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Discovery Lands in Florida
duh P3rf3ss3r writes "As reported by the BBC, the space shuttle Discovery safely landed at Kennedy Space Center in Florida at 2232 GMT. Discovery's 13-day mission is being called a success after astronauts undertook four space walks to install new wiring and to do battle with a recalcitrant solar panel. The next scheduled flight is the Atlantis shuttle in March. A video chronicle of the mission, including the landing, is available at NASA's video gallery."
Cool, I was first. /ironfist A.K.A Anonymous Coward.
Why? About a fifth to a third of the textbooks I want aren't available when I want them. They either aren't in the library collection (inter-library loan here we come ...), or they are on loan. The campus bookstore doesn't stock them (surprise) and they'll take weeks to arive if they are in print, or I have to chase them up on Amazon because they're out of print or in backorder.
So ... I'd be very happy with the ability to print any book in the catalogue in 7 minutes. This means of course that we would have the permission of the publishers, but given that I'd be happy to pay for out-of-print or even back-order copies I suspect that the difficulties will be resolvable.
Should this happen then I think that a good case can be made for having the Library install the machine and signing deals with publishers so that the machine can print _copyrighted_ books which the Library would otherwise have to keep in its collection. I can think of several out-of-print-but-still-useful mathematics books that would benefit from wider availability.
And yes, I often want a physical book instead of a file. I much prefer reading text from paper than from a screen, (and thanks to the publishers electronic articles aren't searcheable because you get them as images, so no advantages to be had there), and because I tend to scribble in my books (*coughs* with pencil of course *coughs*), mark passages, and take them with me.
And what exactly did that cost you? Probably Real subsidized the video distribution. Would you rather have paid to see the clip? If you are nervous about what Real might do to your machine, then you can use a virtual machine and install the Real player into that. Then after watching the clip, exit the machine without saving state and voila - no harm done. I will say that I have not tried this with Real player so I don't know if it will work in this particular case, but I have used this technique with other applications that I don't want mucking around with my machine.
The more you regulate a company, the worse its products become.