| Tuesday, April
9, 2002
We are home, I have cleaned up most of the mail. I got the
column to Tokyo and Istanbul and all the other places it goes Sunday night
from Edison New Jersey although I didn't have the book reviews in it: those
go in today, a couple of days late but not a lot.
I'm off to WinHEC next week. I find WinHEC one of the best
conferences I go to each year; I'll find out a lot more about Intel, AMD,
various support chip makers, and what's coming next in this wonderful world
of little computers. (You can tell mine are working just fine...) I
hope to write a short essay on the Israeli situation: there's not a lot to
say but there is some deadwood that needs clearing out before there can be
any progress. If anyone WANTS progress other than Colin Powell. I would
not trade jobs with that man for any reward you could name. And the US has
to make some fundamental decisions about where we are going; all these
matters are connected. Empire or Republic, US interests or World
interests; we have to decide on OUR priorities. I also need
to do a real essay on copy protection and the Hollings (D, Disney) Bill.
And I see that Author Services, which represents the estate of L. Ron.
Hubbard, is using some of their resources to campaign against any revision
to the 20-year copyright extension. They can do that: they are both agent
and publisher. But the latest 20-year extension, now under challenge in
the courts, didn't require and reversions to original authors, and was
more the Disney Protection act than an author protection act. Where the
publisher owns the properties outright there is no conflict of interest,
but in some cases authors would as soon have their works public domain as
under the copyright control of a publisher -- which is likely to have been
bought and merged nine times and have changed every single member of its
staff since the time the author first dealt with that house. This
is not to say that all aspects of copyright extension are wrong; but in
fact I don't think the Constitution intended nearly infinite copyrights,
and I certainly don't need them. When I got in this racket you got 26
years, plus the possibility of a 26 year extension -- but the author filed
for the extension, meaning that he got his rights back then. Later
it was changed to life plus 30, then life plus 50, and now life plus 70
years, and they are talking about longer. Frankly, I don't work to pass
money to my great grandchildren. I was happy enough with 26 plus 26. I
would be willing to settle for 26 plus 26 or life plus 30 which ever was
longest; that seems fair enough to me. Some of my
colleagues don't agree, and a few want life plus 100 years or something:
which I believe is in violation of the US Constitution since I can't think
it encourages authors nor is it "limited". We'll get to all this
another time. Try
http://judiciary.senate.gov/special/feature.cfm
an interesting place to go: make your views known.
And now I have a pile of work to
do...
The Internet is hideously SLOW today...
You ought to have a look at
http://news.bbc.co.uk/hi/english/business
/newsid_1894000/1894070.stm which is the story of
how AOL/Time-Warner is writing off $54 billion -- that is billion -- in
assets. The merger was the most clever thing AOL could have done with its
inflated dot boom assets, and effectively shielded AOL from the dot bust;
but look at what happened afterwards. The losses here are surely in the
same category as those of Enron; after all we are talking about totals
great than the Gross Domestic Product of many nations including some not
very small ones like New Zealand; more than the national budget of many
larger countries; all that gone in smoke, and due to new accounting rules,
has to go Right Away rather than being concealed over a few years. It will
be an interesting story to follow.
I keep looking at my web statistics, which are fairly
large, large even in comparison to sites that are getting significant
revenue from advertisements. My problem with advertisements is that I
don't want to sell them, I don't like to see them, and I don't want to
annoy my readers with bad ones. Moreover, if I take all comers, I will
surely end up advertising stuff I hate, and if I try to be selective it
will become more work than it is worth, and how do I review someone who is
paying me money to run an ad? BYTE can do that because sales and editorial
are not the same people. Me, there's just me. So I will
continue with my "public radio" model and nag you every now and
then about subscriptions. I do
intend to make some changes here, particularly in organization to make it
easier to find things. At Jersey Devil Con -- great fun actually --
I made some references to my space papers and in particular the rocket
equation. I didn't have time to explain that in any detail, so I wanted to
refer people to my SSX concept paper.
It didn't turn out to be easy to do because I had trouble finding it. It's
really quite a good introduction to the rocket equation, too. So
I am going to have to do something about navigation here. Real Soon Now. 
Two
pictures from Jersey Devil Con: on the left, my collaborator Mike Flynn
(Fallen Angels, Niven, Pournelle and Flynn; we won the Prometheus Award
with that one). On the right me with Convention Chairman Steve Yoder, who
has the official convention shirt...
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