Tangentially to the copyright monitor thing: my local library, and I suspect many others, now has machines for checking out the books. This is great, as it frees up the librarians to do more of the work that requires brains, but it means that I can no longer see how many times the book I'm reading has been borrowed in the past. I used to get a kick out of knowing that I was the first person in 5 years to read a book, or that 58 people had read it this year...

My main library (Ealing Central Library) has automatic machines, but they're pretty unreliable. You can check out about 90% of books, but the check-in machine is usually either completely broken or makes a farty-beepy noise and tells you the book doesn't exist.

Which annoys me as I have to make decisions about whether it's worth joining the long manual queues, or just put the problem books back.

Heh, I remember DigScents. They were called snortals, I believe. Ah, the dreams of dreamers.

DigiScents, that is.

From the CES articles:

Panja Broadband Music Player
Have you ever sat in your living room and thought, "Gee, I wish I could listen to that jive Internet radio without my PC!" No, of course not. Internet radio is unreliable, boring, and (for lack of a better word) stupid.

And

3Com Kerbango
First of all, any product named after a fictional drink from Battlefield Earth automatically deserves our scorn. Putting that aside, the very concept of an Internet radio - which is what Kerbango is - screams redundancy. You've got a computer with a broadband Net connection, and if you bought it in the past few years, it probably has pretty good audio capability. But instead of just using your existing hardware, you're going to go ahead and pay extra money so you can have another appliance that just puts your already-paid-for computer's aural capabilities in a slightly more attractive box. Yipee.

So UGO hated Internet Radio, and therefore no one would ever find it useful ever. These devices were just ahead of their time.

my local library, and I suspect many others, now has machines for checking out the books. This is great, as it frees up the librarians to do more of the work that requires brains, but it means that I can no longer see how many times the book I'm reading has been borrowed in the past. I used to get a kick out of knowing that I was the first person in 5 years to read a book, or that 58 people had read it this year...
Our library has these and they are awesome - totally reliable and incredibly fast. You can stack up to five books on the reader and within a second or so, it has them checked-out. Plus, I get a printed list of what books I have taken so I can ransack the kids' bedrooms looking for the books they've left everywhere and know when I've found them all. The only flaw is that I have to remember to unlock CDs/DVDs myself and the machine to do this is not near the check-out machines.