The most recent 20 comments posted to Electrolite by Ray Radlein:

I always remind them that people fought, and were killed, so that we don't have 12 hour work days, and so that we have things like OSHA. Without unions, sweatshops would be the norm, rather than some heinous hell perpetrated on illegal aliens.

The difference here between the "New Democrat" position against unions and the "Old Plutocrat" position is that the "New Democrat" who is opposed to unions readily grants, arguendo, their groundbreaking achievements in the past, and concedes that they deserve eternal thanks for their blood and effort — but that their work is done now, and the workplace (except for the lower rung of manual and service jobs) has achieved a kind of magical equilibrium wherein their continuing agitations are not only no longer needed, but, indeed, actively unhelpful. They are seen as a quaint anachronism, akin to hunger strikes in support of women's suffrage.

That's the thinking of New Democrats who are antagonistic or ambivalent towards unions. The position of Old Plutocrats (i.e., the current Republican Party) is, of course, that 12 hour work days and child labor are good things, that made this country great, and that things like OSHA and an honest NLRB are unacceptable roadblocks on the glorious march to the Nineteenth Century.

By the same token, the type of person who would leave that sort of message is exactly the type of person who would either pay no attention to the preview, or notice the problem and decide that fixing it wasn't worth the effort.

Actually, the caps lock getting stuck halfway through makes perfefct sense, given that it the first letter affected by it was an "a": On those thankfully rare occasions when my suboptimal left-hand positioning on the home row bites me, it frequently does so by causing me to hit both the "CAPS LOCK" and 'a' keys at more or less the same time, leading to either a few capitalized letters following an 'a', or a few capitalized letters, the first of which is an 'A'.

On the other hand, I'm pretty sure that I would have noticed my error upon hitting "PREVIEW".

Exactly where do hamsters score on this test, one wonder?

Are you talking about the rare flightless hamsters?

I suppose the Uncharacteristic SF industry post is as good (or bad) a place as any to pass along a report, from Victor Gonzalez, that F. M. Busby died yesterday afternoon in Seattle. Details will presumably be updated on his CaringBridge patient web page (with guestbook).

When my eyes first read your message, they made the words into "Scottish Play v. Real Madrid," which, I think, would be an absolutely fascinating event to watch for two hours on Match of the Day.

Places I've managed, we always thought of HR as the dept you'd put your stupid brother-in-law in, so he wasn't anywhere that he could screw up anything important.

The British used to think the same about their Quartermaster's Corps, once upon a time. Among the many valuable lessons painfully gained at Gallipoli was the fatal flaw in that approach. Marlborough could have told them better.

First it's Richard III, and now MacBeth! Will no one spare me from this turbulent bard?

I think you mean the 1971 Playboy interview, Greg.

Actually, he does mean the 1981 interview with John Lennon, which was in the January issue of Playboy — meaning it was on the newsstands at the time that Lennon was shot (I have heard reports that Mark Chapman bought that issue shortly before shooting Lennon).

Curiously, the issue also featured a nude pictorial of Barbara Bach, who married Ringo Starr a couple of months later.

The issue also contained one of my favorite Ray Bradbury short stories, "Heart Transplant," and the first installment of Frank Herbert's God-Emperor of Dune.

I was disappointed by the crop of ads this time.

I dunno... a dancing bear kicking Burt Reynolds in the groin? Now that's comedy gold.

I was impressed by the audience cue cards that turned the top half of one side of the stadium into one giant banner saying "N A"

Not "Na na na nana nana" on one side and "Hey Jude" on the other side of the stadium; just plain old "NA." It struck me as pretty bizarre, really, making the effect similar to a giant "M U."

Yeah, I was disappointed in Lindsay Graham, too, although I can only imagine what the smackdown would have been if he had voted "No."

On the other hand, the WaPo gleefully described just how much time he spent not applauding during the State of the Union address, and threw in the added bonus that he evidently has characterized the President's pet "Malpractice Reform" legislation as "stupid." Throw in on top of that the fact that he was one of the three Republicans who agreed with Waxman and signed a letter to the DoJ urging a criminal investigation into the theft of the Democratic Judiciary memos, and he's moved way to the top of the GOP League Table in my book.

My favorite Graham story, however, is a tale recounted by some of Tom Daschle's former staffers, about how Graham used to sneak over to Daschle's office after hours, when the GOP leadership wasn't looking, to work on legislation — just like the Democrats were an actual part of the government, or something!

Well, you can see why he had to keep that sort of thing on the QT, right?

Anyway, one late night, as he was leaving Daschle's office, he evidently paused in the doorway, turned around, and dramatically proclaimed, "Lindsay Graham: Republican by Day... but Democrat by Night!" before sweeping out with a flourish.

All I can say is, I sure don't remember him being anywhere near that cool when I was living in South Carolina. I think he's taken this whole "being a Senator" thing to heart.

Obviously, the enemies of Mattel® are getting desperate.

Well, then, I need another situation where the public sets a price for a thing and waits and sees if an individual among them will take the risk to collect the reward.

Oh, that's easy: It's called a reverse auction. Like Priceline.com. You can probably even use William Shatner as the New Copyright Movement's Official Spokesperson if you want.

Slashdot is reporting that the panix.com domain has been hijacked and the DNS and registrar level, and all incoming e-mail is being redirected to somewhere in Canada. The registrar (in Australia) which seems to have stolen panix.com is closed for the weekend.

Maybe we could send a couple of spare brigades over to Egypt — I hear tell the Sphinx still has one or two recognizable facial features we could use for target practice.

What we'd also see is more emphasis on other ways of making money, outside of licensing the original work.

I think what we'd see in the event of a return to a short fixed period is the expansion of trademark law and possibly even patent law to fill the moneymaking void left by the retreat of "To Infinity and Beyond! ®" duration copyrights.

After all, if you can patent a software algorithm, it's nothing more than a hop, skip, and a fall down a long flight of stairs to get to the notion of patenting plot devices, or trademarking not just character names, but also, say, specific sets of character relationships — all designed to prevent derivative works being made from popular and lucrative, but recently out of copyright, books and movies.

They're wildly imaginative, thoroughly entertaining, and manage to be enjoyable even after the middle of the third book, when Our Hero announces that he's going to save the universe with the power of Objectivism.

<cheapshot>Aha! So it's a fantasy, then.</cheapshot>

Ray, have you read John C Wright's "Golden Age" trilogy?

Impressively enough (well, impressively to me, anyway), I've never even heard of it.

At the very least, we need to get a firm handle on fixed-term versus death-plus while people are still dying. Because once that stops happening, nothing will ever go out of copyright.

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