While ELF system is extremely slow, I remember the data rates being described as in the range of bits/minute, I am at a loss to understand how it effects mammalian sea life. The ELF and VLF systems use electromagnetic waves for communication, not acoustic. I think that you are confusing them with the high power active sonars used by the Navy, which I can only imagine as deafening to whales and dolphins.
He never discussed the national debt or the fact that over 25% of all federal taxes collected pay interest on that debt. He never suggested paying down that debt first and then cutting taxes after it was paid down.
I am curious as to where this statistic comes from. The IRS states (pg 76) that 8% of federal spending is used to pay interest on the debt. Now I personally believe that 8% is still too much of a load on the economy, but it is much better than 25%. Also note that this is only used to pay for interest on the debt, not the debt itself.
LEDs with 'drive efficiencies' greater than 90% are available
Actually the drive efficiency is referring to the power converter (similar in concept to a wall wart used for a lot of consumer electronics) used to power the LED. It has nothing to do with the LED itself. What that press release is actually saying is that you have lost ~5% of your power before it even gets to the LED. Since LEDs are DC powered, the complete system will always have an additional conversion efficiency hit compared to lights that can be powered directly off of the AC grid. This also applies in situations where the DC levels need to be stepped up or down for use with LEDs.
The reason the mission ended (and the reason that the Spirit and Opportunity missions will end, if everything goes well): dust gathering on the solar cells until they can no longer provide enough electricity for the vehicle to function.
Actually I was under the impression that the reason the missions end is due to loss of battery performance from discharge and thermal cycling. Dust on the solar panels could easily be cleaned off, as someone suggested, by a wiper. If there is nowhere to store the energy from the panels, then there is a problem.
* tokyo-osaka via the chuo-shinkansen route (duh).
* hong kong - guangzhou - shanghai
I don't quite understand why a maglev is any better in these locations than a conventional "bullet" train. If I remember correctly, the main drag force on a fast moving train is not friction from the wheels but air resistance. Maglev trains experience the same air resistance as conventional trains. The upper speed limit for steel wheeled trains is 225 mph. This is faster than any existing commerical maglev system.
If all that we really want is faster trains, are not conventional trains a more economical solution? While I am sure that are not cheap, they are probably less expensive to develop and maintain than a maglev and the associated infrastructure.
That means calculations, such as working out the factors of prime numbers, which present problems for even the fastest supercomputers could be trivialized by a quantum computer.
Hell, I have an awesome algorithm that runs in O(1) time for determining the factors of prime numbers, but no one is writing a news story about me.
Maybe because DSP is designed for digital signal processing, not to handle branches and stuff that ordinary CPU does.
True, I realize this. But I am under the impression that a lot of heavy duty number crunching algorithms have a minimum number of branches, and mostly just perform the same operations on multiple sets of data. Think of the FFT and simulations of systems based on differential equation models. This should include weather models and quite possible nuclear events. These applications seem like areas where the DSPs would shine and where supercomputers are most often applied.
Why are not DSPs used in configurations such as this. The TI 67xx series are able to perform about 1 GFLOP/s running at only 150 MHz and cost only about $40 per chip.
This price/performance ratio seems to make them very attractive compared to general purpose CPUs. According to the NASA G5 Study, the P4 2.66 GHz is only able to achieve 255 MFLOP/s. And the P4 costs about 4x the price of the 6711 DSP.
It seems that DSPs should be the clear winner in supercomputer applications, what are their disadvantages and why are they not used? Granted there is a lack of mass produced hardware such as motherboards for DSPs, but that alone should not exclude them from the supercomputer realm.
The 60 bits/second is only used for the key exchange. The key is for a ordinary symmetric cipher, such as RC5, DES, AES, or Blowfish. For example a 64 bit key for RC5 would take slightly over a second to transfer. And our friends at distributed.net have been working on breaking a 64 bit RC5 messages for the past four years and still have not exahausted the keyspace. Symmetric ciphers have many more valid keys per bitsize than asymmetic ciphers, giving you stonger protection. Keys for symmetric ciphers don't need to be as large as those for asymmetric cipers, 60 bits/second is a little slow, but definitely adequate.
Those MP3's must sound great running at less than 10Kbit/sec.This is definitely too slow to stream, and much slower than 56K modems to transfer. Is the goal to be able to remotely control a MP3 player (that has its own local storage or fast network connection)? The MP3 decoder seems like a waste of space and power to me. These devices seem much better suited for text and sensor communications.
I took a linear programming class a while back, and the professor stated that more computing time has been spent running the simplex method than any other algorithm in history. Definitely an important one, but my favorite is still the FFT.
Actually mass is not immutable, or more properly mass is mutable. It is part of the famous e=mc^2 equation. By adding energy to a system you can get an increase in mass, without a change in matter. This is the basis of the theory that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate something up to the speed of light. The more you accelerate, the more energy you have which increases your mass, which in turn requires more energy to accelerate. So weight varies with mass and the gravational field, mass varies with energy, and matter can be considered a constant.
Teflon's invention is not related to the space program. Integrated circuits were not first mass produced for space exploration. They were first mass produced to control ballistic missles. While this is similar to rockets used for space exploration the intent was not to make scientific discoveries, it was to be able to deliver a nuclear weapon payload anywhere in the world.
While I do appreciate NASA, I think that the department of defense has had a much larger technological impact on our lives (digital computers, IC's, internet among other things).
The point about IDE over SCSI is that if PC manufacturers would have added $2 more in components 10 years ago, we'd all be running SCSI right now instead of IDE. Then SCSI would enjoy the economies of scale which currently make IDE so cheap.
While this might be true on the controller/motherboard side, I don't think that it is true on the drive side. What is the physical difference between an IDE and a SCSI drive? Perhaps a SCSI drive uses higher quality components, but basically the difference boils down to the controlling chipset. Assuming identical quality, in the price difference between a $65 40GB IDE and a $168 36 GB SCSI you are paying $100 for a controlling chipset. I am very skeptical that a SCSI chipset costs $100 more to produce than an IDE chipset.
Now, even assuming that the drive components (platters, heads and whatnot) are of significant better quality to warrent the increase in price, why don't they make a SCSI-LITE? Use drives that are exactly identical to the IDE drives, but just replace the chipset with a SCSI controller? This would allow most of the SCSI benefits (more devices per controller, lower cpu utilization) with the drawback that the performace is equal to that of an IDE drive (since the actual hard drive is physically the same). I, and I expect many others, would gladly pay a $5 to $30 premium (but not $100) for such a drive.
How many boxes do you see with a high-end CPU and a bargin basement chipset/motherboard?
I think that depends on what you mean by high-end CPU. If you mean XEON processors, then most likely very few. If you consider Athlon XPs as high end, then I would suspect that many come with the ~$50-75 ECS/Shuttle/Biostar motherboards to cut prices.
How about getting rid of IRQ's on the PC platform!
Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but you want to get rid of interrupts? Interrupts are a good thing, what we need to do is increase the number of them instead of removing them. If I remember correctly powerpc architecture has 64 hardware interrupts instead of the measly 16 on the x86 platform. We want more interupts not less.
How about getting rid of drive letters in Windows/Dos and having mount points!
I agree with this. While in the short term it would be a pain migrating existing users over. Everyone would have to learn to use/mnt/floppy (or its equivalent) instead of a:. Some sort of symlinking could get around this though. Mount points for hard drives are a great improvement.
How about a better drive interface than the stupid IDE interface. (Macs did it right with SCSI, but now to be "cheap" they do it too [sigh])
Oh the great IDE Vs SCSI debate. I don't think that Macs support IDE to be "cheap", I think that they do it to be relatively competative/affordable. For some reason unknown to me, SCSI drives are much more expensive than IDE drives. Looking at todays pricewatch listings, I found that the cheapest $ per GB for SCSI was $3.85/GB for a 36.4GB drive. While on the IDE side you could get a 60 GB for $1.37/GB. The cheapest SCSI is over 2.81 times the price of IDE per GB. Never mind that some SCSI drives ran over $10/GB. While I do realize that SCSI is superior to IDE (higher performance, less cpu utilization, more devices per controller), and I would never use SCSI in a server or workstation, is it really worth almost 3 times the price for the desktop? Most desktop uses (browsing internet, email, word processing, solitare) would not even be noticeably improved by the increase in performance. For tasks such as these IDE is more than adequate.
What I would find interesting is a size/performance comparison between a $x SCSI drive and a $x IDE hardware RAID array.
The only reason we haven't seen OGG Vorbis support on solid state players is that they would only lose money by doing so, at least for now. This is coming from someone who encodes all of his own CD's as.ogg's.
Actually I think that the only thing stopping OGG Vorbis on hardware players is the lack of a free fixed point decoding library. Right now you can find free floating point decoding libraries, but not fixed point. Most of the processors used in hardware players do not support floating point operations. The CPU's only have an integer unit. When a fixed point library is released, I think that you will find Ogg supported everywhere that MP3 is, since it should be trivial to add, and will only take up a little more ROM.
This is the sum of the numbers from 1 to a million. The question was asking for a sum of all of the digits of the numbers from 1 to a million. A slightly harder problem.
Even Microsofts high marketshare is mainly based on hollywoods movies because they always show windows and people think that every computer must have windows and therefore buy only computers with windows.
I don't know about that. It seems that in most movies that I see, all of the machines are Macs. They are especially visible in movies such as Independence Day, and Mission Impossible. I think that they used SGIs in Jurassic Park, but I can't recall off of the top of my head any instance where I saw a windows logo in a movie.
But anyway I think that I like filthy's review of the movie much better.
The tabbed browsing is almost up to galeon-level, though the speed is still slow, and its missing an (X) to close individual tabs. Use ctrl-w to close tabs in the meantime. This feature is quickly becoming my favorite.
You should check for the X again. It shows up on my 0.9.6 right underneath the loading icon. ctrl-w works as well.
If am I wrong, which it looks like I am, then I totally support censorship by the medium owners. I believe that whoever controls/owns the medium should be allowed to determine what is presented. And if people do not like a certain distributer, they are free to find another that does cater to their desires. I would actually prefer that clearchannel started censoring songs. This allows the entry of a new stations that will play these songs, and if these songs are popular the stations should do well. If people want to buy/consume something then there will be someone to sell/supply it for them.
Well, I stand corrected then. But I do believe that the Christian labels that are either publically owned (I don't know if there are any) or a subsidiary of a publically owned company have money as a major if not the most significant factor in their business decisions. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing, money must be made to stay in operation.
On a similiar note how many Christian bands allow for their music to be downloaded from their web sites? I would think that a donation based system would be a perfect fit for this market(for lack of a better word). Also what are the licensing rights like? Most CDs have strict restrictions (that nobody follows) such as no public performances without proper licensing and fees. I do find it refreshing that the Christian music market is able to keep the message at such a high priority. But again this segment is different from mainstream music where the primary goal is to entertain(not that Christian music isn't entertaining).
/. getting pissed off that they might decide to censor a bunch of songs
I hate to nitpick, but I don't think that it is possible for radio stations to censor songs. Radio stations are private entities that can play whatever they choose to. Is it censorship if a friend brings a CD to your house that you don't like, and you refuse to play it? I wouldn't define it as such, you own your equipment and should be allow to choose what you play. Censorship applies when the owner of the distribution method wants to distribute information but the government won't let them, not when you choose not to distribute it. I don't like the fact that clearchannel owns so much of the radio market, or most of the crap that they play, but I do fully support their right to choose what they do or do not play.
Not to mention DCTalk is a Christian band; they want their message spread as wide as possible, even if it means losing some money.
This statement is pretty funny. Do you actually think that the artists have any input in the decision to copy protect the CDs? It does not matter that the band would be willing to loose some money if the result is that their message is spread further, the record label certainly does not share this viewpoint. The record label wants to make as much money as possible from an album, and from their point of view copy protection is the best way of accomplishing this goal.
I had a problem with this CD at first. I could not play it under windows without pressing the play button on the CD-ROM. I did a little searching around and found some alternate ASPI drivers for Windows. After installing these the CD worked great. I could play it under winamp and my ripping program didn't even hesitate to rip it. This makes me wonder if the CD is really copy protected or if it is just the enhanced CD portion causing problems.
I looked at my CD case and I did not find Universal anywhere on it, I only found Interscope and Almo. Also I noticed that nowhere on the CD or in the print was the CD Audio logo found. There was a logo stamped on the inside of the jewel case, but there is the same logo on the inside of my Half-Life jewel case and on my blank jewel cases, so I think that it is added at the factory without any regard to what CD is going to be placed in the jewel case. The lack of the CD Audio logo anywhere else on Beautiful Garbage may indicate that it is not compliant with the Redbook standard, and therefore imply that it is copy protected. But then again this could also be as a result of the enhanced CD portion. I don't have any other audio CD jewel cases around to check this against.
Google will find the ASPI drivers for you. They work for me under 98, but I don't know about NT/2000/XP. On another note this new CD is quite a departure from their first two, so I definitely recommend download mp3's from it first to decide if you really like it.
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While ELF system is extremely slow, I remember the data rates being described as in the range of bits/minute, I am at a loss to understand how it effects mammalian sea life. The ELF and VLF systems use electromagnetic waves for communication, not acoustic. I think that you are confusing them with the high power active sonars used by the Navy, which I can only imagine as deafening to whales and dolphins.
He never discussed the national debt or the fact that over 25% of all federal taxes collected pay interest on that debt. He never suggested paying down that debt first and then cutting taxes after it was paid down.
I am curious as to where this statistic comes from. The IRS states (pg 76) that 8% of federal spending is used to pay interest on the debt. Now I personally believe that 8% is still too much of a load on the economy, but it is much better than 25%. Also note that this is only used to pay for interest on the debt, not the debt itself.
LEDs with 'drive efficiencies' greater than 90% are available
Actually the drive efficiency is referring to the power converter (similar in concept to a wall wart used for a lot of consumer electronics) used to power the LED. It has nothing to do with the LED itself. What that press release is actually saying is that you have lost ~5% of your power before it even gets to the LED. Since LEDs are DC powered, the complete system will always have an additional conversion efficiency hit compared to lights that can be powered directly off of the AC grid. This also applies in situations where the DC levels need to be stepped up or down for use with LEDs.
The reason the mission ended (and the reason that the Spirit and Opportunity missions will end, if everything goes well): dust gathering on the solar cells until they can no longer provide enough electricity for the vehicle to function.
Actually I was under the impression that the reason the missions end is due to loss of battery performance from discharge and thermal cycling. Dust on the solar panels could easily be cleaned off, as someone suggested, by a wiper. If there is nowhere to store the energy from the panels, then there is a problem.
* the US northeast corridor
* london-edinburgh via manchester/liverpool
* tokyo-osaka via the chuo-shinkansen route (duh).
* hong kong - guangzhou - shanghai
I don't quite understand why a maglev is any better in these locations than a conventional "bullet" train. If I remember correctly, the main drag force on a fast moving train is not friction from the wheels but air resistance. Maglev trains experience the same air resistance as conventional trains. The upper speed limit for steel wheeled trains is 225 mph. This is faster than any existing commerical maglev system.
If all that we really want is faster trains, are not conventional trains a more economical solution? While I am sure that are not cheap, they are probably less expensive to develop and maintain than a maglev and the associated infrastructure.
That means calculations, such as working out the factors of prime numbers, which present problems for even the fastest supercomputers could be trivialized by a quantum computer.
Hell, I have an awesome algorithm that runs in O(1) time for determining the factors of prime numbers, but no one is writing a news story about me.
True, I realize this. But I am under the impression that a lot of heavy duty number crunching algorithms have a minimum number of branches, and mostly just perform the same operations on multiple sets of data. Think of the FFT and simulations of systems based on differential equation models. This should include weather models and quite possible nuclear events. These applications seem like areas where the DSPs would shine and where supercomputers are most often applied.
This price/performance ratio seems to make them very attractive compared to general purpose CPUs. According to the NASA G5 Study, the P4 2.66 GHz is only able to achieve 255 MFLOP/s. And the P4 costs about 4x the price of the 6711 DSP.
It seems that DSPs should be the clear winner in supercomputer applications, what are their disadvantages and why are they not used? Granted there is a lack of mass produced hardware such as motherboards for DSPs, but that alone should not exclude them from the supercomputer realm.
it's capped at 15k or something, while I'm paying for 128 uploads
15k is exactly what you are paying for. The speeds that describe your line are in kbit/s, and 128kbit/s turns out to be 16kByte/s.
m
The 60 bits/second is only used for the key exchange. The key is for a ordinary symmetric cipher, such as RC5, DES, AES, or Blowfish. For example a 64 bit key for RC5 would take slightly over a second to transfer. And our friends at distributed.net have been working on breaking a 64 bit RC5 messages for the past four years and still have not exahausted the keyspace. Symmetric ciphers have many more valid keys per bitsize than asymmetic ciphers, giving you stonger protection. Keys for symmetric ciphers don't need to be as large as those for asymmetric cipers, 60 bits/second is a little slow, but definitely adequate.
Those MP3's must sound great running at less than 10Kbit/sec.This is definitely too slow to stream, and much slower than 56K modems to transfer. Is the goal to be able to remotely control a MP3 player (that has its own local storage or fast network connection)? The MP3 decoder seems like a waste of space and power to me. These devices seem much better suited for text and sensor communications.
I took a linear programming class a while back, and the professor stated that more computing time has been spent running the simplex method than any other algorithm in history. Definitely an important one, but my favorite is still the FFT.
Actually mass is not immutable, or more properly mass is mutable. It is part of the famous e=mc^2 equation. By adding energy to a system you can get an increase in mass, without a change in matter. This is the basis of the theory that it would take an infinite amount of energy to accelerate something up to the speed of light. The more you accelerate, the more energy you have which increases your mass, which in turn requires more energy to accelerate. So weight varies with mass and the gravational field, mass varies with energy, and matter can be considered a constant.
Teflon's invention is not related to the space program. Integrated circuits were not first mass produced for space exploration. They were first mass produced to control ballistic missles. While this is similar to rockets used for space exploration the intent was not to make scientific discoveries, it was to be able to deliver a nuclear weapon payload anywhere in the world.
While I do appreciate NASA, I think that the department of defense has had a much larger technological impact on our lives (digital computers, IC's, internet among other things).
The point about IDE over SCSI is that if PC manufacturers would have added $2 more in components 10 years ago, we'd all be running SCSI right now instead of IDE. Then SCSI would enjoy the economies of scale which currently make IDE so cheap.
While this might be true on the controller/motherboard side, I don't think that it is true on the drive side. What is the physical difference between an IDE and a SCSI drive? Perhaps a SCSI drive uses higher quality components, but basically the difference boils down to the controlling chipset. Assuming identical quality, in the price difference between a $65 40GB IDE and a $168 36 GB SCSI you are paying $100 for a controlling chipset. I am very skeptical that a SCSI chipset costs $100 more to produce than an IDE chipset.
Now, even assuming that the drive components (platters, heads and whatnot) are of significant better quality to warrent the increase in price, why don't they make a SCSI-LITE? Use drives that are exactly identical to the IDE drives, but just replace the chipset with a SCSI controller? This would allow most of the SCSI benefits (more devices per controller, lower cpu utilization) with the drawback that the performace is equal to that of an IDE drive (since the actual hard drive is physically the same). I, and I expect many others, would gladly pay a $5 to $30 premium (but not $100) for such a drive.
How many boxes do you see with a high-end CPU and a bargin basement chipset/motherboard?
I think that depends on what you mean by high-end CPU. If you mean XEON processors, then most likely very few. If you consider Athlon XPs as high end, then I would suspect that many come with the ~$50-75 ECS/Shuttle/Biostar motherboards to cut prices.
How about getting rid of IRQ's on the PC platform!
/mnt/floppy (or its equivalent) instead of a:. Some sort of symlinking could get around this though. Mount points for hard drives are a great improvement.
Perhaps I am misunderstanding, but you want to get rid of interrupts? Interrupts are a good thing, what we need to do is increase the number of them instead of removing them. If I remember correctly powerpc architecture has 64 hardware interrupts instead of the measly 16 on the x86 platform. We want more interupts not less.
How about getting rid of drive letters in Windows/Dos and having mount points!
I agree with this. While in the short term it would be a pain migrating existing users over. Everyone would have to learn to use
How about a better drive interface than the stupid IDE interface. (Macs did it right with SCSI, but now to be "cheap" they do it too [sigh])
Oh the great IDE Vs SCSI debate. I don't think that Macs support IDE to be "cheap", I think that they do it to be relatively competative/affordable. For some reason unknown to me, SCSI drives are much more expensive than IDE drives. Looking at todays pricewatch listings, I found that the cheapest $ per GB for SCSI was $3.85/GB for a 36.4GB drive. While on the IDE side you could get a 60 GB for $1.37/GB. The cheapest SCSI is over 2.81 times the price of IDE per GB. Never mind that some SCSI drives ran over $10/GB. While I do realize that SCSI is superior to IDE (higher performance, less cpu utilization, more devices per controller), and I would never use SCSI in a server or workstation, is it really worth almost 3 times the price for the desktop? Most desktop uses (browsing internet, email, word processing, solitare) would not even be noticeably improved by the increase in performance. For tasks such as these IDE is more than adequate.
What I would find interesting is a size/performance comparison between a $x SCSI drive and a $x IDE hardware RAID array.
The only reason we haven't seen OGG Vorbis support on solid state players is that they would only lose money by doing so, at least for now. This is coming from someone who encodes all of his own CD's as .ogg's.
Actually I think that the only thing stopping OGG Vorbis on hardware players is the lack of a free fixed point decoding library. Right now you can find free floating point decoding libraries, but not fixed point. Most of the processors used in hardware players do not support floating point operations. The CPU's only have an integer unit. When a fixed point library is released, I think that you will find Ogg supported everywhere that MP3 is, since it should be trivial to add, and will only take up a little more ROM.
isn't that easier.
It would be if it was the right answer.
1+2+3+...+n = n*(n+1)/2
This is the sum of the numbers from 1 to a million. The question was asking for a sum of all of the digits of the numbers from 1 to a million. A slightly harder problem.
Even Microsofts high marketshare is mainly based on hollywoods movies because they always show windows and people think that every computer must have windows and therefore buy only computers with windows.
I don't know about that. It seems that in most movies that I see, all of the machines are Macs. They are especially visible in movies such as Independence Day, and Mission Impossible. I think that they used SGIs in Jurassic Park, but I can't recall off of the top of my head any instance where I saw a windows logo in a movie.
But anyway I think that I like filthy's review of the movie much better.
The tabbed browsing is almost up to galeon-level, though the speed is still slow, and its missing an (X) to close individual tabs. Use ctrl-w to close tabs in the meantime. This feature is quickly becoming my favorite.
You should check for the X again. It shows up on my 0.9.6 right underneath the loading icon. ctrl-w works as well.
If am I wrong, which it looks like I am, then I totally support censorship by the medium owners. I believe that whoever controls/owns the medium should be allowed to determine what is presented. And if people do not like a certain distributer, they are free to find another that does cater to their desires. I would actually prefer that clearchannel started censoring songs. This allows the entry of a new stations that will play these songs, and if these songs are popular the stations should do well. If people want to buy/consume something then there will be someone to sell/supply it for them.
Well, I stand corrected then. But I do believe that the Christian labels that are either publically owned (I don't know if there are any) or a subsidiary of a publically owned company have money as a major if not the most significant factor in their business decisions. And this isn't necessarily a bad thing, money must be made to stay in operation.
On a similiar note how many Christian bands allow for their music to be downloaded from their web sites? I would think that a donation based system would be a perfect fit for this market(for lack of a better word). Also what are the licensing rights like? Most CDs have strict restrictions (that nobody follows) such as no public performances without proper licensing and fees. I do find it refreshing that the Christian music market is able to keep the message at such a high priority. But again this segment is different from mainstream music where the primary goal is to entertain(not that Christian music isn't entertaining).
I hate to nitpick, but I don't think that it is possible for radio stations to censor songs. Radio stations are private entities that can play whatever they choose to. Is it censorship if a friend brings a CD to your house that you don't like, and you refuse to play it? I wouldn't define it as such, you own your equipment and should be allow to choose what you play. Censorship applies when the owner of the distribution method wants to distribute information but the government won't let them, not when you choose not to distribute it. I don't like the fact that clearchannel owns so much of the radio market, or most of the crap that they play, but I do fully support their right to choose what they do or do not play.
Not to mention DCTalk is a Christian band; they want their message spread as wide as possible, even if it means losing some money.
This statement is pretty funny. Do you actually think that the artists have any input in the decision to copy protect the CDs? It does not matter that the band would be willing to loose some money if the result is that their message is spread further, the record label certainly does not share this viewpoint. The record label wants to make as much money as possible from an album, and from their point of view copy protection is the best way of accomplishing this goal.
I had a problem with this CD at first. I could not play it under windows without pressing the play button on the CD-ROM. I did a little searching around and found some alternate ASPI drivers for Windows. After installing these the CD worked great. I could play it under winamp and my ripping program didn't even hesitate to rip it. This makes me wonder if the CD is really copy protected or if it is just the enhanced CD portion causing problems.
I looked at my CD case and I did not find Universal anywhere on it, I only found Interscope and Almo. Also I noticed that nowhere on the CD or in the print was the CD Audio logo found. There was a logo stamped on the inside of the jewel case, but there is the same logo on the inside of my Half-Life jewel case and on my blank jewel cases, so I think that it is added at the factory without any regard to what CD is going to be placed in the jewel case. The lack of the CD Audio logo anywhere else on Beautiful Garbage may indicate that it is not compliant with the Redbook standard, and therefore imply that it is copy protected. But then again this could also be as a result of the enhanced CD portion. I don't have any other audio CD jewel cases around to check this against.
Google will find the ASPI drivers for you. They work for me under 98, but I don't know about NT/2000/XP. On another note this new CD is quite a departure from their first two, so I definitely recommend download mp3's from it first to decide if you really like it.