| Monday,
September 10, 2007 General
Petraeus has testified, and what he said needs comment and analysis; but not
tonight.
I have just returned from the beach house.
Here is an announcement (but see below; cancel this transmission):
If you sent me mail between Thursday 6 September at 0900
PDT and Sunday, 9 September at 2000 hours (8 PM) PDT, I do not have that
mail. If you sent it and I answered it, I have neither your mail nor my
answer. If I sent you mail, I do not have a copy of it. In short, for that
period I have lost all the mail. (It will eventually be recovered, but
not for a while.)
If you have recently sent me a subscription notice and you
have not received a welcome message, PLEASE LET ME KNOW. YOU ARE NOT
ENROLLED. Please send me a notice. If you paid by subscription to Roberta's
mail, that is not lost, but the NOTICE TO ME that you subscribed is lost.
What happened is that Orlando, the t42p IBM
ThinkPad, died Sunday evening. It's not serious: it's a "fan error."
Attempts to reboot get the process started, there are words on the screen,
then "fan error" and the system stops. I am certain this can be repaired and
easily.
I have had adventures trying to read the hard
drive. It's intact, but attempts to read it with Windows XP or Vista have
failed. That story will be in the (delayed!) column; it amounts to the fact
that the disk has an active partition and Windows isn't smart enough to get
past that. I can go in with partition magic and change that disk partition
status (I think), but I have decided that I'd rather just leave things
alone: I'll put the drive back in the machine, get the machine fixed, and
peel off anything I need. Eventually I'll export all the mail for that
period to a disposable pst, and import that pst into this system, and I'll
have all the mail.
The most important file on that machine was
done Saturday: the final submission copy of INFERNO II. Of course I saved
that off onto a thumb drive, and I have transferred that to other machines;
and I had already sent a copy to Niven and another to our agent in New York.
So we that file. I don't have the "Inferno Record" file that records day by
day how many words I wrote the day before and whatever happened to affect my
work. But I have that up to Thursday, and eventually I'll recover the
entries for Friday, Saturday, and Sunday, so it's hardly a problem.
I am sure there's a clever way to use a USB
drive case to get at the files on that disk, but I have spent a couple of
hours trying and it's just not worth the effort.
So that's where we are, and why the column
will be late.
(Column was delayed but I am fully recovered,
with all mail and data restored.)
================
I have many thoughts about Petraeus and his
testimony. If we intend to win that war, he's the right general. Heck, if he
wants to be emperor I may well join in the cheering. Note that 60% of the
country now trusts the military more than the Congress and President put
together. We live in interesting times.
============
Let me be clear: I have an external USB case
for the external drive. Windows sees the drive at the device manager and
Disk Management level, but it will not assign a drive letter to it, so I
can't access it. This is because it is a boot drive, and Windows
doesn't seem to be able to cope with it.
Sigh. (and that too is fixed; see the
column.)
==============
Cancel Previous transmissions. I have access
to the drive, through an external cage. I am copying the files now. It was
something Eric Pobirs said that was the clue. The story will be in the
column, and it's interesting. Anyway I have all the data.
====
From Michael Capobianco,
President of the Science Fiction Writers of America:
In light of recent events, I want to make a
few things clear about where Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of
America (SFWA) stands.
SFWA isn't about to retreat from the
fundamental principles on which our organization was founded. SFWA
stands for the author's rights. The most fundamental author's right is
the right to control who can make copies of his or her work. This
includes the right to license works through Creative Commons, give them
away, license them to publishers for money, or any other creative use
that an author can devise. The author is the one that gets to choose how
and when, no one else.
Many of us believe that it is inevitable
that e-books will become the predominant way to buy and read books in
the not too distant future. It may take many years or there may be a
sudden sea-change. As yet, e-books represent a relatively small presence
in commercial publishing, and we don't yet know how soon or how rapidly
their popularity will grow. Most authors retain the copyright to their
works and license them to publishers for a limited amount of time, and
can sell and profit from them again. We're sf writers, our business is
looking forward, and so we're doing our best to anticipate a future
where e-books dominate the landscape, and to ensure that we'll still be
around, telling stories -- and paying our bills -- when they do.
It is my firm belief that artistic endeavor
can only flourish on the web and elsewhere if the creators control their
work. Take away that control, and you cripple the potential of the
future.
The current state of the law makes it far
easier for copyright infringers to upload works illegally than for
authors to protect their works from illegal distribution. Companies
seeking to make a business out of providing user-provided content must
be proactive, or they become repositories for these illegal copies.
We're at a tipping point. Who will own and
profit from the content that drives the brave new digital world to come?
Will it be corporations like Google, which is already showing its hand,
making agreements with publishers and libraries that deny authors the
right to choose? Will it be scribd.com and its ilk?
Or will it be the men and women who create
the content: the artists and musicians and writers? I can assure you
that SFWA will be in the forefront of the fight.
Michael Capobianco, President, SFWA
He has my entire support in this. I expect to
see further developments including the founding of a new anti-piracy
committee equipped to act for members.
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