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May we one day see a FOSS satellite in orbit?

like these?

one of the microsat's listed on that page I recieved the schematics and diagrams for at a dayton Hamvention some years back. and if you contact the right people that will gladly share their info with you.

Many sattelites in orbit are Free and Open Source.

So the US doesn't have a problem then? :-)

Thanks for the heads-up. Perhaps it is obvious that I am a novice at Taphonomy (I didn't even know the word before), but I did google before I posted my previous comment and found several sites suggesting that fossilization occurs with low probability, though I found no actual numerical probabilities in my quick search. e.g. Taphonomy: Death Is A Sure Bet, Fossilization Is A Long Shot

While skimming other excerpts, I developed the sense that the probability of fossilization across species varies widely, and furthermore that events which may rapidly bury species greatly increases the probability of their fossilization.

After re-reading my isolated statement that you quote, it occurs to me that I may have failed to communicate my question very well... I didn't intend to question whether there are generally a lot of fossils everywhere (which there are), but rather the probability distribution of fossilization across species (frequent) and similarly across the Earth as it relates to species (ubiquitous), particularly as they apply to 'The Great Dying' (an extinction line), which may have been a time of great upheaval -- perhaps even making relatively permanent changes in the environment which would then support a different range of species?

In any case, as a newbie, I can always use more info. Thanks for the link. :)

In Australia we switched to metric in the 70s, when I was a teenager. Once the weather reports are ONLY in Celsius, you quickly adapt. Just as you do to different currencies when you visit another country. After a few months you don't even convert back, you just think native.

Also, no one uses "centigrade" units, in Europe or anywhere else. That was replaced by Celsius in 1948. "Big and awkward" -- can you really tell the difference between 75 and 76 Fahrenheit?

That was patched a long time ago. You need to upgrade your trees.

many things get pattented before even invented or widely used, look at:

communications satelites in 1945
MS patents zeros and ones
and many more...

MSU - 1970s era air temperature

• http://ghrc.msfc.nasa.gov:5721/sensor_documents/ms u_instrument.html

• http://amsu.cira.colostate.edu/
• http://aqua.nasa.gov/AMSU3.html

• http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Technology/atms_summary.ht ml

• http://ghrc.nsstc.nasa.gov/uso/readme/ssmt1.html (about the only decent information that's left about it)

• http://xenon.aerojet.com/Weapon_Systems/Earth_Sens ing/SSMIS/
• http://www.osdpd.noaa.gov/PSB/IMAGES/ssmisdoc.htm
• http://www.metoffice.com/research/interproj/nwpsaf /ssmi/ssmis_ug_moud001_v2.pdf (PDF gets pretty technical but lots of good info)

• http://www.ipo.noaa.gov/Technology/cmis_summary.ht ml

All of the above are what are known as microwave sounders or radiometers. They look at radiation in specific bands in the microwave region of the spectrum (based on oxygen absorption lines) to infer air temperatures.

It looks like the study in the article was using MODIS and TOVS data. TOVS consists of some of the above instruments - MSU and AMSU in particular for this application. MODIS is another sensor that doesn't look at the microwave region of the spectrum, so it's out of my area of expertise. Look at the website for more info on that if you're interested. :)

Colorado State Mechanical Engineering is do some cool R&D on Mass Production of [Thin-Film] Photovoltaic (PV) Modules which could drastically reduce the cost of PV cells in the future.

I look forward to seeing the interesting results as the basic conservation laws are reexamined and we end up neat things like warp drives, levitation, and all the other stuff I've wanted since I was 4!

No problem! The warp drive link will be send to you on a later date. Here you go.

I got one of these things flying for over 2 minutes (the owners tried for about half a year before giving up).

Bzz. Wrong on both counts. Last time meter was defined in a way you describe was in 1795.

Meter is a measure of distance. Bit is a measure of information. Both have definitions.

Your not knowing this foundation of Informatics -- despite it being offered and discussed elsewhere in this very thread perfectly illustrates my original point (moderated off-topic by now).

[Your stubborn insistence on "1 or 0" (what happened to "left or right", "black or white", then?), coupled with calling me "Jackass" point at several personality flaws too, but that's really off-topic]

Try the 6th meaning in this page, for example...

Upcoming talk and demonstration on the development of Brain-Computer Interfaces: http://www.notacon.org/speakers.html#lowne (shameless plug)

Invasive, motor-cortical BCI development at Utah: http://www.bioen.utah.edu/cni/Projects/Motor.htm

Mike Gibbs' work with BCIs at Oxford University's Robotics Group: http://www.robots.ox.ac.uk/~mgibbs/research.html

The Neural Prostheses program at the National Institutes of Health includes calls for proposals in BCI development: http://www.ninds.nih.gov/npp/

The University of British Columbia's BCI research group: http://www.ece.ubc.ca/~garyb/BCI.htm

Results of the 2003 Brain Computer interface competition (focuses on signal processing techniques): http://ida.first.fraunhofer.de/projects/bci/compet ition/results/index.html

BCI development at the Cognitive Science and Technology group at the Helsinki University of Technology: http://www.lce.hut.fi/research/bci/

Dr. Jessica Bayliss's BCI work and extensive bibliography (very important, seminal work on BCI development): http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/ and http://www.cs.rit.edu/~jdb/research/baylissThesis. pdf

Dr. Charles Anderson's work at Colorado State University with EEG pattern classification in BCI systems: http://www.cs.colostate.edu/eeg/index.html

Manchester University's Toby Howard has written some good articles on BCIs, mostly for Popular Science: http://www.cs.man.ac.uk/aig/staff/toby/research/bc i/

Dr. Michael Black at Brown University teaches a course in BCI development: http://www.cs.brown.edu/courses/cs295-7/home.html

Cyberkinetics, Inc. makes medical-use BCIs: http://www.cyberkineticsinc.com/

The US will adopt IPv6 as quickly as it's adopted the metric system.

Popular science doesn't have the best record, but this stuff happens to be for real. I have seen a video demonstration of somebody playing pong via eeg (no invasive probes required). I'm not saying XBOX-2 will have a brain-machine interface, but this is not just another Popular Science sci-fi piece.

The free radicals do the damage, so just consume foods with antioxidants and everything will be fine.

Crisis averted.

Now all countries' currencies are decimal and the US, long ago a pioneer in going decimal, is the last holdout for non-Metric measurement.

i had a hard time finding something. look at http://www.ext.colostate.edu/pubs/farmmgt/05002.ht ml

IAAL but this isn't legal advice.

"Worrying about fish that may make it to the wild and into the food chain seems pretty tame in comparison."

The complaint of the CFS seeks regulation, or at least oversight - the point of the injunction is to stop something irresponsible before it starts, rather than waiting to see irreversible results before condeming them. It is true that GM food is an everyday part of our life, but the production of those crops is regulated, and with good reason. Additionally, this seems different than the life-saving potential of greater food production - if it's merely making money from entertainment value associated with the Nemo fad, then perhaps it should be looked at more seriously. These fish will make it into the wild one way or another, and the same concerns they have with Salmon (a food crop) shouldn't be ignored just because this is a toy.

Not to mention the fact that some kid or college student will inevitably eat one of these.

From The U.S. Metric Association

The kelvin (K) temperature scale is an extension of the degree Celsius scale down to absolute zero, a hypothetical temperature characterized by a complete absence of heat energy. Temperatures on this scale are called kelvins, NOT degrees kelvin, kelvin is not capitalized, and the symbol (capital K) stands alone with no degree symbol. [In 1967 the new official name and symbol for "kelvin" were set by the 13th General Conference on Weights and Measures (CGPM).]

No, I'm pretty sure about the calorie/Calorie distinction (due to a very long, arduous science project back when I was in school where I made a (horribly inaccurate) calorimeter), and I'm very sure about the term kilocalorie being used in Japan (I'm a Japanese translator), but your point is very well taken that using calories/Calories instead of Joules makes as much sense as using Fahrenheit instead of centigrade. Ick.

As an aside, I wonder how many slashdot users realize that the only other countries in the world besides the U.S. that haven't officially switched to the metric system are Liberia and Myanmar.

You drooling java fanboys are all alike. Doing a google search on "java" doesn't prove anything about Java's performance (seriously- those werent even benchmarks you linked to). Neither does linking to a page titled "C++ Sucks".

Here is some data right back at you:
http://www.jelovic.com/articles/why_java_is_slow.h tm
http://dir.salon.com/tech/col/garf/2001/01/08/bad_ java/index.html
http://www.advogato.org/article/624.html
http://www.cs.colostate.edu/~cs154/PerfComp/

Chew on dat, butt monkey.

If they are using kph everywhere, I guess it's because they are in the US. This is incorrect use of the SI. The obvious reason is that "per" isn't written "per" in all languages of Earth, and it takes Americans to not care about it, or not notice about it, and stick to a "mph" lookalike. It's just as if I wrote "km/h" as "kmah".

i found some science info

http://lamar.colostate.edu/~hillger/flashcardsbasi c.pdf

http://www.pnl.gov/ag/usage/acroel.html#k

there is no such shit as "KPH"

read

The main area in which we saw benefit was switching from the Portland Group Fortran Compiler to the Intel Fortran Compiler, which cut the timestep (simulation time/real time) nearly in half.

Every cluster in the department is assembled from commodity x86 components. Groups here have been moving from proprietary Unix architectures to Linux/x86 systems and clusters. Our group started out on RS/6000s, then moved to SPARC, and is now moving to x86. In terms of price/performance there really is no comparison.

As for TCO, the lifetimes of clusters here are relatively short, one or two years at the most. Thus a high initial outlay cannot be set by lower cost of operation.

"women do not have a constitutional right to pleasure inducing devices"

Listen to this prank call: it's (more or less) on topic and hilarious...

Actually, it's not the folks but the microbes that live in them.

Funny quote from the above link:

In human hospitals, there have been many explosions in the colon triggered by use of electrocautery performed through a proctosigmoidoscope.

So be careful out there.

It's too damned early for unit conversion.

And still you think that the rest of us should do it in our heads? Quoting you:
Yes, because people can't do simple conversions in their head.

There are three (3) countries in the world that still uses the imperial system: Liberia, Burma and the US. Every other contry implements the metric system.. Look here if you're interested.

There's a certain "American Tunnel Vision Syndrome" around Slashdot, it seems..

It's fun, very tasty, come in a variety of colors (iSpuds?), and you don't even have to wash the dirt off this way.

Assuming this isn't a dumb april fools joke (are they lame this year, or what?)...

No.

What you see is the result of a whole lot of post-processing by a supercomputer called 'your brain'. The input from the optic nerve is quite inferior to the image you see.

For instance, your digital camera would have a blind spot in every picture. It's also upside down, and probably non-uniform in its curvature.

Here is a great summary of the rationale behind converting.

Now, maybe someone will be able to make this go. But this company doesn't look like it. If you manage to get to their web site and look at the programming language "Viva" they have designed, it looks like you are drawing circuit diagrams. Imagine programming a complex algorithm with that.

There are already better approaches to programming FPGAs (here, here, here). Look for "reconfigurable computing" on Google and browse around.

Supplying nothing but an ad hominem attack like that tells us who the 'bit of a net kook' is.

Bile isn't much of an argument.

Setting aside the whole nature vs nurture issue, the reason that two calico cats won't look the same even if they are "genetically identical" is due to mosaicism. Basically what happens is that the gene for certain types of coloration is carried on the X chromosome. Early in embryonic development, each cell in the cat inactivates either the paternal X chromosome or the maternal X chromosome (obviously this only applies if the cat is female). This inactivation happens once at a fixed stage in the cat's development; as the cat develops, these individual cells multiply and eventually the cat becomes a patchwork of coloration, some triggered by the paternal X and some by the maternal X chromosome.

There's no way to predict this pattern, so two cats whose parents have different patterns of orange or black fur will always look different, and the clones of any one of these cats would all look different as well.

And while this is a particularly colorful example of mosaicism, it in fact happens in all mammals, so female clones will always express different patterns of X-linked genetic traits.

I have to agree, the university I attend has a great station. Commercial-free radio that doesn't suck. Best part is that our radio is student funded (tuition fees) so we pick what plays.

headlines in leet

Apparently noone in the submitter/editor chain understands SI units like the rest of had to learn in high school. It should probably be:

1 km 802.11b @ 2Mb/s

Case is important in SI units. One still has to read Geek, but at least it's meaningful to fluent speakers of Geek.

Kudos to you for giving a darn about the quality of your tutoring, and doing some work on this project.

Do some Googling and see what is happening at writing centers, which provide the same services you will be doing, but for writing instead of math. There are already several centers (like Colorado State and Auburn) who are using chat for writing help online. You might be able to find some general suggestions for tutoring practices which can help you out.

You might also see what folks in electronic library reference are doing, such as the RefeXpress service here at Florida.

If you have a minute, I'd appreciate an email regarding what you find out, how it helps you out, etc. (speaking not only of these suggestions but your research in general).

good luck,
cbd.

I'm not implying that, I'm explicitly stating that astronomers do not perform experiments.

From that link:
nonetheless the bottom line in examining potential human-caused effects is: are these effects large enough in magnitude to be extricated from the `noise' of the natural variability of the system?

You conveniently left out the immediately following sentence: "There are few, if any, cases in which we can answer this question affirmatively."

From the same site, have at look at this: The Dangers of Overselling.

This guy is not "out in left field," this is a fairly moderate opinion.

The only example of a meteorological "experiment" I can think of would be cloud seeding. But please, see this page at Colorado State: The Importance of Natural Variability.

Again, the point is that atmospheric manipulations are not repeatable.

Um, the metric system was adopted in France in 1795 How much longer could it possibly take? It's not exactly a fine line between 'gradual' and 'never happening!' And I thought ISA and DOS were bad because they took decades to die. But centuries!

Not to push you over the edge, but the antibacterial soaps are controversial; many studies show they are little more effective than regular soap. Some contend the antibacterial ingredients can cause problems all their own.

Most bacteriocides that you'd be willing to put on your skin take a while to work, more time than you'd have the soap on. The most effective treatment is a good scrub, which physically scrapes the bacteria away -- not glamorous but effective. Most of us do a lousy job at handwashing -- it needs to be thorough and repeated during the day, as the bacteria multiply on your skin -- myself included, and I have two of those little disease vectors called "children."

Only 40% of people wash their hands exiting public restrooms, one study showed (imagine being the data-taker); the problem there being the encouragement of the fecal-oral route of disease transmission from the non-handwasher to others. I'll let you visualize what fecal-oral involves. So be a good citizen and lather up.

Oh, and the next time the press reports someone getting sick from beef tainted with E. coli, note that "coli" means colon, where these bacteria were discovered. These E. coli come from careless slaughtering practices and, stated frankly, mean that "there's manure in the meat." (quoting the muckraking author of the excellent Fast Food Nation)

It's a microbe's world after all.

Actually, the last 7 years (except for el nino years like this one) have seen a much higher number of Atlantic hurricanes than usual. Colorado State University tropical storm researcher William Gray's research indicates that this is due to a long-term (25-50 year) shift of the atmospheric circulation in the Atlantic. Correspondingly, there was diminished Atlantic hurricane activity around the turn of the 20th century, so technically, there ARE more hurricanes now than there were 100 years ago.

Interestingly, North Atlantic Sea Surface Temperatures (SSTs) have been about 0.4 to 0.6 degrees warmer than normal since about 1995. While this is almost certainly associated with the larger number of hurricanes, it's difficult to say what the ultimate cause is. In other words, is this a "real" anomaly, or is it just another of the long-term cycles of the Atlantic Ocean?

Check out The Little Shop of Physics. "The Little Shop of Physics is a collection of hands-on science experiments that are designed to be used by students at all grade levels, K-16"

Which people are you referring to? The studios who want to outlaw commercial skip? If so, you're missing/neglecting a vital piece of copyright history. Sony sold Betamax VCRs. Disney and MCA sued Sony for copyright infringement. Sony won, establishing that time-shifting was legal. Here are the important points from that article:


Universal City Studios and Disney felt that the introduction of VTR's (VCR's) were infringing on copyright laws by allowing consumers to record copyrighted material off the television, and allowing new companies to rent out copyrighted material. The plaintiffs (Universal City Studios and Disney Productions) had to prove that the alleged infringements caused economic harm to their industry, or would in the future. The plaintiffs felt that by allowing consumers to record television shows it would cause the royalty prices on re-runs to fall drastically. The court felt that taping off air for entertainment or "time shifting" (recording a program in the present to view at a later date, shifting time) constituted as FAIR USE. Plaintiffs also argued that allowing rental use of video cassettes would cause box office prices to fall. The court allowed this practice to stand on the basis of the First Sale Doctrine of the 1976 Copyright Act, which states: the first purchaser of a copyrighted work (a film on video cassette) could use it in any way the purchaser saw fit as long as copyright was not violated by illegal duplication. (ibid.) In other words you are allowed to rent out the original copy that you bought from the studio, but cannot make copies of the original to rent out. It is rumored that another reason Universal City Studios brought the suit against Sony was because Universal sought to prevent Betamax from capturing a significant part of the home video market before Universals' parent company, MCA, could introduce it's DiscoVision Laserdisc system that was scheduled for release in 1977. The decision handed down in October 1979, by the U.S. District Court ruled in favor of Sony. They court felt that set manufacturers could profit from the sale of VCR's, and that the plaintiffs did not prove that any of the above practices constituted economic harm to the motion picture industry.


In other words, people /were/ yelling and screaming, and they were struck down. Now, however, we live in a digital world, and the people doing the suing have a lot more money, and we're going through the same sort of thing. It's looking like the battleground is congress this time, rather than the courts. Time-shifting is considered Fair Use, however the television studios and MPAA are trying to stop that.

Metric system for distances, volumes and weight is way more usable than the so-called english system. US Government somewhat endorses the metric system but implementation is not gaining momentum. Americans don't want anything to change, that's the problem. Same Coke, same fuel consumption, same miles, same TV, same emptyness.

I think people in the US don't want to switch because there is no advantage to a switch. Really, what would the point be? There are 260 million people happy with the current system, why should they switch?


This would be the point

The supreme court likes taking the side of the consumer in cases involving the doctine of first sale

Those were the days.

Now CDs cost $19 or $20. The dot-com boom is, well, you know. Napster's gone. And the Digital Millennium Copyright Act has survived a legal challenge, which has only encouraged our fine Congress to pile on more onerous legislation.

Granted, none of this is as alarming as the apparent suspension of habeas corpus in the extended detention of more than 1,000 unnamed people in the U.S. since 9/11, but it's pretty darned ominous just the same.

Added to this heady mixture in recent weeks is a new generation of digital copy protection that's been showing up on music CDs distributed by Sony in Europe. Fast becoming known as the case of "Celine Dion Killed My iMac," initial reports indicate that these discs are not only unreadable by computers, but may actually crash them and prevent them from rebooting, necessitating a service call.

Aside from the immediate hardware questions--"Where the !@#$% is the iMac's manual CD eject hole and how the !@#$% do I get to it?!?"--several major questions about this situation have gripped the Mac universe. Here, without further ado, are the Curmudgeon's curmudgeonly answers to the top five. Some are techical, some are legal, some are political, some are a mix of all three.

Dayplanner note: if you already know exactly how CDs and copy protection work and you're pressed for time, feel free to skip right on down to Question #3. That's where things get, as they say in New England, wicked controversial.

QUESTION #1: Why do Macs and other computers choke on copy protected CDs?

When you look at the business side of a normal audio CD, you see one continuous semi-glossy surface that contains the audio information, or the "program". Bracketing the program are the lead-in and lead-out sections, which are the high-gloss rings at the inside and outside edges of the disc, respectively. The CD's audio tracks are not arranged in a particularly orderly fashion on the disc. As Robert Starret explains in an old but still definitive Emedia Professional article:

Red Book [i.e Audio CD] tracks are not files, per se. They are made up of a bunch of data that is meant to stream, and within the stream there is more than music. ... Data on an audio disc is organized into frames in order to ensure a constant read rate. Each frame consists of 24 bytes of user data, plus synchronization, error correction, and control and display bits. One of the first things that it is crucial to understand about CDs is that [their] data is not arranged in distinct physical units. Instead, the data in one frame is interleaved with the data in many other frames so that a scratch or defect in the disc will not destroy a single frame beyond correction.

Audio discs were designed to be read sequentially, in real time, with the digital data converted to an analog signal that would be played through a stereo's speakers. There was no need to have data on the disc to pinpoint the exact location of the beginning of a song. It is good enough just to get close. That extra data containing an exact starting address for each song takes up space that could otherwise be used for musical data.

So what a computer sees when it looks at an audio CD is not a foreign language, as when a Mac sees a DOS-formatted disc. Rather, it sees no language at all. There's no map, no file cabinet. Everything's just strewn out on the floor. This is why you can't just double-click an audio CD's icon in the Finder and drag one of the files to your hard drive. (If you do, the copied file will be zero k and contain no data.) Instead, you have to "rip" the file with a special digital audio extraction program or utility that manually searches out and extracts the tracks on the disc. That, by the way, is most likely why the term "ripping" came about. The kind of translation necessary for digital audio extraction no doubt struck many folks as analogous to the process of printing postscript-encoded fonts and images on a printer. Converting postscript to bitmap (so a printer can shoot ink droplets or laser-heated toner dots onto the paper) requires a Raster Image Processer, or RIP; hence "ripping."

Now, the key thing to understand here is that since audio CDs have no filesystem, and therefore no real data files, audio CD players do not need to be able to read data. Any data on an audio CD is ignored.

Computers, of course, come at CDs from the opposite perspective: data is their first order of business. So computers look for--and, if they find one, read--a data track on a CD before they look for, or read, an audio track. Data first, audio second, with each being treated separately.

You will be able to see this separate treatment in action if you have an "Enhanced CD" that contains bonus data material in addition to the audio program. Sara McLaughlin's 1999 release Mirrorball is one of the best-known Enhanced CDs. Stick it in your Mac and you'll see two separate CD icons, or volumes, show up on your desktop, one for the audio CD tracks and one for the data.

Look on the underside of the CD and you'll see that a very shiny band interrupts the normally continuous semi-gloss surface. This band is the lead-out for the audio disc, which is normally at the edge of the disc. But on an Enhanced CD, there's a second patch of program material after the lead-out. This is the data portion. Now look at a picture provided by German Magazine Chip of the underside of a disc that uses the Key2Audio copy protection technology Sony has employed most famously on the European release of Celine Dion's most recent album (ignore the disembodied hand holding the felt-tip marker for now).

Note the shiny band about 1/4 of the way in from the outside edge of the disc, just like you'd see on the underside of Mirrorball. The material from that band out to the disc's edge is a data track. Unlike a normal Enhanced CD, however, the data track on this CD is corrupt. I don't know exactly how it works, but it is formatted in such a way that a computer will initially recognize it as a valid data track but will not in fact be able to read it successfully. This situation will result in: the computer endlessly trying to read the disc; the computer giving up and ejecting the disc (or asking you to eject it); or the computer giving up with the disc sitting in the drawer, unmounted on the desktop and invisible to the OS. The second possibility is annoying; the first and third possibilities are potentially disastrous.

So computers choke on Sony's copy protected discs because (1) computers read data tracks first, and (2) Key2Audio data tracks are corrupt. Audio CD players, on the other hand, aren't capable of reading data tracks--remember, audio CD tracks lack a filesystem and there are no directories or headers to read. So audio CD players simply ignore the data track, just as they do for normal Enhanced CDs.

QUESTION #2: What's with this magic marker trick to defeat copy protection? Does it really work?

You betcha. Computers read data tracks first, but the data track has to be located at the end of the CD. Sounds confusing, but it has to be that way. In computer parlance, an Enhanced CD is a form of multisession CD. The CD is written to more than once; in the case of Enhanced CDs and Mac-PC hybrid CDs, this happens because you want to write two different types of data to the same CD. Audio CD players can only read the first session on a CD--again, no need or ability to know what multiple sessions are since an audio CD is expecting to see only audio CD tracks. So the audio content has to be the first thing on the disc, located on the inside of the disc surface. The data track is on the outside.

So if you take a magic marker--or, more dangerously a piece of electrical tape or a Post-it note--and use it to cover over that shiny band that divides the audio program from the data track, your computer won't realize that there even is a data track as it scans from the beginning of the CD--the inner part where the audio stuff is--to the outside looking for data. What your computer will see is a final audio track that seems to go on and on until it reaches the edge of the disk. This will put a whole lot of silence at the end of the last track when you rip the CD (a problem you can rectify using the Quicktime Player as an audio editor), but otherwise you'll be good to go.

QUESTION #3: Is Apple liable for the damage caused to my iMac by these CDs?

The answer to this one as far as the Curmudgeon is concerned is a big fat hairy NO. Before I explain why, I must say that I find it disheartening that so many folks on Usenet and the Mac Web are complaining about Apple in regards to this issue. Yes, it sucks to have to take your iMac to a repair shop and pay something on the order of $250US just to get a stuck CD removed. Yes, it's annoying that modern Macs have manual-eject holes that are difficult to see and hidden behind decorative outer CD doors. But I think the root of folks' complaints is that some Apple machines seem to be damaged more seriously by these disks than most WinTel PCs (largely, from what I can tell, by the aforementioned difficulty in detecting and accessing Macs' manual eject holes). While I don't want to downplay the real expense and misery some folks have experienced, it seems to me that the knee-jerk blaming of Apple comes from a kind of Mac inferiority complex run amok: "Why do Apple machines have to react worse to this than WinTel machines?!? My PC friends are going to rake me over the coals on this one! I thought Macs were supposed to be easier to use and better-built, and yet my PC just let me eject the CD!" And so on.

These sentiments are understandable, but they don't form the basis for a proper understanding of whether or not Apple should pay to fix this problem. Putting aside the question of legal liability for the moment, it's just not right to expect Apple or any computer manufacturer--or any CD player manufacturer whose machines won't play these new CDs, for that matter--to anticipate technology that hadn't been invented when the machine was designed. Early CD players were confused by Enhanced CDs; many home and car CD players still can't play CD-RWs; many DVD players (which are always labeled "DVD/CD/VCD") can't handle CD-Rs. In fact, the different CD formats are covered by different technology standards: Red Book for normal audio CDs, Yellow Book for data CDs, Orange Book for CD-R and CD-RW, and Blue Book for Enhanced CDs. Incidentally, the fact that CD-R and CD-RW are grouped together under a single standard explains why manufacturers are hesitant to certify that their CD and DVD players will play home-brewed recordable CDs: unless a player can handle both CD-R and CD-RW discs, it's not Orange Book compliant.

Now the funny thing is that much of the debate over Apple's responsibility here has skipped over this simple, and to my mind obvious, fact. Instead, the debate has proceeded to another, related question:

QUESTION #4: Are these new Sony discs really CDs or not? Should Apple support them even if they're not CDs?

Here's where the Curmudgeon throws you a curve ball, because contrary to what you've read, it's entirely possible, even likely, that these copy protected discs are in fact CDs.

Of course, Apple's position, as stated in a now-infamous Knowledgebase article is that Key2Audio discs "are technically and legally not Compact Discs (CD format)" because they do not conform to the CD audio format, and so Apple is under no obligation to make Macs work with them.

Sony agrees, having removed the "Compact Disc Digital Audio" badge and logo from discs that use the Key2Audio system.

But I don't think that really settles the matter. Attentive readers of the Mac Web might recall that the first draft of Apple's knowledgebase article stated that inserting such a disc into a Mac constituted misapplication of the product (the Mac, not the disc) and therefore any resulting problems were not covered under warranty. Apple has since removed that portion of the article, no doubt on the advice of legal counsel.

I don't know why that paragraph got removed from the article, but I have a hunch it's because the question of whether or not a Key2Audio disc is a CD has not come close to being settled.

Consider this: while the Sony discs don't conform to the Red Book CD standard, they appear to conform to the Blue Book standard--the one that governs Enhanced CDs. It's not possible to look at the full specs for CD standards without paying Philips (co-creator of the CD format along with, ironically, Sony) quite a bit of money. But available summaries of the Blue Book standard indicate that the standard does not say what has to be on that data track. Philips presumes that data tracks on Enhanced CDs "will in general contain items like disc and track titles, lyrics, and background information on the music," (quoted from here), but the Blue Book spec doesn't actually prescribe specific uses for the data track. The only requirement, as far as I can see, is that the data track be formatted with a known filesystem, typically ISO-9660 (DOS), and/or HFS. Since the Key2Audio system works precisely by getting the computer to "take the bait" by first recognizing the data track, and then confuses it by messing up the actual structure or nature of the data, it's reasonable to assume that the Key2Audio system does in fact conform to the Blue Book standard. (In other words, if the data track was not formatted with a valid filesystem, the computer would ignore it or spit the disc out.) Aside from the obvious marketing nightmare ("Our Enhanced CDs are unique because they diminish the product!") The only difference between a Key2Audio disc and an Enhanced CD is that the Key2Audio CD's data track is used to implement copy protection rather than to provide song lyrics, videos and other more traditional Enhanced CD data content.

Now, you might think the Curmudgeon is splitting hairs here. Who cares if you call it (A) an out-of-spec disc that's not a real CD, or (B) an Enhanced CD with a screwy data track?

It seems to me that there's a huge difference. It might seem like Sony is shooting itself in the foot by omitting the official "CD Digital Audio" badge from its copy protected discs. But to my eyes it's the opposite: Sony is weaseling out of the truth, which is that its discs are in fact Blue Book-compliant CDs that are not out-of-spec but rather are defective, and have intentionally been made defective, using the Blue Book format as a trojan horse to disable the user's hardware when that hardware is a computer.

Insofar as these discs damage or disable computers, they operate like computer viruses, except that instead of working on the software side, they attack via hardware and firmware. Their method of copyright protection is less like MacroVision and CSS (the copy protection mechanisms used on VHS and DVD), and more like the "zapping" techniques used by cable companies to disable cable boxes in homes where cable service or premium channels are being received illegally. In those cases, however, there's a way of distinguishing between legal and illegal activity. Legal cable setups don't get their boxes zapped. With Key2Audio, the technology behaves as though inserting a CD in your computer makes you a criminal.

Now, if a court were to agree with my argument that Key2Audio discs are in fact really CDs, then Sony (and Key2Audio) could be liable to lawsuits from computer users who lost time, money and perhaps data as a result of damage done to their computers by these discs. Conceivably, Sony could also be liable to suits brought by computer manufacturers for sabotaging their machines or interfering with their business practices. By saying these discs aren't CDs, Sony hopes to extricate itself from such liability. One can only hope that Sony gets its ass handed to it by the European Union courts--which are routinely more consumer-friendly than their U.S. cousins--before this situation gets out of hand.

This brings us to the second part of this question: Should Apple support these discs even if they're not really CDs? To which the Curmudgeon replies: Heck No! Key2Audio discs do not represent a new technology or a new CD spec. They are a malicious corruption of an existing spec. Without manual intervention by the user on a disc-by-disc basis, it's impossible to design drive firmware or CD driver software that can differentiate between an Enhanced CD and a Key2Audio CD.

That said, it would be nice if drives used in Macs had their firmware updated so that insertion of a Key2Audio disc would generate a normal "This disc is unreadable" message from the OS, allowing for a smooth and uneventful eject procedure.

Even better would be a user-selectable option to "ignore data volumes on multisession CDs" via a CD Preference Pane (OS X) or Control Panel (OS 9). You could select that option and use Key2Audio discs to your heart's content. If you needed to use an Enhanced CD, you could uncheck the option. It would be a bit of a kludge, but that's the best that can be done given the insidious nature of the Key2Audio technology.

QUESTION #5: What about Fair Use?

The much-ballyhooed concept of "fair use" is much more complicated than it seems, and much too complicated to cover fully here. Its value in helping us fight the good fight against Sony is significant but limited.

It is of course true that it's not a violation of fair use to rip a CD and load its songs onto your hard drive or mp3 player, or onto a mix CD-R. The essence of the famous, then obscure, now famous again "Betamax" case (in which Sony was the defendant, ironically, and which was decided by the Supreme Court exactly one week before the release of the first Macintosh) is that it is permissible for you to record or copy copyrighted material so long as it does not deprive the copyright holder of revenue it could obtain if your copy did not exist. So in that sense we all do have a legal "right" to rip CDs.

At the same time, fair use does not obligate Sony to make its music CDs technologically compatible with your Mac, particularly if Sony gets away with claiming that these things aren't really CDs. Technological compatibility is a matter for the market, not the courts: if enough people refuse to buy such discs, Sony will stop making them. If folks buy them, then they'll keep on making them.

The tragedy here is that the market doesn't work like a democracy. Consumers will never have the ability to choose between copy protected and non-copy protected versions of the same CD. You won't see Virgin Records marketing their non-copy protected version of the Celine Dion CD against Sony's copy protected version. It's that old problem of copyright.

So if we leave the fantasy world of economics textbooks and travel to the real world, in which demand is not merely met but created, shaped and channeled, we see that relatively few people--especially children and teens--want or "demand" a non-copy protected CD. What they desire is the music that happens to be on the CD (or the persona, or fame, or body, of the person who makes the music). So the kid hears Britney on the radio or sees her in a video on MTV, or sees her in that Pepsi commercial on broadcast TV, and then goes to the store to buy the music. Upon arrival, our young consumer is presented with a CD. The fact that it costs $18.99 even though it cost Sony about 99 cents to manufacture isn't really relevant. The fact that it's copy protected probably isn't relevant either. The $19 copy protected CD is the product, end of story. There's no other legal way to get the music. Thus, there's no way to gauge the consumer's preference for copy protection, because the consumer isn't choosing or rejecting a content-delivery medium; rather, the consumer is choosing (or rejecting) the music.

So fair use gets lost in the muddle of the market. But we can try to find it again if we take a gander at the reason Key2Audio exists in the first place: online music swapping.

The record industry says that CD ripping and music piracy go hand-in-hand; hence the need for digital copy protection. Yet a moment of reflection yields the following observations:

(A) Most noncommercial piracy these days (i.e. mp3 sharing) does indeed involve ripping CDs onto computers.

(B) At the same time, most ripping does not lead to piracy.

(C) Virtually no commercial, for-profit piracy involves ripping CDs onto someone's computer and distributing them via file sharing. Instead, it is likely that commercial, high-volume piracy involves mass copying of audio CDs via standalone CD duplicators that can copy any kind of copy protected disc as easily as they copy Playstation CDs (which use a similar copy protection mechanism). To stop this sort of pirating, the record companies will have to continue to rely on the same law enforcement agencies and tactics as clothing manufacturers and electronics manufacturers do in their efforts to shut down counterfeit designer jeans plants and "Sorny" or "Sonee" Walkman manufacturing operations.

(D) No more than one successful rip of a song from a CD is necessary in order for it to be disseminated all across the internet. In order to accomplish such a successful rip, a person can spend less than $300 for a standalone CD duplicator or less than $3 for a Sharpie felt-tip marker.

These observations all point to one undeniable conclusion: digital copy protection schemes like Key2Audio will not stop illegal music copying. So not only will Key2Audio infringe on fair use, but that's all it will do.

The "casual" illegal copyer, who rips a CD, makes a mix CD for his or her car, puts another copy on an mp3 player, and gives three CD-R copies of the original CD to three friends, may in fact be prevented by Key2Audio technology from using his original CD to engage in this mixture of legal and illegal uses. But as long as someone, somewhere, has managed to rip the CD, this person will still be able to download the album and make that mix CD, copy that file onto an mp3 player, and make those CD-R dubs for friends. The source material, being in mp3 format, will be of slightly inferior quality, but it will hardly be noticeable, let alone objectionable, to most people listening with most audio equipment.

With all this in mind, a new picture emerges. We no longer see a push-pull between fair use and copyright, or between consumer desire and intellectual property. Instead, we see piracy continuing more or less undisturbed, with fair use being seriously disrupted.

It would be paranoid and silly to think that Sony and other record companies would want to destroy fair use just for the heck of it. There has to be a method to their madness, yes?

Let's return to the Betamax case. There was an equally important, but lesser known, second prong to that case. As detailed on this helpful web page, Sony was sued by two movie studios, not two television networks. One of the studios' major complaints was that Sony's Betamax allowed for the creation of a video rental market, which allowed video stores to buy one copy of a movie on tape and rent it out hundreds, even thousands, of times until the tape wore out, without ever paying an additional dime to the movie studios. The Supreme Court ruled that this kind of video rental business was covered under fair use by what's known as First Sale Doctrine, which in essense means that when you buy something you can do whatever you want with it (as long as it's the original, not a copy). That's right--it's legal for you to rent your music CDs to your friends for fun and profit, as long as you're not renting them CD-R copies or keeping a copy for yourself while you rent the original. First Sale Doctrine, it turns out, is what propelled the Betamax case to the Supreme Court: it was the part of the original District Court Decision that was overturned at the Appelate level, enabling Supreme Court review of the entire case. First Sale Doctrine, by the way, is also why you can "license" as much software as your bank account will allow, but you cannot actually buy any.

It is First Sale Doctrine, rather than the more well-known "personal copy" rule, that is ultimately under attack by the record industry. For what reason could there be to prevent you from ripping your own CDs, except to offer you the "opportunity" to purchase multiple versions of the same music so you can listen to that music in ways that currently are defined as fair use: a CD for your stereo; an mp3 for your hard drive, and a "secure digital" copy for your record-industry approved portable digital music player? With a CD priced at $19, an mp3 at $5 (which would include a royalty to counteract the inevitable hard drive-to-hard drive copying), and a secure digital version priced at $2.50, that'd be $26.50 for one music album. No doubt you'd be able to buy all three togeter in a package deal for "only" $25. Or maybe you could license all three formats for the low, low price of $9.95 a year, for the rest...of...your...life--remember DivX DVDs?

Key2Audio is the first step in a dreadful double perversion of Fair Use. The first perversion is the idea that by making a copy of music for yourself, you are depriving the copyright holder of the ability to obtain revenue from selling you additional copies of the same music. The second, linked, perversion is that by destroying your ability to exercise fair use, the record company extends its copyright power beyond the content (the music) to the delivery medium (the CD).

There's no doubt this will all be fought out in the courts. And a recent New York Times article indicates that tech companies might finally be waking up to the threat posed by Hollywood and the RIAA.

But more than that, this requires grassroots action by all of us. As I wrote at the beginning of this column, Key2Audio isn't the worst threat we face by a long shot. But it's ominous as one more little indication of the broad threat to notions of freedom and privacy that are crucial to the quality of life in our country as we know it.

For more information, or to get involved, try The Campaign for Digital Rights at http://uk.eurorights.org/, the Electronic Frontier Foundation at http://www.eff.org/, or the ACLU at http://www.aclu.org/.

We have nothing to lose but most of our rights.

You can build your own spectroscope and see the spectral lines in sunlight with:
- Piece of diffraction grating, the non-aluminized, see-through kind
- Box that toothpaste came in
- Tape and office supplies

Cut a round 1-cm hole in one end of the long, squarish box. Tape the diffraction grating over it.

Cut a narrow slit, with an X-Acto or similar knife, in the other end.

Now go look at something that lights up by heating gas. This would be either the sun or a fluorescent light, or a mercury-vapor light, etc. Look through the end with the diffraction grating. Compare the sun with a fluorescent--That's one of the ways they can tell what's in a star without going there.

Here's how to build a bigger one with some links, but the toothpaste box one, you can carry around and impress your friends. (One way or the other.) Link from that page about a spectroscope made from an old CD.

A couple years ago I read about a similar thread of research concerning fractal antennas. You can eiter have an array of fractal elements or a single wire bent into a fractal shape. With the array of elements you can get the range and reception qualities of a random antenna array and still have an efficient system like a regular array. With a single wire you it ends up needing only a fraction of the space it needed before for the same length wire. You can fit a half wavelength dipole inside the housing of the phone quite easily. Jagging the shape of the wire introduces natural capacitance and inductance so less external equipment is needed to tune the antenna. IIRC the single wire antennas used Koch curves. The people who started the research on them formed a company called Fractal Antenna Systems who are trying to work with eantenna manufacturers. Sych antennas could be molded into the plastic case of a cell phone AND be 20% more efficient. A link to Koch curves (java is a good thing to have) is here. I don't remember which SciAm article I read the story from but I think it was in 1999.

Actually, the meter is now defined as the distance light travels in vacuum during 1/299 792 458 of a second. This happened in 1983. Originally, it was 1 / 10 000 000 the distance between a pole and the equator, but that was way back in 1793.

Check this link for more details.