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The truly confounding thing about the California recall insanity is why either party would want to run the godforsaken place at all. If the Republicans were smart they'd let the Democrats keep it; if the Democrats were smart they'd hand the state to the Republicans and walk away laughing. Trust me on this one: Whichever party takes the governorship will be held responsible for "fixing" the state, which will take twenty years of suffering if it can be done at all. That means that whichever party takes the governorship this fall will lose the governorship in '04 and the presidential vote as well. I had thought for awhile that the Republicans were backing Arnold so that they would be sure to lose, but they're probably not that clever—and I was unprepared for the degree of support that an aging bodybuilder from Austria could garner out on the Left Coast. They're now in mortal danger of winning, heh. Politics just works that way sometimes, so if you're out there in California somewhere, decide which party you want to take the Presidency and the Senate in 2004—and then vote the other way in the Davis recall. |
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I've been using PocoMail since March, and I'm quite happy with it overall. Outlook Express was just too weird and proprietary for me, and—egad—it stores its blocked senders list in the Windows Registry. Worst of all, OE uses IE for viewing messages, exposing people to any number of worm/virus script exploits that beset IE. As most of you know, I have very little tolerance for "executable documents." I want to look at information, not give it control of my machine. PocoMail uses its own "dumb" HTML viewer, which has no scripting abilities at all, and I like that. About two weeks ago, I upgraded to PocoMail 3.0. So far, so good—though I expected more. I have not had time to fully explore its new scripting abilities, but it has the ability to strip out all HTML code, leaving behind only text. It can also strip out only IMG tags, allowing you to look at an HTML spam message without downloading images that can tell the spammer that there's a "live" address here. I have been disappointed in the spam filtering, however. In particular, the partial subject line filtering does not seem to work. Putting words like "V1agra" in the subject line spam keywords list should snag a message with "V1agra" anywhere in the subject line, but it does not. Spammers have graciously provided us with a good many idiosyncratic spellings that would never appear in a legitimate message, and Poco can't seem to spot them. I may be doing something wrong, but I'll be damned if I can figure out what. Overall, Poco 3.0 is a win, and I do recommend it. I suspect that I'll be able to figure out the subject line filtering at some point. The chickenboners who haunt my inbox seem to focus almost entirely on pills these days (whatever happened to "JLo's Pink Engagement Ring"?) including a lot of what I thought were tightly controlled compounds like Vicodin—er, V1codin. Subject line filtering will skim a huge number of them out of my hair, so I had better allocate some time to figuring it out. Let me know if you have any ideas. |
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Whew. That's a lot of telescope to haul around. And because it is, I realized that I had used it a lot less than I had used my other big telescope over the years. I consider my 8" scope my cheap-and-scruffy instrument, because it's made of scrap lumber and pipe fittings, with no ball bearings and no least sign of machined parts. I started work on that scope when I was only 13, and finished it while I was a freshman in high school. It had a square plywood tube at first, changed to a length of aluminum vent pipe somewhere along the way. The 8" uses a "turn on threads" mount, meaning that its "bearings" are just two pipe fittings screwed together loosely enough to turn freely, but with enough friction to keep a breeze or minor weight imbalances from moving it. Although low-tech in the extreme, this system is extremely effective, and almost elegent in its simplicity. It's not especially fragile. It's not especially heavy. (Even at 51, I can lift the whole thing and lug it short distances.) It comes apart with great ease, using a screwdriver and an Allen wrench. Because of all that, I realize I've used it probably ten times as much as the larger 10" scope, which (if you look at the photo above) is the yellow thing parked in a corner of the garage. There's a lesson here: Keep factors like ease of use in mind when you build something, or you'll end up leaving that something in the garage while you use something else. Remarkably, I got this almost exactly right when I drew my little sketch at age 13—but never realized it until almost four decades later. |
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I've been hearing rumors since midsummer, but until I actually saw it posted as a task group on the IEEE's Web site, I was unwilling to say much about 802.11n. Well, there it is, their first meeting is scheduled, and I would guess that we're off and running. 802.11n is "high-throughput" 802.11 wireless networking. What they mean by "high" has not yet been defined; I've seen media people cite values up to 320 Mbps. Most, however, suggest 100 Mbps, which isn't quite double the top rate of 802.11a and 802.11g. The task group schedule, which you can download from the IEEE's site, specifies an October 2005 date for publication of the standard, but that's pure speculation at this time. Rumor has it that, like 802.11b and 802.11g, the new standard will work at 2.4 GHz (a bad idea, in my view—that street's too crowded already!) but again, this has not been confirmed. Apart from putting WLANs on par with 100 Base-T wired Ethernet, what is this good for? Consumers have bought hugely into 802.11g, even though no broadband Internet connection technology I'm aware of puts any strain on creaky old 802.11b. I have moved lots of files around our wireless network (mostly for centralized backups) but that's about all that most people use it for. However, when "wireless-n" hits the streets, I'll lay odds that it will be a huge success. Part of that success will be simple ignorance of what that speed buys you, and part the ancient desire to have the latest and greatest. However, some small but not insignificant part of it will be driven by the file sharing underground. The relentless attacks by Big Media will force file sharing to go local, and a lot of that will be teens hanging out down at the mall, swapping songs among their PDAs. We already have 1 GB flash memory cards; by the time 802.11n hits the streets, most PDAs will have that much storage and more. A wireless connection with throughput (not bit rate) at the 50 Mbps level will allow typical MP3s to be transferred in a couple of seconds, and whole albums in less than a minute. High-throughput 802.11 wireless will, I predict, bring 802.11's ad-hoc network mechanism out of obscurity and into the limelight. In my analysis, ad-hoc needs a lot of bandwidth just to manage a wide-open N-way connection among local machines. Give it more throughput (and some attention on the software side) and ad-hoc could become something truly useful, even if it ends up being Big Media's worst nightmare. |
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With regard to "cat craziness" (see yesterday's entry) an amazing number of people wrote, saying, "I thought you were just being funny, but then I looked on Google and there may be something to it." Well, shucks: I thought I was just being funny (and didn't even bother looking on Google) but in truth, there may in fact be something to it. Bill Roper sent me this article from the Toronto Star, which is short but at least gives the scientist's name and location. (Dr. Jaroslav Flegr, of Charles University in Prague.) However, Larry Nelson hit the jackpot by locating the actual article abstract in the peer-reviewed journal BMC Infectious Diseases. (I think you have to be a subscriber to get the whole thing, but unless you're also a medical professional, you're unlikely to need—or even be able to digest—the whole thing.) Michael Covington unearthed this older abstract that hints at the same phenomenon cited by Dr. Flegr. Michael also sent the CDC writeup on toxoplasmosis, which is very useful for getting some background on the disease in general. Michael also makes the savvy observation that reckless people and those who don't see personal hygiene as a priority are naturally more likely to contract diseases that can easily be picked up from cat crap and raw meat, so there is some question as to the direction of the cause/effect arrow. Some skepticism is in fact warranted, but sheesh—it makes you wonder what else may influence our behavior and psychology! |
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The following item came in through Ken Rutkowski's email news aggregator, and I reproduce it in full here since he doesn't link to anything to support it. The parasite is real, but nothing I've found points to the studies cited:
I'll only be half-serious here (ok, maybe one quarter serious!) and suggest that the cultural revolution that happened in much of the West circa 1968 was peculiarly synchronized to the rise in popularity of cats in middle-class households. What we see here is nothing less than a possible explanation for the emergence of hippies, the crime explosion, and the sexual carnival. Now, back in the 50's and early 60's cats were not a middle-class thing, like dogs were. Come the mid-60's cats were suddenly very chic, especially among the intellgentsia and college students, who seemed to go off their collective nuts all at once in 1968. Coincidence? Probably, but it's better than most of the conspiracy theories going around these days. I'll believe in feline parasites long before I'll believe in aliens, the Age of Aquarius, harmonic convergence, or contagious memes haunting the collective unconscious. Something caused the nuthouse we call the Sixties, and if you have a better theory than mine I'll hear it. (I won't promise not to make fun of it, but I'll hear it!) |
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Apologies
are due to the several Marines who wrote and reminded me that there is no
such thing as an "ex-Marine." Once a Marine, always a Marine.
(I've already corrected the 9/21 entry where I made the mistake, so don't
go looking for it.) All I meant was a Marine who was no longer on active
duty. (As one said, "I'm a Marine until I die; I just don't get paid
for it these days.") Thanks guys, and just a general note to all who
read this: Never hesitate to zing me when I get something wrong. I want
to be right, and sometimes it makes for some interesting discussion.
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I haven't published a picture of the house lately because it hasn't changed much since the one I posted for 9/15. We've ordered the roof tile (a sort of greenish gray) and it won't be here for two weeks, so until that happens there won't be much top show you on the exterior. The action is all inside right now. Earlier today the house was swarming with plumbers, electricians, and HVAC guys, all putting the infrastructure together. We walked the house with the media guy, who installs the security system, cable TV runs, and network cabling. We've had to rearrange a couple of the heating vents, and we've caught some errors while they could easily be reversed, which is one of the reasons I'm willing to work so hard at this.
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A short addendum to yesterday's entry: A number of my friends (primarily the fanatically liberal ones) were not happy with my move here. Some cite the "conservative culture" of the Springs (which, if it means personal responsibility, is fine by us!) but most also suggest that in a nuclear war, NORAD (which lies less than two miles from here) will be targeted early and heavily. Perhaps. But targeted by whom? The Russians, certainly, but MAD, while not at hair-trigger ready anymore, is still an issue. Actually, any global power who could attack us here in mid-continent would be identified by satellite intelligence and then paved over. Any power that has the tech to reach us here has the smarts to know it's a suicide gesture. Those who are truly vulnerable to nuclear destruction are those who live close to the coasts and within easy reach of terrorists packing cruise missiles or simply static fissile devices in rusty cargo containers. The irony is that the coasts are "blue country"—liberal, in the new Brooksian color-coding—and are also at the greatest risk of nuclear destruction. (An excellent recent article in the September 2003 Atlantic on the anarchy that reigns in international waters is worth reading, though it's not yet online.) It's always possible, though thoroughly unlikely, that terrorists could smuggle a device into the US, build it into the back of a delivery truck, and blow it up as close as they could get to Fort Carson or NORAD. But that's also true of millions of other targets around the country, and the soul of terrorism is to target civilians. I worry about terrorism, but no more than those who live in other areas.We're all targets—therefore location as a risk parameter mostly factors out. Finally, if a genuine nuclear conflagration breaks out, I'm not sure I want to face the aftermath. Being vaporized along with NORAD would probably be easier than any other outcome. But let's just say that there are a lot more nuclear scenarios involving New York City than Colorado Springs—and that's yet another reason I'm here. Dubuque might be a hair safer, but Dubuque doesn't have mountains! |
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Carol and I chose Colorado Springs for our new home after a month's analysis that involved a lot of hard thought, Web research, and spreadsheeting. One reason we chose it—as well as the neighborhood in which we settled—was its safety. There is some crime here, but it's not a lot, and it's not anywhere near where we live. As I've mentioned before, we're quite close to Fort Carson (currently less than a thousand feet!) and we hear their artillery practice from time to time. Our street is pleasant, middle-class, and quite diverse in terms of race. In terms of culture, however, it's relatively homogenous: Most of the people living on our street are military living off-base (we are renting a house owned by an Army officer, in fact) or former military who liked the area and decided to stay. This, to us, is a fine thing: The military teaches responsibility—and marksmanship. As I like to say, there are a fair number of Marines and Army infantry...um...persons living here on Danceglen Drive, and I think the local thugs are smart enough to know that breaking into a Marine's house is a really bad idea. Colorado is a concealed-carry state, and the advantages to that are less clear, but on balance I favor it. To get a permit you have to have a clear criminal record, pass a background check, and take a firearms safety course. When concealed carry is forbidden, criminals know that ordinary people are very unlikely to be armed. With concealed carry, crooks have to make that extra calculation: Is that balding guy a pushover—or a retired infantry officer? In the Springs, if a non-criminal is carrying heat, it's also quite likely that he or she knows precisely how to use it. The anti-gun lobby warned for years that concealed carry would mean an explosion of deadly domestic violence, but recent studies cited in the local paper showed that that wasn't happening, either here or anywhere else. All that being said, I'll freely admit that I moved here in part because of all the guns—artillery and otherwise. I'll add that it was not the guns alone but the gun culture that tipped the balance—there's a gun culture on the South Side of Chicago that wouldn't have inspired the same confidence, heh. I'll also suggest, though I have no proof, that one of the reasons there was so little gun-related violence in the 1950s is that a far greater percentage of young men served in the military, and soaked up both the military culture of responsibility and the military attitude toward firearms. Although military culture is not for everyone, it seems to leave an indelible mark on those who complete a tour of duty successfully. I'm not sure how else we might expose our young people to that culture, but boy, we could sure do worse than try. |
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As
it happens, the Conairphone "Internet Telephone" (see yesterday's
entry) is nothing more than a standard telephone handset. I figured that
out by swapping it in to the kitchen wall phone and making a couple of calls.
All the magic (what little magic there is) lies in the cable. At least one
other company, Dialspree, sells a
similar product with what looks like an identical cable, so I had some hope
that the cable could be purchased somewhere as a separate item. So far no
luck, but if you know of a source do pass it along. When I get some time
I'll poke at the cable with my VOM and trace out the pinouts, then perhaps
do a short Web paper on it. In the meantime, if you get on Skype somehow,
give me a call. I'm interesting in comparing audio quality over different
connections.
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While researching a paper I hope to present at the February '04 O'Reilly Emerging Technology Conference, I stumbled upon word of a brand-new free utility called Skype. It's best characterized as an IM client that does VoIP as well as text messaging. I think that that's been tried before, but this time the creators (who are the creators of the Kazaa P2P file sharing system) used a P2P mechanism for address lookup and routing around NAT firewalls. (I've read their FAQ but I'm still not entirely sure how they pulled that off. It's a damned good trick!) You look up people on the P2P network and add them to your local directory. The client does presence management; you can tell (as with IM) whether your party is online or away before making a call. To test it, I dug around in my computer junkbox and pulled out this thing called a Conairphone Internet Telephone INT100CS, which a company called Riparius Ventures had sent to me at Visual Developer way back in 1998. I could never get the bundled software to work correctly, so it went into The Box of (Almost) No Return, and why I kept it all these years I have no idea. Still, it looks like an ordinary phone handset, and has two plugs and a jack coming off the end of its cord. One plug goes into your sound card's speaker jack, and the other into the mic jack. Your speakers (if you have them) plug into the cord's jack so that they will work as well. I got it all installed this morning and was trying to figure out how to test it, but not long after that I heard a very convincing telephone ring from my speakers, and by clicking an icon on the popup window I "answered" the "phone." Begosh and begorrah, there was a young chap on the line who lives in Denmark. He had just installed Skype and chose me at random to test the system. He spoke near-perfect English. We talked for awhile, and then hung up, by clicking an icon rather than sticking the handset anywhere. It was eerie; I'm not sure what to compare it to. Maybe ham radio for the 21st century. "CQ Denmark!" Now, the idea of an IM client doing VoIP isn't an astonishing thing in itself. What threw me back completely in my chair was the quality of the audio. It was better than PCS—there was utterly no comparison, no grittiness, no distortion due to packets arriving out of order. (How do they do that!) It was better than an analog phone. No, it was CD quality audio. Skype took virtually no configuration nor troubleshooting. I installed the software, filled out a couple of fields, and it just worked. Now, I don't know how well Skype would work on a limited-bandwidth dialup (I will test it as time allows and report back) but for people with broadband, it represents an amazing way to keep phone bills down, if you talk to similarly connected but faraway people on a regular basis. (I wish to God I had had this while Carol was away at grad school in '75-76.) Give it a try. You can use a headset with a boom mic; anything meant to work with a sound card.You can still buy the Conairphone handset from Riparius for $24.95, but because it has no batteries and the sound card provides no power, I suspect it's nothing more than an ordinary phone handset with a special cable. (I tossed out all my old phones when I left Scottsdale or I'd lash up a cable for one of the old handsets, just to check for sure.) If you want to find my entry in the P2P directory, look for the nickname "Novilio." (I tried using "Jeff Duntemann" but the system won't accept spaces in the name.) Give a call. Sounds like the future to me. |
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I finally got a copy of the 1992 edition of my book Assembly Language Step By Step to download from Overnet (see my entry for September 12, 2003) and sure enough, it was a pirated copy. (Sometimes publishers license books to online firms for publication as ebooks, and Coriolis did some of that, but I had never heard of Wiley doing the same for my assembly book.) Some guy took the scarifyingly large amount of time and trouble to scan and OCR all 450-odd pages and spin it all into a readable PDF. The most interesting part was a short note at the very end of the file: What can I say? I had actually thought of doing this myself, or at least posting some subset of the book for free downloading as bait for the much-expanded (for Linux especially) 2000 edition. Now somebody else has done it for me. I guess I should be grateful. If I work at it long enough, I suppose I eventually will be. |
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Ha! I uploaded an incomplete entry here to this date the other night, while I was half-dizzy with fatigue. It started to wander, so I'm setting it aside until I have some time to make the point in a coherent manner. Sorry for the booboo. |
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 Our
house is the last house in the near neighborhood to be built, however, about
half a mile south, new construction continues apace, and while out walking
in that direction the other day, I happened upon the construction dumpster
shown at left. It may take a second to realize, but the big jagged thing
with jaws on the left side of the container is supposed to be an "S".
Not that that helps completely, since there really shouldn't be an apostrophe
in the company name—unless they're so clever as to indicate that this
is the dumpster belonging to Crapmas...sorry, Scrapmaster LLC.
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I've been trying to steal my own books, and haven't had a whole lot of success. (Reverse shoplifting my magazines was a whole lot easier, though it's hard to tell how useful it was.) Having been tipped off that all three of my most recent books were available for downloading on something called Overnet, (see my entry for September 9, 2003) I figured I'd better go take a look. I learned a lot in the process, though at times it's hard to tell just what. Overnet is an interesting thing: It's a peer-to-peer file-sharing network with a rough resemblance to the original Gnutella network, and more resemblance to Sharman's Kazaa, which was the last thing I looked at in the file sharing universe, some months ago before it all got ugly. It's not well documented, and I had a lot of poke-and-puzzle to do after installing it. (I also had to surgically excise a lot of spyware it installed for me.) Overnet perfects what Kazaa (as best I know) introduced: Taking bits and pieces of the file from many different people who have it shared, so that the overall burden of file transfer is spread across many connections. The more who have a file in their share folder, the faster that file can be shared. That much is plug-obvious. A less obvious and much more fascinating insight came to me when I actually found my book files and queued them up for download. Overnet looks for people who have the file shared, and attempts to connect to them. Four or five people each had shared my books, and one person actually had a copy of my novelette "Borovsky's Hollow Woman." However, all of those people were clearly maxed out on their uploads, because my requests were placed in their queues, with queue numbers like "1454." So nothing came down in the first hour. Or the first day. 24 hours after requesting the files, I had received nothing. Only during the second night did a couple of my requests float to the top of somebody or another's queues, and the data started coming down. Three days later, after much starting and stopping, I got an intact copy of The Delphi Programming Explorer, 2E. Assembly Language Step By Step (1992) is most of the way down as of this morning. I got 46K of Jeff Duntemann's Drive-By Wi-Fi Guide somewhere along the way, but nothing more. And "Borovsky's Hollow Woman" has yet to begin coming in. I thought something might be wrong with my connection, or with the Net, and then tried downloading an e-book version of one of the Harry Potter books that we already have here. Hundreds of people were sharing it, and I watched spellbound as Overnet efficiently orchestrated the probing of those hundreds of sharers. First one, then three, then five, and suddenly twenty or thirty different people started sending me bits, and in less than five minutes, I had a 7 MB file. My assembly book PDF is roughly the same size (which in itself puzzles me) and it's still not all here, having been in process since late in the day on September 9. This suggests something I call the Popularity Conundrum: The more popular your stuff is, the more vulnerable it is to file sharing, and the relationship is by no means linear. On the flipside, the less popular your stuff is, the more infuriatingly frustrating the downloading will be—and I can't help but think that by now, most people would have either given up or actually bought the damned thing from Amazon. It's almost as though the system were giving unpopular content a boost: We'll dangle it in front of the file sharing community when they search for it, but when they reach for it, snatch! No go! Unintentionally, Overnet is helping market obscure content (like mine) by allowing searches, but not downloads. The big question, of course, is whether anybody who wants to steal my books wants them badly enough to guy pay for them through normal channels. There's no consensus on this, and I won't hazard a guess. But it's been fascinating to get a look at what all the shouting is all about, let me tell you. |
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The framing and exterior sheathing of the house is finished, and by gully, it actually looks like a house, and a good one. They're putting in the stairway to the lower level today or tomorrow, and are about halfway through felting the roof, which makes it waterproof—just as the summer monsoon rains are coming to an end, natch. Now the hard work begins—for us. Carol and I now have a universe of small decisions to finalize. We've known about some of them for a long time, and some decisions have already been made, especially those relating to gross structural aspects. (We chose the locations for the central vac ports the other day—a challenge entirely new to both of us.) Still, we have to choose a roof tile color by Monday, kitchen cabinet stain color by Tuesday, and have been put on notice that countertops, major appliances, and custom electrical outlet positioning will all need to be decided ASAP, whew. This is not easy for two people who are not in any sense color intuitives, artists, designers, or æsthetes. And it's not like we've ignored the issues until now. We've been driving around the neighborhood for months (and sometimes driving all the way across town) staring at different houses for the sake of their roof tile, stucco, trim color and stone facing harmony, sometimes until we want to scream. The colors look radically different depending on the tenor of the light falling on the houses: A roof that looks green in soft light fades to gray in harsh sun. Shadow makes stone look darker; light washes out the subtle colors. Stucco always looks lighter on a house than on the one inch square samples they hand you to pick from. It's just nuts. I keep telling myself that no matter what we choose (and we are choosing conservatively) we will have a great house that melds with the lot and looks good in an understated way. I was a little ostentatious as a young man, but all that has passed away. I now want comfort, coziness, and a sense of groundedness, and the design of the structure reflects that. So far so good. Now we have to get the decor correct, and I find the prospect completely terrifying. Details as they happen. Keep watching the left margin. |
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The Colorado Springs Gazette ran a feature a few days ago on Crayola Crayons, and one thing the author emphasized is how they smelled, and how that very particular smell is something that most people associate with the happier moments of their childhood. It's kooky, but I actually do remember that smell, and no, there is nothing quite like it. And what was even more interesting was almost immediately remembering a number of other smells from my extreme youth:
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This morning, the news in all the media I monitor was abuzz with the RIAA's detonating their ultimate weapon: Hundreds of lawsuits against individual file sharers. (It was a front-page story in the Wall Street Journal.) The mainstream media was remarkably sympathetic, considering that 12-year-olds were being served lawsuits with potential copyright infringement judgments of $150M ($150,000 per song times a thousand songs). Not so on the geek sites, where people are swearing up and down that they will buy no more CDs from RIAA members. (And behind my grin I'm thinking, "dare ya!") Some have cynically suggested that the labels are looking at lawsuit settlements as an alternate revenue stream, but that's nuts: Get one or two people to put up a fight, and they will easily eat anything the labels might rake in on $3,000 settlements. It's all hopeful legal theater, intended to frighten kids away from file sharing. (Responsible oldsters gave it up long ago.) What the labels forget is that kids do all kinds of crazy things, completely oblivious to possible dire consequences. Will kids who risk criminal prosecution and jail terms to smoke dope be deterred by something as abstract as a civil lawsuit? (As one said on one of the forums: "What are they gonna take? My car? They can have it—if they can start it.") There are millions of kids out there swapping songs. Even if they can't balance a checkbook, they can calculate the odds. The chances of any one of them being hit with a suit are vanishingly small. I've expressed some modest sympathy for the labels in the past. They really are in a very bad spot—not bad enough to excuse their current legal excess, but bad nonetheless. What the lawsuit storm will certainly do is force file sharing networks to evolve, just as spam filters have bred much cleverer spam. Identifying file sharers on a primitive network like Kazaa is child's play. Finding out who's sharing files on Freenet may well be too difficult to pay off, for the RIAA or anyone else. Even worse than Freenet, from the labels' perspective, is the spectre of file sharing going local. People laugh at me when I say that, but it's a natural consequence of MP3 files staying the same size while local storage media get vaster and vaster, and high local area bandwidth (think 802.11g and gigabit Ethernet LAN parties) gets ever more common. They now make 1 GB flash memory cards, and hard disk space is under a dollar a GB. When kids get together, they're just going to take everything their friends have that they don't already have, and sort it out later. Fifteen kids are going to pool their dollars at the mall, buy a couple of CDs, then go home, rip them, and share the files fifteen ways across an encrypted private network like Justin Frankel's wickedly clever WASTE. Kids will gather files from newsgroups, or over file-sharing networks from other kids who live in countries beyond the RIAA's reach, and those files will trickle around a multitude of local networks that are deliberately restricted to groups of people who know one another in a single local region. (Let's call them file-sharing speakeasies.) These networks cannot be tracked, and because so many of them rely on private network connections, they cannot be probed without search warrants. It really is that grim, and laws won't help much. We'll have to be putting college kids away for ten years for trading songs, which (if it ever happens often enough to have an effect) will cause a political backlash that might erase all the recent laws that Big Media has bought for itself. Most parents hate the music that their kids listen to, and might be quietly glad to see the labels showing the signs of desperation that may precede a death spiral. Porn merchants know better than to complain about being ripped off on file sharing networks. I guess the labels don't yet realize that they're barely half a notch above porn merchants in most people's estimation. (If they wonder why, maybe they should listen to some of their own lyrics sometimes.) I don't know if there's a way out. I would gladly pay 50c per song for the handful of popular songs that I might discover I like these days, and not share them—but I'm an un-hip and reasonably affluent 51-year-old who went to Catholic school. My MP3s are for the most part crappy rips from vinyl that never made it to CD—think the Peppermint Trolley Company. I stand completely outside the modern music business, except for the occasional classical disc that I still buy. Yet I will admit that the problem reaches into a lot of other areas, including some that cut quite close to the heart: An (unnamed) reader told me recently that all three of my most recent books are listed as downloadable document files on the Overnet file sharing network. I checked on Overnet's Web search client Jigle, and shee-it! There they are! I would greatly like to know who went to the immense trouble of scanning them, since they were never released as anything but paper editions. And boy, us guys in the IP business are in for an interesting couple of years. |
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A
little behind on my big consulting project, so I'll be brief, and it should
be over by Monday. At that point, I can start being interesting again. Hang
in there.
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They're going to begin mounting our windows in the house today, and if I get up there later and get some shots I'll link to them in the margin. In the meantime, I'm on the downwind leg of this big project so I'll be brief, but some new odd lots turned up this morning while I was shoveling spam and trying to shake a headache:
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I'm still blasting away on that big Evans Data analysis project, but I'm closing in on it and should be done by Saturday. In the meantime, some odd lots while I catch my breath and sip a Vanilla Diet Pepsi...
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September 30, 2003:
We've chosen
our lighting fixtures, and that was enough to make us crosseyed all by
itself. We happened across an amazing centerpiece fixture for the formal
dining room, which I show at left. It's harmonious with the Mission/Arts
& Crafts style in which we're decorating the house, and the photo
doesn't really do it justice; it's dazzling.
