Clif, the Canadian DMCA forbids removing DRM from works that are in the public domain, too -- it's the DRM that's protected, not the copyrights.

RTFA, please, especially if you're going to call me an idiot.

You know, every time you send a message to this blog, you consume a discretionary energy resource, generate carbon, etc.

It's the height of hypocrisy to assert YOUR right to expend discretionary energy resources, but to demand that everyone else limit themselves to only the barest survival rations.

Honestly, if you set out to discredit the idea of conservation, you could not do a better job than @13 -- any sane person thinking about trying conservation confronted with this standard would conclude either a) the whole thing was cooked up by extremists who expect you to keep such a close eye on your water use you'll be drinking out of a thimble or b) the situation is so dire that the only way out is to live like a miserable hermit, so might as well live up the planet's last few years while they last.

Zombie: You seem to be suggesting that children should never, ever be given water to play with in quantities of more than 250ml. Do you think children should be allowed to frolic under a sprinkler? How about a kiddee pool? Squirt guns? Water balloons?

What about science projects? I learned about water surface tension from my father by experimenting with different sized vessels and an eyedropper on the kitchen table. Maybe he should have just sat me down in the living room and read aloud to me from the encyclopedia?

And how about all the child development specialists, the Piagists and so on, who tell us that cognitively, water-play is an important part of human (and, indeed, all primate) learning?

Should I stop giving my daughter baths and just wipe her down with a moist towelette? What about those times she fails to finish the contents of her sippee cup (which holds 500 ml, more than double the amount you are comfortable allowing children to use). Should that water be boiled and re-used the next day, or am I allowed to pour it down the sink? Should I install a cistern for unused sippee cup water to use on watering the houseplants? Or maybe I should just get rid of the houseplants (who drink about a litre a day -- quadruple your recommended allowance for children).

Which houseplants are we allowed to have? Which activities are our children allowed to have? Will you be coming by our houses with a green armband to supervise our water use? Am I allowed to dilute the baby's rice cereal 5-1, or should I stick to 3-1 and deal with the constipation and vomiting using dry-wipes?

Also:

Zombie@6: "Delightfully" -- you keep using that word. I do not think it means what you think it means.

MHY@4: Oh yes, by all means, let's given children untreated water to play in, because the carbon footprint of treating a case of the squirts that has your kid flushing the toilet forty times a day for a week while you try to rehydrate her with electrolyte salts is so much better for the planet than a bucket of clean, treated water to play with on a hot day.

Are you seriously suggesting that we solve the planet's water problems by forcing children to play exclusively in contaminated water?

Jesus Christ, do you live in a cave somewhere? The amount of water used by a kid to paint the house would be a fraction of the water necessary to fill a kiddee pool, run a sprinkler, or have an epic Super Soaker battle. If your version of green involves sitting very still, trying not to consume any resources, you might as well blow up the planet now, because apart from you and a couple of hairshirt-wearing ascetics, no one in the world is going to adopt your program.

Artfreakydude, you've rather missed the point.

Well, Clif, rather than speculating on how poor the audiobooks must be, you could actually just, you know, *download the free samples* (which are excellent, and linked off this post) and discover that you're wrong about this.

JJasper -- no, it's NOT up to the publishers to choose DRM or no DRM, at least not with Audible. Audible's position is that EVEN IF A PUBLISHER REQUESTS NO DRM, they still insist on it. This is about Audible forcing publishers and writers to be locked into their DRM platform, and has nothing to do with publisher choice. My audiobook publisher, Random House (the largest publishing conglomerate in the world), asked Audible to sell my latest book without DRM, and they refused.

I see your problem now. You think that because I link to something on Boing Boing, I agree with every single possible word, and every interpretation of every single possible word, in it.

I don't.

There, that was easy.

I asked Ken, our sysadmin about this, and he told me that doing so would require gigantic amounts of hardware to get this running.

Brit, my banking bits are no easier to DRM than any other bits. That's precisely WHY I won't be sending you my bits. I'll be keeping them a secret, right here.

The thing about DRM is that it presumes that I can send you some bits and then keep you from knowing what they are and copying them. This isn't a very plausible thing to believe.

Icky2000, did you actually read the relevant piece of the MPAA's brief? I quoted the relevant sections above. The reason Wired (and I) characterized the MPAA as saying they don't want to have to prove wrongdoing is because they said, "WE DON'T WANT TO HAVE TO PROVE WRONGDOING." That's not a strawman, it's a quotation.

Here's that quote again:

"Mandating such proof could thus have the pernicious effect of depriving copyright owners of a practical remedy against massive copyright infringement in many instances," MPAA attorney Marie L. van Uitert wrote Friday to the federal judge overseeing the Jammie Thomas trial.

"It is often very difficult, and in some cases, impossible, to provide such direct proof when confronting modern forms of copyright infringement, whether over P2P networks or otherwise; understandably, copyright infringers typically do not keep records of infringement," van Uitert wrote on behalf of the movie studios, a position shared with the Recording Industry Association of America, which sued Thomas, the single mother of two.

Lulu@3: By this reasoning, anyone who sends mail in an envelope -- rather than by world-readable postcard -- is also a presumptive criminal. Anyone who wears clothes -- rather than walking around naked -- is a presumptive concealed-weapons-carrier. And anyone who shreds their confidential documents -- rather than filing them carefully -- is a presumptive criminal.

I'm sorry, it's just not the case that copy shops in the US take a "how would the photographer or authorities find out about it to stop it, and would they waste manpower on enforcing it" attitude. Since K-Mart paid out a high-six-figure settlement to photographers for reproducing portraits, no major copy shop has been willing to take that risk. It's virtually impossible to get your portrait shots enlarged, retouched or reproduced at a Wal-Mart, K-Mart, Kinko's, etc. What's more, these shops have been known to turn away such requests for photos that are *not* studio portraits because they "look too professional" and *might* be studio portraits.

Well, here's a real, and frequent example from the US, where the copyright vests with portrait photographers, not commissioners:

Your old aunt dies. You got to Kinko's to have her wedding photo enlarged to sit next to the casket. Kinko's says, "I'm sorry, but absent any hard proof that the photographer vested copyright in your aunt, I need to assume that this copyright belongs to him, so you can't have this photo (or any other portrait photos) for the funeral." The only way to get around it is to track down the descendants of a photographer who took your aunt's wedding photos fifty years ago and ask them for a license (and pay whatever they charge).

There's nothing about the existing system that precludes commissioners and photographers negotiating for different rights -- the only thing Canadian law says today is that, absent any other agreement, the photographer is assumed to have assigned copyright in photos to his clients.

Skep@5: 10,000 pounds is pretty close to 1,000,000 US dollars these days.

mgabrysSF@4: "I didn't see mr sun mentioned or the ice receding on mars."

That's because you didn't look.

http://gristmill.grist.org/story/2006/12/17/222712/69

Church: yes, I read it. I don't recall that the book computed a single thing (except for the position of its atoms in space -- something that this jewelry is also doing). Are you suggesting that the novel was a Von Neumann machine?

Moon: No, steampunk doesn't have steam in it. Steampunk is stuff that looks like it comes from the sort of alternate reality described in THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE, in which computation (and a host of modern technologies engendered by it) arrive a century earlier. It has nothing to do with steam per se (nor with "punk" -- the word is a play on "cyberpunk," which DID have something to do with punk, to whit its nihilist bent, and the "punk" in "steampunk" is there because the first steampunk novel was written by two prominent cyberpunks.)

@2: And the function performed by THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE (the book for which the term "steampunk" was coined) was what, exactly?

What a great note, Jordan!

You think that Man with the Hex sounds like "Someone Done Hoodoed the Hoodoo Man?" Apart from having similar titles, what do they have in common?

Holy fuck is this AWESOME.

So, Polomoche, which Louis Jordan song do you think sounds like "Man with the Hex" or "Caviar and Chitlins?"

Louis Jordan's delivery, composition and arrangement style is pretty much totally, absolutely different from the Atomic Fireballs'. Even songs like "Cheese and Cornbread" and other uptempo numbers feature much more choral vocals, a smoother delivery, a generally slower-paced arrangement, and a lot more comedy that the Fireballs.

Indeed, there's practically *no* comedy in the Fireballs' songs, which makes any comparison to either Calloway (who had a similar energy but again, an utterly different delivery from the Fireballs) or Jordan thin indeed.

Just because they're in the same genre and Jordan got there first doesn't make him "the real thing" -- with the implication that this is the false or denatured thing.

Have you heard any of the Atomic Fireballs' catalog?

Lo@14 -- look forward to seeing the files! No, there aren't any with the CC baked in, though you're welcome to make one!

Polomoche@8: I can sing about 200 Louis Jordan songs from memory and there's not a one of them particularly like the Atomic Fireballs. There's no universe in which Jordan is remotely close to "jump blues."

Jed@10: "It might be nice if this thing were broken up into several, rather than one CBR."

Luckily it's CC licensed -- send me the URL once you've uploaded it and I'll add it to the post!

Ifireball -- correct, sir. The filesize really ratcheted up when I ripped the PDF into PNGs. I imagine that a lot of that was rasterizing the type-pages, the rest just inefficiencies in the process. I'd love for someone to produce a smaller k-size version that retained the resolution and quality.

Hey, Daveybot! I've done talks in Edinburgh and Glasgow since I moved to the UK, and I'm sure I'll do more before long!

Absent@2: You should compile a list of the metatags!

Eustace@8: Seen 'em? I OWN ONE!

http://www.flickr.com/photos/doctorow/2556601928/

Well spotted, Shard -- image replaced!

You guys have an extremely exotic definition of fashion that somehow excludes "Clothing you wear to look distinctive, establish group identity, and please your aesthetic sense."

26,27: The file is ripping now and doing VERY well! Thanks everyone!

Cory

Kiergsmith@14: this seems super-promising, but the output is all v. low-rez -- only 477px wide! I'm shooting for 4,000!

Takuan, if you build that, I will not only buy one, I'll blog it!

David@7: indeed it did take two of us! Tanya was F/T, we were both P/T to start!

Cory

Sam, have a look at the forth amendment and tell me how this could possibly be constitutional -- for bonus points, read p on "general warrants" and "writs of assistance" and how they led to the forth amendment.

Click through -- the main mechanism sits under the desk.

Clif Marsiglio, I've never once argued for the abolition of copyright.

I haven't "copied and pasted" anything about the my critique of the US copyright regime into the debate about the Harper bill.

You really don't know much about Canadian copyright -- on that score, we agree. There's no such thing as "fair use" in Canada (the thing you're thinking of is "fair dealing" and it's a radically different, though related, concept).

What's more, "private copying right" is not "fair use" or "fair dealing."

Look, you're just making stuff up here. You don't know anything about Canadian copyright law -- and you haven't paid close enough attention to the earlier posts on this to have an intelligent opinion on it.

You just showed up to grind some kind of axe about "rule of law," and when you discovered that this had nothing to do with "rule of law" you made up some more stuff.

There's lots of online resources through which you could educate yourself about:

* Commonwealth copyright

* Trade agreements and copyright

* The WIPO Copyright Treaty of 1996

* Fair dealing

* Private copying rights

What's more, it's pretty easy to find out what I favor for copyright reform (there's a very long list of dozens of essays I've written on the subject here: http://craphound.com/articles.php -- though you won't any in which I advocate for the abolition of copyright -- that also comes under the heading of "you're making stuff up").

It's also pretty easy to discover what the words "public domain" mean in this context, and how that differs from the various CC licenses I've used on my work (CC itself has lots of material on this subject).

The world's copyright systems are different. Knowing a little about US copyright law doesn't mean you know much about Canadian copyright law.

Copyright reformers have many nuances in their beliefs. Arguing (as I have) for limits on term and scope of copyright doesn't make me a copyright abolitionist.

Copyright itself is not an immutable "social contract" handed down on stone tablets by Victor Hugo in 1886. It is a dynamic system whose reforms have *always* come about because an older law made a new commonplace activity illegal (for example, the following practices and technologies were all illegal for years before copyright law was changed to accommodate them): making records, broadcasting records, cable TV, jukeboxes and VCRs).

Hand-wringing moralizing about how kids are "violating the social contract" totally misses the fact that the social contract was written just last week by a bunch of giant entertainment companies who want to extract rent from said kids.

What's that, Xyzzy? You want MORE STEAMPUNK? Well, if you insist! I'll be sure to post LOTS OF STEAMPUNK EVERY SINGLE DAY JUST FOR YOU!

STEAMPUNK!

STEAMPUNK!

STEAMPUNK!

Clif Marsiglio: first of all, please don't characterize my work as being "in the public domain." That's a legal term and it's wholly incorrect.

Second of all, under current Canadian law, the private copying right arguably (and per some caselaw) makes private downloading lawful. This isn't about kids breaking the law: this is about Canadian lawmakers *changing the law* to criminalize kids. And doing so at the behest of a foreign power, against the wishes of the Canadian rightsholders, performers, record labels, writers, librarians, citizen's rights groups, etc.

Yup -- I have a little upload script that resizes and sends any jpgs on my desktop to my server for easy embedding, and it prompts for the size info before uploading. I accidentally hit the 5 twice, trying to make it 500 px wide.

Preserverence is basically the art of self-deception -- you just keep telling yourself that you're certain to attain victory ANY SECOND NOW, even if you have no basis to assert this.

Thanks, everyone! This has been the tour of a lifetime and it was all SO WORTH IT. I've got two more stops -- private industry things -- before I go back to London, but everywhere I've gone, people have been so kind and effusive and generous -- that's worth any amount of sleep.

I haven't been silent at all. I will be posting at least one, often two or more posts about Little Brother, every single day, for at least two months, and if you don't like it read something else. I've said it before and I'm happy to say it as often as you'd like (time permitting, given the book tour schedule).

If you don't like reading websites in which the editors talk about their projects and appearances, then you don't like reading Boing Boing. I'd hate to see you reading a site you don't like -- what a waste of your time -- so you should probably take yourself elsewhere.

Can't get more straightforward than that, can I?

Ahaley, Tivo doesn't honor the broadcast flag -- which effects broadcast programming. They respond to a few other flags as part of their cable agreements.

The big deal about *broadcast* is that the spectrum (which belongs to the American public) is loaned for free to broadcasters, who, in return, are NOT ALLOWED to restrict the recording in this way.

The tour stops were picked out with some science by Tor Teens, based on the places where bestselling YA fiction becomes a hit first -- IOW, the places that seem to be centers for diffusing enthusiasm about kids' books. If it were up to me, there'd be twenty more cities on this tour (though it'd probably kill me!), but this is all about spending Tor's money as intelligently as possible.

Falk, you need to look up the difference between embedding and copying. But of course, that would mean you'd have to discuss the facts, rather than grinding your personal vendetta axe.

Those are great -- too bad the pix are all stuck in linkable flashblobs. Why do designers love Flash so much? It must be a gigantic pain to update those sites, and no one can link directly to one of your pieces... It's like the artist is saying, "Hey, all my pieces are equivalent, so one really needs to show a friend any one specific piece."

Spoon, are you making a funny or something?

Little Brother is already available as free download, just like all my books, and as has been noted, is a NYT bestseller.

Thanks everyone!

AriB@2: Anything you can come up with from the book, I'm game to see!

No, it's not necessary for the hash to be reversible in order for it to violate privacy -- for example, the hash may be stored with other identifiers (e.g. names gleaned from debit cards) or may be mined after the fact -- e.g., someone wants to figure out if you were in a certain place at a certain time, so they take the hash of your face and run it against the database.

Indeed, the storing of hashes without other identifiers creates new privacy risks, inasmuch as such hashes will necessarily contain many collisions, so that false circumstantial evidence of your presence at a given till could be generated, without any way for you to refute it.

Other lovely facts about the British approach to privacy:

If you're arrested (or even brought in for interrogation but not charged), your DNA is sampled and held on file, indefinitely, whether or not you are convicted of any crime.

Immigrants -- even those who've lived in the country for years, as I have, and are only renewing their visas -- are now required to give a full suite of biometrics to the Home Office.

HMRC maintains a semi-secret taxation records-keeping system for the wealthy and titled, because they don't believe that the existing system used by "normal" people is secure.

British passports have biometric identifiers and RFID chips.

Scotland Yard has announced its intention to begin to mine Oyster Card data to automatically identify "criminals."

The head of Scotland Yard advocated DNA sampling for children as young as 5 who exhibit "antisocial" tendencies, so as to make it easier to arrest them later in life.

God, the British smugness about civil liberties is insufferable.

The UK suspended habeas corpus first, and more enthusiastically.

The UK is closer to a national ID infrastructure than the US.

The UK allowed (and finally rescinded) a regulation that would fingerprint all passengers in T5 in London.

The UK passed RIPA, then sat quietly back as the Met and local councils used the extraordinary, invasive anti-terrorism powers to spot people whose dogs muck the pavement.

The UK collects enormous amounts of financial data on its citizens, then lets the bloody HMRC repeatedly lose 25,000,000 households' worth of that information. Repeatedly. Over a period of years.

The US is not a model nation by any means, but whatever privacy-discarding madness it is gripped by, the UK is likewise in the grasp of.

Hey, Spooke -- get stuffed.

I'm a Canadian.

I live in Britain.

This isn't "American" perspective on anything.

I get the impression they'd be really happy to have someone volunteer to set up tech stuff for them.

Um, Coresoup, Derren Brown is a renowned skeptic who has devoted his career to debunking psychic phenomena, and makes no claim to doing anything supernatural. He, like James Randi, Penn and Teller, etc, is a conjurer who openly derides those who seek to deceive the public.

You, sir, are talking out of your ass.

Simon, "Walkman" was lost because Sony had the stupid temerity to sue a DICTIONARY for describing the term (accurately) as generic. IOW, they forced a judge to decide between giving them exclusive rights, or censoring whether lexicographers could legitimately publish their observations about the way people spoke.

Eai@4: No, that's just a fairy tale that trademark lawyers tell their clients to justify their billings. In practice, it's unheard of for courts to allow truly deceptive uses of marks, even if this kind of use has been allowed. For example, we all use "to google" as a generic way to describe searching, but there's zero chance that Microsoft could launch a campaign called "Google it with MSN Search" without losing the ensuing courtroom battle.

Copyrightme@29: "Of course, as a nationally recognized copyfighter you'll be making the entire book available as a free download, yes?"

Why yes: http://craphound.com/littlebrother/download/

@17Mousewrites: Nope, never been to that one!

@4, 7: Indeed, I will be posting about Little Brother daily for a couple of months at least. I'll be mentioning each day's tour stops, all the new Instructables, any really cool remixes, any awards it wins, etc. At least once, often twice a day. Sometimes more, as events warrant.

@5: Almost all - I'm covering half the overseas flight from London so I can go Premium Economy, which is a lot easier on my back (and my sciatica).

@6: Not this time! I do get to Portland every couple years, though.

I already have a DSL line from BT, which I'll be keeping.

Is "internet users have short attention spans" not rather patronising?

No, I don't think --

Wait, what?

Hellhead, you're just the sort of person I was hoping would sign up -- by all means, send in a request!

Regarding other authors -- no not that I know of. Someone should set up a service, though.

Tuktuk! Hilarious -- what a family tree!

The PDF's fixed now -- thanks!

Charleswi: that only works if you know where in the card the chip lives.

Bwahahahahaha!

Sheer hilarity!

@2: That's pretty silly.

So, when a headline reads, "US asks Canada for better terms in trade agreement," you think it should read, "Elected representatives of the US ask elected representatives of Canada for better terms in trade agreement?"

Or, "Hollywood numbers slump" should read, "Numbers for Hollywood film industry slump"?

You must live somewhere with REALLY wide newspapers.

Mwiik -- it wont be sooner than Monday!

Torrance, it was a repost, so I nuked it.

Hey, Destructor! Yes, there's a UK edition coming on Nov 17 that will also be sold throughout the commonwealth, including .au, .nz and .za

I just use Thunderbird, but I've used Mail.app and even Entourage with these tips in past.

Xodarap, I think you're wrong, sorry! Take "Scalzi" out of the sentence and see how it reads.

Torrance -- yeah, I keep podcasts on the iPod and pop the bead in whenever I've got a few seconds; it's the only way I can keep up.

Jeff, see: http://www.forbes.com/2006/11/30/cory-doctorow-copyright-tech-media_cz_cd_books06_1201doctorow.html

Fixed!

Airpillow, I take your point. I think there's a time for funny, ranty stuff and a time for serious, "neutral" tone. Blogs are great for the former, position papers, journalistic editorials, etc are generally where I do the latter.

I've looked at the comments from the WotC guys, and while there's a little word-mincing, there's a pretty clear indication that the intent is to poison the previous edition and the open license that went with it.

Jared@11 not yet! I'll have everything up shortly, though, around the time the book launches.

Kerry@10 Thanks for the review!

Clockwork@9 So, you think it infringes on your liberties to be told that it's rude to come here and dictate what should and shouldn't be on the blog?

I'm going to be posting about Little Brother on a very regular basis for the next year or so. I will be posting more links to the related instructables, there will be videos and audio material, keysigning parties, and reminders of each stop on the book tour.

If that bothers you, you're probably in the wrong place (or you can figure out how to skip the stuff, as, I assume, you skip everything else that we post that you're not interested in).

Boing Boing is the place where the four editors post about the stuff we find interesting, and about the stuff we do with the stuff we find interesting (e.g. books, videos, etc). If that's not what you want to read, you've come to the wrong place.

Registrado, it'll go up once the book's out.

Thanks, MKUltra!

Rob O -- I have 10,000 books in storage in Toronto, another several thousand in a storage in LA, and still more in storage in London. That's the tip of the tip of the iceberg. You try moving continents ever 2-3 years for a decade and see where your books end up.

Automatt, the book'll be up for download the same week as it comes out in stores -- more specifically, it'll be available for download as soon as I get home to London and get the last few files I need to upload online.

There is a bigger tour, including some NYC dates -- but not BookExpo Canada.

May 1 it is. Durrrr.

The UK cover is completely lovely -- the US cover (shown here) not as good.

Lava, this was *originally* posted on complett.nl, where Materialicious found it. But they're not Magellan -- they didn't "discover" something previously unknown. Many people have gone to the site in times gone by. Many people have appreciated this work in person, too. Materialicious and lots of other people posted about it, and other people saw it, and other people saw what they posted, and so on.

"Via" means, "this is where I saw it." It does not mean, "This is the first person in the world who ever wrote a blog post about it."

Life is too short -- and provenance is too difficult to determine -- to track down "via"s unto the first hit a website ever received.

Takuan, I bow before you.

Linea, my grandfather was a watchmaker who had literally 10,000 partial movements in his apartment when he died.

Thanks, Andrew!

Magician, you're missing the point. Say I want to run a video service. I can buy all the bandwidth in the universe, a bundle of fiber as thick as a baby's arm going straight into my server, and it won't make any difference to Virgin's customers. Virgin is saying that it doesn't matter how fast they get the data from me -- all that matters is how much I've paid them to reach Virgin customers.

So, realistically, how will this work? Will every person who wants to serve files to the Internet have to buy a data connection and then bribe *every ISP in the world* to deliver the packets faithfully to their customers?

Shouldn't Virgin's first service priority be giving me the packets I asked for at the fastest possible speed?

Annoyedcapitalist: the empirical evidence from Internet2 researchers who've used the best-available QoS mechanisms is that the management costs of these systems are ALWAYS higher than adding the capacity necessary to obviate them:

http://commerce.senate.gov/public/index.cfm?FuseAction=Hearings.Statement&Statement_ID=40

Network operators want to charge us *three times* for our connections:

1. I pay for my broadband

2. Google pays for its broadband

3. My ISP charges Google to connect to my broadband

This is just rent-seeking, exploiting a regulatory monopoly -- the public's largesse -- to pick the public's pocket.

Imagine that you ran a successful independent pizzeria, Annoyedcapitalist's American Style. When I call you up, BT says, "You're ringing a basic-tier pizzeria. Please hold for 2 minutes, the time we delay calls to Annoyedcapitalist's American Style because they haven't paid us a 'premium tier' fee. Their line isn't engaged -- we just don't route calls to them as efficiently as we might in order to maximize our revenue. In the meantime, if you're hungry for pizza *now*, why not try Domino's, who have paid for premium-rate call-routing."

That's a pretty sweet racket for BT -- whose lines and right of ways have been paid for by the public, directly (through subsidy when they were a public entity) and indirectly (though free and low-cost rights-of-way) -- but how is this good for the public, pizza, or capitalism?

If BT or Virgin want to run a purely capitalist enterprise, let them negotiate for every foot of sewer and every pole they string their wires through, and pay market rates for them. But if they're going to get this stuff at public subsidy, they need to act in the public's interest -- or someone else should be given their wires and the mandate to run them.

Well, that's a watch *movement* in a nicely chased silver ring.

@14, sorry, I couldn't disagree more.

In Eldred v Ashcroft, the supremes held that *ninety eight percent* of the works in copyright are orphaned. Not only can their authors not get paid for their use, but in many cases, all known copies of these works will disappear before their copyrights expire, which will effectively remove these artists from the historical record -- forever. This is already happening to a lot of early, post-1928 (Steamboat Willie) film stock, which is disintegrating in archives because it can't be used because no one knows whom it belongs to.

The orphan works proposals that have reached anything like maturity say that:

1. Various entities -- including nonprofits, including artists' groups, including others -- can use registries to help with orphan works. These registries will be optional, and the LoC will work to keep them honest. The LoC has maintained its own registry since Ben Franklin.

2. Anyone who finds a work that is not in the registry is required to conduct a good-faith search for the author. If that search comes up null, the LoC or a collecting society will collect a set royalty for use of the work and escrow it for the author.

3. If the good-faith search turns out to have been merely pro-forma, conducted *without* good faith, the author will be entitled to massive statutory damages.

None of this is coherent with the bizarre rant that this guy published. He's basically made up a bunch of stuff, backed it up with selective and misleading quotations, and then declared the sky is falling.

Orphan works legislation is desperately needed, so that we can:

* Make new works from old

* Rescue old works from history's scrapheap

* Pay the 98% of artists whose works are presently orphaned

You're right. The Berne convention prohibits mandatory registration. That's why we can be absolutely certain that the US will not pass an orphan works rule on the lines that this guy is worried about, nor will any other WTO signatory.

So, the question is whether more artists have been put out of business by the net than have been put into business by it. The net positively overflows with musicians, fine artists, visual artists, filmmakers, etc who are making art and reaching an audience (and, presumably, making money at it).

MarkFrei: Well, if you want to do something entrepreneurial (sell art on the market) and you don't want to have to figure out what's commercially viable before you try it, I guess you're pretty much out of luck. Entrepreneurs who don't care about selling stuff people want to buy at a price and in a form they want to buy it in generally don't do very well.

Maybe you could apply for grants?

@3: Someone posts a ridiculous loaded hypothetical that's totally unrelated to the post: what do you do? Dismiss the hypothetical and ignore the straw-man

Um, the magnet person was a sarcastic hypothetical person, made up in response to the council's assertion that they need to protect their street-signs. Yeesh.

I think would be good for kids -- I think they're better at loving stuff without having to understand it (viz Alice in Wonderland) than big people.

Dustin -- the reason her sex is relevant is that she's lipsynching MEN who speak, and the incongruity of this is part of its artistic impact.

If the artwork in question was, for example, wearing a fake maternity pad 24/7 and recording public reaction, and the artist was a man, I would probably headline it, "Man artist wears pregnancy belly."

Art, right freakin' on.

This isn't art criticism, it's crummy attitudinizing and straw-man crap. This guy has invented a group of poseurs (the mythical "people in top hats" who don't know what to make), who are not anywhere in evidence, are entirely irrelevant to this post, and used them to damn Jake (with faint praise and an arch sneer), and anyone else who happens to enjoy something without (apparently) designing circuit boards.

It's a literal non sequitur, an attempt to hijack a thread in order to rubbish the legitimate passions of others.

It's inexcusable.

If the only excuse you can offer for your sneering is that the people you're sneering at are "thumbless," then you're a bigger troll than I took you for. Apparently learning to design circuit boards doesn't turn you into someone who's also learned to value human endeavor for its own sake.

You have fun there up on your exalted perch, but please forgive us mere thumblesses for our "histrionics" when you tell us that we are insufficiently subculturally pure for this movement that you have appointed yourself arbiter and executioner for.

Honestly, what a shitty, petty little stream of piss you've left in your short career as a Boing Boing message-board poster. It's people like you who stop others from ever doing creative things, insecure snipers who sit on the sidelines and tell everyone else how lame their clothes, loves, and enthusiasms are.

Who the fuck asked you?

Evilrooster and Agent 86, you cats are tops in my books.

"Emulating?" Oh, the arrogance!

How about "celebrating?" How about "enjoying?"

Yes, you sit there on the sidelines, sneering at the people who are having a good time, telling them that they're not *really* enjoying themselves. Give the old spleen a good workout. I'm sure that when you lie on your deathbed, you'll smile grimly at the productive hours you spent spoiling other peoples' fun.

You know, "making things," doesn't technically including "making people miserable."

Oh for god's sake -- what is it about someone *liking* something and *being excited by it* that causes sourpuss grumpuses to crawl out of their holes to piss all over them?

Who *cares* if "subculture" or "movement" or "esthetic" is the right word for it?

Didn't you get enough of arguing about whether so-and-so is a *real* goth/punk/whatever when you were 16?

If Jake wants to call himself a steampunk, more power to him! If someone else who likes top-hats wants to say the same, yee-haw, follow your weird, buddy, and more power to you!

Christ, anything you can do to have a good time, feel good, and make the world and more interesting place, allez!

And anyone who says you're using the wrong word to describe what you do, or that it's lame because it is the wrong color or not interesting to them, they can pound sand. Griping about other peoples' passions most assuredly does NOT make the world a more interesting place.

Creating an account for the sole purpose of posting a message that tells people who are having a fun time playing around with culture, fabrication, and identity that they are insufficiently edgy because they don't make their own top-hats is really dysfunctional.

Cuvtixo, dismissing an entire realm of activity as "harmless" -- especially a traditionally feminine one -- in the same breath that you dismiss an entire field of scientific endeavor does not do you proud.

The guy from Warner used to be a free agent. He's a radical copyfighter named Jim Griffin, and he's a hell of a dude. I trust him to the ends of the earth.

Skep, you're misunderstanding me -- yes, a DJ could be busted for *downloading* a song, but the act of *playing* the downloaded song over the air is legal. The license covers playing music, period, regardless of source.

As to royalties, there are plenty of double dips -- indeed, they're the norm in blanket licenses. For example, a DJ buys a CD at a record store -- that's one royalty to the composer and artist. Then she plays it on the air -- that's another royalty. The broadcast is piped through a department store that pays for the performance right -- that's a THIRD royalty.

It's useful to compare this to other blanket licenses, for example, the license offered to radio stations.

When a DJ drops the needle on his record, he is legit, no matter where the recording came from (an iPod, a bootleg, a download), and no matter what happens to the transmission after it is received (shared, retransmitted, recorded, webcast). The radio station has paid for the right to play all the music, over its equipment, regardless of origin or eventual disposition.

In this system, an ISP's customer is like the DJ: it doesn't matter where she gets the music, nor what the people who receive it from her do with it. *Her* use is legit. Solving the global issues is a matter of proving the model works and going to other countries and looking to get their ISPs to offer comparable licenses.

Or compare this with the US compulsory license on compositions: if you want to sell a recording of you performing *any song ever written*, you just need to pay a small fee to a collecting society, which will pass the money on to the composer.

You sell the record to me, and I take it to a country that doesn't have the deal and sell it on as a wholesaler: you're still legit. The composer still got paid in the USA. It may be that the recording found its way to China and got duplicated 10,000,000 times. You're still legit. The composers need to get a better deal out of China, but abandoning their US revenue until that happens is suicide.

Keneke, I just hate it. Artistically, I think it fails -- it's meanspirited, opportunistic (trying to jump on a pop culture bandwagon that had already left the scene like an old white guy in a bad suit and comb-over doing a Flava Flav impression) and incoherent (what does Gloria Estefan have to do with Polynesia?). The brilliant twoaxis symmetry that guaranteed that every seat in the house was a great one is gone, so half the theater misses half the show now.

The old show's jokes were corny and sweet, the new show's jokes are lame and dismissive.

Every time I hear Iago tell us that the tiki birds are stupid, I remember how much pleasure my grandfather got from them, and I think, "What a prick the guy who did this must have been."

Photocopy them and send Scribd the copies.

My want list? WANT ALL OF IT! I'm gonna try to phone order on the day after.

I love the total absence of anything resembling sane threat-modelling here:

We must defend ourselves against terrorists and pirates here -- they'll stop at nothing!

So we'll delete their images, because these unstoppable pirratists may be incredibly determined and nefarious, but surely they'll be discouraged at the thought of a) buying a small, secret camera or b) using an undelete tool to recover the image off their memory cards.

When your "security" plan relies on easily discouraged suicide bombers, you're just fucking around.

One thing that I've figured out about Heathrow flights is that business-class and first-class travellers get a MUCH better deal than coach travellers. BA's Terminal One check-in is at the other end of the terminal, with its own high-speed security check that lets out directly into the duty-free in the middle of the terminal. Virgin's Upper Class limo service drives you right onto a tarmac security checkpoint with its own guards (by contrast, coach travellers on Virgin go through the Terminal 3 security checkpoint, which often runs more than 2 hours -- I once was stuck in it for more than 3.

The shittier Heathrow is, the stronger the value-proposition for business class tickets.

Inverse Square, was that a non-sequitur, sarcasm, or are you really incapable of understanding why this specific post, which is about an item on Search Engine, contains this disclaimer?

Hey, Aaron -- sorry about that, I missed that the image wasn't created by the same person who created the article. If it hever happens again (doesn't happen very often), you can email me and I'll fix it right away.

Thank you, thank you, thank you, Teresa, for posting that fantastic document. It's as perfect a description of our aspirations for Boing Boing's message boards as I can imagine. I'm really glad you took my advice and posted it all to the front door.

Cory

Thanks for the tip on the woody, Bloo! I've got a soft spot for those old rattletraps!

Peter@1: I love how your mind works.

Jennfrank, that's HILARIOUS!

"Which leads us to the obvious question.. if in a free economy only the very good can support themselves on what is effectively donations.. then what happens to the rest of the content creators?"

Substitute the word "royalties" or "payments" for "donations" and you've described the status quo in every field of artistic endeavor.

Where do the mediocre artists earn a living, with or without an Internet?

Also: Scott's not soliciting donations, he's selling books.

FWIW, the former cyber-czar, Richard Clark, was a seriously awesome dude who was, by all accounts, hounded out of office by the Bush Administration, because he was a Clinton appointee (despite being a Republican).

Boomzilla -- that's news to me. I explicitly did NOT give permission for D&OITMK (and my other books) to be sold for the Kindle store. I'll have a word with my publisher.

Functional elements of designs are not copyrightable (this is why we describe design copyrights as "thin copyrights"). The Davis Wing and other elements of the fuselage are *all* functional -- and therefore not copyrightable.

Just got this:

Dear friends,

With great sadness I would like to announce that, Arthur C. Clarke, a visionary science fiction writer who won worldwide acclaim with more than 100 boo ks on space, science and the future, die d Wednesday in his adopted home of Sri Lanka, an aide said. He was 90.

Clarke, who had battled debilitating post-polio syndrome since the 1960s and sometimes used a wheelchair, died at 1:30 a.m. after suffering breathing problems.

I had the privilege of visiting him a week ago at the hospital with Michael Snowden.

My thoughts go out to everyone here that has been inspired by his
works as much as I have.

Please check the official media statement at http://thilinaheenatigala.blogspot.com

Thilina Heenatigala
General Secretary
Sri Lanka Astronomical Association

(Please forward the message around)

= = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = = =

Thilina Heenatigala
http://thilinaheenatigala.blogspot.com
http://thilinaheenatigala-astronomy.blogspot.com

General Secretary
Sri Lanka Astronomical Association
http://aalk.lakdiva.net

Observing Coordinator
Astronomy & Space Study Center

Instructor
Royal College Astronomical Society

Founder & Moderator
Sir Arthur Clarke Birthday wishes blog
http://sirarthurcclarke90.blogspot.com

Jupiter12, can you cite a source for "tourism is at an all time high?"

It's certainly not what I've heard and seen reported.

Re "Don't go" -- you guys ever hear of capitalism? In a capitalist system, customers of businesses express their views on those businesses in order to influence those business's behavior.

Speaking of "don't go" -- if you don't like market economies, move to a banana republic somewhere.

finisterre@2, I'm sorry, that's just not true. If you own a tuner, you have to pay. If you buy a monitor or another set without a built in tuner, you can argue against paying the license, but tuner=license.

HJ03@1: Yes, hard to believe the American Peso has been so debased by the Fed that 60 quid is $120.

Well, you'd have to ask Eliot. But I suspect that a US warrant wouldn't be any more valid for the Canadian company than a Saudi warrant is.

My favorite registrar is TuCows/DomainDirect.com -- I use them for all my domains. They're in Canada, so out of the US Treasury's jurisdiction, and I know the founder personally (Eliot Noss) and trust him to be honorable and cautious in honoring takedowns and similar complaints.

Strathmeyer@2: Major DNS changes can take up to 48h to propagate.

Audio costs a LOT more to produce than print books.

iPlayer DRM has nothing to do with keeping people from outside of the UK watching iPlayer shows. There's a geo-IP system that does that. The DRM is about restricting what the license-payer, who is forced, by law, to pay for the production of this programming, may do with it.

The BBC's charter does not require it to prevent foreigners from using its services, BTW -- the charter prohibits the BBC from devoting extra resources to accomplishing this, though. That's why there's no geofence on bbc.co.uk's news service.

Mr Wednesday -- I invite you to prove this for yourself by visiting one of this country's many fine high-powered, omnidirectional broadcast towers. You can also verify this by pointing a satellite dish at the sky, whence the BBC's unencrypted signal emanates.

Kid: the majority of starving artists have never ended up where NIN is, labels or no labels (97% of artists with a major label record deal earn $600 or less from it, according to a filing Alanis Morrisette's lawyer made in the Napster case).

Most artists will always starve. But there are indies who are making a living from CC (Jonathan Coulton), megastars who are earning a living from CC (NIN), and lots of people somewhere in the middle (Danger Mouse, the Beasties) who used or use CC for part or all of their income.

Bottom line: the traditional major label position that all copying must be controlled to get an income for artists, and that majors are the smartest people when it comes to getting artists paid, is demonstrably false.

Acejohnny: I do both; I use the Internet personally and Creative Commons, and I work with my publisher's traditional PR apparatus. As I like to say, "I get the book on Slashdot, they get it into the New York Times." It's a good mix.

Peebz -- I didn't live overseas for most of a decade; I took the train to the frist several of these events. But I'm a vegan, I eat locally grown minimally processed food, I live in an insulated 700sqft flat with two other people, use public transit or walk exclusively in town, and have replaced every major appliance with high-efficiency equivalents in the past five years. Where I have discretion to reduce my energy consumption, I have. Where energy is necessary to my income, I expend it. You're digging coal with your spacebar -- but I'm willing to bet that my net consumption is median or below for the industrial world.

Remember that this is very different from the state of MP3 players a decade ago: the dawn of the MP3 player era was the end of the walkman era, during which the massive global appeal of walkmen had already been proven out (not to mention that ten years ago, manufacturing was much more dispersed around the planet, rather than all in one place).

Also remember that the groups who place a high value on the convenience of ebooks -- expatriates living overseas, nomadic frequent travellers, poor students -- are not people who drive mass markets, either because they are not very numerous, or because they are poor (or both).

If this were a tube campaign, it would be a London Transport Police poster. It's not. It's a Met poster, intended for widespread dissemination across London.

So, CShottan, how is it that the "political movement" has so completely captured the peer-reviewed science world that every study concurs that human-generated CO2 is adversely changing the climate? Do you believe that the incredible might of arrogant scientists has completely conquered the pitiful strength of every industrial entity that stands to benefit from the status quo?

Is it totally impossible to imagine that, say, climate change can have both human and "spontaneous" origins? Or that the European Warm Period was the result of the very long-term de-sequestering of carbon from human activity over the millennia preceeding it, a preview of the massive change that the much more aggressive changes since?

Meanwhile, even if the European Warm Period was such a great period that we needn't worry about global warming because Greenland was an Eden then, what about the rest of the world during the same period -- the incredible droughts and catastrophic loss of human life experienced in the southern hemisphere during that period.

Sorry, no Hamburg on this trip -- maybe next time! Thanks for the invite, Joker, but I go to 10PM and then have to get up tomorrow at 4:30 to make my flight out, so it's straight to bed!

I'll willing to bet that organ donors, if presented with a choice, would pick burn victims over boners.

Spoon: the difference is in the nature of the complaint. Complaining that a blog about subject X contains too much subject X is just dumb (doing so in the message boards for posts about subject X is even dumber, since it's a great big screw you to the people who actually like subject X)

OTOH, complaining about products that have been deliberately -- and admittedly -- reduced in quality to curry favor with the record industry is perfectly valid.

Oh, ffs, Complicity, read the article would you? You see the part where I say authors have a legitimate interest in their works and getting paid for it? You see the part where I say that knowledge is precious and valuable?

Christ, if that's the best you can do, go back to Digg.

Biffpow, you're laboring under the misapprehension that English has an academy that determines its formal correctness (like French, German or Hebrew). English has no such academy and no formal rules -- merely dialects, usage and rough consensus. The world's largest pool of English-speakers is in India, speaking an English that's extremely different to Canadian, British and American English.

As a Canadian living in the UK who writes on subjects I studied primarily in the US, I write my own hybridized English -- as do most expat "native" English speakers.

All my tools had knives or scissors

I don't think there's any risk of the driver-heads slipping the buckle -- it's very sturdy when done up.

Screwing and unscrewing stuff with a driver that's attached to a belt-buckle isn't nearly as good as a standalone driver, but this is about exigencies, not planning.

Weightedcompanioncube: When, exactly, was Boing Boing less political?

Bongo, I think you're misconstruing my point: once you tell people that the reason that they have been afforded an interest in this idea or that is because it is their property (rather than characterizing it as a limited, policy-driven regulatory monopoly, as even WIPO's charter holds), then you invite them to draw numerous faulty analogies to the disposition of their knowledge.

For example, a stadium owner can condition your entrance on the basis of your agreement to subject to a metal-detector search; if a book is "property" of the author, then your receipt of the book could be conditioned on your willingness to accept certain comparable terms (for example, a requirement that you register as the owner of the book and report on its status to the author -- has it left the country? Been lent? etc).

Indeed, an oft-repeated shibboleth of property-addled writers is that readers "only own the physical book -- the words remain the author's property." This isn't even true in today's propertized copyright system (exhaustion, fair use, and other exceptions and limitations in law all acknowledge that the reader has an interest in the words and ideas, as well as owning the physical book).

"Intellectual Property" is an affront to the idea of property, since it holds that all objects might embody someone else's "property" (a secret, a trademark, a copyright, a patent, etc) and that therefore you can't really be said to "own" anything. Your house's plans remain the "property" of the architect. Your wedding photos remain the "property" of the shooter. Your microwave, computer, t-shirts, carburetor, and TV remote are all someone's "property." The only true owners in an intellectual property are sharecropping knowledge barons who grudgingly dole us out limited rights to their "property."

Take Jeff's #6: patents are *not* property. They are most assuredly regulatory monopolies enacted to encourage inventors to eschew trade secrets in exchange for limited terms of exclusivity. They have a policy rubric and patent systems can therefore be empirically measured and compared to discover how "well" they work: if this country's inventors make more recourse to trade secrets than that country's inventors, then the former has a worse patent system than the latter's.

An even better example is in trademark, which is even less "property" than patent. Trademarks have their origin in common-law consumer protection cases, and were codified (recently) into law on that basis. Companies are granted trademarks in order that they might protect *the public* from misleading use of the marks. It doesn't matter a fig if an abuse of a mark harms its "owner's" interests: trademark protection only cover harm to the public interest. And yet, many is the trademark "owner" who will defend the undying need to protect his "property" -- said property constituting a word used in everyday speech by millions, a thrumming of their vocal cords that, nevertheless, does not belong to them, but rather to some distant "trademark owner."

Ratbastid, I think you're confusing "technical enforceability" (e.g., could you throttle a server? yes!) with legal enforceability ("Do I form an agreement to limit my use of your web-page just by looking at your web-page?")

From Scalzi's piece: "By his own admission, in Burt’s writing career, which goes back into the last century, he’s produced five short stories that would be SFWA qualifying. His one novel was self-published (publisher: Techsoft. CEO of Techsoft: Andrew Burt) and has more Amazon reviews (seven) than sales registered by BookScan (five)"

Zenhammond: Boing Boing exists as the place where the editors can write about the stuff they care about so that people who care about the same stuff can read it.

Boing Boing does not exist as a place where someone tries to figure out what stories will be popular among some notional audience and attempts to write to that audience.

The former is a blog. The latter is a magazine. I write for magazines -- if you'd like to commission me to write to your spec, you can found a magazine and approach me with a contract. But on this blog, the editors get to choose which subjects they'll post about, and what they'll say about them.

dotSUB is a great site for collaborative subtitling.

Morbius@1: Apparently, you've hallucinated some editorial guidelines directing the editors here as to what we may and may not post. Unfortunately, we are not actually working for you. Boing Boing has ALWAYS featured its' editors' personal projects -- and it always will. If that bugs you, you're reading the wrong site.

Now, as weird as it is for you to show up and complain that you don't like the flavor of the free ice-cream -- and to make ridiculous, unsupported and untrue statements about the proportion of my posting that concerns my projects (it's less than one percent, something that you can easily verify) -- is that you think that this would be MORE acceptable if I disguised posts about myself by getting my co-editors to write about ti.

Where on earth did you get the impression that Boing Boing was a place that didn't include its editors' personal projects? These have been a feature of Boing Boing since the print days. If that bugs you, go somewhere else.

If they'd played "Sugarplum Fairies" when I was a teen mall-rat, I would have organized an interpretive dance recital.

Another way of phrasing this:

Who has a better handle on how much food a baby needs -- a government bureaucrat or a medical doctor who is also the baby's parent?

Since when does the government have a legitimate role in determining how much food our children need during airport delays?

You know, I couldn't really figure it out -- some kind of self-publishing something. She was intense.

My understanding is that many CCTVs have some sensitivity into the IR in order to resolve detail in poor light conditions. The CCD in these cameras is reputed to fail when exposed to high intensity IR light sources.

Yeah, why would you try to improve the quality of children's lives by giving them a safe place to play in a country haunted by a decades-old civil war that involves child soldiers? After all, so long as there's a single sick person or crowded school, no other development work should be undertaken.

Not CC licensed, though.

Sandalian -- find me a photo of a roof-rider that's CC licensed and I'll include it. That's a photo of an Indonesian train, and it's the closest I could find.

I can't hear you -- I've got a banana on my wall!

I always liked the gloriously inconsistent world of Varley's stories and novels that seemed to inhabit similar, non-identical settings with small discontinuities that served the needs of each story.

toomanytribbles, do you know something the Guardian doesn't?

"A 2,000-year-old mechanical computer salvaged from a Roman shipwreck has astounded scientists who have finally unravelled the secrets of how the sophisticated device works."

Dbarak, if you're ordered to do something illegal and you do it, you're a criminal. Even if you're a soldier. Even if there's a war on. That's been a matter of settled international law since the Nuremburg Trials, and was a norm of international law for centuries before that.

The US executed Japanese military personnel who'd waterboarded US prisoners, because waterboarding a prisoner is a capital crime and the people who commit it -- and are complicit in it -- are criminals.

Super Paper Mario -- sorry, you're right.

The deal with buying used lease printers is that you usually don't get the maintenance contract. Given the number of moving parts this thing has, that's just begging for trouble, unless you really, really love fixing printers.

The problem with a PoD-only book is that there's an enormous amount of work that my publisher does that isn't just arranging for the book to be printed (indeed, I used to work in prepress -- if that's all Tor did, I could fire them and up my royalty rate by 800%).

What Tor does is edit, publicize, and deploy an army of trained sales people to retail outlets across the country to personally talk up my books to buyers for chains and indies. Not only do I lack the time to do that -- I just *can't* do that. I'm not a salesman, and if I was, I couldn't possibly cover the ground that Tor's seasoned, expert reps cover every day.

I with everyone who says that registering a trademark on "Lennon" (and then saying that your career is over if you can't hold that trademark) is dumb as a sack of hammers.

The world of recorded music has been happily disambiguating people with similar names for its entire lifespan. Whomever told this woman that she needed to get a registered trademark on her name in order to have a career was a moron.

Stevemars@6: No, you're part of the "visa waiver" programme and can travel to the US without a visa -- you just fill in a form at the border.

#7: "Customs people (my observations, I've known a couple) in the past tended to use their experience and intuition to decide how much scrutiny was called for."

I've driven across the US-Canada border crossing hundreds of times in my life and the *only* time I've been asked to pull my car over for a thoroughgoing search, an interview, etc was when there were two black people (science fiction writers Nalo Hopkinson and her husband, David) in the car with me.

I was never more ashamed to be Canadian than that day.

ZOMGROFL! Poesy laughed her cute li'l butt off.

Well yeah, until the Canadian DMCA makes the legal risks associated with operating a sharing-friendly website for music so risky that they all shut down and you can't find the indie music you love anymore.

We're over the moon this morning, folks. She's just over 24 hours old today. A million thanks to everyone who posted -- especially the poetry and photoshops (I cried at the former, laughed hysterically at the latter). She slept in our room last night, in a bassinet and sometimes on us when she was fussing. I nodded off this morning around 6AM with her chuffing like a railroad engine, nuzzled in my throat.

Jeff, other telcos refused to cooperate.

Paulballs, where are the posts in which I make fun of Jesus? Generally speaking, I mention religion very little. Your offense at this picture of a sign on a churchyard is evidence of a tortured mind -- you've invented an offense and then taken up its cause. But if you'd like to create an index of all the posts ever that mention religion on Boing Boing, count up the extent to which they mention different faiths, and compare that to an index of the proportion of faiths whose tenets are discussed in the English-language media that I consume, I'd be delighted to see the results (you might start with the post earlier this week that talked about a Confucionist/Buddhist theme-park in Singapore)>

I firmly believe in putting the Ch back in Channukah and the X back in Xmas. I don't have an anti-Christian bias: I have an anti-believing-in-ghosts-zombies-gods-demons bias. I don't care which book or code causes you to believe in ghosts, zombies, gods, demons, etc, I'm biased against it. Zoroaster or Holy Jesus, they're all just delusional spirituality to me. I am equally skeptical of belief in Zeus, Estarte, Isis, and, of course, Xenu.

Zuggy@7: Hilarious!

Joe@6: Sorry, but it's just not true that the ability to burn and rip Audible books makes it easier to rip them. If I'd gone that route, it would have required me to burn 400+ CDs (which is several days' work, and which requires that you stand by, swapping discs, day and night) and then rip them (ditto). And when it was done, I'd have weird overlaps in the file, since burning a track that's longer than 70min to a CD produces mid-sentence breaks in the file.

Mshea@10: The thing that really cheeses me off about Audible is their refusal to do non-DRM books even if they author wants a non-DRM book. My agent was ready to do the deal with Audible when they said, "Sorry, it's DRM or nothing." It's not as though Audible doesn't know how to distribute MP3s (several of their free as in beer feeds are MP3), and it's not as though Apple won't sell a DRM-free file for them. It's sheer bloody-mindedness, and it turned me off the company.

Deal with it.

Felsby, when I met with the CIOs of the Danish ministries two years ago, they explained to me that they do *not* use single numbers across agencies, do *not* log everyday transactions against the national ID number, etc -- and then they told me why: "When the Nazis marched into Denmark, they went straight to our police stations and started going through the files."

Thanks Luis!

Because this is a steam-powered insect?

AFAIK, the first use of Steampunk was in reference to Gibson and Sterling's THE DIFFERENCE ENGINE; given that both were arch-exemplars of "cyberpunk," it makes sense.

Thanks the one -- well spotted, M.C.!

I think that Cora's and Papa Ceo's and Pizza Gigi all do a really good job on delivery pizza -- better, in fact, than Massimo's does -- but Massimo's has them all beat for slices.

Pgei, I think you'll find that pizza (in its modern incarnation) was invented in New York by Italian immigrants.

Brain Damage, I admire your reserve. I go to Toronto once or twice a year and I ALWAYS go to Massimo's and usually have at least three slices so I can try all the varieties, then usually have a fourth of whichever I liked best. Then I lie down and curl up into a ball and go into a starch coma.

Rob, you're less objectionable (and more convincing) in your "I'm bored and you suck" pose than you are in your "I will patronize you now" pose. If you have to choose one, I'd go with the former.

Meanwhile, you just go on publicly declaring what you'd do with your opportunities should you suddenly find yourself in a position to address millions and go around the world -- I think the rest of us understand exactly why that opportunity has never arisen for you.

Raw Bacon, Diesel is an AWESOME store.

Jjasper, Orwell is one of history's greatest documenters of the conditions and privations of working people; books like DOWN AND OUT IN PARIS AND LONDON and THE ROAD TO WIGAN PIER are as clear-eyed, ferocious and brilliant an exegesis on labor and the working poor as have ever been published.

Fydebeetles, you're barking up the wrong tree. Any copyright interest in the silhouettes of the cars, etc ("design rights") are thin at best and clearly overridden in this case by doctrines like fair use (USA) and fair dealing (elsewhere).

You need to look to trademark to find the doctrine at issue here. And trademark only extends to uses of the mark that mislead the public about the origin of goods or services. Thus a use that does not cause a member of the public do believe that Ford endorsed it is not covered by trademark law, either.

As to whether there are "no additional rights than anyone else," this is untrue as a point of law. As the owner of a physical object, many rights are conferred upon you by doctrines like first sale.

In Europe, first sale is somewhat eroded by droit morale and its cousins, but it's simply untrue that owning a painting confers no rights upon you (and even less true in the US, where droit morale doesn't exist,