| Tuesday,
November 22, 2005
Subject: The Writing on the Wall.
Dear Dr. Pournelle,
Thanks for posting the link (
http://www.brusselsjournal.com/node/485 ) about the motives of
welfare-consuming Muslim wackos (“youths” for the politically correct)
burning Europe. I congratulate the author on making the key point that
western communists (or whatever more fashionable name they might prefer) are
profoundly stupid in embracing their absolutely literally *mortal* enemies.
I think he overlooks the main reason they hate us, which is that we run the
world but are just exactly stupid enough to do that! Present company
excepted of course.
As always, thanks and best regards,
Jim Utt
Dayton, OH USA
==
And related:
==
Subject: Pessimism on a Monday.
Your response to Milford's letter from Texas really
starts the week off on a low note..... I do wonder if the threat of Islamo
Facism is quite as dire as some suggest:
1) It is hard for me to imagine that a religion
devoted to returning the world to the middle ages is going to produce a
society that can compete economically with the West.
2) Given half a chance, with even a little bit of
economic comfort plus internet access, will the children of Islam be any
less susceptible than ours to the lure of Playstation, designer jeans, junk
food, junk TV, sex, drugs, and Rock and Roll.
If China's economic power continues to grow, it seems
likely that they could evolve into a much greater threat down the road, one
that would make our current war on Terrorism look a little bit like a side
show. Of course, as China's power grows relative to ours, Islamo Facism may
need to shift it's focus to the East. Perhaps we will simply be reduced to
onlookers in the next great conflict!
CP, Connecticut.
Our Cultural Weapons of Mass Destruction
will indeed bring down militant Islam; but what they do to us first is a
matter of concern. If our schools were what they were when I was young I
would not be so concerned. A republic needs citizens with a certain level of
understanding, and salable skills so they depend on themselves and not the
government. Is the trend in that direction now? I wish I had more cheerful
news. But it is not yet too late.
==
Time to get serious about our own hemisphere.
http://americanthinker.com/comments.php?comments_id=3702
-- Roland Dobbins
=================
New PHISHING tricks
Evening Jerry,
The e-Bay spoofers are getting more creative. I just
received an e-mail that appears to be a question from a potential buyer (but
I'm not selling anything at the moment). The natural assumption is that
someone has misrouted the e-mail, so a helpful individual would click on the
respond link to let the buyer know that the message was misrouted. Of
course, you have to enter your eBay userID and password to respond. I'm sure
that all sorts of nasty things would then happen to your account. If you're
interested I'll forward the message, but they did a good job on this one -
very realistic.
So to borrow your advice that what you say three times
is true:
Never click on a link in an e-mail Never click on a
link in an e-mail Never click on a link in an e-mail.
Cheers,
Doug
--
doug[@]douglhotka[.]com
"Do something you like. Forget about the pay, for
Christ's sakes. Regulate your style of living to fit your income. Just have
fun in your job, that's the main thing." ~ General Chuck Yeager
And we also have
Subject: FW: You_visit_illegal_websites
Jerry,
Here is a fun variation on a virus laden message...
jim dodd
------ Forwarded Message
From: <Admin@cia.gov>
Date: Mon, 21 Nov 2005 19:45:03 +0000 (GMT)
To: <victim@idiot.com>
Subject: You_visit_illegal_websites
Dear Sir/Madam,
we have logged your IP-address on more than 30
illegal Websites.
Important: Please answer our questions! The
list of questions are attached.
Yours faithfully,
Steven Allison
++++ Central Intelligence Agency -CIA-
++++ Office of Public Affairs ++++
Washington, D.C. 20505
++++ phone: (703) 482-0623 ++++
7:00 a.m. to 5:00 p.m., US Eastern time
Be careful out there.
=====================
Russell Seitz on
Subject: The Pirates of New Orleans
Dear Jerry; As a sequel to Talk like a Pirate Day, you
may want to read an intriguing new book about the life and times of the
brothers Lafitte, William CDavis's The Pirates Lafitte.
Seems an agent of perfidious Albion , Captain Nicholas
Lockyer of HMS Sophie, delivered a letter to Jean , in his lair on
Grand Isle, exhorting him to join in liberating Louisiana from " a faithless
imbecile Government' and exhorting all nationalities on the scene to abolish
"The American usurpation in this country' offering the assistance of the
Seminoles ;"these Brave red men only burn with an ardent desire of
satisfaction...to join you in liberating these Southern Provinces from their
Yoke, and drive them ( the Americans, that is ) into those limits formerly
prescribed by " King George.
This while Napoleon was simmering ashore on Elba, and
Wellington was getting a weekly brief on the state of operations in the Gulf
of Mexico.. Good thing they unleashed General Jackson.
On another front, I had an oped in the WSJ on 11
November on how the 234 lawyers in Congress are outnumbered by the 8
cientists it currently boasts- but the page is subscribers only , so you
must find a blogolink to read the whole thing. I'm off to the Vineyard for
the annual turkey shoot , which never fails to produce a Thanksgiving feast
of freshly shot mussells and frozen venison, for the turkeys all move
abruptly to the right hand side of the Bell curve for the duration of the
season , relapsing into idiocy only when the coast is clear. Some think this
evidence of intelligent design,
Best to all
Russell Seitz
The Brothers Lafitte were also involved in
Orleanist politics (that is, in promoting the Orleanist branch of the French
monarchy after the restoration; unlike the old Bourbons "who had learned
nothing and forgotten nothing", the Orleanists promoted a reformed
constitutional monarchy), and Henri had a hand in the revolution that installed
Louis Phillippe. My ancestors in New Orleans seem to have had some dealings
with the Lafitte's although it's not clear precisely what their relationship
was. But then everyone from Louisiana has family legends of involvements
with Jean Lafitte...
============
Dan Spisak reports:
Subject: Satan is skating on ice today
A few items of interest:
1. Forbes is reporting that Dell has supposedly told
its Taiwan contract makers to start drawing up plans for AMD-based systems.
Perhaps opening the new fab in Germany finally gives them the capacity to
meet Dell's volume demands?
http://www.forbes.com/technology/feeds/afx/2005/11/20/afx2347168.html
2. The head of the RIAA implies that what Sony did
with its DRM was reasonable in a "virtual" press conference:
http://www.riaa.com/news/newsletter/111805.asp
Columbia University, Columbia Spectator: With fears of
illegal file sharing throughout the music industry, many companies have
taken measures into their own hands. Within the last two weeks, there has
been a great deal of discussion about Sony BMG's rootkit program. Does the
RIAA condone such actions on the part of individual companies to protect
their profits?
Cary Sherman: "There is nothing unusual about
technology being used to protect intellectual property. You can't simply
make an extra copy of a Microsoft operating system, or virtually any other
commercially- released software program for that matter. Same with
videogames. Movies, too, are protected. Why should CDs be any different?"
-Dan S.
============
The benefits of globalization.
http://www.breitbart.com/news/2005/11/21/D8E0U1K00.html
- Roland Dobbins
Bye bye, GM.
One of the problems is the abysmal state
of American public schools.
They have become a bureaucracy.
It is a law of bureaucracy that those who
put the good of the bureaucracy ahead of the good of the public and/or the
ends the bureaucracy is supposed to serve will ALWAYS end up in control of
the bureaucracy, while the conscientious who take their jobs seriously --
like classroom teachers who break their hearts daily -- are considered
contemptible in comparison to the bureaucracy official. In the case of the
teaching "profession" it is a treble bureaucracy: the school system itself,
which might be reformed by election of a new school board, but will never
be, because of a second bureaucracy, the teacher unions; and all of them
bullied by the US Department of Education bureaucracy.
The only way General Motors could ever be
built again would be for us to destroy, eradicate, eliminate the treble
bureaucracies of the public school system and start over. Charles Murray
told us how to do that over a decade ago, but no one listened. And of course
we've known for far longer than that.
==========
Subject: Playing Wing Commander on
modern hardware
I frequently play Wing Commander I on my 2.4 GHz
Pentium 4 with the aid of DOSBox 0.63. You shouldn't need to change any
DOSBox settings other than the speed (which should be around 3000 cycles).
Wing Commander II and Privateer are harder. Your
computer may have speed issues, and they are unstable unless you use some
voodoo command-line switches. See
http://www.wcnews.com/news/showupdate.php?id=6042
In general, DOSBox does an excellent job of pretending
to be a 25 MHz 386 with MCGA graphics and Ad Lib sound (which is the sort of
machine Wing Commander I originally ran on). It sometimes exceeds these (its
Sound Blaster support is very good these days) but it starts to get flaky,
as you found with Conquests of the New World. If you have hours of time and
effort to spare (which I doubt) you can gain some performance by poking
around the configuration files, as discussed at
http://dosbox.sourceforge.net/wiki/index.php?page=RunningResourceDemandingGames
Michael Horton
Australia
============
On Copyright
(note: as a rule I do not care for the technique of chopping letters into
small pieces and making what look like replies, because the context is often
lost. I encourage you to go back to the original letter and read it all
before reading commentaries.)
Please continue to post your readers' interpretations
of copyright law, but could you at least pick letters polite enough to not
insult a professor trying to correct common misunderstandings?
From Braxton S.
Cook:
> "Sanford law professor Lawrence Lessig said
there were limits to the > monopoly publishers and authors hold over their
books." > > Now how in the holy heavens does this idiot come up with an
opinion > like that?
I suspect that his opinion comes first from the U.S.
Constitution, which only allows that monopoly to be held for a limited time.
It is further supported by U.S. Copyright law, Title 17, Chapter 1, Sections
107-112, 117, 119, and 121-122, all of whose titles begin "Limitations on
exclusive rights".
In particular, section 107 is what allows me to give a
copy of 4% of Mr. Cook's letter to my email recipients without his
permission, and it's what Google thinks allows them to give a copy of 1% of
a book to its users without the author's permission.
Now, I don't agree with everything Lessig thinks
either - it looks to me like Google is committing copyright infringement
with every scan of a book they don't own, and they'll be committing mass
copyright infringement as soon as someone scripts a way around their attempt
at remaining within fair use limitations. But disagreement is why we have
courts in the first place: we know that even educated lawyers can disagree
with each other without being "demented".
Some of Mr. Cook's other questions have equally plain
answers:
> How does anyone come to believe that what I
create isn't mine and mine > alone?
That belief comes when you make a copy of what you
create, then give that copy to another person in exchange for money. With
tangible property, unless you got a signed contract along with the money,
that would be the end of your rights. "Intellectual property" is already
much less limited.
> How is society benefited by stealing the
works of authors?
Society is benefited because unlike tangible property,
"stealing" intangibles does not deprive the owner of its use. If matter
duplicators were invented, and people could now "steal" a car without taking
away the original, I suspect that public outcry would legalize that kind of
stealing in 10 days, and everyone in the world would own luxury cars in 11.
We make copyright infringement illegal not because it does any harm in the
short run, but because copyrights are the best way we've found to reimburse
creators and encourage more original art creation in the long run.
> How does allowing Google to make money on
your literary characters > enhance innovation?
The same way that allowing Google to make money on
your web pages enhances innovation.
Try searching Google Print for literary characters'
names. A search for "Lazarus Long" revealed to me books by authors I'd never
heard of but now want to read, and views on science fiction from broader
literary and social science perspectives. A search for "space elevator"
produces a long list of interesting fiction and non-fiction, and the ability
to look at a couple pages is enough to weed out the false positives.
Hundreds of thousands of new books are published every
year. It's not as bad as the millions of new web pages, but it's certainly
more than enough to benefit from the existence of a search engine. This is
more of a benefit to readers than to writers, but good writers do a lot of
reading too - all those "space elevator" hits come from authors who didn't
innovate that concept itself, but wrote innovative books which included it.
--- Roy Stogner
This is more or less the standard "pure"
libertarian position: since taking a copy of a work does not deprive the
original owner of anything, there is no such thing as intellectual property.
The "property right" is created by law, and is not "natural". It is theft if
I steal your chair, but not a copy of your painting or novel.
One problem here is that in the real
world, all "rights" are created by law. We can argue that "rights" are
natural, (the Declaration says they come from endowment by a Creator), but
they are meaningless if the only enforcement of your "rights" is from
self-help or through cooperation of your friends. This is "rights" in the
sense that the Mafia has rights. See Thomas Hobbes for more: without law,
"rights" are hard to come by. (And the third world needs law and order, not
"democracy" which is usually a system of reallocation of property through
counting noses, and generally results in poverty for all". Democracy without
rule of law tends to increasing confiscation until the productive members of
the society turn to a tyrant who will protect them.)
Much of this is discussed in my current
column at www.byte.com.
Jerry, Braxton S. Cook said, among other things:
>"Sanford law professor Lawrence Lessig said
there were limits to the monopoly publishers and authors hold over their
books."
And then he wondered:
>Now how in the holy heavens does this idiot
come up with an opinion like that?
Jerry, at the risk of putting words in Mr. Lessig's
mouth, I'm going to suggest that that he came up with that opinion from
reading the U.S. Constitution, which says, in part:
Article 1, Section 8. The Congress shall have power to
... [do many other things, and] ... promote the progress of science and
useful arts, by securing for limited times to authors and inventors the
exclusive right to their respective writings and discoveries;
I think that the vital point there is that Congress is
given that power to ``promote the progress of science and useful arts''.
Enriching authors and inventors is a necessary side effect of copyrights and
patents, not the reason for them. If the copyright and patent law is having
the opposite effect, then I think it's hard to argue that the law is
constitutional. Unfortunately, our courts have taken to making the
constitution up as they go along, so contradicting the plain language and
intent of the constitution is no reason to overturn a bad law. In any event,
in our legal system, the authors' rights aren't rights, properly speaking,
but privileges, granted because those privileges ``promote the progress of
science and useful arts''. Given that, those privileges can be taken away or
curtailed when they no longer promote the desired end. Mr. Lessig's argument
might be far different, and far better, than mine.
Spider Robinson's ``Melancholy Elephants'' made a
great case for limiting the term of copyright. It's been years since it
appeared in Analog, but as I recall, he made the point that the public
domain is our common heritage, and that nothing could be more destructive of
our culture and society than to keep our recent past from falling into the
public domain in a timely way. It's not the same argument that I'm putting
into Mr. Lessig's mouth, but I think it's another strong argument for
``limits to the monopoly publishers and authors hold over their books''. I
don't remember whether it would be reasonable to extend Robinson's argument
to limiting the extent, as well as the duration, of the author's control.
I make my living through patronage: I work for a state
government, which pays me to produce reports and forecasts. Patronage worked
for Shakespeare, and maybe it's time we tried it again for other works of
fiction, besides my economic forecasts. Or maybe we should just trade off
duration for extent in the copyprivilege: let authors retain total control
for a few decades, or let them retain much less control over distribution
for far longer, at the author's option. Unfortunately, the current system
gives authors both essentially permanent duration and total control, and I
think that we're approaching Spider's dystopia, in music and fiction
(through copyright law) and software (through patent law) and probably other
areas. I'm not against copyright, and I don't want to force you to get a day
job. On the other hand, I want my great-grandkids to be able to find your
works on Project Gutenberg.
Maybe Australia has gotten it right: they end
copyright 50 years after the author's death. That should support even a
newborn child through college.
Nels Tomlinson
Juneau, Alaska
I was opposed in 1976 to the change from
28 years with renewal in the 28th year to life plus 50 years, and I
certainly do not like the current life plus damned near forever.
One problem is that the Congress doesn't
write the laws. They allow the staff, many of whom look for jobs in
publishing and recording industries in return for services rendered while
working for Congress, to write the laws. Few Congresscritters know a darned
thing about the laws they pass, even those on the relevant committees.
I can make a living in journalism and
forget the fiction, and given the way the law and technology are going
perhaps I should. Or, enough of you can subscribe,
and I'll have a patron...
==
Jerry P:
Your column in Byte was right on, as usual. That
congressmen cannot defend DMCA comes as no surprise as Tom Coburn and others
have pointed out that no one in either house actually reads and is familiar
with the bills they pass. They rely upon staffers to attempt to understand
and advise them about what they are actually voting on. Staffers seem to
reside in the shadows of DC and move along to others when their host shark
loses his seat or finds more lucrative employment with a fat cat.
That we don't get more of the DMCA type of legislation
is the wonder of the century. We did get a lot of environmental laws which
once passed never get revisited to determine if they make sense. By the way,
I do agree on your stance about Google et al in their attempt to use
copywriter materials without permission. But you may have to hire a class
action lawyer to take action; horrors. As you have not been injured as of
yet, it would seem you have no cause to complain, at least as far as the law
is concerned. Of course, once someone at Google scans Mote, Pandora's box is
opened and you can only hope that no one at Google takes a copy and shares
with his friends, or gets hacked and the copy stolen. Then you have suffered
an injury but cannot prove that it was intentional. Stay out of the hands of
the lawyers, and get the Congress to make real laws, not paper tigers.
Charles Simkins
==================
Subject: Just a stunning view
Jerry,
This site
http://www.panoramas.dk/fullscreen3/f2_mars.html has a Quicktime
VR of the view that Spirit has from the top of the Columbia Hills. Many
other good panoramas too. Worth looking at!
Chuck Bouldin
======
Papers, please.
I've no idea of the veracity of this story - and
that's the sad part.
http://www.papersplease.org/davis/facts.html
--- Roland Dobbins
Algorithm agility is an essential feature in
any Internet protocol.
-- Bruce Schneier
It appears to be all too real.
=======
Minor miracle - NYT writes non-moonbat article about
nuclear power.
http://www.nytimes.com/2005/11/20/
business/yourmoney/20nuke.html
--- Roland Dobbins
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CURRENT
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