John Mitchell, an outside counsel for the National Association of Recording Merchandisers (NARM), warns that Florida and Utah have passed second-hand goods legislation (familiarly known as "pawn-shop laws") that could make the buying and selling of used CDs extremely unprofitable for stores and inconvenient for consumers trying to unload music they no longer wish to own.
It began with an email from reader Ed Hoffman. "I was looking for a Pass Labs dealer and found out that Pass Labs has dumped all of their dealers around the country. Do you have any information about what is going on?"
Internet radio streams have received a reprieve from the US Copyright Review Board (CRB) decision to <A HREF="http://stereophile.com/news/042307net/">restructure the royalty fees</A> for the format. In March, the CRB established fees, effective retroactively to the beginning of 2006, that would be ramped up each year through 2010, with a cost of 0.08¢ per performance (per listener) in 2006, going up to 0.11¢ in 2007; 0.14¢ in 2008; 0.18¢ in 2009; and 0.19¢ in 2010.
Freida Hughes is less than reverent about a Robert Service poem. She's right—the callow lad got bent out of shape when his booty call wasn't the idyll he had imagined.
Bagheera's bug huntin'!
Because I thought I was the boss of him, that's why.
"These syllables might be nonsensical, but they are telling and resonant."
"Housed in the Agency's Headquarters Building in McLean, Virginia, this unique collection illustrates the history of US intelligence—which effectively began when this country was still 13 separate colonies—by showing some of the artifacts and tools used by men and women serving in various aspects of espionage."
In the 1920s and '30s, fliers would race their home-built and "suicidally overpowered" single engine aircraft—sometimes in front of 60,000 spectators. The Granville Brothers' Gee Bee Model Z was little more than a massive motor with stubby little wings attached, but it paved the way for the fast fighters the Air Corps put aloft in WWII.
I've been reading Chet Raymo's <I>Walking Zero</I>, a meditation on the history of science focussed through a walk along the prime meridian in the UK. It's a lovely book, one I tend to linger over, reading a chapter and then mulling over it for a few days. Highly recommended.