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From Watts' own blog:

Here at the Sarnia Best Western I don't have the actual statute in front of me but it includes a lengthy grab-bag of actions, things like "assault", "resist", "impede", "threaten", "obstruct" -- hell, "contradict" might be in there for all I know. And under "obstruct" is "failure to comply with a lawful order", and it's explicitly stated that violence on the part of the perp is not necessary for a conviction. Basically, everything from asking "Why?" right up to chain-saw attack falls under the same charge. And it's all a felony.

Making Light put it more caustically:

Peter Watts has been found guilty of being assaulted by a border guard. The actual charge was obstructing a border officer. The other charges were refuted in court, but there remained the fact that Watts, having just been punched twice in the head, did not immediately drop to the ground when ordered to do so, instead asking what the problem was. Apparently, this is a felony.

Your Google-fu is weak my son. Apparently the quote really is from Heinlein's first published story, "Life-Line", written in 1939.

In a third of all fatal accidents where there are two or more people in the vehical and some are wearing seatbelts and some are not, the one that dies is the one WEARING the belt. The one ejected is the one that survives.

Citation needed. Seriously, seriously needed. You're discouraging people from taking a life-and-death safety measure, you need to back it up.

Might there, on rare occasions, be a case where someone who was unbelted would have survived where a belted driver of passenger is killed? Sure. Given enough accidents, all things are possible. But a third of accidents? I'm calling B.S.

You'll notice that professional race drivers, probably the people most familiar with MVAs, wear not just seatbelts but five-point harnesses to ensure they don't get ejected. Here's a nice description of what happens when you don't wear your seatbelt:

In a collision, you have three or four sub-collisions all taking place in sequence. First, the vehicle hits some object. The vehicle abruptly slows, but unrestrained objects inside it continue at the same speed, in the same direction. Then the unrestrained body hits the interior of the vehicle, and starts to slow. That's the second collision. That body's internal organs are still moving at speed until they hit the inside of the chest (or get cheese-sliced by their supporting ligaments--and that's where you get things like bisected livers or aortas). The fourth collision is when your buddy who was riding in the back seat lands on your head, because he wasn't wearing his seatbelt either and he kept moving at the same speed in the same direction. Newtonian physics: Learn it, live it, love it.

There are two major routes that unrestrained persons take in a front-end MVA (Motor Vehicle Accident). Up-and-over or down-and-under (AKA "submarining"). With up-and-over, the upper body launches forward and up. The head strikes the windshield. (This produces the classic "windshield star") Your injuries here include concussion, scalp laceration, and various brain bleeds. You can suspect fractured cervical vertebrae (and if you have a fracture with compromise to the spinal cord at C-4 or higher, you've lost the nerves that control chest expansion and the diaphragm. "C-4, breathe no more," as the saying goes).

Go a little farther through the windshield, and it isn't unexpected to leave some or all of your face behind stuck in the broken glass. You'd be surprised by how easily faces come off the facial bones.

You can also expect fractured wrists, arms, and shoulders, from folks trying to brace themselves.

A little farther through the windshield, all the way out of the vehicle (a situation we call "pre-extracted for your convenience"), and in addition to whatever damage you took on the way through, you get the damage from hitting the ground, trees, and metal poles at however-many-miles-an-hour.

Sure, you hear people talking about wanting to be "thrown clear" in the event of an accident. If you want to simulate being "thrown clear," go to the fifth floor of a building and jump out the window.

It's simple: if you won't wear your goddamn seatbelt, you're too mentally challenged to be permitted to operate a motor vehicle.

I think you're incorrect about Heinlein. If you look at his books, the closest I think he comes is The Moon Is a Harsh Mistress in 1966

While I haven't read it, I've seen recent reviews of Friday that comment on how accurately it foretells the Internet as we have it today. It's not a central part of the book, but just part of the background of the world that it's set in. I've also seen suggestions that For Us, The Living (which I also haven't read), while off in some admittedly important details (like the basic way the technology works) has a worldwide information network with a similar function to the modern Internet. Here's an interesting discussion on the subject.

I hate to tell you hunnie but didn't you get the memo saying that most books were out of print 5 years later these days?

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/007181.html

sure, the handful few superstars would feel the pinch (relate to music industry)

But the MAJORITY of artists would not notice the difference.

here. There aren't perfect answers, unfortunately, but there are some pretty good ones.

As long as they don't all jump at the same time. There was a threat that only the Weekly World News reported that the Chinese wanted to shift the orbit of the earth. Unfortunately, I can't find their full story online, but you can imagine the potential such an effort would have, if properly coordinated.

This is how I find out about 90% of the stuff that I've read in the past several years, and the results have been excellent, IMO. You can start with mine (link above) and the sites it links to, and the sites they link to, etc. Googling for booklogs is a pretty good tactic, as well. The key is to find out what the blogger likes, and look for congruence (or useful contrast) with your own tastes.

I also highly recommend searching through the Open Threads of Making Light, as book recommendations are a frequent topic. The blog itself is hosted by Patrick and Teresa Nielsen Hayden, senior editors at Tor, and SF luminaries are frequent commenters. The community at Scalzi's Whatever is another good place for hunting down SF recommendations, and he frequently has stuff from or about interesting new authors on their works.

Barbara Bauer, described by SFWA as one of the twenty worst literary agents they know of, and who has a history of threatening people who are critical of her and getting ISPs to shut down web sites that are critical of her and claiming her name is her intellectual property and cannot be published without her permission, sued Wikimedia (among others) for repeating some of the above claims about a year ago. But I've heard nothing about the case since. Can anyone comment?

Barbara Bauer, described by SFWA as one of the twenty worst literary agents they know of, and who has a history of threatening people who are critical of her and getting ISPs to shut down web sites that are critical of her and claiming her name is her intellectual property and cannot be published without her permission, sued Wikimedia (among others) for repeating some of the above claims about a year ago. But I've heard nothing about the case since. Can anyone comment?

Barbara Bauer, described by SFWA as one of the twenty worst literary agents they know of, and who has a history of threatening people who are critical of her and getting ISPs to shut down web sites that are critical of her and claiming her name is her intellectual property and cannot be published without her permission, sued Wikimedia (among others) for repeating some of the above claims about a year ago. But I've heard nothing about the case since. Can anyone comment?

And it's Multivac not MULTIVAC!

http://www.scribd.com/doc/3407/The-Last-Question

You know, given the whole scribd / Asimov / Doctorow thing, I'm rather surprised that's still up there.

I wasn't going to watch it but when I did I was amazed at how everyone just treated him as their next news object. I didn't see all the video but you'd think someone would have been kneeling down next to him reassuring him instead of standing over him taking pictures or standing with their hands in their pockets as he was splayed out on the hot parking lot.

  This article is a good reference: http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/008884.html

The doodles in this book bear absolutely no relationship to anything that goes on in real organisms, but after staring at them for a while, I realized what this book is actually about.

This book is a description of the development and evolution of balloon animals.

This is simply the music industry's response to the vanity press. I first saw it commented on here.

The coffee as-poured by McDonalds is ~82 degrees C.

I get 190F = 87C from the source below.

so while she's driving.

She wasn't driving. You know nothing.

The basic summary of the case is this:
"in the ten years prior to Stella's accident, over 700 men, women, and children had been burned by the unsafe McDonald's coffee. For years, McDonald's sold coffee that was "unfit for human consumption", and made $1.3 million dollars a day in profit doing so. Information such as this wasn't really reported by the media. What was reported was the $2.6 million dollar jury verdict.

The jury arrived at that figure by calculating the profit of two-days worth of coffee sales, and "fining" McDonald's that amount to get their attention and make them fix the problem.

It worked. The day after the verdict, McDonald's lowered the coffee temperature to a safe-but-hot 158 degrees. (70C)"

Links:
http://www.corpreform.com/2003/11/more_about_mcdo. html
http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/archives/0058 50.html

Next task: Blow up the centrifuge. So back you go, and weirdly you can't blow up the centrifuge by pumping 40mm grenades into it. You expend all the 40mm grenades on hand. Did anyone think to bring along any C4? No, I thought you packed it! You knew we were going to have to blow up a centrifuge and no one brought any C4? What kind of chickenshit outfit is this? No C4. Oh well. But! Happy thing, just a few rifle rounds makes the centrifuge blow up. Task complete!

Light Saber training should be included within the High School Science Curriculumn.

Absolutely. Only by correct training can a large number of rather gruesome light sabre accidents be avoided.

Some things I know about moderating conversations in virtual space .

Suggestions include:

1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden.

5. Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.

6. Civil speech and impassioned speech are not opposed and mutually exclusive sets. Being interesting trumps any amount of conventional politeness.

Some things I know about moderating conversations in virtual space .

Suggestions include:

1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden.

5. Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.

6. Civil speech and impassioned speech are not opposed and mutually exclusive sets. Being interesting trumps any amount of conventional politeness.

Some things I know about moderating conversations in virtual space .

Suggestions include:

1. There can be no ongoing discourse without some degree of moderation, if only to kill off the hardcore trolls. It takes rather more moderation than that to create a complex, nuanced, civil discourse. If you want that to happen, you have to give of yourself. Providing the space but not tending the conversation is like expecting that your front yard will automatically turn itself into a garden.

5. Over-specific rules are an invitation to people who get off on gaming the system.

6. Civil speech and impassioned speech are not opposed and mutually exclusive sets. Being interesting trumps any amount of conventional politeness.

Signing the contract would have left the writers open to accusations of fraud. Probably the best discussion of Atlanta Nights is at Making Light, the web log of Teresa Nielsen Hayden, noted Tor editor and one of the collaborators on Atlanta Nights. See here and here

Signing the contract would have left the writers open to accusations of fraud. Probably the best discussion of Atlanta Nights is at Making Light, the web log of Teresa Nielsen Hayden, noted Tor editor and one of the collaborators on Atlanta Nights. See here and here

The fulltext is available for free download at Embiid Publishing http://www.embiid.net/books/books.asp?793777024&P= 331&C=0 in Rocket, Windows, or Palm format.

The paperback copy is self-published at Lulu.com. All proceeds go to the Science Fiction and Fantasy Writers of America Emergency Medical Fund.

PublishAmeica isn't going to make one thin dime off this.

More on the story at Making Light http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/

-- Jim Macdonald

Teresa Nielsen Hayden is an editor for Tor. She has deeply covered Atlanta Nights and may have written a chapter.

http://nielsenhayden.com/makinglight/

Yes, I am one of the thirty-odd writers who collectively make up "Travis Tea," a pseudonym (and a pun -- say it outloud). :-)

Here is some background on this wacky collaborative sting project that we cobbled together.

Several months ago, in response to a claim by a certain publisher that writers working in the SF/F genre believe it "does not require believable storylines" or "does not need believable every-day characters," genre writer James D. Macdonald got approximately 40 mostly science fiction and fantasy writers to cobble together an intentionally horrendous monstrosity of a novel (read it here as an FTP download in RTF and PDF format) and then submit it, in order to display the less than discriminating tastes of that same certain publisher in regard to the kind of work they accept for publication.

Earlier last week, the sting has been revealed, the publisher fell for it (retracting the acceptance as soon as news spread, of course), and I proudly own up to having authored Chapter 13 of ATLANTA NIGHTS by Travis Tea .

Here's a bit of an excerpt from my chapter:

"Actually, I think I am ready to order now," said Isadore, firmly ignoring it all, flipping back his red forelocks out of his face and beyond the back to where the bulk of the abundant and suggestive ponytail rested against his wide strongly utterly virile back -- a back that could do the beast with two backs so well, when one of the two backs came into question and under scrutiny (but the other back of course depended on the woman writhing with him, under him and on top of him ah, the beasts they would make!).

Yes, you can even buy your own copy at Lulu.com to read for gut-wrenching hilarity and educational purposes (lessons on how not to write can be derived from the perusal of this book). Here is the stellar lineup of blurbs from the back cover. And that's just the ones that fit the back cover. There are twice as many additional blurbs inside the front matter of the book. Some of them are truly classic....

I predict this will replace THE EYE OF ARGON as midnight panel reading material at science fiction conventions. This book, is purely and genuinely bad. So bad that it's great. In all seriousness, The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest should give it a special achievement prize. :-)

For more detailed coverage, including a list of contributors, of the ATLANTA NIGHTS atrocity -- or should we say, travesty -- see the Cold Ground blog , and Tor Books editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light . ..

Also, looks like the LA Times has picked up the story .

:-)

Vera Nazarian

Yes, I am one of the thirty-odd writers who collectively make up "Travis Tea," a pseudonym (and a pun -- say it outloud). :-)

Here is some background on this wacky collaborative sting project that we cobbled together.

Several months ago, in response to a claim by a certain publisher that writers working in the SF/F genre believe it "does not require believable storylines" or "does not need believable every-day characters," genre writer James D. Macdonald got approximately 40 mostly science fiction and fantasy writers to cobble together an intentionally horrendous monstrosity of a novel (read it here as an FTP download in RTF and PDF format) and then submit it, in order to display the less than discriminating tastes of that same certain publisher in regard to the kind of work they accept for publication.

Earlier last week, the sting has been revealed, the publisher fell for it (retracting the acceptance as soon as news spread, of course), and I proudly own up to having authored Chapter 13 of ATLANTA NIGHTS by Travis Tea .

Here's a bit of an excerpt from my chapter:

"Actually, I think I am ready to order now," said Isadore, firmly ignoring it all, flipping back his red forelocks out of his face and beyond the back to where the bulk of the abundant and suggestive ponytail rested against his wide strongly utterly virile back -- a back that could do the beast with two backs so well, when one of the two backs came into question and under scrutiny (but the other back of course depended on the woman writhing with him, under him and on top of him ah, the beasts they would make!).

Yes, you can even buy your own copy at Lulu.com to read for gut-wrenching hilarity and educational purposes (lessons on how not to write can be derived from the perusal of this book). Here is the stellar lineup of blurbs from the back cover. And that's just the ones that fit the back cover. There are twice as many additional blurbs inside the front matter of the book. Some of them are truly classic....

I predict this will replace THE EYE OF ARGON as midnight panel reading material at science fiction conventions. This book, is purely and genuinely bad. So bad that it's great. In all seriousness, The Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest should give it a special achievement prize. :-)

For more detailed coverage, including a list of contributors, of the ATLANTA NIGHTS atrocity -- or should we say, travesty -- see the Cold Ground blog , and Tor Books editor Teresa Nielsen Hayden's Making Light . ..

Also, looks like the LA Times has picked up the story .

:-)

Vera Nazarian

Raising minimum wage

Minimum wage is a red herring and has been for decades. The minimum wage is, for all intents and purposes, tied to inflation, but only when measured over the long haul. Republicans and Democrats both get tremendous political captial by slinging mud at each other over this "safe" issue. The Democrats demand a huge increase, the Republicans demand no increase. In the end they compromise on a figure that just happens to match inflation.

In the recently Republican-controled congress this has broken down a bit. The Republicans are sort of lost in that they know an increase is required, but they've never had to use their own votes to pass one. This is just a re-adjustment to the new norm, and you'll see the rate go up soon enough.

Issues of "safety" vs "freedom"

Both parties couldn't be less interested in either one. I know of only one congressman who is actively outraged by the concept of extraordinary rendition a bi-partisan concept introduced by Clinton and expanded by Bush whereby suspected terrorists, drug dealers or anyone we can shoe-horn into a dangerous sounding category can be exported to a country where tourture is legal for "questioning". Still like your party?

Various moral issues

No matter how you slice your morality, both Republicans and Democrats have worked hard to flaunt it. Concepts like the one I describe above are just the easiest examples. International influences being allowed to buy executive favor (Clinton, Bush), sex in the oval office (Clinton), drug-running for international influence (Bush Sr.), wholesale invasion of sovreign nations without cause (Reagan, Bush Sr, Clinton, Bush).

The last president with any morality whatsoever was Carter, and Congress was so terrified by this that they wouldn't work with him on a single issue. Then again, I'll take an ineffectual president over one that can "get things done" like Carter's successors.

This was posted TEN WHOLE DAYS ago (08:28 PM:, 15 Oct 2004) at the blog Making Light. Are we gonna let a bunch of Science Fiction writers and editors get away with being nerdier than us?

The Nerdier, Newsier Blog Jonathan Vos Post ::: (view all by) ::: October 15, 2004, 08:28 PM: "... Great equations change the way we perceive the world. They reorchestrate the world -- transforming and reintegrating our perception by redefining what belongs together with what. Light and waves. Energy and mass. Probability and position. And they do so in a way that often seems unexpected and even strange...."

1. Author is functionally illiterate.
2. Author has submitted some variety of literature we don't publish: poetry, religious revelation, political rant, illustrated fanfic, etc.
3. Author has a serious neurochemical disorder, puts all important words into capital letters, and would type out to the margins if MSWord would let him.
4. Author is on bad terms with the Muse of Language. Parts of speech are not what they should be. Confusion-of-motion problems inadvertently generate hideous images. Words are supplanted by their similar-sounding cousins: towed the line, deep-seeded, incentiary, reeking havoc, nearly penultimate, dire straights, viscous/vicious.
5. Author can write basic sentences, but not string them together in any way that adds up to paragraphs.
6. Author has a moderate neurochemical disorder and can't tell when he or she has changed the subject. This greatly facilitates composition, but is hard on comprehension.
7. Author can write passable paragraphs, and has a sufficiently functional plot that readers would notice if you shuffled the chapters into a different order. However, the story and the manner of its telling are alike hackneyed, dull, and pointless.

1. It's nice that the author is working on his/her problems, but the process would be better served by seeing a shrink than by writing novels.
2. Nobody but the author is ever going to care about this dull, flaccid, underperforming book.
3. The book has an engaging plot. Trouble is, it's not the author's, and everybody's already seen that movie/read that book/collected that comic.

1. Someone could publish this book, but we don't see why it should be us.
2. Author is talented, but has written the wrong book.
3. It's a good book, but the house isn't going to get behind it, so if you buy it, it'll just get lost in the shuffle.
4. Buy this book.

His wife and fellow SF editor, Teresa Nielsen Hayden, also has an excellent (and much more heavily-trafficked) blog, Making Light. Both are highly recommended.

Electrolite is a blog by Patrick Nielsen Hayden, one of the leading book editors in the science fiction field. His blog is now almost all Democratic politics, occasionally as seen from an SF fan's perspective but always from a viewpoint of solid common sense.

Leave USENET and go talk to a bookseller -- like the GM or owner of a local bookstore. Odds are that they'll be able to backup my statement.

Booksellers don't decide what's a genre and what isn't. They usually file books according to the genre printed on the back of them (normally just above and to the left of the bar code). So, publishers define the genre. And the publishers are led by their editors.

Here's what one well known editor in the SF field has to say on the matter.

I'll leave people to draw their own conclusions.

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, over at Naking Light , reminisces about multiple BSOD's at the subway station under the World Trade Center:

"The first time I felt like normal life was starting to come back again was when they got the N and R running on their old route, but it's meant we've been commuting through (past? under?) a mass gravesite twice a day. (That was another marker: The first time I didn't smell that burnt-plastic reek as soon as the doors opened at Canal Street.)

"At first and for a long time thereafter, the station was full of heavy upright timber supports, spaced closely together, connected to each other by 4x4 cross-ties and heavy hardware fastenings. They looked like the bottom half of a singularly unfortunate grove. On the platforms on both sides of the station, big hand-lettered signs said DON'T STOP HERE, to keep subway conductors who'd driven that route for decades from automatically making the stop.

"After they'd gotten the roof shored up level again--that downward bulge was profoundly disturbing--the spookiest thing was the farecard machines. They stayed on the whole time. As the months went by, their internal computers crashed, one by one, changing their previous displays to the blue screen of [word left out]. A few times when I passed through the overhead lights were dimmed, and the station was lit by the bluish glow of those screens."

Teresa Nielsen Hayden, over at Naking Light , reminisces about multiple BSOD's at the subway station under the World Trade Center:

"The first time I felt like normal life was starting to come back again was when they got the N and R running on their old route, but it's meant we've been commuting through (past? under?) a mass gravesite twice a day. (That was another marker: The first time I didn't smell that burnt-plastic reek as soon as the doors opened at Canal Street.)

"At first and for a long time thereafter, the station was full of heavy upright timber supports, spaced closely together, connected to each other by 4x4 cross-ties and heavy hardware fastenings. They looked like the bottom half of a singularly unfortunate grove. On the platforms on both sides of the station, big hand-lettered signs said DON'T STOP HERE, to keep subway conductors who'd driven that route for decades from automatically making the stop.

"After they'd gotten the roof shored up level again--that downward bulge was profoundly disturbing--the spookiest thing was the farecard machines. They stayed on the whole time. As the months went by, their internal computers crashed, one by one, changing their previous displays to the blue screen of [word left out]. A few times when I passed through the overhead lights were dimmed, and the station was lit by the bluish glow of those screens."

• Jay Allen's MT-Blacklist" plug-in;
• Simon Willison's Blacklisting Comment Spam;
• Scripty-goddess' Anti-Comment Spam Tactics;
• BurningBird's Comment Spam Quick Fix;
• Kalsey Consulting's ideas on dealing with Comment spam; or
• even my own observations and suggestions on the topic

Separating out the bizarre attacks on Joi Ito for eating lunch, his thesis seems to be that 'A-list bloggers' have hijacked and neutered the phrase from the Anti-war (or anti-Bush) protestors, and swamped Google with this new interpretation.

In fact, the original article he cites (reproduced here) did not contain the phrase 'second superpower'; it had a throwaway rhetorical flourish in the first sentence:
The fracturing of the Western alliance over Iraq and the huge antiwar demonstrations around the world this weekend are reminders that there may still be two superpowers on the planet: the United States and world public opinion.

(Orlowski elides the first part about the Western alliance to support his these that it's all about the street, man).

As he says, this meme circulated about the web a bit, and eventually James Moore explored the idea in more detail, and a broader context than just marching against Bush, combining it with the preceding discussions on 'emergent democracy' that had been going for a while. Of course this gets a higher rank for 'second superpower' - it is in the title, and enough people found it interesting enough to link to.
Instead of a lot of incoherent slogans, here are people discussing how to bring it about.
Orlowski then completely distorts the quote from Patrick Nielsen Hayden I posted to the list. Discussing a report on the very disruptive, street-blocking protests, where protesters in San Francisco, Boston, Washington and elsewhere shouted the same slogan, "This is what democracy looks like!"

Patrick said
No, that's not what democracy looks like.

It's what protest looks like, and it's often the right thing to do. And of course "democracy" had better entail significant tolerance of unruly protest, or it's not very democratic.

But that slogan is stupid, even by the standards of slogans. Long and often boring meetings are what democracy looks like. Tiresome horse-trading is what democracy looks like. Talking to your neighbors is what democracy looks like.

Democracy can function perfectly well without people painting their faces and blocking streets. It can't function at all without that other stuff.

The emergent democracy group is about how to build tools and structures to capture democratic intent in a digital world. If you're interested in this, join in.

Perhaps what Orlowski is really worried about is that a group who aren't part of the clerisy of professional Journalists and activists are taking an interest, and actually discussing ideas calmly and rationally, and thereby attracting links from other people, Doc and Dave earned their high Google ranking by writing lots of things that people found interesting enough to link to, day after day for over 5 years.

Andrew, if you have interesting things to say about the future of democracy, join the discussion, but don't troll for cheap links by stooping to selective quotation and ad hominem attacks.

[Crichton is] forever describing things that could change the world--but don't. The Andromeda strain of space germs mutates into harmlessness and goes away; the lost city of the Congo is wiped from the map by lava; in Sphere, the discoverers of the extraterrestrial artifact of untold power use that power to wish it into retroactive nonexistence. The fact that Crichton has no interest in showing what might have happened is what makes him a writer of suspense fiction, rather than of science fiction. A science-fiction writer would naturally want to see what would happen if the technologies stayed out of control (as most do), and might even want to ask whether the consequences would be all bad (as they often aren't). Might not free-range dinosaurs make Costa Rica an even more interesting place than it is today? What if nanoswarms offered promise as well as peril? Prey, with its kill-them-all-and-get-out approach, is neither as frightening nor as fascinating as Greg Bear's novelette of twenty years ago, "Blood Music," in which the characters, transformed by the nanotechnology within them, become both far more and much less than human.

It seems to me that the toughest thing facing an author today is an industry that's going to ask for one compromise after another

That's crap. Good editors -- and there are plenty of them out there -- are a writer's best friend, where the quality of the work is concerned. (They may not be where the money's concerned, but that's why you have an agent. Which you don't need until you already have an unsigned contract in your hand, by the way.)

The toughest thing facing an aspiring author today is getting the damn book written. (All of you would-be writers in this forum wondering if Xlibris would be the way to go if, as, and when you get around to writing that book are putting the cart before the horse.)

The second toughest thing is writing a good book. Interestingly, probably 95% of the aspiring writers and up-and-coming writers I've met fall into one of two categories: Either they write really well but don't get much done, or they already have two manuscript the size of phone books that they're trying to get published, and they're crap. (The other 5% are Tim Pratt, who doesn't seem to have either problem.)

Writers of the first sort have trouble because their drive for quality makes them spend more time on their stuff, more time revising, and even yet still more time throwing it out and starting over. ("Writer's block isn't not being able to write. It's thinking that everything you write is shit." -- Maureen McHugh)

Writers of the second sort have trouble because they don't understand why they can't sell their stuff, and so they blame the editors, the publishers, the slush pile readers and the reading public, instead of putting the blame where it belongs: on themselves, for not working to improve their writing.

(P.S. Yes, IAAPW. Barely. But ask one who's been around a while. You'll get the same answer.)

Doc Searls has some interesting points on Nielsen Hayden's site (scroll down or just read it copied below):

Regular radio pays fees to ASCAP and BMI that go to composers, not to performers. And they are based on a station's revenues, not on a per-play/per-listener basis.

There is little or no copyright burden on ordinary radio. You pay nothing for what you hear on your city's KISS-FM station, and that station pays nothing except to composers. Generally they get the records for free ("for promotional puposes only" it says on the CD) from the record companies, or for a fee from some other service.

There is no equivalent between the burden placed on regular radio by current regulations and that placed on Internet radio by the CARP/LOC regulations. The burden on Internet radio -- in fees, in reporting, in every other respect, is stuff NEVER experienced by ordinary radio. If somebody ever even thought of bringing them up in Congress, the NAB and its legislative tools would squash it like a bug.

But Internet radio got lined up for execution because the DMCA, under pressure from a paranoid entertainment industry, characterized webcasting -- then still very young -- as something other than radio: as a "performance" delivery system, kind of like a digital venue -- a virtual club.

This characterization was born of the fear that eventually digital copies would in fact be "perfect" copies of a performance, and that therefore the artist should be compensated on a per-listen basis.

Then the DMCA based fee guidance on a "willing buyer/willing seller" concept wrapped in fuzzy and circuitous guidance language which was based in turn on the assumption that the only thing close to webcasting in prior reality was commercial radio, which has no such thing as a "willing buyer/willing seller" relationship with its audience -- only with its advertisers, which is irrelevant.

The DMCA authors ignored the example of public radio, which *does* have a seller/buyer relationship with its audience (who are customers, or at least in that position). The authors also ignored the existing webcasting successes on the Net itself, which include KPIG (which sold advertising at a higher rate because it had this bonus 2000+ people all over the world at any time, listening live) and countless other stations that put out a PayPal tip jar that collects up to $3000 and more a month in some cases.

Of course, most of these first economic models for the industry hadn't yet happened while the CARP was meeting, so they missed it. Why pause to actually observe an industry in the midst of birth? Hell, why even invite them to a meeting?

Nearly none of the major webcasters (KPIG, WCPE, Radio Paradise, SomaFM, etc.) were invited to the hearings. Live365 was, and apparently botched it by submitting and rescinding testimony, according to one RIAA guy. (That story is in Salon.)

So the CARP panel based their fees on the Yahoo example, which was worked out by Mark Cuban before he sold Broadcast.com to Yahoo for $5.7 billion in stock that he later unloaded way before the crash. Now he's known for buying big toys that most famously include the Dallas Mavericks.

Mark's plans for Broadcast.com were to scam the feds into helping him drive the small fry out of the market. He'd do that by negotiating a per-stream deal of some kind, rather than a percentage of revenue deal. That's because percentage of revenue would favor the small guys who had no revenue. Fair enough, but his scam was to agree to charges on a per-stream basis, and then multicast all the streams through one porthole, so it would be charged as just one. That porthole never got done, and was under wraps when the "Yahoo deal" was negotiated. And Yahoo has since dropped out of the radio business (wasting the whole $5.7 bil), making the CARP rationale even more absurd than it already was.

Most of this, including a highly disclosing email from Mark Cuban, is archived at RAIN.

NPR claims to be reconsidering its link policy, and in the meantime, it's posted more specious rationalization. Brutally, brutally stupid.

The policy was originally intended to maintain NPR's commitment to independent, noncommercial journalism. We have encountered instances where companies and individuals constructed entire commercial Web "radio" sites based on links to NPR and similar audio. We have also encountered Web sites of issue advocacy groups that have positioned the audio link to an NPR story such that one cannot tell that NPR is not supporting their cause. This is not acceptable to NPR as an organization dedicated to the highest journalistic ethics, both in fact and appearance.

However, NPR also recognizes that the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement. We are working on a solution that we believe will better match the expectations of the Web community with the interests of NPR. We will post revisions soon at www.npr.org.

Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited. If you would like to link to NPR from your Web site, please fill out the link permission request form.

• The policy was originally intended to maintain NPR's commitment to independent, noncommercial journalism.

  This policy does not serve this commitment. The end-product of independent, noncommercial journalism is public discourse, which on the Web takes the form of links. If you're committed to journalism, you must endorse linking.

• We have encountered instances where companies and individuals constructed entire commercial Web "radio" sites based on links to NPR and similar audio.

  Was this infringement? If so, why didn't you seek redress in the courts? It's my opinion that someone who constructs a directory -- commerical or non-commercial -- of references to locations on the web no more infringes than someone who produces a tourist map to a city that marks the location of major attractions.

• We have also encountered Web sites of issue advocacy groups that have positioned the audio link to an NPR story such that one cannot tell that NPR is not supporting their cause.

  You are lying. There is no way that one could link to a stream of a fair and impartial newscast (links to streams must be to the whole stream, from beginning to end, remember) such that it can't be distinguished from advocacy or opinion. If there were NPR stories that were indistinguishable from advocacy, this indicates that the NPR stories were not impartial to begin with.

• This is not acceptable to NPR as an organization dedicated to the highest journalistic ethics, both in fact and appearance.

  No other journalistic organization of note has a parallel policy (NPR's ombudsman's defamatory fabrications about CBC and BBC notwithstanding). The idea that linking must not be permitted because it would compromise the appearance or fact of ethics is a fantasy concocted by NPR's representatives.

• NPR also recognizes that the majority of the linking on the Web is not infringement.

  How grand of you. All linking on the web is not infringement. The recititation of public facts -- this document exists at this location -- is never an infringment. Promulgating this myth is purely wrong, especially from a journalistic organization that prides itself on its ability to seek out and deliver the truth.

• Linking to or framing of any material on this site without the prior written consent of NPR is prohibited.

  In the words of Patrick Nielsen Hayden, "Of course, it isn't 'prohibited.' Or rather, it's 'prohibited' with exactly the same legal force as I have when I say 'False legal claims designed to intimidate the public are hereby prohibited. Signed, Me.' This is the web. If you put a public document onto it, it's linkable. If you don't want to be linked to, use some other means of putting your information online."