The Metaverse, a phrase coined by Stephenson as a successor to the internet, constitutes Stephenson's vision of how a virtual reality-based internet might evolve in the near future.

One Google Earth co-founder claimed that Google Earth was modeled after Snow Crash

Technology and its dangerous effects on nature and human life as perceived in Mary Shelley's Frankenstein and William Gibson's Neuromancer

Gibson explores artificial intelligence, virtual reality, genetic engineering, and multinational corporations overpowering the traditional nation-state long before these ideas entered popular culture. The concept of cyberspace makes its first appearance, with Gibson inventing the word to describe "a consensual hallucination experienced daily by billions."

fellow author Jack Womack goes as far as to suggest that Gibson's vision of cyberspace may have inspired the way in which the internet developed, (particularly the World Wide Web) after the publication of Neuromancer in 1984. He asks: What if the act of writing it down, in fact, brought it about? (269).

alleges that "The world's four major recording studios had devised an illegal enterprise intent on maintaining their virtually complete monopoly over the distribution of recorded music."

If the relief requested in the complaint is granted, the RIAA's entire campaign will be shut down for good.

You buy a CD but can't take it to the gym. The Audio Home Recording Act legalized our right to copy music for personal use -- for example, making a tape of a CD to use in a Walkman. But new copyright legislation makes it a crime to extract music from copy-protected CDs. You pay for cable but you aren't allowed to use your VCR. In the Betamax case, the Supreme Court ruled that making a copy of a TV show was a legal, non-infringing use of broadcast content. But new HDTV standards will make it illegal to copy a digital broadcast without the permission of the TV station. You buy a DVD but you can't watch it the way you want to. It seems obvious that users should have the ability to fast-forward and rewind movies as they see fit. But new copyright laws threaten that right: it is a crime to sell a DVD player that would allow a consumer to fast-forward through the ads at the beginning of a DVD! You own an electronic book, but you can't lend it to your son at college. Your right to lend a physical book is protected by the "first sale doctrine." This law states that purchasers of copyrighted works such as music or books have the right to dispose of the works in any way that they wish: they can sell them, loan them, rent them, or give them away. But new copyright laws criminalize all of those activities for digital content such as electronic books.

"Whereas Printers, Booksellers, and other Persons, have of late frequently taken the Liberty of Printing... Books, and other Writings, without the Consent of the Authors... to their very great Detriment, and too often to the Ruin of them and their Families:..."[1]

This paper surveys undergraduate computational science and engineering (CSE) programs at universities in the United States.

also available as a single document (PDF format)

Undergraduate Programs

Despite offers from the bnetd developers to integrate Blizzard's CD key checking system into bnetd, Blizzard claims that the public availability of any such software package facilitates piracy, and moved to have the bnetd project shut down under provisions of the DMCA.[citation needed] As this case is one of the first major test cases for the DMCA, the Electronic Frontier Foundation became involved, for a while negotiations were ongoing to resolve the case without a trial. The negotiations failed however, and Blizzard won the case on all counts: the defendants were ruled to have breached both StarCraft's End User License Agreement (EULA) and the Terms of Use of Battle.net.

BitTorrent accounted for 53 percent of all P2P Internet traffic in June of 2004.

P2P traffic accounts for two-thirds of the traffic on the 'Net

the Copyright Cartel is not going after the technology or the hosting companies. It is targeting Web site owners who have links on their sites to copyrighted material it is illegal for them to offer.

a typical BitTorrent download will gradually rise to very high speeds, and then slowly fall back down toward the end of the download. This contrasts with an HTTP server that, while more vulnerable to overload and abuse, rises to full speed very quickly and maintains this speed throughout.

To share a file or group of files, a peer first creates a "torrent." This small file contains metadata about the files to be shared and about the tracker, the computer that coordinates the file distribution. Peers that want to download the file first obtain a torrent file for it, and connect to the specified tracker, which tells them from which other peers to download the pieces of the file.

"I visit a torrent site weekly to download this week's episode of my two favorite tv shows, House M.D. and The Apprentice. I work on the nights that both shows air on national tv, so I download a torrent file of each. To me, this is no different that setting the VCR to record something while I'm at work... but the benefit with a torrent file is that it takes up a lot less space than a video tape. I received a letter from my cable internet provider, who was contacted by NBC Universal saying that they'd tracked illegal downloading of a HOUSE MD file. It was a 'cease and desist' letter notifying me that, essentially, NBC was 'on' to me, and if they so chose, they could take me to court for pirating copyrighted material."

designed to protect the fixed expression or manifestation of an idea rather than the fundamental idea itself.

Copyright therefore may not subsist in the idea of a man venturing out on a quest, but may subsist in a particular story which follows that pattern.

Critics of the this so-called dichotomy point out that in many cases, the "expression" and the "idea" are both intangible ideas, and the nature of any such "expression" is inherently subjective. For example, in the case of the adventure story cited above, one judge might rule that changing the names, quest items, and personal habits of all the characters in the story is perhaps enough to create a distinct "expression"; other judges might rule that the two story ideas are essentially "the same", and do not have distinct "expressions".

"Corporations have wielded the DMCA to censor magazines, academic researchers, and competitors," said EFF Senior Intellectual Property Attorney Fred von Lohmann. "Now Vivendi is using the DMCA to threaten customers who simply want to improve the gaming environment for a product they've purchased legitimately."

"It essentially shuts down any competitor's add-on innovation that customers could enjoy with their legitimately purchased products. Add-on innovation is one of the hottest areas of creativity and economic growth right now in software, and this decision will slow investment and development in that field."

The DMCA Chills Free Expression and Scientific Research.

The DMCA Jeopardizes Fair Use.

The DMCA Impedes Competition and Innovation.