Here's another question from a curious reader:

Q: I've been snooping around the local electronic retail scene lately looking for a CD-writer. What are the must have components of such a device? And do you think this form of duplicating art is ethical?

A: CD-writers come in a couple different flavors. One is simply called the CD-Writer, which allows you to "burn" the data that you want onto a blank compact disc. It has a good amount of space, and it's great for backups, archives, etc. Once you burn a CD, you can't change the data that's on it - it's there forever. You use special compact discs called "CD-R"s, which at today's prices can cost as low as 50 cents a piece.

The other flavor is called a CD-Rewritable drive, which acts like a different version of a hard drive. You can "burn" data to a disc, but you can also erase and re-write new data up to a few hundred times before it wears out. The "CD-RW" blank discs are a little more expensive, but not by much.

CD-R drives have been around for enough time now so that the difference between one and the other is meaningless. They are all equally sturdy, stable, and feature-rich. What used to cost $1000 in 1997 costs less than $250 today. I highly recommend them.

As for the ethical question of duplicating art - well, it depends on what you're duplicating. If you're copying a music CD from a friend, then certainly it's against the law, but it's not any different than making a cassette copy from a friend - the quality is just better.