Those who'd like to all the objections, as well as a much smaller number of filings in support, can find them at The Public Index, which is run by the New York Law School: http://thepublicindex.org/documents/responses
Filings in opposition tend to be substantial and weighty, citing both U.S. and international copyright law. Filings in favor tend to be of the "Gee, I like free books" sort. The most substantial of them is probably that from Sony, which is 20 pages long and filed by a NYC law firm, but, with one exception, it doesn't deal with the issues of copyright. Here's the closest Sony comes to admitting that authors have rights.
"The non-exclusivity provision of the Settlement--which makes plain that that the right given to Google do not permit copyright holders or the Registry itself from licensing e-book right to others--ensure that healthy, price-driven competition will remain after the Settlement is approved."
Yes, you read it right. The Google settlement gives Google and Google alone the right to display online for profit the contents of any book first published anywhere in the world since 1922 without the author's knowledge or consent unless they formally opted out by last Friday, September 4, 2009. Just heard about that? Tough luck. You've been screwed by Google with Sony's warm approval.
And to add insult to considerable injury, Google and Sony purr that Google's right is non-exclusive. What does that mean? Having brushed aside an author's copyright, they say, "Oh, well. We don't care if you sell someone else the right to publish your book. That is, if that someone else can compete with free." Under copyright law, of course, Google has no right to publish a book at all without the author's permission. They have no rights at all, much less exclusive rights. That's a good indication of ethically and legally clueless Google and Sony are.
Until I read this document, I felt sorry for Sony. They used to be so popular, now that aren't. But it helps to remember that much of their failure came from an obsession with protecting the copyrighted music they own. Now, in their zeal to sell their ebook readers, they're helping Google stomp on the copyright of several million authors. Color them hypocrites, very big hypocrites.
I no longer feel sorry for Sony. If they languish in obscurity, they're only getting what they deserve. Sony can't zealous defend their own copyrights by every nasty means available and run roughshod over the copyrights of others without deservedly getting sneered at.
The basic premise of the Google settlement is that any book not "commercially available" is effectively out of copyright. How would Sony feel if music fans regarded any music not available commercially at the moment as effectively out of copyright? That's what we are talking about here.
Apple has got me so ticked off, I'll probably put my energy into getting a 1-G iPhone cheap and forget buying these ho-hum iPod touches. That way, Apple won't get a penny and I'll probably save money.
I need a camera, and I need a mike and I don't want to pay AT&T fees. I also need them soon. I thought I would get that in the new touches. Instead, Apple is giving the tiny Nano more features but not the iPod touch. Why? With that tiny 2.2-inch Nano screen you can't see much of what you've taken and the equally tiny battery isn't likely to last long in video mode.
What's going on? If Apple has production problems with camera-equipped touches, they should say so, give us the details of new touch, and a release date. This cult of secrecy is such a pain. You'd think they were the Kremlin circa 1935. Both have a cult-like obsession with not admitting mistakes.
Still worse is the possibility that Apple wants to build high walls between its products, doling out features in odd ways to fit a marketing straight-jacket. The iPhone would be for work and business for those with the money. The touch is for games but not recreation, hence the lack of a camera and the boring length of game promotion today. Color touch users fat and flabby couch potatoes. The Nano is for mostly outdoor recreation (camera and Nike added), but has nothing that lets you get work done. If so, it's stupid move.
To add insult to injury, I just checked the specs on the new touches. The 8 gig model ships with the old-style earphones not the remote earphones and without a plastic dock adapter. Total saving for Apple? Probably about 25 to 50 cents. Cost to customers who don't want to pull their touch out of their pocket every time they pause music: $30 That stinks. Heck, even the cheap little $59 Shuttle ships with remote earphones. While Jobs was gone, the niggling little bean counters seem to have been running Apple. This is the unfortunate result.
I hate companies that treat their customers as if they were stupid, and that's precisely how I feel Apple is treating its customers now.
For those who're following the debate about the Google settlement, I'm documents related to the case along with links to useful sources of information, particularly news about the settlement from Europe.
I'd agree with Bluestone's remarks and add some of my own.
First, an always running updater is a security hole of the first order. Gain access to it, and someone malicious could do anything it could do, meaning alter applications without our knowledge.
Second, there's in this the now-typical Google 'we rule the world' attitude in this--much like that at Microsoft fifteen years ago. Why should Goggle applications has an always running updater while other don't? Not even Apple makes that sort of demands and OS X is one heck of a lot more important to a Mac than anything Google might do.
Third, CmdrTaco is being naive if he thinks open sourcing an abomination leads to the "obvious conclusion" that it's to be trusted. He forgets that the danger lies in the code that's being downloaded, not the code that is doing the downloading. It's the idea itself that's bad not the implementation.
Finally, what does Google intend this open sourcing to do? Do they want every application on our computer to have an auto-update-without-asking running continually in the background? Bad as what Google is doing, that'd be an even worse horror. And like Google, they're not likely to tell us what they're doing.
I believe it was the philosopher Kant who offered as a moral test the question, "What would the world be like if everyone did this?" One person lying doesn't usually do much harm. Everyone lying would make life almost unbearable.
Having every application behaving like Google's would be an utter disaster. Open-sourcing Google's code makes as much sense as marketing a "Do It Yourself A-Bomb Kit" in the Middle East. The malicious genie is out of the bottle. Now we have to consider the possibility that every obscure application we download contains Google's dastardly code. A seemingly benign application could mutate on command into a monster. And because it spreads any time we're online, it could spread like wildfire. Google doesn't even seem to have been thinking when they came up with open-sourcing their monster.
What the Greeks called hubris, overweening pride, has struck again. Google has replaced Microsoft as the giant, high-tech business that seems most clueless about the distinction between good and evil, sensible and foolish. They censored the Internet for China, they claimed to own every book not in print, and now they want to determine what's on our computers without our consent and without our knowledge.
This is very interesting. I worked at Eglin AFB from 1966-68, part of that time at a radar site (A-20) that provided radar tracking during the Mercury and Gemini projects. One of our FPS-16 radars would take up the track of a spacecraft from a radar at White Sands and pass it on to one at Cape Kennedy. During reentry into the Atlantic, our track was particularly important because the craft was often so far into reentry that the on-board beacon was difficult to track by the time it appeared over the horizon for Cape Kennedy.
A few weeks before each mission, NASA would put the upper stage of an Atlas into orbit, so the range could practice by skin tracking it (no beacon transmitter responding). The NASA crew chief told me, with quite a bit of pride, of one such launch, where on the first orbit the radar in Africa, Australia, Hawaii (I believe) and White Sands couldn't pick up that upper stage. The radar at A-20 not only picked it up, it picked it up as it broke over the radar horizon some 1200 miles. out.
Now to the interesting part. We had an Ampex video recorder (S/N 32) in a back wall in data processing that, as best I can remember, looked precisely like the one they're using to recover that long-ago data. We used it only occasionally to capture radar data during ECM missions. I can't recall it ever being used during a NASA mention though. What mattered then was the digital position data, which with an FPS-16 is extremely accurate.
That said, it would be interesting if a historical link did exist a USAF radar site used by NASA and the recorder now being used to recover that data.
There's a more detailed account of recovering this data at:
Ggogle might also want to fund making another Adobe product, Framemaker, run well under Wine/Codeweavers. It's the best long-document application on the market and Adobe, for reasons of their own, dropped the Mac version and quit developing the Linux version.
'If Google's multi-lens camera cars come to Europe and inadvertently find themselves taking pictures of persons leaving a church or sexual health clinic, they may just need to pull over and start picking up signatures.'"
So if I'm in Paris and take a picture of Notre Dame that just happens to catch some well-known atheist leaving, and (unknowingly) post it to a blog, I'm is serious legal trouble? How absurd. I always thought Europe had way too many laws. This only confirms that impression.
What Google is doing has a lot of people (particularly women) understandably upset, but from what I've hear it's no more illegal here than all the satellite photos they've been posting for several years. If our laws made what Google's doing illegal, they'd also be making most outdoor photography illegal. (How do you take a picture outside without including some stranger in it?) Europeans, particularly those in Belgium and Northern Germany, may like a "What is not mandatory is illegal" mindset--the infamous attitude of the Prussians--but I'm not sure most people in the US will.
This is another clever move by Apple. They've also made the next OS version more iTunes like. Now with both iTunes and Safari teaching people to handle a Mac-like interface, moving from Windows to OS X will be much, much easier.
In the late 90s, Apple had to ship IE as the default browser on all Macs to keep Microsoft happy. Now Apple can move on to Microsoft's turf with a browser for Windows and there's nothing Microsoft can do about it.
Apple could improve their security user interface by adding a Security pull-down to the Apple menu. It'd let users easily turn on/off administrator privileges, WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet (none, local, Internet), camera, and mike. Anything that's a security hazard should be easy to disable utterly and completely.
Make locking the door easy, and you make intrusion hard.
I wouldn't sweat the lack of "gotcha' features. Before 10.3, Apple's OS X was rather dull and before 10.2, it had a lot of rough edges. With 10.4, Apple got to the point where adding "gotcha" features was easy. Vista is roughly at the 10.1 or 10.2 stage. Time will demonstrate whether Microsoft can get to a point where they can bring in some clever innovations. The ability of Vista to use a flash drive to speed up virtual memory demonstrates that they can. Those who've used it say it speeds up applications quite a bit and it's something Apple has yet to announce for OS X. Mac users need to harass Apple about that. Copying should be a two-way street.
The focus on enterprise customers is a more serious problem. It parallels my gripe with Adobe about InDesign. In design work, the big guys are newspapers and graphics-rich four-color magazines. InDesign enhancements have focused on their needs and not the more mundane needs of small publishers like myself. Forget a category of client, and you can loose those clients. But even there, Microsoft will be forced to change or see its small and home business clients migrate to Macs (and yet more servers to Linux). That would give Macs a better selection of business-related software and that software might, in turn, open doors in larger and larger businesses.
Competition is good. Apple and Linux are both positioned to keep Microsoft from getting too fat and happy or, if it does, to keep Microsoft from dominating a market it's taken for granted.
So what. Every single one of the scientists trumpeting global warming is not only being offered money, he is being paid money, lots of money, to do his research. That's the dastardly evil of the grants system. It makes people lie to get and keep grants. And it influences the research they do.
I know. I got out of a modest medical research group in part because I was digusted with how poorly done and useless most of the research was that I didn't want to be part of a month off from research to write proposals to get the government to throw more money at the same sorts of projects. In my case, there seems to have been enough sense in the system that they didn't get the grants and had to close down the group.
But generate the proper hysteria, and scientists can keep the monies flowing in.
This is a scam. That's why climatologists gather from all over the world for conferences in climate conditioned hotels. It's why the celebrities hyping global warming fly about in large private jets that generate 10,000 pounds of CO2 an hour. It's why, like Barbara Stressland, they live in huge climate-conditioned homes. They know it's all about lording it over ordinary people, that an elite such as themselves doesn't have to play by the rules, and that the warnings are really a scam.
You're being had. This is a scam just like eugenics and the population bomb. And it's being promoted by precisely the same people: rich liberals and progressives, newspapers like the NY Times, and scientists. Get over your idea that science is about facts. A century ago, scientists were convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Italians and Russian Jews coming to this country were 'feebleminded' and unfit to be citizens in a democracy. Learned books were written on the subject, someone even suggested a Broadway play on it. The NY Times called it a "wonderful new science" and trashed anyone who said otherwise.
It was religious fanatics (meaning Catholic leaders) and ordinary business men who opposed the idea. The latter knew quite well that these immigrants were good workers and posed no threat. And take note of the fact that one of the chief proponents of those sorts of ideas, Planned Parenthood (then called the American Birth Control League) remains the darling of the liberal media. That's an indication of just how respectable eugenics was. Even the discrediting of eugenics didn't discredit its champions.
Do not believe scientists when they get like these. There's something about science that, roughly every generation, sends one branch off into a lemming-like madness. It's happened before. It's happening again. About 2030-2040, there'll be another one. Get ready for it and get ready to fight it.
And I might add that this deception is all-too-obvious. Climate change is going on all the time and always creates benefits and problems. All the climate news coming out of these fear mongers is negative. That's a clue that you're being manipulated. And why is no one pointing out that our last warm period, Europe from 1000 to 1300, was marvelous. Greenland really was green and grapes could be grown in England and Nova Scotia (Vineland). As climatic trends go, warming is much better than cooling.
Remember it's con men who paint exaggerated scenarios. Do as I suggest, they say, and all will be wonderful. Don't do as I suggest, and all will be dreadful. Honest people don't talk that way because life isn't that way.
We are being duped and in a decade or so, that will be all too obvious. That's why the rush to do something before the facts overtake the hype. Once these nasty little laws go on the books, they'll be as hard to change as legalized abortion, the primary product of the population explosion hysteria (and really driven by liberal fears about high birthrates among poor blacks).
When someone tries to manufacture a hysteria, stop, take a deep breath and do the one thing they do not want you to do--think.
Good. History is repeating itself. Every generation or so science "goes off the rails" and develops crazy "the sky if falling ideas." Eugenics and a "population explosion" with global famines were all trumpted by prominent scientists in prestigious journals just like global warming is today. It's about as credible.
Since the scientist who still have sense tend to hunker down and mutter cautious little statements about "not going to fast," there is a brief period in which politics has to get involved, telling the scientist to stop their silly chatter. Interestingly, for eugenics and the population explosion it was mostly religious people, particularly Catholics, who pressured the politicians to keep the scientific community from getting what it wanted--the ability to sterilize anyone from groups they didn't like. (There's no bigot like a scientific one.) I document all that in infinite detail in my The Pivot of Civlization in Historical Perspective. Read it if you want to discover just how racist the Ivy League colleges can be and why.
Sometimes, of course, the hysteria moves so fast, that efforts to block what scientists are doing comes too late. The furor over a population explosion was an obvious hoax. After the birth control pill hit the market in 1960s, US birthrates began to plumet AMONG WHITES. They did not drop nearly so fast among the black underclass, hence the real source of alarm for both population scientists (who're Darwinian to the core--many in the 1960s were rebranded eugenists) and liberals, who don't like blacks as much as they pretend. I once had a liberal English professor and supporter of Planned Parenthood point at a young black man nearby and whisper, "That's why we need legalized abortion." Exactly.
There are all sorts of similarly nasty agendas behind the global warming hysteria. Europe wants to stomp on a US economy that's far more robust than their own, hence their zeal for Kelo. And those who used to trumpet socialism now conceal it behind environmentalism. In Europe, they're called watermelons--green on the outside, red inside. It's the same old game of regiment the masses and keep them serfs.
And there are the pitiful folks in white coats who're part of all this. All their lives they've labored in obscurity, begging for tiny little federal grants. Hyping global warming gets them on CNN and gives them the keys to lots of grants. If you think scientists have too much integrity to do that sort of thing, you've not seen them chasing after research grants.
A lot of harm results if these people aren't blocked until the hysteria fades. Eugenics resulted in tens of thousands of poor people being sterilized, but it never achieved it's real goal, which Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger hinted in her Pivot of Civilization was forcibly sterilizing 10% of the US population (particularly recent immigrants). And the population explosion hysteria did get two of its goals, federally funded "family planning" (particularly for blacks and Hispanics) and legalized abortion (particularly for you know who). But it didn't get its ultimate goal, forcing religious, middle-class families to not have more than two kids, under penality of horrible taxation. That's why they are so paranoid about the "religious right."
Remember, many these scientists are way out on a limb. They're making predictions that'll be laughable in a couple of decades. Apparently, it's creating a split in the climatic sciences. Younger scientists know the data isn't there to back up the claims being made and are fearful they'll spend their lives in a discredited profession. (Who today claims to be in population studies? In 1970, it was the height of cool. Ditto eugenics, which in 1912 the NY Times called a "wonderful new science.") The older scientists, who'll soon retire with their pensions fattened by all those research grants, don't care. The younger ones do.
So keep in mind what this is. It's an attempt to keep this hysteria from becoming policy long enough for the facts to make it clea
I quote: "Neither article quite says that some responsibility must fall to the administration's footdragging on global warming."
Every so often the "scientific community" goes wacky, typically aided and abetted by the hysteria prone portions of the media, and a left eager to increase its power. This is one of those cases.
1. In the late 1800s, it was the alleged superiority of people from northern and western Europe over everyone else. They were the civilizers, everyone else was trash. In the US, it was popular at places such as Harvard and inspired the drive for immigration restrictions that kept out Italians and Russian Jews. In Europe, it was championed by German professors such as Ernst Hackel (Darwin's counterpart in Germany) and led to all the nasty stuff about Aryan supremacy. I'm editing a collection of G. K. Chesterton articles written during WWI, and he's all over German academia for that foul idea. Only later did it move from the universities to politics and the result was Nazism.
2. In the early 1900s, the scientific hysteria of choice was eugenics, tooted as a "marvelous new science" in 1912 by the NY Times. Progressives and liberals thought state-controlled breeding was a wonderful idea (though they were careful not to say that very loudly). The primary critics were reactionaries such as Catholics. The result was the 1927 Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell, which claimed that forced sterilization was constitutional. That decision would be referenced favorably in the 1972 Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion.
3. In the 1960s it was the Population Bomb, made credible by being championed by Science magazine and others. In the midst of plumeting birthrates in industrialized world, population controllers told us we were having too many people. What we were having was too many black and brown babies for the likes of the eugenicists who were now calling themselves population controllers. The result is a disaster, with all the major developed countries except the US having birthrates so low, they will not be able to sustain their social support systems over the next few decades. The Population Bomb was an Evil Idea that became in effect a Really Dumb Idea. Ideas matter, bad ideas harm, really bad ideas do a lot of harm.
4. In the 1970s, we had a fizzle. Global cooling was the danger the scientific community was alleging. The goal was like all the others, to give scientists a chance to kick people around. Every so over those bookish nerds in white coats get the urge to "kick ass" with unfortunate results.
5. Now we have yet another scientific hysteria, global warning, with all the usual suspects involved--scientists wanting power, a hysterical media, the political left needing an excuse to regiment and, of course the ignorant little twits who, like H. G. Wells, worship a science they know little about and actually believe the propaganda. (Slashdot is full of them.)
Except for #1, whose success came too late to keep out millions of people from Italy, Russia and Poland, and #3, which cheated by getting an edict from the Supreme Court, these hysterias, while they did a lot of harm, weren't able to achieve their intended agendas. #1 and #3 wanted the state to dictate who could have children. Catholics kept that from happening, which is why liberals hate the old fashioned kind of Catholicism.
All the fuss about global warming is simply hysteria. You see that in the numerous inaccuracies (i.e. sea level rise in Gore's book). You see it in efforts to paint everything bad, when climate changes always have both good and bad effects. You see it in contorted efforts to blame what's probably a natural effect into something we (particularly the US) is doing. If people aren't doing it, they you can't kick people around. You see it in the concealment of history, such as the fact that a 1000-1300 AD warming period was marvelous for Europe.
So, if the Bush administration is foot-dragging on this, more power to them. Hysteria and lies, particularly those that claim to be sci
This CNN reporter, like many of her colleagues, is utterlessly clueless, knowing about as much about this topic as a reporter who'd breathelessly report, circa 1925, that Oldsmobile had a revolutionary new factory that would turn out a new invention called the automobile, powered by gasoline, which would replace the horse and buggy. Notice the use of "legendary" to describe a flesh-and-blood person, Jason Epstein. That's a good indication of a fluff-headed, hysteria-inclined journalist. King Arthur is legendary. Epstein isn't.
This technology has been around and in wide use for years. Print on Demand has trade journals and is a routine part of publishing today. Tens of thousands of the books you find on Amazon are POD books. Some publishing companies, including my own, are built around a POD model. One printing company, Lightning Source, where I do business, recently upped its POD production capacity from one to three million books a month. Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge University presses all release some scholarly works POD and have for years.
True, there hasn't been much effort to put the machinery into bookstores or libraries, but that's merely a matter of economics and quality. Will there be enough demand to cover the cost of this $50,000 machine and its maintenance? Will the books be reasonably priced and not poor quality? Think of all the troubles you have had with copy machines in libraries. This machine is far more complex, so how likely is it to be well maintained? POD books can look quite good, as good in quality as most traditionally published books. But that's because they're printed in factories with experienced staff overseeing far larger and more expensive machinery. An economy of scale keeps the quality high and the cost low.
Don't be so quick to believe what you hear from news outlets such as CNN.
Imagine you're in a tight spot and your only communication tool is a radio with a dead mike or a flashlight, not an unimaginable situation. If you don't know Morse code, you're not only in trouble, you're likely to end up dead. Morse or something like Morse (such as the code used by Vietnam War POWs) will always be useful.
Personally, I think rudimentary Morse code, along with basic hand signing and a useful second language such as Spanish ought to be a requirement for all high school diplomas. If you don't learn it, you'll be stuck flipping burgers.
But then I think students should actually learn something in high school, a radical idea that apparently runs contrary to what most public schools in this country think "education" is all about. No dodge ball in grade school, it might hurt someone's self-esteem. No courses that take effort in high school, again it might hurt someone's self-esteem. Yes, we can't do anything that might reveal that some of us are lazy and stupid can we? You see that in the whinning posts here. "Oh," they say, "it actually takes effort to learn the code. I can't stand that sort of thing. Trying to think sets my head all abuzzing."
I might add that Morse code can be very useful today. Tests have shown that people can text message far faster with it than with the kludgy keys sequencies used on cell phones. And the folks who designed Morse code were smart. Vowels that are such a burden to enter with a cell phone that they're left out are a snap in Morse code. E is a dit. T is a dah. You can enter them in a flash.
And despite what they taught you by implication in publik schul, you're not dumb. You can pick it up in a few weeks using easily available software.
These children would be much better off if this money were used to fund talented local teachers and sturdy, good-for-kids books. The teachers would be better than any machine. The books can be read anywhere and would last for decades.
This is a joke, right? He can't really be serious. He meant to announce this last spring as an "April's Fool joke but forgot.
Look at the sad shape Microsoft is in once the feds stripped them of their ability to use their monopoly power to bully. The stock is stuck where it was years ago. Vista is coming out years late and devoid of once-promised features. Do we really want a President who'll take until 2010 to ready the 2008 budget? A President who'll threaten to end trade with Canada over some minor fishing dispute? (That's the equivalent of how Microsoft 'negotiated' with IBM.) One that will offer a 'vaporware' solution to Islamic terrorism? Someone that will give us 'fireside' chats looking at the ceiling and rocking mechanically like someone with autism?
No, Gates is the only famous American around who'd make a worse President than Jimmy Carter--and that's saying a lot.
From when I first heard about this product, I've been complaining that the authors of the idea are clueless. Low-cost computers would do more good placed in the hands of parents, where they might increase village productivity and household income. The kids themselves would be better served by a good teacher, inexpensive books, blank paper and pencils.
I suspect the idea's supporters are trying to replicate their youthful experiences in affluent suburbs. Top=down benevolence often works that way.
This report is foul. The mainstream media apparently regards itself as above criticism and would deny the First Amendment to anyone, in government or not, who dares to criticize them. They're not against censorship, they merely want to be the censors, banning the rest of us from criticizing them. That's why they hate Fox News and why any criticism from the Bush administration, no matter how well deserved, ties them in knots.
And we need to translate "not revealing their sources" into what it really means. In areas where keeping silent is legal, something is not being said. A lawyer is not revealing what his client told him, a person is not forced to testify against himself, a priest doesn't violate the confessional. No lie is being said. The truth merely can't be discovered by a certain path because it would violate principles that are very important.
But a news media that can conceal their sources is a news media that can (and clearly does) broadcast their lies to tens of millions of people. It's a license not to keep silent but to lie on an enormous scale and not be held accountable by revealing a source whose credibility we can then judge. That's foul and that's precisely why the media wants this right. They want to conceal often dubious sources from us.
CBS Memogate is a good example. Thanks to a fax number printed on the alleged memos, Internet blogs were able to track down the source. Dan Rather had told us his source was "highly credible." He turned out to be someone who'd been under psychiatric care, someone with an ugly vendetta against Bush, and someone so screwed up, the Texas Democratic party didn't want to have anything to do with him. That is why "we the people" need to know these sources. We can never, never trust the news media's claims about their sources. When it suits their purposes, they lie.
We also need to get one thing very, very clear. Our freedoms, our rights, our liberties do not depend on on the mainstream press or professional journalists. Many of them lack the objectivity, the integrity and often the intelligence to give us the news fair and balanced. The more power they get with exceptions from legal responsibility, the less safe we are as citizens. They can and do distort the political process, searching after dirt on people with one point of view, while concealing the serious crimes of those whose politics are different. Justice Clarence Thomas, a black conservative, was ruthlessly pursued because of poorly supported allegations that he talked 'potty mouth' on a few occasions. Highly credible charges by a woman (and a Democrat) who ran nursing homes that Bill Clinton raped her were dismissed and got little play.
That is the press that in this country has such an inflated opinion of itself and that wants "rights" against criticism and legal accountability that are denied to the rest of us.
--Michael W. Perry, Editor of The School of Journalism by Joseph Pulitzer
I've just downloaded the study and haven't read it, but I can already see a number of classic pitfalls.
1. First the timing of more cable with the increased diagnosis of autism may be a coincidence. For a one-or-two year-olds, cable doesn't mean more to watch. There's almost no programming for that age, unless there is a round-the-clock Teletubies channel I've not heard about.
2. They may be confusing cause and effect. I worked with austistic children. They're not stimulated by contact with other people like ordinary children, but they are often attracted by repetitive patterns of light of the sort a small child might find on TV. As a result, the parents might have been more likely to put them in front of a TV as a pacifier.( And that might have even made the child's autistic tendencies worse.) In such a case, TV was not so much the cause as a diagnostic sign.
I'll see if the authors deal with those problems in their paper. It's hard to believe that they don't.
And TV addicts shouldn't get all in a dither about this. At most, this just means that parents shouldn't put little baby Johnny down in front of a TV. It's not going to turn a 22=year-old into an austitic.
Ah yes, here's why Slashdot slants the stories it posts as badly as the NY Times or even the now departed Dan Rather at CBS, with this post OK'd by none other than Cmdr Taco himself. Warmed over sixties hysteria about a "population bomb." Warmed over seventies hysteria about garbage burying us. He'd even be hysterical, eighties style, about WWIII, if He Who Must Not Be Named (Reagan) hadn't put Soviet Communism into history's dustbin. Does the guy ever think? And does he ever read anything that doesn't confirm his hysterical, the sky is falling, hate-the U.S. mindset?
Nary a word about the real fact that the long-term birthrate in the U.S., helped by immigration, is just barely at the replacement level, meaning our baby boom will be able to retire without Social Security going bust--if we get medical costs under control. Not a word about all the good the U.S. does in the world while most Europeans pick their noses and whine.
And there's no indication that this cluesless ideologue is aware of a major crisis that is undeniable--the well-below replacement birthrates of Europeans that's driving the immigration into Europe of millions of people who don't integrate into European or democratic culture and who live off the generosity of socialist, welfare state economies, rioting to beat the boredom, as they did in Paris a few days ago. Europeans aren't having babies and their largest economies--France and Germany--are stalled at double-digit unemployment rates and morbid growth rates in productivity. How are they going to pay for the declining years of their aging and spoiled populations? How are they going to keep from coming under Sharia Law when their countries become more that 50% Muslim? No one knows and, more telling, virtually no one in European politics seems to be looking for an answer. Better to bash the U.S. and whine about microscopic quantities of lead or some other 'toxic' chemical in those U.S.-designed iPods.
It's called tranference when someone whose mind isn't particularly strong transfers his attention from a real danger to a fake danger that feels more comfortable. Hysteria about those fake dangers and demonization of their alleged cause are the most obvious clues. From the 1870s to 1940s, the demon of frightened European minds was the Jew. Today it's the U.S. with Israel, filled not accidentally with Jews, thrown in for nostaglia's sake. It is oh-so comforting for these weak minds to feel that all the world's ills could be solved if two of the world's most stable democracies and most productive economies could be reduced to Western European levels of impotence and incompetence. But that isn't going to happen. And baring some miracle, Europe's real problems, left unfaced, with evenutally destroy it. If Europe's cultural treasures survive, it will be because the U.S. persuades this Taliban-to-come to sell them to us rather than destroy them.
If Cmdr Taco really thinks the United States is so awful, he should pack his toothbrush, a change of underwear, and his laptop and move to some country that better suits his ill-tempered ideology. But he'd be well advised to look at their violent crime rates before he moves to some European cities. And in any case, please spare us these mindless rants.
As I have said before, SlashDot would be a lot more interesting and useful if it wasn't so obvious that the gatekeepers do their best slant and spin what gets posted to fit their political correct agendas.
Apple's mistake is a common one. They're letting their lawyers have free rein in this and lawyers, when they're not being cowards, are bullies.
No corporation worth a piddle lets lawyers make this sort of decision. Apple lost any claim to "podcast" at least two years ago. You can find remarks by Steve Jobs in which he refers to podcasts in general as podcasts--as iTunes certainly does. When Apple's own, flagship product uses "podcast" as a generic term, they don't have a legal leg to stand on. Some Internet advocacy group should sue Apple, getting a court order that it end this harassment and getting their legal costs paid. Money will open Apple management's eyes to what their lawyers are doing.
Countries should never let their generals (or, even worse, their hysteria-prone press) make foreign policy. Corporations should never let their lawyers decide corporate policy.
What sort of world do these media pundits live in? They seem to have too much money and too little brains. Once I decided not to buy a MacBook because of the heat issues, my purchase date slipped to next spring, when I'll save $129 (maybe more) because it'll come with 10.5--a substantial part of the purchase price and a lot of money for a writer. Until then, my Wallstreet will have to do.
And I'm hardly alone in thinking that way. Lots of people have money issues, even with the much improved Mac pricing, and wait is one of the best rules in computer purchasing. Wait until the heat and battery issues are cleared up. Wait for the next OS. Wait for the rumored compact 12" model using low-voltage chips with 10-hour battery life. Waiting always gets you more for less, particularly when the current models have "issues."
In the Windows world, the opposite process may be taking place. People are buying now, so they don't get stuck with all the hassles Vista will have its first few years. Vista, at best, will be a lot like OS X's 10.1, a bit buggy and lacking in even the necessary refinements.
No, this news story is a yawner concoceted by those who don't know what they're writing about.
J.R.R. Tolkien's THE CHILDREN OF HURIN, one of his three Great Tales, reconstructed from its "unfinished state" by Christopher Tolkien, edited together from multiple drafts, to Harper UK, by the Tolkien Estate, for publication in April 2007 (world). US rights to Houghton Mifflin, for simultaneous publication with Harper.
Here is the blog of Michael Drout, the English professor who discovered Tolkien's Beowulf translation. His latest post comments on The Children of Hurin.
HarperCollins is going to be publishing Tolkien's Children of Húrin as a stand-alone volume next year. According to the press release (which I haven't been able to find on line), the text was created by Christopher Tolkien's painstaking editing together of Tolkien's many drafts. The book will include a new map by Christopher Tolkien and a jacket and color paintings by Alan Lee.
He mentions several previously published versions of the tale and points out: "From the press release, it seems as if these variants will be stitched into a coherent whole in the same the way that Christopher Tolkien brought together disparate texts to create the 1977 The Silmarillion."
Prof. Drout is also the editor of The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, which due out this October. It's a scholarly reference, which must explain the $199.95 price tag on Amazon. (Maybe you can get your public or school library to get a copy.) Since I contributed several articles, I'm hoping all contributors get free copies.
--Michael W. Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien (The only book-length, day-by-day chronology of LOTR.)
Slashdot Mirror
Those who'd like to all the objections, as well as a much smaller number of filings in support, can find them at The Public Index, which is run by the New York Law School:
http://thepublicindex.org/documents/responses
Filings in opposition tend to be substantial and weighty, citing both U.S. and international copyright law. Filings in favor tend to be of the "Gee, I like free books" sort. The most substantial of them is probably that from Sony, which is 20 pages long and filed by a NYC law firm, but, with one exception, it doesn't deal with the issues of copyright. Here's the closest Sony comes to admitting that authors have rights.
"The non-exclusivity provision of the Settlement--which makes plain that that the right given to Google do not permit copyright holders or the Registry itself from licensing e-book right to others--ensure that healthy, price-driven competition will remain after the Settlement is approved."
Yes, you read it right. The Google settlement gives Google and Google alone the right to display online for profit the contents of any book first published anywhere in the world since 1922 without the author's knowledge or consent unless they formally opted out by last Friday, September 4, 2009. Just heard about that? Tough luck. You've been screwed by Google with Sony's warm approval.
And to add insult to considerable injury, Google and Sony purr that Google's right is non-exclusive. What does that mean? Having brushed aside an author's copyright, they say, "Oh, well. We don't care if you sell someone else the right to publish your book. That is, if that someone else can compete with free." Under copyright law, of course, Google has no right to publish a book at all without the author's permission. They have no rights at all, much less exclusive rights. That's a good indication of ethically and legally clueless Google and Sony are.
Until I read this document, I felt sorry for Sony. They used to be so popular, now that aren't. But it helps to remember that much of their failure came from an obsession with protecting the copyrighted music they own. Now, in their zeal to sell their ebook readers, they're helping Google stomp on the copyright of several million authors. Color them hypocrites, very big hypocrites.
I no longer feel sorry for Sony. If they languish in obscurity, they're only getting what they deserve. Sony can't zealous defend their own copyrights by every nasty means available and run roughshod over the copyrights of others without deservedly getting sneered at.
The basic premise of the Google settlement is that any book not "commercially available" is effectively out of copyright. How would Sony feel if music fans regarded any music not available commercially at the moment as effectively out of copyright? That's what we are talking about here.
Apple has got me so ticked off, I'll probably put my energy into getting a 1-G iPhone cheap and forget buying these ho-hum iPod touches. That way, Apple won't get a penny and I'll probably save money.
I need a camera, and I need a mike and I don't want to pay AT&T fees. I also need them soon. I thought I would get that in the new touches. Instead, Apple is giving the tiny Nano more features but not the iPod touch. Why? With that tiny 2.2-inch Nano screen you can't see much of what you've taken and the equally tiny battery isn't likely to last long in video mode.
What's going on? If Apple has production problems with camera-equipped touches, they should say so, give us the details of new touch, and a release date. This cult of secrecy is such a pain. You'd think they were the Kremlin circa 1935. Both have a cult-like obsession with not admitting mistakes.
Still worse is the possibility that Apple wants to build high walls between its products, doling out features in odd ways to fit a marketing straight-jacket. The iPhone would be for work and business for those with the money. The touch is for games but not recreation, hence the lack of a camera and the boring length of game promotion today. Color touch users fat and flabby couch potatoes. The Nano is for mostly outdoor recreation (camera and Nike added), but has nothing that lets you get work done. If so, it's stupid move.
To add insult to injury, I just checked the specs on the new touches. The 8 gig model ships with the old-style earphones not the remote earphones and without a plastic dock adapter. Total saving for Apple? Probably about 25 to 50 cents. Cost to customers who don't want to pull their touch out of their pocket every time they pause music: $30 That stinks. Heck, even the cheap little $59 Shuttle ships with remote earphones. While Jobs was gone, the niggling little bean counters seem to have been running Apple. This is the unfortunate result.
I hate companies that treat their customers as if they were stupid, and that's precisely how I feel Apple is treating its customers now.
http://inklingbooks.com/googlesettlement/googlesettlement.html
First, an always running updater is a security hole of the first order. Gain access to it, and someone malicious could do anything it could do, meaning alter applications without our knowledge.
Second, there's in this the now-typical Google 'we rule the world' attitude in this--much like that at Microsoft fifteen years ago. Why should Goggle applications has an always running updater while other don't? Not even Apple makes that sort of demands and OS X is one heck of a lot more important to a Mac than anything Google might do.
Third, CmdrTaco is being naive if he thinks open sourcing an abomination leads to the "obvious conclusion" that it's to be trusted. He forgets that the danger lies in the code that's being downloaded, not the code that is doing the downloading. It's the idea itself that's bad not the implementation.
Finally, what does Google intend this open sourcing to do? Do they want every application on our computer to have an auto-update-without-asking running continually in the background? Bad as what Google is doing, that'd be an even worse horror. And like Google, they're not likely to tell us what they're doing.
I believe it was the philosopher Kant who offered as a moral test the question, "What would the world be like if everyone did this?" One person lying doesn't usually do much harm. Everyone lying would make life almost unbearable.
Having every application behaving like Google's would be an utter disaster. Open-sourcing Google's code makes as much sense as marketing a "Do It Yourself A-Bomb Kit" in the Middle East. The malicious genie is out of the bottle. Now we have to consider the possibility that every obscure application we download contains Google's dastardly code. A seemingly benign application could mutate on command into a monster. And because it spreads any time we're online, it could spread like wildfire. Google doesn't even seem to have been thinking when they came up with open-sourcing their monster.
What the Greeks called hubris, overweening pride, has struck again. Google has replaced Microsoft as the giant, high-tech business that seems most clueless about the distinction between good and evil, sensible and foolish. They censored the Internet for China, they claimed to own every book not in print, and now they want to determine what's on our computers without our consent and without our knowledge.
A few weeks before each mission, NASA would put the upper stage of an Atlas into orbit, so the range could practice by skin tracking it (no beacon transmitter responding). The NASA crew chief told me, with quite a bit of pride, of one such launch, where on the first orbit the radar in Africa, Australia, Hawaii (I believe) and White Sands couldn't pick up that upper stage. The radar at A-20 not only picked it up, it picked it up as it broke over the radar horizon some 1200 miles. out.
Now to the interesting part. We had an Ampex video recorder (S/N 32) in a back wall in data processing that, as best I can remember, looked precisely like the one they're using to recover that long-ago data. We used it only occasionally to capture radar data during ECM missions. I can't recall it ever being used during a NASA mention though. What mattered then was the digital position data, which with an FPS-16 is extremely accurate.
That said, it would be interesting if a historical link did exist a USAF radar site used by NASA and the recorder now being used to recover that data.
There's a more detailed account of recovering this data at:
http://www.thenewstribune.com/news/nationworld/v-lite/story/682783.html
Ggogle might also want to fund making another Adobe product, Framemaker, run well under Wine/Codeweavers. It's the best long-document application on the market and Adobe, for reasons of their own, dropped the Mac version and quit developing the Linux version.
So if I'm in Paris and take a picture of Notre Dame that just happens to catch some well-known atheist leaving, and (unknowingly) post it to a blog, I'm is serious legal trouble? How absurd. I always thought Europe had way too many laws. This only confirms that impression.
What Google is doing has a lot of people (particularly women) understandably upset, but from what I've hear it's no more illegal here than all the satellite photos they've been posting for several years. If our laws made what Google's doing illegal, they'd also be making most outdoor photography illegal. (How do you take a picture outside without including some stranger in it?) Europeans, particularly those in Belgium and Northern Germany, may like a "What is not mandatory is illegal" mindset--the infamous attitude of the Prussians--but I'm not sure most people in the US will.
In the late 90s, Apple had to ship IE as the default browser on all Macs to keep Microsoft happy. Now Apple can move on to Microsoft's turf with a browser for Windows and there's nothing Microsoft can do about it.
--Mike Perry, Untangling Tolkien (LOTR chronology)
Apple could improve their security user interface by adding a Security pull-down to the Apple menu. It'd let users easily turn on/off administrator privileges, WiFi, Bluetooth, Ethernet (none, local, Internet), camera, and mike. Anything that's a security hazard should be easy to disable utterly and completely.
Make locking the door easy, and you make intrusion hard.
--Mike Perry, Untangling Tolkien
I wouldn't sweat the lack of "gotcha' features. Before 10.3, Apple's OS X was rather dull and before 10.2, it had a lot of rough edges. With 10.4, Apple got to the point where adding "gotcha" features was easy. Vista is roughly at the 10.1 or 10.2 stage. Time will demonstrate whether Microsoft can get to a point where they can bring in some clever innovations. The ability of Vista to use a flash drive to speed up virtual memory demonstrates that they can. Those who've used it say it speeds up applications quite a bit and it's something Apple has yet to announce for OS X. Mac users need to harass Apple about that. Copying should be a two-way street.
The focus on enterprise customers is a more serious problem. It parallels my gripe with Adobe about InDesign. In design work, the big guys are newspapers and graphics-rich four-color magazines. InDesign enhancements have focused on their needs and not the more mundane needs of small publishers like myself. Forget a category of client, and you can loose those clients. But even there, Microsoft will be forced to change or see its small and home business clients migrate to Macs (and yet more servers to Linux). That would give Macs a better selection of business-related software and that software might, in turn, open doors in larger and larger businesses.
Competition is good. Apple and Linux are both positioned to keep Microsoft from getting too fat and happy or, if it does, to keep Microsoft from dominating a market it's taken for granted.
So what. Every single one of the scientists trumpeting global warming is not only being offered money, he is being paid money, lots of money, to do his research. That's the dastardly evil of the grants system. It makes people lie to get and keep grants. And it influences the research they do.
I know. I got out of a modest medical research group in part because I was digusted with how poorly done and useless most of the research was that I didn't want to be part of a month off from research to write proposals to get the government to throw more money at the same sorts of projects. In my case, there seems to have been enough sense in the system that they didn't get the grants and had to close down the group.
But generate the proper hysteria, and scientists can keep the monies flowing in.
This is a scam. That's why climatologists gather from all over the world for conferences in climate conditioned hotels. It's why the celebrities hyping global warming fly about in large private jets that generate 10,000 pounds of CO2 an hour. It's why, like Barbara Stressland, they live in huge climate-conditioned homes. They know it's all about lording it over ordinary people, that an elite such as themselves doesn't have to play by the rules, and that the warnings are really a scam.
You're being had. This is a scam just like eugenics and the population bomb. And it's being promoted by precisely the same people: rich liberals and progressives, newspapers like the NY Times, and scientists. Get over your idea that science is about facts. A century ago, scientists were convinced, beyond a shadow of a doubt, that Italians and Russian Jews coming to this country were 'feebleminded' and unfit to be citizens in a democracy. Learned books were written on the subject, someone even suggested a Broadway play on it. The NY Times called it a "wonderful new science" and trashed anyone who said otherwise.
It was religious fanatics (meaning Catholic leaders) and ordinary business men who opposed the idea. The latter knew quite well that these immigrants were good workers and posed no threat. And take note of the fact that one of the chief proponents of those sorts of ideas, Planned Parenthood (then called the American Birth Control League) remains the darling of the liberal media. That's an indication of just how respectable eugenics was. Even the discrediting of eugenics didn't discredit its champions.
Do not believe scientists when they get like these. There's something about science that, roughly every generation, sends one branch off into a lemming-like madness. It's happened before. It's happening again. About 2030-2040, there'll be another one. Get ready for it and get ready to fight it.
And I might add that this deception is all-too-obvious. Climate change is going on all the time and always creates benefits and problems. All the climate news coming out of these fear mongers is negative. That's a clue that you're being manipulated. And why is no one pointing out that our last warm period, Europe from 1000 to 1300, was marvelous. Greenland really was green and grapes could be grown in England and Nova Scotia (Vineland). As climatic trends go, warming is much better than cooling.
Remember it's con men who paint exaggerated scenarios. Do as I suggest, they say, and all will be wonderful. Don't do as I suggest, and all will be dreadful. Honest people don't talk that way because life isn't that way.
We are being duped and in a decade or so, that will be all too obvious. That's why the rush to do something before the facts overtake the hype. Once these nasty little laws go on the books, they'll be as hard to change as legalized abortion, the primary product of the population explosion hysteria (and really driven by liberal fears about high birthrates among poor blacks).
When someone tries to manufacture a hysteria, stop, take a deep breath and do the one thing they do not want you to do--think.
Good. History is repeating itself. Every generation or so science "goes off the rails" and develops crazy "the sky if falling ideas." Eugenics and a "population explosion" with global famines were all trumpted by prominent scientists in prestigious journals just like global warming is today. It's about as credible.
Since the scientist who still have sense tend to hunker down and mutter cautious little statements about "not going to fast," there is a brief period in which politics has to get involved, telling the scientist to stop their silly chatter. Interestingly, for eugenics and the population explosion it was mostly religious people, particularly Catholics, who pressured the politicians to keep the scientific community from getting what it wanted--the ability to sterilize anyone from groups they didn't like. (There's no bigot like a scientific one.) I document all that in infinite detail in my The Pivot of Civlization in Historical Perspective. Read it if you want to discover just how racist the Ivy League colleges can be and why.
Sometimes, of course, the hysteria moves so fast, that efforts to block what scientists are doing comes too late. The furor over a population explosion was an obvious hoax. After the birth control pill hit the market in 1960s, US birthrates began to plumet AMONG WHITES. They did not drop nearly so fast among the black underclass, hence the real source of alarm for both population scientists (who're Darwinian to the core--many in the 1960s were rebranded eugenists) and liberals, who don't like blacks as much as they pretend. I once had a liberal English professor and supporter of Planned Parenthood point at a young black man nearby and whisper, "That's why we need legalized abortion." Exactly.
There are all sorts of similarly nasty agendas behind the global warming hysteria. Europe wants to stomp on a US economy that's far more robust than their own, hence their zeal for Kelo. And those who used to trumpet socialism now conceal it behind environmentalism. In Europe, they're called watermelons--green on the outside, red inside. It's the same old game of regiment the masses and keep them serfs.
And there are the pitiful folks in white coats who're part of all this. All their lives they've labored in obscurity, begging for tiny little federal grants. Hyping global warming gets them on CNN and gives them the keys to lots of grants. If you think scientists have too much integrity to do that sort of thing, you've not seen them chasing after research grants.
A lot of harm results if these people aren't blocked until the hysteria fades. Eugenics resulted in tens of thousands of poor people being sterilized, but it never achieved it's real goal, which Planned Parenthood founder Margaret Sanger hinted in her Pivot of Civilization was forcibly sterilizing 10% of the US population (particularly recent immigrants). And the population explosion hysteria did get two of its goals, federally funded "family planning" (particularly for blacks and Hispanics) and legalized abortion (particularly for you know who). But it didn't get its ultimate goal, forcing religious, middle-class families to not have more than two kids, under penality of horrible taxation. That's why they are so paranoid about the "religious right."
Remember, many these scientists are way out on a limb. They're making predictions that'll be laughable in a couple of decades. Apparently, it's creating a split in the climatic sciences. Younger scientists know the data isn't there to back up the claims being made and are fearful they'll spend their lives in a discredited profession. (Who today claims to be in population studies? In 1970, it was the height of cool. Ditto eugenics, which in 1912 the NY Times called a "wonderful new science.") The older scientists, who'll soon retire with their pensions fattened by all those research grants, don't care. The younger ones do.
So keep in mind what this is. It's an attempt to keep this hysteria from becoming policy long enough for the facts to make it clea
I quote: "Neither article quite says that some responsibility must fall to the administration's footdragging on global warming."
Every so often the "scientific community" goes wacky, typically aided and abetted by the hysteria prone portions of the media, and a left eager to increase its power. This is one of those cases.
1. In the late 1800s, it was the alleged superiority of people from northern and western Europe over everyone else. They were the civilizers, everyone else was trash. In the US, it was popular at places such as Harvard and inspired the drive for immigration restrictions that kept out Italians and Russian Jews. In Europe, it was championed by German professors such as Ernst Hackel (Darwin's counterpart in Germany) and led to all the nasty stuff about Aryan supremacy. I'm editing a collection of G. K. Chesterton articles written during WWI, and he's all over German academia for that foul idea. Only later did it move from the universities to politics and the result was Nazism.
2. In the early 1900s, the scientific hysteria of choice was eugenics, tooted as a "marvelous new science" in 1912 by the NY Times. Progressives and liberals thought state-controlled breeding was a wonderful idea (though they were careful not to say that very loudly). The primary critics were reactionaries such as Catholics. The result was the 1927 Supreme Court decision, Buck v. Bell, which claimed that forced sterilization was constitutional. That decision would be referenced favorably in the 1972 Roe v. Wade legalizing abortion.
3. In the 1960s it was the Population Bomb, made credible by being championed by Science magazine and others. In the midst of plumeting birthrates in industrialized world, population controllers told us we were having too many people. What we were having was too many black and brown babies for the likes of the eugenicists who were now calling themselves population controllers. The result is a disaster, with all the major developed countries except the US having birthrates so low, they will not be able to sustain their social support systems over the next few decades. The Population Bomb was an Evil Idea that became in effect a Really Dumb Idea. Ideas matter, bad ideas harm, really bad ideas do a lot of harm.
4. In the 1970s, we had a fizzle. Global cooling was the danger the scientific community was alleging. The goal was like all the others, to give scientists a chance to kick people around. Every so over those bookish nerds in white coats get the urge to "kick ass" with unfortunate results.
5. Now we have yet another scientific hysteria, global warning, with all the usual suspects involved--scientists wanting power, a hysterical media, the political left needing an excuse to regiment and, of course the ignorant little twits who, like H. G. Wells, worship a science they know little about and actually believe the propaganda. (Slashdot is full of them.)
Except for #1, whose success came too late to keep out millions of people from Italy, Russia and Poland, and #3, which cheated by getting an edict from the Supreme Court, these hysterias, while they did a lot of harm, weren't able to achieve their intended agendas. #1 and #3 wanted the state to dictate who could have children. Catholics kept that from happening, which is why liberals hate the old fashioned kind of Catholicism.
All the fuss about global warming is simply hysteria. You see that in the numerous inaccuracies (i.e. sea level rise in Gore's book). You see it in efforts to paint everything bad, when climate changes always have both good and bad effects. You see it in contorted efforts to blame what's probably a natural effect into something we (particularly the US) is doing. If people aren't doing it, they you can't kick people around. You see it in the concealment of history, such as the fact that a 1000-1300 AD warming period was marvelous for Europe.
So, if the Bush administration is foot-dragging on this, more power to them. Hysteria and lies, particularly those that claim to be sci
This CNN reporter, like many of her colleagues, is utterlessly clueless, knowing about as much about this topic as a reporter who'd breathelessly report, circa 1925, that Oldsmobile had a revolutionary new factory that would turn out a new invention called the automobile, powered by gasoline, which would replace the horse and buggy. Notice the use of "legendary" to describe a flesh-and-blood person, Jason Epstein. That's a good indication of a fluff-headed, hysteria-inclined journalist. King Arthur is legendary. Epstein isn't.
This technology has been around and in wide use for years. Print on Demand has trade journals and is a routine part of publishing today. Tens of thousands of the books you find on Amazon are POD books. Some publishing companies, including my own, are built around a POD model. One printing company, Lightning Source, where I do business, recently upped its POD production capacity from one to three million books a month. Harvard, Oxford and Cambridge University presses all release some scholarly works POD and have for years.
True, there hasn't been much effort to put the machinery into bookstores or libraries, but that's merely a matter of economics and quality. Will there be enough demand to cover the cost of this $50,000 machine and its maintenance? Will the books be reasonably priced and not poor quality? Think of all the troubles you have had with copy machines in libraries. This machine is far more complex, so how likely is it to be well maintained? POD books can look quite good, as good in quality as most traditionally published books. But that's because they're printed in factories with experienced staff overseeing far larger and more expensive machinery. An economy of scale keeps the quality high and the cost low.
Don't be so quick to believe what you hear from news outlets such as CNN.
--Mike Perry, Inkling Books, Seattle
Imagine you're in a tight spot and your only communication tool is a radio with a dead mike or a flashlight, not an unimaginable situation. If you don't know Morse code, you're not only in trouble, you're likely to end up dead. Morse or something like Morse (such as the code used by Vietnam War POWs) will always be useful.
Personally, I think rudimentary Morse code, along with basic hand signing and a useful second language such as Spanish ought to be a requirement for all high school diplomas. If you don't learn it, you'll be stuck flipping burgers.
But then I think students should actually learn something in high school, a radical idea that apparently runs contrary to what most public schools in this country think "education" is all about. No dodge ball in grade school, it might hurt someone's self-esteem. No courses that take effort in high school, again it might hurt someone's self-esteem. Yes, we can't do anything that might reveal that some of us are lazy and stupid can we? You see that in the whinning posts here. "Oh," they say, "it actually takes effort to learn the code. I can't stand that sort of thing. Trying to think sets my head all abuzzing."
I might add that Morse code can be very useful today. Tests have shown that people can text message far faster with it than with the kludgy keys sequencies used on cell phones. And the folks who designed Morse code were smart. Vowels that are such a burden to enter with a cell phone that they're left out are a snap in Morse code. E is a dit. T is a dah. You can enter them in a flash.
And despite what they taught you by implication in publik schul, you're not dumb. You can pick it up in a few weeks using easily available software.
--Mike Perry, Seattle, KE7NV
--Mike Perry Untangling Tolkien
This is a joke, right? He can't really be serious. He meant to announce this last spring as an "April's Fool joke but forgot.
Look at the sad shape Microsoft is in once the feds stripped them of their ability to use their monopoly power to bully. The stock is stuck where it was years ago. Vista is coming out years late and devoid of once-promised features. Do we really want a President who'll take until 2010 to ready the 2008 budget? A President who'll threaten to end trade with Canada over some minor fishing dispute? (That's the equivalent of how Microsoft 'negotiated' with IBM.) One that will offer a 'vaporware' solution to Islamic terrorism? Someone that will give us 'fireside' chats looking at the ceiling and rocking mechanically like someone with autism?
No, Gates is the only famous American around who'd make a worse President than Jimmy Carter--and that's saying a lot.
--Mike Perry, Seattle
I suspect the idea's supporters are trying to replicate their youthful experiences in affluent suburbs. Top=down benevolence often works that way.
And we need to translate "not revealing their sources" into what it really means. In areas where keeping silent is legal, something is not being said. A lawyer is not revealing what his client told him, a person is not forced to testify against himself, a priest doesn't violate the confessional. No lie is being said. The truth merely can't be discovered by a certain path because it would violate principles that are very important.
But a news media that can conceal their sources is a news media that can (and clearly does) broadcast their lies to tens of millions of people. It's a license not to keep silent but to lie on an enormous scale and not be held accountable by revealing a source whose credibility we can then judge. That's foul and that's precisely why the media wants this right. They want to conceal often dubious sources from us.
CBS Memogate is a good example. Thanks to a fax number printed on the alleged memos, Internet blogs were able to track down the source. Dan Rather had told us his source was "highly credible." He turned out to be someone who'd been under psychiatric care, someone with an ugly vendetta against Bush, and someone so screwed up, the Texas Democratic party didn't want to have anything to do with him. That is why "we the people" need to know these sources. We can never, never trust the news media's claims about their sources. When it suits their purposes, they lie.
We also need to get one thing very, very clear. Our freedoms, our rights, our liberties do not depend on on the mainstream press or professional journalists. Many of them lack the objectivity, the integrity and often the intelligence to give us the news fair and balanced. The more power they get with exceptions from legal responsibility, the less safe we are as citizens. They can and do distort the political process, searching after dirt on people with one point of view, while concealing the serious crimes of those whose politics are different. Justice Clarence Thomas, a black conservative, was ruthlessly pursued because of poorly supported allegations that he talked 'potty mouth' on a few occasions. Highly credible charges by a woman (and a Democrat) who ran nursing homes that Bill Clinton raped her were dismissed and got little play.
That is the press that in this country has such an inflated opinion of itself and that wants "rights" against criticism and legal accountability that are denied to the rest of us.
--Michael W. Perry, Editor of The School of Journalism by Joseph Pulitzer
1. First the timing of more cable with the increased diagnosis of autism may be a coincidence. For a one-or-two year-olds, cable doesn't mean more to watch. There's almost no programming for that age, unless there is a round-the-clock Teletubies channel I've not heard about.
2. They may be confusing cause and effect. I worked with austistic children. They're not stimulated by contact with other people like ordinary children, but they are often attracted by repetitive patterns of light of the sort a small child might find on TV. As a result, the parents might have been more likely to put them in front of a TV as a pacifier.( And that might have even made the child's autistic tendencies worse.) In such a case, TV was not so much the cause as a diagnostic sign.
I'll see if the authors deal with those problems in their paper. It's hard to believe that they don't.
And TV addicts shouldn't get all in a dither about this. At most, this just means that parents shouldn't put little baby Johnny down in front of a TV. It's not going to turn a 22=year-old into an austitic.
--Mike Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien
Nary a word about the real fact that the long-term birthrate in the U.S., helped by immigration, is just barely at the replacement level, meaning our baby boom will be able to retire without Social Security going bust--if we get medical costs under control. Not a word about all the good the U.S. does in the world while most Europeans pick their noses and whine.
And there's no indication that this cluesless ideologue is aware of a major crisis that is undeniable--the well-below replacement birthrates of Europeans that's driving the immigration into Europe of millions of people who don't integrate into European or democratic culture and who live off the generosity of socialist, welfare state economies, rioting to beat the boredom, as they did in Paris a few days ago. Europeans aren't having babies and their largest economies--France and Germany--are stalled at double-digit unemployment rates and morbid growth rates in productivity. How are they going to pay for the declining years of their aging and spoiled populations? How are they going to keep from coming under Sharia Law when their countries become more that 50% Muslim? No one knows and, more telling, virtually no one in European politics seems to be looking for an answer. Better to bash the U.S. and whine about microscopic quantities of lead or some other 'toxic' chemical in those U.S.-designed iPods.
It's called tranference when someone whose mind isn't particularly strong transfers his attention from a real danger to a fake danger that feels more comfortable. Hysteria about those fake dangers and demonization of their alleged cause are the most obvious clues. From the 1870s to 1940s, the demon of frightened European minds was the Jew. Today it's the U.S. with Israel, filled not accidentally with Jews, thrown in for nostaglia's sake. It is oh-so comforting for these weak minds to feel that all the world's ills could be solved if two of the world's most stable democracies and most productive economies could be reduced to Western European levels of impotence and incompetence. But that isn't going to happen. And baring some miracle, Europe's real problems, left unfaced, with evenutally destroy it. If Europe's cultural treasures survive, it will be because the U.S. persuades this Taliban-to-come to sell them to us rather than destroy them.
If Cmdr Taco really thinks the United States is so awful, he should pack his toothbrush, a change of underwear, and his laptop and move to some country that better suits his ill-tempered ideology. But he'd be well advised to look at their violent crime rates before he moves to some European cities. And in any case, please spare us these mindless rants.
As I have said before, SlashDot would be a lot more interesting and useful if it wasn't so obvious that the gatekeepers do their best slant and spin what gets posted to fit their political correct agendas.
--Mike Perry, Seattle
No corporation worth a piddle lets lawyers make this sort of decision. Apple lost any claim to "podcast" at least two years ago. You can find remarks by Steve Jobs in which he refers to podcasts in general as podcasts--as iTunes certainly does. When Apple's own, flagship product uses "podcast" as a generic term, they don't have a legal leg to stand on. Some Internet advocacy group should sue Apple, getting a court order that it end this harassment and getting their legal costs paid. Money will open Apple management's eyes to what their lawyers are doing.
Countries should never let their generals (or, even worse, their hysteria-prone press) make foreign policy. Corporations should never let their lawyers decide corporate policy.
--Mike Perry, Seattle
And I'm hardly alone in thinking that way. Lots of people have money issues, even with the much improved Mac pricing, and wait is one of the best rules in computer purchasing. Wait until the heat and battery issues are cleared up. Wait for the next OS. Wait for the rumored compact 12" model using low-voltage chips with 10-hour battery life. Waiting always gets you more for less, particularly when the current models have "issues."
In the Windows world, the opposite process may be taking place. People are buying now, so they don't get stuck with all the hassles Vista will have its first few years. Vista, at best, will be a lot like OS X's 10.1, a bit buggy and lacking in even the necessary refinements.
No, this news story is a yawner concoceted by those who don't know what they're writing about.
J.R.R. Tolkien's THE CHILDREN OF HURIN, one of his three Great Tales, reconstructed from its "unfinished state" by Christopher Tolkien, edited together from multiple drafts, to Harper UK, by the Tolkien Estate, for publication in April 2007 (world). US rights to Houghton Mifflin, for simultaneous publication with Harper.
--Michael W. Perry, Untangling Tolkien
Wormtalk
And here's what he says:
He mentions several previously published versions of the tale and points out: "From the press release, it seems as if these variants will be stitched into a coherent whole in the same the way that Christopher Tolkien brought together disparate texts to create the 1977 The Silmarillion."
Prof. Drout is also the editor of The J. R. R. Tolkien Encyclopedia, which due out this October. It's a scholarly reference, which must explain the $199.95 price tag on Amazon. (Maybe you can get your public or school library to get a copy.) Since I contributed several articles, I'm hoping all contributors get free copies.
--Michael W. Perry, author of Untangling Tolkien (The only book-length, day-by-day chronology of LOTR.)