The media is abuzz with reports of illegal music and movie downloading, peer-to-peer file sharing and the related legal and legislative battles being played out in courts and in Congress. Many of these discussions perpetuate a myth that existing, or soon-to-be developed, digital rights management (DRM) technologies are the key to solving the entertainment industry’s piracy woes. As support for this notion, many people cite Apple’s successful iTunes music download service. The conventional wisdom is that since iTunes uses DRM and iTunes is successful, then DRM must have been instrumental in that success. The truth is that Apple’s DRM technology, called FairPlay, was indeed instrumental in Apple’s success, but not because FairPlay prevents piracy.

For preventing piracy, FairPlay is not only totally ineffective, it was built that way on purpose. The iTunes client software enables consumers to burn the songs that they purchase to audio CDs. Once on CD, songs are unencrypted, unprotected and completely beyond the control of FairPlay. You can copy the song to a file share; make a million duplicate CDs; or re-encode the song in another format by using legitimate tools like Windows Media Player. So, since the notion that FairPlay prevents piracy is simply not factual, why did Apple bother to include it in iTunes?

There are two very logical reasons for Apple to use FairPlay. One has nothing to do with the effectiveness of its anti-piracy features and everything to do with marketing. That is, having a DRM-based copy protection illusion made it much easier for Apple to convince record labels to distribute their music through iTunes. Another reason for FairPlay’s existence has nothing to do with protecting rights holders from piracy and everything to do with protecting Apple from competition. Apple’s iPod player and iTunes service were designed to work together. FairPlay is used to keep out interlopers. Any would-be iTunes or iPod clone maker would almost certainly have to reverse engineer FairPlay, which makes the task of creating a decent clone much more difficult and gives Apple both technical and legal counterattack options. Apple showed its cards when RealNetworks announced Harmony, a technology it developed to enable iPod users to buy songs from Real’s on-line music store. Apple responded by threatening that future software upgrades will probably break Harmony’s compatibility. Apple also suggested that Real’s actions may have been a violation of the law because the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes circumventing copy protection illegal. While the validity of Apple’s legal argument is far from certain, one thing is clear: Apple intends to use its DRM to protect its own commercial interests, which have absolutely nothing to do with protecting rights holders from piracy.

Hackers have found technical ways around FairPlay. Digital content pirates, however, do not have to crack FairPlay; they can simply take advantage of a gaping, built-in hole. But even if we disregard all past experience with copy protection and assume that FairPlay could be made foolproof, it would still provide little or no protection from piracy to rights holders. Copies of digital content are exact copies. They do not degrade no matter how many times you duplicate them. Consequently, even just one unprotected copy of a digital work can be perfectly duplicated millions and millions of times while being distributed by using file sharing technologies. Since many of the latest file sharing technologies, which include the wildly-popular Bittorrent, are freely available in source code form to anyone, the tactic of litigating against proprietary P2P software and service companies is becoming much less effective. The entertainment industry has started going after the operators of Bittorrent servers, but as soon as one is taken down, more spring up. Technical measures for thwarting file-sharing have also been attempted, but countermeasures are created almost as fast. The inescapable conclusion is that, short of a complete government-enforced lock-down of the Internet, entertainment businesses will increasingly have to face the challenge of competing with free.

Another challenge for DRM is its negative value proposition for consumers. In the real world, a significant number of microwave oven clocks blink 12:00 for years on end because consumers are either unable to learn how to set their clocks, or they are just unwilling to bother. Yet some in the entertainment industry continue to flirt with the idea that consumers will not only tolerate, but also pay for, complex DRM-based solutions that are terrible for preventing piracy, but pretty good at inconveniencing the very consumers upon whom commercial success depends. This notion that DRM can protect rights holders and help them to compete with free is perpetuated by the purveyors of multiple incompatible DRM solutions. These vendors find an eager audience with some executives who are so desperate to insulate their business models from change that they are willing to believe that DRM snake oil is the answer.

In order to create a service that consumers would use, Apple had to provide burning capability in the initial implementation of iTunes. One cannot be certain, however, that such a feature will always be available. At some future point, Apple could decide that it is in Apple’s best interest to remove the CD burning feature. If that happens, the only way for customers to get Fairplay-encrypted music out of iTunes will be to circumvent Apple’s DRM, which is illegal due to the DMCA anti-circumvention provision and similar laws in other jurisdictions. It is also important to note that burning capability is notably absent for iTunes video downloads. With the growth in popularity of Apple’s iPod, there has been a corresponding growth in Apple’s market power. You can expect Apple to do everything possible to increase that power and erect barriers to competition. With laws like the DMCA on the books, a critical barrier to competition has the full backing of the government’s taxpayer-funded law enforcement resources.

Apple’s iTunes has demonstrated that you can indeed compete with free. But as this document has shown, the actual effectiveness of Apple’s DRM in thwarting piracy played no part in that success. It is important to note, however, that iTunes could not be successful solely by using proprietary encryption to lock out competitors and by promoting its DRM to rights holders as an elixir to piracy. The other half of the iTunes formula for success is completely dependent on peoples’ behavior: if consumers did not recognize value in iTunes, they would simply not use it. Moreover, virtually every song legitimately purchased through iTunes can be acquired for free via illegal means. Apple’s iTunes service, in combination with the iPod player, offers consumers a complete and integrated solution that is easy to use, flexible (e.g. you can burn songs to CD) and stylish. iTunes is attractive to consumers, not because FairPlay DRM is restrictive, but in large part because it is not.

Vendors and pundits are doing a profound disservice to the entertainment industry by perpetuating the DRM myth and holding up iTunes as an example. With iTunes, Apple has demonstrated the value of DRM for neither consumers nor rights holders. Apple has shown, however, that you can successfully compete with free, and get consumers to open their wallets, if you offer them something better. The entertainment industry should take heed from the real iTunes example: create something that provides convenience and value, not costly complexity, and and you just might take away the incentive to acquire works illegally. That would make digital piracy obsolete.

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The compact disc has been around since 1978, developed by Phillips and Sony. The reason it was developed was to take over for the Laserdisc as the industry standard digital audio disc. Since its invention, we have seen many updates on the compact disc technology. The most recent being the CD-R and DVD discs. With the CD-R, you can now burn your own discs at home, and then modify those discs at a later date. DVD technology allows us to record video onto a disc, where we used to only be able to record audio and data. As time rolls by, and the disc industry advances, we are presented with new forms of these technologies. The two new contenders are Blu-Ray discs and HD-DVD, here’s a little information about each of these new disc types.

1. Blu-Ray
This type of disc, also known as Blu-Ray Disc, is the next generation of optical disc. It was developed by the Blu-Ray Disc Association, a group of consumer electronic/PC/media manufacturers, including: Apple, HP, Mitsubishi, Phillips, Sony, and others. The Blu-Ray disc type was mainly developed for recording, rewriting, and playing back high-definition (HD) video. It’s also perfect for storing large amounts of data, exceeding previous DVD-R disc storage capabilities. It can hold more than 5 times the amount of information that a traditional DVD can hold, up to 25GB single layer, and up to 50GB dual layer. One of the main differences of the Blu-Ray disc is the type of laser that the disc is read with. Normal DVDs are read with a red laser, the Blu-Ray discs are read with a blue-violet laser. The main benefit of this change is the wave length of the laser types. The traditional red laser has a wider focus, so the blue-violet laser can be focused more precisely allowing more tightly packed data. This equals more data in less space on the disc, this results in the additional storage space available on the new Blu-Ray discs. These new discs are backwards compatible with regular DVDs, which they are expected to replace in the near future.

2. HD-DVD
HD-DVD discs, High Definition Versatile Discs or High Definition Digital Video Discs, are very similar to the Blu-Ray discs. This disc type is being developed by a group of consumer electronics/PC companies, headed by Toshiba. They also use a blue-violet laser to read the contents of the disc, which results in an increase in storage capacity compared to normal DVD discs. The HD-DVD can store 15GB single layer and 30GB double layer, making their storage capacity 10GB per layer smaller than the Blu-Ray. But Toshiba has announced a triple layer disc that can hold 45GB of information, and the HD DVD discs can hold both HD DVD and regular DVD information on one disc.

Right now these two disc types are battling it out to become the next generation of DVD disc technology, conjuring up images of the battle between Betamax and VHS in the 80’s. I guess we’re all wondering who’s going to come out on top? In my honest opinion, I believe that Blu-Ray will become the new standard. Both disc types offer HD capability and large data storage capacity, so it’s kind of hard to say which is better. The Blu-Ray, with its greater maximum storage capacity and the fact that it’s being backed by more of the large consumer electronic/PC/media manufacturers, I believe will win the battle. But it’s all still up in the air, so only time will tell.

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All data storage in modern times are done on disc, be it a computer hard drive or a CD-R disc. Blu-ray and HD-DVD have upped the ante when it comes to the amount of data that you can hold on a disc, but at some time they will eventually become obsolete. Right now our data storage needs are currently met, but as the amount of data available continues to rise, storage technology must evolve with it. The next generation of storage technology is going to be holographic data storage. It sounds pretty futuristic, what is holographic storage?

With CD-R and DVD-R technology, data is stored on the surface of the disc as distinct magnetic or optical changes. With holographic data storage, an entire page of information is stored at once as an optical interference pattern within a thick, photosensitive optical material.

How do they do this?
This is done by intersecting two coherent laser beams, the object and reference beams, within the storage material. The object beam contains all the information needing to be stored, while the reference beam is designed to be simple to produce. The resulting interference between the beams causes chemical and/or physical changes in the photosensitive medium that the data is being stored on. Basically “burning” the information to the storage medium, this mark is called the grating. When the grating is illuminated by one of the two waves that were used to record the information, the light is refracted in a way that the other wave is reconstructed. These gratings can be stacked or superimposed in the same thick piece of media, as long as there is a distinguishing spacing or direction, allowing the stacked bits of data to be accessed independently. In addition to larger storage capabilities, holographic storage also boasts to accelerate data transfer rates to about one billion bits per second and reduce access times to just tens of microseconds.

The benefits

1. Larger storage capacity – Some companies are developing a technology that enables the storage of between 100GB and 1TB of data. Compare this to Blu-ray and HD-DVD, which max out at 50GB. Amazing leap in the amount of data you can store on one piece of media.

2. Accelerated data transfer – The holographic data storage medium in the works boasts data transmission speeds of 100Mbps to 1Gbps. The new HD-DVD and Blu-ray discs clock in at 36.55Mbps, which is only a fraction of the holographic data storage transfer rate.

Well, if you’re like me, you learned quite a bit about a new technology from this short article. This new technology is quite a ways off from being accessible to the common consumer, but some companies are in the process of developing holographic data storage for the corporate sector. Technology is a strange beast, always changing, always mutating. The sky is the limit, and only time will tell where we’ll be headed after the rise and fall of this yet-to-be-seen data technology.

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Statistics give us more and more information related to sudden cardiac arrests and other heart failures. More and more people and in earlier and earlier stages of their life die of a heart disease. Statistics, in the US alone, are extremely alarming:
- Every 30 seconds someone dies because of a heart disease;
- More than 2.500 Americans die daily because of heart diseases;
- Every 20 seconds there is a person suffering a heart attack;
- Each year 6 million people are hospitalized because of a heart disease;
- The number 1 cause of death in the US is a heart disease.
Although the AED is not an universal panacea for all heart diseases, nothing else can compete with its major feature – effectively re-starting the heart after it has been stopped by a sudden cardiac arrest. Because of their ease-of-use and portability, automated external defibrillators are being introduced in more and more public places, and chances are that AEDs will be as common as fire extinguishers in gyms, schools and airports.

From a technical point of view, an AED is used for ventricular fibrillation. In other words, an AED is used at the lower electrical level of the heart, when the two chambers called ventricles are no longer beating in a normal rhythm. The technical term describes that the ventricles are fibrillating, meaning that the muscle fibres of the heart contract spontaneously, rapidly, and irregularly. The heart is no longer capable to pump blood into the body, thus causing a sudden cardiac arrest. Here is where the contribution of an AED device is of great help – it has the capacity to re-start the heart. This is one good reason for a patient with a known history of heart diseases to have such a device at home.
Not long ago, the AED device was used strictly by medical professionals or by the crews of ambulances. Before the 1980s it was a large and heavy device and way too complicated to be used by a person without medical background, but things have changed.
Today, the AED is a portable and automated machine, slim and light and easy to be used by anyone in case of emergency. This device monitors the activity of the heart and determines if defibrillation is necessary. In case the Automated External Defibrillator detects a problem the AED will help you proceed to the defibrillation process by using audiovisual prompts and instructions.

So there are plenty of reasons why an AED device should be kept in all homes around the world. We all have relatives who died because of heart problems, so why ignore the crucial help such a device could offer?
Let’s return to the statistics concerning the Sudden Cardiac Arrest (SCA) incidence in US, because they give more and more reasons to have this machine at home:
- each year 325,000 Americans die because of SCA;
- 95% of those who suffer an SCA die before arriving to a hospital;
- every day, on average, 1000 people die of SCA;
- SCA brings death in a matter of minutes;
- The victims of SCA can be saved by using an AED.
It’s easy to hesitate and have second thoughts when a heart attack occurs, unfortunately SCA can not wait and the AED is a viable solution for emergency cases. And because AEDs are so easy to use (they require little or no training), more and more families will consider them to be a life-saving investment. With people spending money on home security systems, it also makes sense to purchase an AED that you can use at home in case a member of your family suffers a heart attack.

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An EMT or emergency medical technician is competent to provide emergency medical services to those who are critically ill or injured. Various equipments come handy in emergency situations and are used by the EMTs. These are referred to as EMT equipment. These include defibrillators, infusion pumps, suctions, transport incubators, (portable) monitors and a host of such other medical equipment of great importance in emergency situations.

At one time the emergency medical technicians were considered to be ambulance attendants. However, the modern EMT has been ascribed many more tasks which are of immense importance. The EMTs have to respond to various types of emergency calls. Hence the EMTs are given training in practical emergency medical knowledge. They are made to acquire skills and knowledge which can be deployed within a very short time. Hence the range of EMT equipment has also become far wider incorporating several sophisticated complex equipments.

The list of all essential EMT equipment of the day is pretty long. There are to be included portable suction equipment, big valve masks (for children, infants and adults), oropharyngeal or nasopharygeal airways of various sizes, oxygen kit with regulator, nasal cannulas, traction splint with the right accessories, cervical collars, large trauma dressings, sterile gauze pads etc., sterile burn sheet, splints for upper and lower extremity injuries, head immobilizers, rolls of tape of various measures, some necessary kits, a liter each of potable water and saline for irrigation. Triangular bandages, shears, penlight, blood pressure cuff, stethoscope, non-sterile gloves, Vaseline gloves, oral glucose, body temperature measuring devices (like thermometers) and PASG find place in the list too. Besides, paper and pen/pencil and large garbage plastic bags need to be also kept. Among the range of portable monitors needed there are the anesthesia monitors, fetal monitors, ICU monitors, pulse oximeters, telemetry monitors, transport monitors and vital signs monitor.

An EMT equipment bag i.e. a bag containing all the valuable life saving medical equipment or devices required by emergency medical technicians is also becoming available. This special bag enables the EMT personnel to carry the necessary equipment associated with their profession as also the things of everyday use like books, paperwork, cell phone, tools, pocket knifes, iPod, wallet etc.

The EMT equipment comes of great use in military and rescue operations. The EMTs attending medical emergencies, hazardous materials exposure, fires, injuries, trauma and even psychiatric crises use such equipment for carrying out their operatons. These life-saving equipments are just indispensable for the work of emergency medical technicians and emergency medical service providers.

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