Related link: http://registry.faa.gov/arquery.asp

Airplanes are just cool. In addition to the sleek flowing lines, they are complex machines and a tribute to the power of engineering. In the course of organizing all the airplane trivia I knew about, I became a plane spotter, though not one of the serious ones that plans vacations around it. (Too bad that looking at planes is now potential terrorist activity.)

I recently purchased a digital camera, which I take on all my travels. Before, I wasn’t bad about identifying different planes, though I wouldn’t call myself particularly good. Part of the reason is that I often had to guess, and had no way of confirming my guess.

Fortunately for me, all airplanes have registration numbers. There’s a prefix assigned by the country, followed by a string of characters. U.S. airplanes have a registration number that begins with “N”, such as “N7264V”. (This is the registration number for a CRJ-200 I flew last week.) Other countries have different prefixes: United Kingdom registration numbers begin with “G-”, and Canadian registration numbers begin with “C-”. The registration records tell you which company manufactured the plane, the year it was built, the type of engines, and even the serial number.

Many of my airplane pictures have the registration number in view, or are easily enlarged to see the registration number with a digital zoom and crop. At that point, I can check my guess by looking up the plane in the appropriate registration database. The link above allows you to look up U.S.-registered planes by querying the FAA database. I’m aware of two others on-line, but my list is by no means exhaustive:

• Canada’s aircraft registration system is run by Transport Canada, and can be accessed through the search page. (If you need a number, look up C-GAQX, which is an Airbus A319 I saw in Phoenix recently.)
• The United Kingdom’s registration system is run by the Civil Aviation Authority, the UK’s aviation regulator. The aircraft registration can be looked up through the CAA’s G-INFO search page. (If you need a number, look up G-BOAF, which is one of the Concordes.)

Related link: http://balkin.blogspot.com/#87596430

Jack M. Balkin, a professor of constitutional law and the first amendment at Yale, finds a silver lining in the Eldred decision in his weblog entry, Is the Digital Millennium Copyright Act Unconstitutional under Eldred v. Ashcroft? (permalink).

Excerpts:

The key holding of Eldred is that “when … Congress has not altered the traditional contours of copyright protection, further First Amendment scrutiny is unnecessary.” The reason for this is that fair use and idea/expression provide “built-in free speech safeguards,” which “are generally adequate to address” the problem that copyright makes reproducing certain speech illegal.

…

Well, what happens if Congress decides to “alter[] the traditional contours of copyright protection,” by greatly restricting fair use, or begins to offer protection to ideas in the guise of protecting mere expression? In that case, “further First Amendment scrutiny” would be necessary. If Ginsburg does not mean this, then its hard to see what her argument amounts to other than a blank check to Congress to rewrite copyright law any way it wants.

And that brings us to the DMCA. As many people know, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act creates a new species of intellectual property protection, sometimes called “paracopyright,” that protects not copying itself but the creation of various devices and technologies that might be used to facilitate copying by circumventing copyright management devices. The DMCA prohibits the distribution of technologies that circumvent copyright management devices, and the Second Circuit has held that it reaches even linking to sites where such technologies may be found. Moreover, the DMCA protects copyright management devices from circumvention even if these devices are employed deliberately to prevent people from using copyrighted materials in ways completely consistent with fair use.

Does the DMCA “alter[] the traditional contours of copyright protection”? Yes, it does, in two respects. First, it creates a new property right that allows copyright owners to do an end run around fair use, effectively shrinking the public domain. Second, it extends that property right to prohibit the use and dissemination of technologies that would protect fair use and vindicate fair use rights. Congress has exceeded the traditional boundaries of copyright protection, superimposing a new form of intellectual property protection that undermines the “built-in free speech safeguards” crucial to the holding in Eldred. Hence, under the logic of Eldred, the DMCA is constitutionally suspect.

So even while Eldred has forced the battle over statutory copyright terms back to the Congress, it may have bolstered the prospects for constitutional challenges of the DMCA.

Which was worse, the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act (CTEA) or the Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA)?

Hams are fascinating people. They have tremendous command of the art of wireless networking, and are very conscious of their community, and the importance of its place in the world.

Particularly interesting to me is where Hams and their networking efforts interface with the Community Networks agenda of bringing ubiquitous wireless networking to the masses.

The HSMM project seems to be a tremendous leap in a very exciting direction. If Hams and Part 15′ers can leverage each other’s experience and resources, all sorts of interesting possibilities open up. Imagine a coordinated effort to use Part 15 networks as client endpoints, and aggregate traffic through high-power (and high profile) Ham repeaters. Of course, we’ve imagined it before, and have always run up against a couple of basic tenets of Amateur operations that forbid such matter-of-course elements as encryption, commercial traffic, rebroadcasting of music, and even basic unattended third party communications. If the ARRL is behind interconnecting Ham networks with the Internet, then I must have misinterpreted the rules. I certainly hope so, and it’s very likely, as I’m still studying for my Technician Class license.

I just wrote to the organizers of HSMM (I’m just dying for more details), and hope to hear back soon…

From: Rob Flickenger 
Date: Wed Jan 15, 2003  5:48:12  PM US/Pacific
To: tis@arrl.org
Subject: The "hinternet"

Hi there--

My name is Rob Flickenger.  I'm not a Ham (yet) but I am
very active in supporting community wireless networks
that operate under Part 15.  In fact, I wrote a book
about it [1] last year for O'Reilly.  I found an article
about the "hinternet" [2] on the arrl.org website, and I
am very interested in your project.  It sounds like we
have similar, or at least, compatible goals in building
a ubiquitous high speed data network.

I write to you for two reasons.  I am looking for a
pointer to more information about your project, as there
are a huge number of questions in the minds of Part 15
networkers.  For example, how can Part 97 and Part 15
networks interoperate?  How do existing Ham rules about
third party traffic, encryption, and commerce apply to
data transmitted on the hinternet?  I have been working
on building Part 15 data networks [3] with many other
like-minded groups [4..8] for a couple of years now,
with considerable success, and more than a little active
interest from local Ham operators.

Secondly, I am currently working on the second edition
of Building Wireless Community Networks, and I would
very much like to include up to date information about
the state of your project.  Do you have a mailing list,
website, or other online resource regarding your
project?

I am studying for my first Technician license, and have
been for some time.  My barrier to entry has always been
that my real interest is in high-speed Internet traffic,
and as Ham privileges would do relatively little to help
me develop data networks, I haven't given my study the 

attention it deserves.  If Ham rules have changed in
light of the HSMM project (or, perhaps, if I simply
misinterpret the current rules) then I know many people
who would gladly become Hams.  I work with a dedicated
group of people who have been passionately working on
building free access wireless networks for schools, low-
income housing, emergency services, and the general
public.  I believe that most, if not all of these goals
are directly in line with the spirit of Ham
communications.

I appreciate any and all information you can point me to
that will help us work together for the common good.

Best regards,

--Rob

[1] http://www.oreilly.com/catalog/wirelesscommnet/
[2] http://www.arrl.org/news/stories/2003/01/10/3/?nc=1
[3] http://nocat.net/
[4] http://freenetworks.org/
[5] http://seattlewireless.net/
[6] http://nycwireless.net
[7] http://personaltelco.org/
[8] http://bawug.org/

Should Ham networks be able to tie into Part 15 Community Networks (and ultimately, the Internet)?

U.S. patent number D440,263 is what’s called a “design” patent. Design patents protect the “ornamental design” of an item. If you get a design patent, you can keep people from making things that look like your item. They are reasonably rare because they do not offer protection that is as strong as the much more common “utility” patents sought by most inventors.

This patent is, well…amusing. In a recent note to the PATNEWS list, Greg Aharonian wrote a defense of Nancy Pelosi of San Francisco, quoting a letter written to the editors of The Economist. The letter said, in part, “Trent Lott’s Mississippi is near the bottom in education with no major research facility and has a long history of racism.” Aharonian quipped that the number of patents issued per capita was likely to be higher in San Francisco than Mississippi, and cited D440,263 (issed to a Petaluma man) as something that might have been issued “in anticipation of Senator Lott’s statement.”

It’s a design patent, so there’s only one claim that protects the item as drawn. You need to get a TIFF plug-in for your browser to view the images, but it’s worth it. Trust me.

As many others have noted, U.S. patent 6,449,344 was issued to AOL last September. Naturally, many people have said that the patent is “obvious,” and have started to search for prior art. Tim O’Reilly received an e-mail noting a possible previous communication system, but the legal system is heavily weighted in favor of printed and dated pieces of paper. E-mails and screen captures are not likely to be effective prior art in litigation.

Greg Aharonian’s PATNEWS mailing list is a fun-filled newsletter, always delivered with at least a slight touch of sarcasm. (Sign up for the list here.) A recent message noted two papers that might undermine AOL’s newly minted patent. Both describe Zephyr, a communication system developed by MIT as part of Project Athena.

• DellaFera, C.A., et. al. “The Zephyr notification service.” USENIX Association Winter 1988 Conference, pp. 213-219. (Sadly, USENIX conference proceedings are only on-line from 1993 onward, so this paper isn’t available in electronic form.) The abstract reads:

  “Zephyr is a notice transport and delivery system under development at Project Athena. Zephyr is for use by network-based services and applications with a need for immediate, reliable and rapid communication with their clients. Zephyr meets the high-throughput, high fan-out communications requirements of large-scale workstation environments. It is designed as a suite of ‘layered services’ based on a reliable, authenticated notice protocol. Multiple, redundant Zephyr servers provide basic routing, queueing, and dispatching services to clients that communicate via the Zephyr Client Library. More advanced communication services are built upon this base.”

• Fay, D.Q.M. “Internet and the electronic classroom.” Microprocessing & Microprogramming, December 1994, pp. 847-50. The abstract reads, in part,

  “Describes the use of gopher, WWW, ftp, telnet, e-mail, and online Zephyr messaging for a first-year university undergraduate computer science module. The aims of the module, and the profile of the students are described. The computing environment available to undergraduates is described in detail…”

Also, Jabber has their own analysis of the technology claimed by the patent. Their analysis draws from a basic interpretation of the patent by a patent attorney.

I’ve never used Zephyr. If you have, how much like IM was it?

Related link: http://www.newscientist.com/news/news.jsp?id=ns99993243

“Hey, don’t empty that beaker… it’s my MP3 collection!”

New Scientist magazine reports that scientists have stored text data in the DNA of living bacteria — and then recovered the message after a hundred generations of reproduction:

The scientists took the words of the song It’s a Small World and translated it into a code based on the four “letters” of DNA. They then created artificial DNA strands recording different parts of the song. These DNA messages, each about 150 bases long, were inserted into bacteria such as E. coli and Deinococcus radiodurans.

No word yet on whether they’ve searched the DNA of creatures in the wild for pre-existing messages from ancient extraterrestrials.

Lawyers from Disney and the Harry Fox Agency have sent a “cease and desist” letter to the E. coli and Deinococcus radiodurans demanding that they immediately stop reproducing Disney’s copyrighted lyrics. At 7 cents a copy, the petri dish of ever-dividing bacteria now owes $24 trillion in mechanical licensing fees, and counting.

What messages would you store in bacteria for discovery by the distant future?

Related link: http://www.law.com/jsp/article.jsp?id=1039054470520

Citrix, which is headquartered in Ft. Lauderdale, Florida, is suing to get a refund of all the state corporate income taxes paid over the last several years. (Their lawyer also says that he is considering adding the IRS as a defendant to the suit, but it’s hard to see what effect that would have in a state court lawsuit.) The proposed legal theory is that information and communication companies have a Constitutional right to free speech, and taxing speech has a chilling effect on that freedom. Ergo, any company that helps process information or enable communication should not pay income tax.

According to the story, a spokesman for the Florida Department of Revenue laughed when asked to comment on the lawsuit, and said that the DOR is looking forward to the pending litigation. A law professor noted that “crackpots” usually file suits like these, and is suprised that a large company would make such a broad claim to tax exemption.

Attempts to get other companies to join the suit do not appear to be going all that well. The Miami Herald declined to participate, but it won’t say why. The suit currently includes their customers, who must “opt out” to refrain from participating.

According to Citrix’s attorney, the lawsuit is not related to a dispute with the state over a $90,000 R&D tax credit, and that the company doesn’t “want this [lawsuit] to be seen as big business trying to save money.”

Update (1/22/2003): Eric Albert notes that Citrix has dropped their suit.

Related link: http://www.ilbbs.com/oracovers/

This has been shown before, but I keep losing the link, so this entry is simply to keep it handy in a link collection.

Related link: http://pennandteller.com/sincity/penniphile/federalvip.html

The story would be funnier if it weren’t so familiar. According to Penn, the security screener essentially said that he had no rights once he crossed the security check point. When he complained and called the police, the security people insisted there was “no problem” and that Penn was “free to go.”

Most of us rush to the airport and can’t afford to miss our flights, so we can’t stand up for ourselves the way Penn can. He asked for a police officer to press assault charges. (Security: “We have no trouble and he doesn’t want to miss his flight.” Penn: “I can take an early morning flight or a private jet.”) A PR lackey for the airport called him back, and promised “VIP” treatment through the security check point, though the improved treatment does not appear in his follow-up article.

Interestingly enough, Penn’s incident occurred at the same airport where, before the change-over to TSA employees, I was also touched in an area below the belt where I wasn’t expecting hands to be. I didn’t complain because I had a flight to catch and couldn’t afford to find out how to contact the right parties without missing my flight and inviting retribution.

Related link: http://www.solarwarrior.com/

Solar energy falls out of the sky every day. Some of it will eventually be converted to electricity by feeding plants, which are eaten by animals, which may be converted into oil and natural gas over eons. That oil and gas may be shipped to a power plant where it is converted to electricity, creating pollution in the process. Some analysis suggests that photovoltaic arrays (solar panels) can dramatically reduce pollution by converting sunlight directly into energy. The problem, of course, is that solar energy isn’t free. You need to have some sort of a collection device to harness the energy, a storage system to store the daytime surplus, and converters that change stored energy into useful power for your household appliances.

In no particular order, here’s my understanding on the major barriers to adoption of photovoltaic arrays on a large scale:

1. Financial. Installing your own solar array costs tens of thousands of dollars (or, as the linked example illustrates, hundreds of thousands of dollars if you want to generate a lot of power). This large up-front investment is required for a payoff that trickles in over the years as hundreds of dollars per month in savings on your utility bill. For many systems, the net payoff happens only after a decade or more, but the average homeowner sells after five to seven years. It would help a great deal to come up with a financial model that allowed the savings to pay for the system over time. If a solar energy improvement directly added on to the value of a home (spend $X on a system and see the value of your home increase by $X), it might be possible to borrow against the increased value of the home.
2. Storage. Solar systems generate usable power when the sun is out, but electric usage is spread throughout the day. To use electricity at night, you may need to store it during the day. In some areas, the utility will “net meter” and give you credit for the power you generate during the day; in others, you may need to store energy during the peak production during the day and draw from it in the evening.
3. Building. Making solar modifications to your home means obtaining approval from local planning authorities. In some locations, the permit approval process is time consuming and expensive.
4. The Utility. Your local utility is in the business of selling you electricity, and may not be too keen on helping you use less of their product. Interconnection costs them money in lost sales, so they may fight it on safety or narrow legal grounds.
5. The Government. The government will not necessarily support you. Public utilities commissions are often in the utility’s pocket, and contributions to key legislators can keep favorable laws bottled up indefinitely. Year-to-year budget considerations and public opinion may also change the government incentives available every year, and photovoltaics may not be economically viable without sustained subsidies. (To be fair, a great number of tax code provisions that provide expensive subsidies for dinosaur-based power are rarely discussed in public policy arenas, so at any point, fossil fuel subsidies dwarf spending on alternative energy technologies.)

Interestingly enough, the financial problem is similar to the one faced by the 802.11 hot spot industry in its infancy. There is a large up-front capital investment (the solar array/access point) that needs to be paid off by a trickle of revenue in small chunks over a long period of time (monthly electric bills/network access fees). Although it might eventually pay off over time, the huge up-front investment discourages it.

As an alternative, it might be possible to change the financial model, as described for the 802.11 access business by this 802.11 Planet article. Originally, hot spot access providers needed a large initial outlay to install a network at a location, and had problems when hotels did not understand how to sell access. RoomLinX converts the large up-front cost to a lease payment plus a management fee, which allows a hotel to develop a business model that pays for an 802.11 network incrementally by attracting guests. (Interestingly enough, Marriott’s hotel business is run on similar lines. They arrange for third parties to take on the large construction debt of building new hotels, and provide management services for a fee.)

Returning to solar energy, I wonder if there’s a similar business for photovoltaic installations. My imaginary business would arrange for installation and maintenence, and consolidate all the financial aspects into a single monthly payment that could easily be compared to an existing utility bill for expected savings. The challenges I see immediately are that a solar array might not add value to a home dollar for dollar, so that it might not be possible to recoup the cost of a system if the home is sold before it is paid off. (Anybody know of research on the value of a photovoltaic array on home values?) My understanding of current financial viability of solar electricity is that long-term viability also depends quite a bit on various tax incentives, and I do not know to what extent changes in the tax system affect installed systems. Furthermore, many of the financial incentives in place depend on home ownership, so there is little hope of assisting renters in this way, especially since owners have no incentive to install systems to save their renters money.

What would it take to get you to use solar power?

By far, the best deconstruction of baseball’s financial situation is Doug Pappas’ “business of baseball” collection. In a series of articles, many published in Baseball Prospectus, he offers a sharp analysis of most of the public claims of poverty made by MLB officials. If your hometown is being held up for a new stadium by baseball, you should take the time to read his analysis of stadium revenue. Naturally, no collection of work on the business of baseball would be complete without a reference to Bud Selig, the dissembling commissioner.

Forbes, a magazine not known as a friend of labor, published its 2002 annual review of MLB’s finances. (Make sure to check out Pappas’ analysis of the Forbes article, too.) I can’t wait for the 2003 review, which will probably puncture a few more of Selig’s outrageous claims.

Elysian Fields Quarterly: The Baseball Review looks like a neat magazine. I was first attracted to the on-line site by an article titled Wrigley’s Soul. The publisher of EFQ also wrote the “Ballpark Frankness” article I noted earlier. EFQ is also affiliated with Knothole Press , a publisher of rare baseball books.

Finally, this article from the August 1981 issue of The Atlantic, which describes the financial stresses building on small-revenue baseball teams more than twenty years ago.

After reading Gifts for Geeks on the Cheap earlier this holiday season, I asked for a Pedco Ultrapod-II to hold my digital camera. (Note: the Ultrapod-II lists for $22, but REI sells it for only $15.)

I’ve had some fun with it since opening the package a few days ago. Last night, I noticed a U.S. patent number on the main leg (4,439,032), so I checked it out.

One of the things that surprised me was how old the patent was. The patent application was filed in late 1982 along with the founding of the company; because the application was allowed in 1984, the patent expired almost two years ago in March 2001.

Also interesting were a few of the patent references cited by the examiner. Patent number 1,170,096 from 1916 is a tripod that has sharp legs that can be mounted on a variety of surfaces. Patent number
3,351,988 , a clamp from 1967, looks a bit like Pedco’s Ultraclamp. Finally, there’s a car mount for a camera from 1977, described in patent number
4,029,246 .

Recent press has trumpeted the release of “802.11g” products, which is not incorrect. 802.11g is still in draft form, and currently shipping products cannot comply with a standard that does not yet exist. The following table should answer the most common questions about the differences between the many radio layers that have been standardized for use with the 802.11 MAC.

Other protocols:

• 802.1x is a specification for LAN authentication on IEEE 802 networks, and can be used on 802.11. It is an adaptation of the IETF’s Extensible Authentication Protocol (EAP) to IEEE 802 layer-2 network technologies.
• 802.11i is a forthcoming specification that will clear up a number of security problems in 802.11. It specifies the temporal key integrity protocol (TKIP), “IV mixing” to blunt attacks against WEP’s initialization vector, a new “message integrity code” to ensure frames are not tampered with (Michael), and an AES-based privacy protocol. It is not ratified yet, but it is expected in late 2003.
• Wireless Protected Access (WPA) is not an IEEE 802.11 standard. It is the Wi-Fi Alliance’s marketing term for the parts of 802.11i that are done now (TKIP, Michael, 802.1x authentication framework). It leaves out management frame authentication and encryption and AES-based privacy.

A few notes:

1. 802.11g has not been finalized, and is still a draft. You can buy draft-complaint hardware, but there is no guarantee that it will be interoperable with equipment that is developed against the final version of 802.11g, expected later this year.
2. Several vendors have proprietary speed enhancements over the standardized rates in the table. Some vendors use the Texas Instruments chipset that allows extended “802.11b” gear to boost speed to 22 Mbps by using packet binary convolution coding (PBCC) instead of complementary code keying, but only when talking to other gear that uses the TI chipset. Similar approaches are used in extended “802.11a” equipment that either uses the OFDM pilot carriers for a 72 Mbps top speed, or bonds two 802.11a channels together for a 104 Mbps speed.
3. 2.4 GHz is a band set aside for microwave ovens, but not because 2.4 GHz is a resonant frequency of water. The selection of 2.4 GHz is due to the period between vibrations, not a natural affinity of water for 2.4 GHz microwave energy.

Related link: http://groups.google.com/groups?selm=889%40uw-beaver&rnum=2

This usenet post compares and contrasts PostScript and Interpress in terms of syntax and implementation, and is a neat read on the history of Adobe and its core technology. Based on this, it’s easy to see why much of the world is using PostScript printers.

Related link: http://www.nytimes.com/2002/12/22/magazine/22FOOTBALL.html?pagewanted=print&posi…

With my recent reading on baseball stadia and the extortion of playing facilities by major league teams, it was only natural that I would eventually come across something on the impact sports has on the collegiate environment.

The linked New York Times article describes the impact of sports on the college environment, focusing on the University of South Florida, a school which only recently jumped into the sports rat race. They are an NCAA Division I school, which means that they have started an obscenely expensive program.

There are a couple of excellent points deep in this article. First, the coach insists his team is “revenue producing,” a term which he must have learned from some out-of-work Andersen accountants. The football program does break even, but only because a good size share of shared athletic costs they run up are not attributed to them, such as the $8,000 annual laundry detergent bill to wash uniforms.

Second, check out the coach’s salary. He currently is underpaid at “only” $180,000/year. (The conference average annual take is $410,000!) In an early interview, he felt that his “market value” was $500,000-600,000. USF recently agreed with him and tore up his old contract to give him a new one, with a final year payout of $700,000.

Third, it’s mentioned this is a clean program. There has not been a great deal of trouble, especially in relation to other football programs. As the article says, “[t]here have been some scuffles, as well as a gunplay accident in which a player was wounded.” (emphasis mine) Given the often high-profile treatment of guns today, especially in relation to schools, it is shocking to see gun violence by “student-athletes” treated so casually.

It’s articles like this that illustrate the real problem with Title IX, which requires that educational programs that receive federal money be free of sex discrimination. (Athletics are typically the most visible source of Title IX lawsuits.) Title IX is indubitably a good thing, and has been used to strengthen women’s athletic programs. The reality of the situation is that administrators are unwillilng to touch the sacred cow of football programs, so minor men’s sports are eliminated to “save” the football program. (In 1975, a Congresscritter from Texas introduced a law to exempt football from Title IX regulations to prevent just this.) In fact, the National Wrestling Coaches Association is suing over the widespread “football as sacred cow” implementation of Title IX. This Cincinnati Enquirer article gets to the same point by woefully sexist and inadequate reasoning. In it, the University of Cincinnati athletic director said that “money making sports should be supported.” As the Times article shows, football programs probably don’t make money unless the most creative accounting techniques are applied.