playstations.
Raytheon Develops World's First Polymorphic Computer [Embedded]
Polymorphic computers are ones where the low-level architecture can be adapted on the fly to different applications. My theory: they built an AI, but they don't want it to know its destiny is to be a missile until its too late to do something about it.
Dungeons & Dragons and IT [Slashdot]
Why do geeks become RPG fans? It's more a questions of why role-players become geeks... The discussion is just as as amusing as you'd expect! Here's the original article.
