The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Dave Bell:

The Secret Service only has to make one mistake...

That's maybe an over-simplification, but look at who has tried to kill the people they're charged with protecting. I'm not sure that this sort of thing is an effective part of the system. How many of the attackers have a history of making threats? How many of those histories have been a single threat. And how do you resolve the conflict between investigating every reported threat and the whole idea of freedom of speech?

It's that last part where the problem is.

I don't know enough to even begin to guess who will be elected to the Papacy. But I'm led to expect that the odds favour an older man, conservative but not hidebound.

The world has changed a lot over the time of the last Papacy. It's possible that the Conclave will end up with a compromise; not a hard-liner who will not change, but somebody who will set a new course to the same port, in the new winds of the 21st Century.

And not somebody who will outlive the people voting for him.

Any guerilla advertising exploiting this opportunity should be in a foreign language and script.

Chinese might be good.

Possibly with a logo that almost looks like some well-known American branding.

What's the Mandarin for "All your General Motors belong to us"?

Intellectual Property is more than just Copyright.

For one thing, there are trademarks.

Whether trademarks should be of indefinite duration is another issue, and whether they have any basis of "promoting innovation" seems arguable. They're different.

And when a lawyer or politician talks about "IP Law" you need to watch out for the cosh up his sleeve, because he's setting up to relabel trademarks as part of the copyright argument.

I dabble a bit in CGI graphics, and one thing I've noticed, which may extend into other commercial-art areas, is the book of samples, where the artists are entering a competition to be published, in a book which will go out to advertising agencies, and paying an entry fee.

I don't know the business, so I can't say how commonplace it is, but, as I've said else-net, other sorts of creative people would see it as a scam.

I've just been reading a novel by Andrew M. Greeley, one of the ones about Bishop "Blackie" Ryan.

I recommend them as a partial antidote to the toxicity of the self-proclaimed christian majority in the US (and, alas, some of them are cousins of mine).

A small family farm example which might suggest another way of handling the issue:

I was a tenant farmer, until the economics (costs, prices, and farm size, mostly) went against me. The tenancy was of a type which had been set up by statute shortly after WW2, and modified later, but is no longer used for new tenancies.

Part of it was the concept of Succession. It didn't die with the tenant. It could be inheritied, under fairly strict rules. I worked on the farm, so I could succeed to the tenacny when my father retired. My brother, a non-farmer, could not. And there were a limited number of successions allowed.

There were other elements, ways for the Landlord to regain occupation of the land. It wasn't extremely biased against the Landlord.

Anyway, would an inheritable copyright, with a limited number of transfers, answer some of the problems?

Or is the real issue the nature of corporations, undying, and thus needing special provisions, special limits whuch they have the resources to influence in the legislatures?

Are we even in the right argument?

I think that if you trace torture back through fiction and drama, it goes back a long way. Think of the movie "Dirty Harry", which is suffused with a moral greyness. Looking back through Clancy, there are threads in his early work which, with hindsight, lead straight to the gigantic hawsers of depravity in his recent books. The last one I read, borrowed from a Public Library, was full of what amounted to state-sponsored terrorism -- sponsored by the USA. Even though it also had the more comforting routine falsehood or heroic, competent, mea chancing to be in the right place to stop a terrorist attack.

It's a long way from "The Hunt For Red October" to making your hero as assassin who happens to be the son of the ex-President.

I think something could blow up in my face if I said too much about the parasites between the creator and the public, but the music and movie businesses seem to be infested in ways that are less apparent in the area of books.

And it's music and movies, as digital media, which seem to be driving the whole sorry mess. Self-publishing in the book world is tainted by the vanity-press slime, but I don't hear anyone thinking that only big publishers can sell non-pirated books.

Look at movies and music, and the image is being created that nothing not from the big guys can ever be non-pirated. Even though it is easier than ever to record and duplicate an album. (Assuming you can play the instruments.)

Movies are still hard. They're bigger and more complicated and need a lot of people to work together. But the basic tech, such as digital video and the editing, is getting down to consumer level. Distribution is a bigger problem than for music.

It looks as if Copyright is being used to maintain near-monopolies on distribution. And the creative people are the last thing the RIAA and MPAA are thinking about.

It's all been said before, by a better writer than I.


Here is naught unproven, here is nothing hid:
Step for step and word for word--so the old Kings did!

As far as that red flag with the Copyleft symbol goes, it's the first I've ever heard of there being a copyleft symbol. Without the explanation, I'd have looked blank.

That may be what makes the flag a bad idea. Do enough people realise what the symbols mean.

On the other hand, the convention IP symbols for copyright and trademark and the rest would combine will with the symbolism of state communism. It would raide the image of the (godless) evil (corporate) empire, in which the powerful ruthlessly exploit the masses under the guise of some illusory doctrine of liberty.

If you're attacking, subvert the enemy's symbolism, not your own.

And my recollection of history is that America's boom as an industrial and commercial nation mostly came when the attitude of the US legal system to other countty's IP laws was more than a trifle cavalier.

The telephone repeats soft snoring sounds.
A purring cat pursues the ghosts of mice uncaught.
The muted screen shows Max Bialystock.

And in some call centre that is forever foreign,
The dreary scripted echoes of hello are unanswered.

A cautious comment: I can see why there might be some confusion about Rivka's response. It isn't written like a newspaper story.

I don't mean that it should be written for morons by idiots who don't understand what they're writing about: I've some idea of how reliable newspaper reporting can be. But there is a structure to a newspaper report which her response doesn't have.

A newspaper report has to grab the reader's attention, and get across the core of the story, in a single blow. That opening paragraph, often only one sentence, has to tell you what the story is about. Then it gets repeated, with more detail.

It is a little like this comment.

There are hidden costs in every power generation technology.

Take Wind Generators as an example. Ignore, for the moment, potential noise nuisance to near neighbours, and birds swatted out of the sky. They're an unreliable energy source, which means the system needs more generating plant running at reduced output to cover the gaps.

And that plant is burning fuel to spin the generators. It's pretty inefficient. And because the unreliable wind is on top of the unpredictable variations in demand, you actually increase the percentage of total capacity that needs to be running, but not generating.

So Wind Generators still use non-renewable fuel sources. So do wave generators (and they break too easily).

With the knowledge we have now, nuclear power is one of the better answers. It's not perfect, but nothing is.

I recently purchasefd some goods from a company in Utah, taking advantage of sale prices and the slide in the dollar. By my calculation I should still have exceeded the duty-free limit on personal imports.

I didn't even have to ask them to lie on the customs declaration.

Of course, not all residents of Utah are LDS.

Well, I checked for my brother's papers. "John F Bell". They don't get trapped into ignoring "JF Bell" so a few extra search terms can be useful, even something as simple as which academic institution somebody works for.

It looks good.

I'm not sure that the mega-church, as such, is significant. Look back into the history, and this all-embracing social structure has been in the other great revivals. But Sunday Schools, to take just one element, didn't start as primarily teachers of religion. They were schools, teaching literacy and numercay to the poor, as well as teaching the religion.

Look at the Victorian revivals, and you find a lot of the rest there.

I suggest the key is the element of retreat, rather than the churches being involved with everything. They're saying "Come and hide with us."

I ought to be careful here, but the Victorians had the Salvation Army, and we're seeing the Salvation REMFs.

I'm afraid that one of the dead giveaways which, alas, would be obvious to any computer user, is that the Royal Navy installs a non-Lyons operating system in one of its ballistic missile subs. Not only is it beyond all credibility that the British computer industry, built on the hard-edged commercial experience of running stock-control and accounting for a large-scale fast-food business, should have no place in the world of high-reliability computing, but the product and company names are just so dumb. Whoever heard of a computer company called something like "Microsoft" or a product named "Windows"? Whether for warships or not.

One angle on the blocking of LJ is that the election is looming, and there is an obvious temptation to try to control the news coming out of Iraq.

And not every soldier is a raving Republican supporter.

The LJ in question was, for a while, pretty hopeful. It was seeing the ordinary Iraqis, and reporting on what they were doing. Recently, it seems, things have changed for the worse in that corner of some foreign field.

So, Bush or Kerry? Carry on into chaos, or change things and try something new?

The whole bit about not enforcing a law is a red herring. Go look for those lists of bizarre local laws. Even with the sensible laws, many of them don't get routinely enforced. The cops have to decide how to use their time. So murder gets a lot of effort, but not every speeding motorist is stopped.

What is significant in this case is that the Mayor was taking an active step. He was issuing the licences.

Does it hurt anyone that this law was broken? Hardly. It wasn't a lynching. But it was an active encouragement to break the law, not a cop ignoring a woman wearing those illegal patent leather shoes.

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