Vitanuova for 2001 July
<M
Y> M> 

Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 15:49:37 -0700
From: Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org>
To: CTY-L@cornell.edu
Subject: Re: Cruel and Unusual writing assignments

[I made a slight change or two here when I put this up on the web.]

Chiu, Tien writes:

> > Tien, it shouldn't be so hard to express "insane asylum" in 
> > words of one
> > syllable; how about "home for the mad"?
> 
> That was indeed what I came up with (actually "house for the mad"), after
> briefly considering "snake pit".  But that was at the end of four pages of
> similar contortions.
> 
> Scarred for life, I tell you, scarred for life.  :-)
> 
> now for the hard part: how do you say "words of one syllable" in words of
> one syllable or less?

They are words which you can say with just one "a", "e", "i", "o", "u" sound
(or blend of these, like "oo" or "ee" or "ou" and so on) out loud, not those
which have two or more such sounds in a word.  (If you can not hear it, it
does not count as a "sound" -- like the "e" at the end of "these" or "one" or
"like".) What I wrote here just now is formed from words which are like this:
each of them may have a few of the signs "a", "e", "i", "o", or "u" when you
write it, but still, if you say it out loud, has no more than one of the kinds
of sounds those make.

You may have to add "y" some of the thyme, if you want to be sure that
this rule will work.


Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 19:35:23 -0700 (PDT)
From: Alison Bazeley <abazeley@yahoo.com>
To: CTY-L@cornell.edu
Subject: Re: Cruel and Unusual writing assignments

--- Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org> wrote:
> [...]
> You may have to add "y" some of the tyme, if you
> want to be sure that
> this rule will work.

You are one sick pup... err, dog.


Date: Thu, 28 Jun 2001 20:19:02 -0700
From: Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org>
To: CTY-L@cornell.edu
Subject: Re: Cruel and Unusual writing assignments

Alison said I was

> one sick pup... err, dog.

for writing that monosyllabic account of what a monosyllabic word is.

Thanks, but it's not as hard as writing lipograms which show profound
admiration for what Mr. Wright did with his book Gadsby, or what an
author whom I forgot long ago also did in his similar La Disparition.
Lipography is a difficult art, an art at which I am not particularly
good, but still I say that it is virtuous to honor Wright and his
cohorts.  And I'm glad to do that, if I can.

If your habit is to hang out with CTY folks, you'll no doubt run
across many constraints which you could try to put on your writing.
Always, in that kind of group, among that ilk, an impishly-grinning man
or woman, boy or girl, will show up, daring you to "Try this!
Lipography, or writing only in monosyllabic words, or only using words
that start with 'j', or only words which can function as nouns...  You
can do it, I know you can!"  You will think that this task is far too
hard, and still you will, with a bit of a strain (to find that
linguistic ability CTY has said your mind plainly contains), do it.
(Abolish your doubts, I say, by trying it.)

And I say that constraints that such folks hand you call for an
originality not as thoroughgoing as that of many famous artists, but
still giving skills which I call, in a way, important.

[Also, my .sig was not my usual .sig with its usual quotation.  It had this
translation of that quotation:

"And do not say, I will study if I can;
for possibly you will not find
an opportunity.  -- Avot 2:5"]


Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 11:32:50 -0400 (EDT)
From: Bram Boroson <bboroson@shell.valkyrie.net>
To: CTY-L@cornell.edu
Subject: writing with constraints


The master of this is Georges Perec, whose novel in French missing the
letter e was translated into English (still missing the letter e) a "A
Void."

Bram


Date: Fri, 29 Jun 2001 12:37:49 -0700
From: Seth David Schoen <schoen@loyalty.org>
To: CTY-L@cornell.edu
Subject: Re: writing with constraints

Bram Boroson said:

> The master of this is Georges Perec, whose novel in French missing the
> letter e was translated into English (still missing the letter e) a "A
> Void."

Although I forgot La Disparition's author as I was writing my own
lipogram, it's plain that actually saying what folks call him is not
so handy for accounts which try to follow that author's own habits!
Possibly this fact was known to him and it was an additional
constraint to stop actors in a play from naming its playwright, mutatis
mutandis.  Thus fourth walls of narration of all sorts can stay
intact -- it's contrary to natural law in that world to proclaim in
full "G---- P---- is my author!" (as in old Judaism it was thought bad
to say out loud a particular holy word, God's actual way of saying
"God"; this strict policy could stop many ways in which folks might say
things about God).

A grand tradition of all antiquity holds as magical what you or I
should truly call a thing, or a man, or a god: if you know this, you
obtain a status as magically knowing it or him.  So you may thus also
obtain mystical information or magically command his or its actions or
by charms do various things (alas, such as injuring a man with magic
this way!).  (Naming-charms and naming-mysticism still last today in
ways which I find amazing.  Cf. ISBN 0-631-20510-1 and any work by its
author.)

So lipography shows us a world in which a law forbids naming rightly
any of a list of things (naturally, giving that list in full is also
against this law) -- and on that list is found (though not from within
this world, not by any man or woman thinking about it within this
story), possibly, our story's own author.  Is this not our situation
as actors in traditional plays or similar dramatic and fictional works?
Why do actors traditionally not know about fourth walls, or an actor
about laws which bind him, holding him back from such a wall?  But in
lipography our way of forming words has profound flaws which imply
that authors of lipograms, and actors in lipographical fictions, could
not approach particular topics at all!  Laws say that such actors must
lack words, which finally an actor might still not actually miss.
It's amazing!  A fourth wall stays wholly apart from vision, but I watch
a traditional play and actors don't pass through it.  Why?
Confabulation?

Cf. Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus 6.372, and 6.43.  At 6.4311: "Our
span of living lacks a boundary, just as our vision lacks a boundary
obvious to us."  This hardly says that a man is not mortal: and as a
famous song asks, do you actually want immortality?

I was dumb to call that last part "Re: writing with constraints" originally, not "Pri: writing with constraints" (la i-a lingvo's word for "about").

About plays and such: I saw a film in which a woman wants to find who owns a particular IP no., so that woman runs "whois" and stuff. But this thing our protagonist is trying to track down is "172.16.a.b", it's from RFC 1918, nobody could actually do things, obviously not "hacking/cracking", with such an origin! It's just as silly as "555-" in films: "Call him up at 555-2923!" and so on. It adds a touch of falsity, in that an actual IP wizard would know, or ought to know, offhand that "172.16..." is imaginary. This woman saw it in that film and (as far as I know) didn't think anything was odd about it, didn't say "Imaginary blocks from RFC 1918! I am plainly not working on this in our world, I am in a film, no doubt". No, a film account of an IP wizard may omit any tidings of RFC 1918; a protagonist who works on this for a living is still ignorant of significant facts about how it works in our world.

Similarly, in traditional films, nobody will shout "My God, that's Uma Thurman!" or "Look, look, it's Tom Hanks!" or "Say, it's Ms. Fonda!" or "Gosh, that's a man who's 0 hops from Bacon", or any such thing. Protagonists probably could turn out as film buffs, and still would not know about any famous actors, if such famous actors co-star in that particular film. (Actors who don't co-star still show up; if Fonda isn't acting in a film, you could allow an actor in that film to point out Fonda on TV or in print.) Odd, that -- for what actual film fan would not know Uma Thurman if said Uma wound up as having him as a husband?

I do think I saw a film in which a man said "Ah, I was told to call you at 555-8291, and that man said 555- and so on too, and all of what I can say, or you can say, I think, starts with 555. Look, I think I am in a film!" and that man was right in thinking this, for in fact that man was in a film. And a film, Truman Show, which talks a lot about fourth-wall topics, is said to show a bunch of similar things: "Look, you can't say this, and I can't say this, and look, all of this is just what you would find in a TV studio, all this has a quality of TV props... aha, so possibly I am in a TV show, or in a play."

I should add ISBN 0-671-65363-6 to my discussion about naming magic. You can find that book's most famous story at this location, and without paying for it.

Copyright violations abound; this book, though, was out of print for many, many, many months, and is still out of print -- so think about what I said not long ago about copyright and works going out of print, so that you can't obtain a work at all.

Accompanying that story is Marvin Minsky's discussion which also talks about UI a lot, and which was not what I thought that story was about. (I admit that Minsky has a good, important tip for your mythical running-into-djinn situations: to ask simply, as a first wish, to know "what is it that I want [...] most".)

But any writing allows many ways of discussing it, many ways of noticing what it is about or what it contains, and many things within it or facts about it you could point out.

I slept pretty late.

I might go to DEF CON 9 in Las Vegas later this month with Andrew. I went to DEF CON just before I started my new job two years ago; perhaps I'll have a new job to start right after this upcoming conference.

I worked on the BBC quite a bit. So much to do, so little time!

My arms felt fine in the morning but hurt again by evening.

The .signature of Werner Koch, maintainer of GPG, says

Omnis enim res, quae dando non deficit, dum habetur et non datur, nondum habetur, quomodo habenda est.

-- Augustinus

I think this means "So everything which is not lessened by being given away, is, as long as it is possessed and is not given away, not yet possessed in the way it ought to be possessed".

Indeed, here it is in the license for MIT Photonic Bands. I followed the link to De Doctrina Christiana there and happened on the very interesting claim

But neither does any man hate his own body. For the apostle says truly, "No man ever yet hated his own flesh." And when some people say that they would rather be without a body altogether, they entirely deceive themselves. For it is not their body, but its corruptions and its heaviness, that they hate. And so it is not no body, but an uncorrupted and very light body, that they want.

Here's Koch's own explanation of the quotation he uses.

Inside another video game, this one a haunted house kind of thing -- you have to retrieve a treasure from a haunted basement, for which you need a map, infrared goggles, and a light source. (I didn't consider why you need a light source if you have infrared goggles, but maybe ghosts and demons don't emit in the infrared because their temperature is near absolute zero -- we know that ghosts are said to be extremely cold -- but maybe they still do reflect light.)

It was really scary. There was a better logical sequence to things than in the last haunted house adventure game dream I had. This time, you could actually find the things you needed, and understand what they were there for. You could understand that at a certain point you would go to the basement, and find this treasure, and then flee. However, there was always a risk of death, and, as often in dreams, death is not particularly less scary just because of the suggestion that it might not be final.

I was there with a woman who acted as a kind of non-player character (or maybe she was being played by someone else who was having the same dream); she did things with me and was a source of hints about what to do to stay alive.

A rant.

One interesting thing in my server logs is that people keep finding this diary through searches for things like "download LinDVD", "LinDVD download", or "real media save to disk" (and various permutations). This is slightly ironic.

I'm high up in the list of results for "LinDVD download" on Google.de.

Unfortunately for people trying these searches, my diary isn't providing access to copies of the software in question. Instead, I was criticizing LinDVD as a bad thing (proprietary software technically inferior to its free software rivals, providing fewer features that users want, and giving a spurious justification for the motion picture industry's claims).

Maybe it's good that people who want to download LinDVD will find my comments. Maybe they'll be inspired to write letters to IBM about not wanting to pay for DVD-CCA licenses (although the "I won't buy computers from customers of licensees of trade associations that sue my colleagues" argument sounds a bit convoluted if you're not involved in the issue). Maybe they'll be inspired to use free software and avoid arbitrary restrictions like region codes. But probably people who wanted to download LinDVD will be frustrated by finding pages of criticism of the program. (There's a reason you can't download LinDVD, though -- because it's proprietary software, and you only get it on OEM systems.)

It's a similar situation with the RealMedia thing: I talk about a program called StreamBox VCR, which I thought was a good and useful program, and is a program which lets you save streams to disk. However, the reason I talk about it is not that I know how you can get a copy, but because there was an important lawsuit in which Real sued StreamBox and succeeded in suppressing the program. So in this case my point is again not to tell you how to get a copy of the program, but to complain about a legal and political situation, and to criticize Real for their proprietary format and for using litigation to prevent other people from making interoperable software that provides better features.

If you are looking for these programs, I can't help you find them; my point is that it should not be difficult to find Linux DVD player software, or RealMedia "VCR" software, but in practice it can be, because of copyright interests and astonishing expansions in copyright law. Therefore, you can write a letter to Real (Rob Glaser, CEO, RealNetworks, Inc., PO Box 91123, Seattle, WA 98111-9223, U.S.A.) expressing your displeasure with their efforts to prevent you from getting software (written by third parties) which would let you save streams to disk -- an activity which is comparable to the function of a VCR. You can write to IBM (I haven't been able to figure out a physical address for people who are responsible for Linux at IBM) telling them that you want software like LiViD or Xine or other free DVD players shipped on their laptops, instead of LinDVD.

You can join the EFF or volunteer there. If EFF wins its current trade secret and copyright-related legal cases, you will have more access to software which will give you more flexibility and control in the use of media you buy. Otherwise, perhaps you should move to a non-WIPO country. :-)

I worked for hours and hours on the Bootable Business Card, and ran into some frustrations, especially in trying to compile the ash shell on Linux. There really are some differences between a NetBSD build environment and a Linux build environment! And ash is maintained in NetBSD, a bit, but not really maintained natively on Linux. Debian grabs the ash source from NetBSD now and then and ports it, and then Red Hat will take the Debian port and try to build it there. Ick.

I spent hours working on the build thing without so much luck. I finally got ash to build, but only with a standard glibc and not with uClibc or with dietlibc. And the static binary that results is just huge, much too big to use in the boot floppy.

So I managed to make a new BBC boot disk based on busybox and an older version of ash than what we had been using (a version Red Hat compiled statically once upon a time which comes out smaller than the one I produced). It boots now (after much experimentation) but it chronically produces zombie processes, which is no good. I still have to figure out what's going wrong there. I think the older ash's handling of child processes and of forking children into the background is suspect.

I did almost nothing else on Sunday but work on the BBC, which means I didn't get particularly far through my to do list.

I talked to Wolfgang in the evening, then to Michelle.

My arms hurt again; I think they would have done a lot better if I had taken more time this weekend to do errands that didn't involve typing. I certainly had such errands to do.

My source for ghosts being extremely cold is D. A. Wright, "A Theory of Ghosts", Worm Runner's Digest 12, 95 (1971), reprinted in R. L. Weber (compiler), A Random Walk in Science (New York: Crane, Russak & Co., Inc., 1973), at pp. 112-3:

It has sometimes been thought that ghosts produce a sensation of cold in their environment. This is perhaps to be expected if they have just returned from outer space, where the temperature is believed to be about three degrees absolute (Penzias and Wilson 1965). It is less obvious why this should occur if they have been resident for some time, as in an old castle (unless, indeed, they have internal means of refrigeration, which seems unlikely, but perhaps not impossible). If the observation is correct, it implies that ghosts must have quite a high specific heat. [...] It is evidently important to obtain more reliable evidence as to the temperature and specific heat of ghosts.

Just before this, Wright suggests that ghosts scatter infrared light be re-emission at radiofrequencies. That, together with the ghosts' low temperature, must be why the infrared goggles in my dream were not sufficient.

Leonard says that Umberto Eco has a new book out. I'm running into a bunch of Eco connections recently: first, re-reading The Name of the Rose (and it shows up a lot in "Existence and Uniqueness"), then reading The Search for the Perfect Language (which I mentioned by ISBN in my constrained writing posted here yesterday -- I couldn't say "Search for the Perfect Language" directly without using an "e"). Then I also saw the link to Eco in Neal Stephenson's home page. Lots of Eco. He is a genius.

After a bunch more work, I got ash 0.3.6 to build statically against uClibc. The great news was that it came out just over 100K and -- even better -- eliminated the zombie problem entirely. So the zombie processes must have been due to some kind of bug in that older version of ash.

I'm encouraged by this, and I put up a test version of the new BBC based on this new boot image.

The test version basically worked properly on my system and on Zack's system; as often, I found a bunch of things that we need to try to fix up before the release. BBC development is proceeding apace.

I've been trying to explain to some people who are not free software geeks why it is that I'm still working on this project if I'm not working for Linuxcare anymore. It doesn't necessarily make sense to them offhand. But if somebody said to me that the maintainer of libfoo stopped working at Yoyodyne Industries, and was still working on libfoo, well, that would make perfect sense to me. What, do people only work on technical projects because they get paid for it?

I was about to take some sterile tears in my eyes the other days. Then I thought that dry eyes are just a symptom of dehydration and fatigue, and instead of using an enabler such as sterile tears (eye drops), I should fix the "underlying problem" and get some water and sleep. But then I thought that simply taking a nap and drinking some water would just "cover up" a lifestyle problem, and that maybe I need to change my work or study habits more fundamentally. It's layered. One person's "fundamental solution" is another's "Band-Aid."

(Sumana, July 2)

What a fascinating exercise it is to try to think of layers on top of layers!

My arms continue to hurt a whole lot.

People have been setting off fireworks all around the neighborhood.

China's capitalists permitted to join Communist Party (seen in San Francisco Chronicle, original from the Washington Post)

Ignoring the various biases one could find in that story, it's amazing! That party really wants to be called Communist, to be called Marxist, no matter what, come hell or high water.

I'm tempted to send written questions to some people I know who are quite different from one another, requesting written answers, and then to publish them on my web site side by side.

This is different from on-line debates because the people wouldn't be arguing against each other and wouldn't even have an opportunity to argue against each other at all. They'd just be expressing their views, and these views would appear side by side.

The kinds of questions I'm thinking of are things like

Some of these sound like college application essays, but my point is not to make people show off their expository writing or creative writing skills. My point is just to hear about what people think, and to compare what people think.

See also David Brin's questionnaire, from which I wouldn't mind taking a few questions for a project like this. (Gosh, some of Brin's questions are subtly or not-so-subtly polemical...)

Apparently it was a popular tradition some years ago to send questionnaires to one's friends or to pass them around at parties. I've actually seen a couple of on-line versions that are chain letters, and those are very interesting, but the things they ask are almost always "What is your favorite color?" or "How many siblings do you have?" or "What is your favorite animal?" or (shading over into the purity tests, which are an interesting kind of questionnaire) "How many people have you ever slept with?". And what I'm thinking about is not really asking about people's characteristics but about their beliefs and thoughts about social, political, moral, and philosophical questions.

There are a couple of books of questions in this vein meant to provoke discussion. But I still feel that I'm not even trying to provoke discussion, just to examine the extent of contrasts among people I know (and see what they have to say). If people are interested later on, they could have discussions.

I lost the domain oath.org because I forgot to renew it. Now I have to apologize profusely to Olympic Athletes Together Honourably, because I was going to give them the domain, and I forgot or they forgot to get the domain transfer form together, and now the thing's lapsed and I doubt that the group will get the domain easily from its new owner.

Does OATH even exist any more? I did a web search just now to try to find them and found a lot of old articles about them from last year or longer ago. But I don't see any contact information.

I had a dream that there was a fast way to get between some city in the Bay Area (Fremont? El Cerrito? Concord?) and Holyoke, MA, by underground train, in such a way that you could commute from one to the other. (Like "Oh, so that's where that subway comes out!".) There was also some kind of school field trip to a historic building in Holyoke which looked like many converted East Coast brick factory buildings from Industrial Revolution days. Hmmm, and Western Massachusetts was beautiful this time of year, like the hills around 280 near the Pulgas Water Temple.

I wonder what exactly I would do with myself if I went back to live around there (Western Massachusetts, not the Pulgas Water Temple). It's easier to contemplate something like that when people out here are on vacation.

Peter Ludlow rules!

I wrote something for the occasion (U.S. Independence Day) last year, and I don't know what to say right now.

Um, process versus product, anybody? :-)

Ludlow's new book talks about and reproduces the famous "Declaration of the Independence of Cyberspace" by John Perry Barlow (who, by the way, will be at the EFF open house in person on the 10th, if you're in the Bay Area; my guess is that John Gilmore will be there too, although I haven't seen that advertised).

I found Barlow's Declaration very exciting when I first read it. Many commentators have discussed the feeling and some have been completely unable to fathom it. "This is independent? You must be joking!"

I guess I could say that, in honor of July 4, you should get on down to your local independent book store (heh!) and pick up a copy of Ludlow's book.

I went out to eat with Duncan at a vegetarian restaurant called Shangri-La in the Sunset District. It was excellent.

Duncan just got back from a trip to China with his family, and he showed me a lot of his photographs.

We got some samples from a company we might hire to do the duplication. They're pretty impressive; they seem to be very high quality to me.

We've still got to hurry up and get the new BBC done.

I can't help wondering if the FTC's investigation of Netpliance was prompted by vast numbers of slashdot readers following a link once upon a time to report Netpliance to the FTC for various things.

If so, then a bad slashdot review of a product can be harmful to the health of the company that manufactures it.

The fact is that I think consumers may have been justified in their complaints about the iOpener, but it's just funny to think of slashdot as being potentially responsible for an investigation like that.

The Bay Area Debian list is making up stories about me!

Jemand mußte Seth S. verleumdet haben...

My father sent me several issues from 1938 and 1939 of the philosophical journal Mind. Unfortunately, it's not the 1950 issue where Turing introduces the Turing test; none of these issues appears to have a particularly famous paper in it. But I always read things where somebody is saying "Oh, yeah, of course this was dealt with in that famous paper in Mind in 1938" (as though you happened to have a bunch of issues of Mind from 1938 at home. Well, now I do.

My father also found my old training manual from the Olympiyeda in 1995. The big surprise was that it contained four postcards, complete with stamps, which I'd written from Israel but they forgotten to mail. I'm afraid the Israeli stamps aren't likely to be honored by the USPS; I could add some U.S. stamps and mail the postcards now, or something. Two of them are addressed to high school teachers of mine, one to my mother, and one to a friend I haven't been in touch with in quite a while.

The pictures on the postcards are pretty eclectic -- a church in Jerusalem, a painting celebrating peace, people skiing at Mount Hermon (the mountain after which my high school was named), and a harbor in Tel Aviv.

I also got a new Dover Publications catalog in the mail.

Bernard quotes:

From the Slashdot link;

``Until now, Microsoft has released only binaries, the ones and zeroes that disguise the original code. But in the "shared source" program, developers will receive the actual source code, written in letters and numerals, of the two future Microsoft products.''

Compiling code is all about obfuscation!

I guess it was a bad idea to call them "binaries".

One of many comments in a recent roundtable discussion showing the controversies about what it means to discriminate. So everyone here has the idea that discrimination is wrong, but people have vastly different concepts about what kinds of practices are wrong.

Some people say that everyone has the right to derive new programs using old programs written by others (and of course to distribute these new programs). According to these people, whoever tries to stop the programmers from doing this is doing something abusive (whether it's done by legal means or not).

Other people say that nobody has the right to derive a new program or to distribute it (always assuming that the original author has not consented, because supposedly volenti non fit iniuria). According to these people, whoever tries to force the programmers to be allowed to do this is doing something abuse (whether it's done by legal means or not).

The interesting thing is that there are legal means to try for each objective -- the GNU GPL, on the one hand, and Microsoft's licenses, on the other hand. But legal doesn't mean that everyone will approve or think that a tactic is ethical.

This particular debate was conducted between Brett Glass (an opponent of the GPL) and some GPL supporters. Brett Glass observed that the Free Software Foundation thinks that proprietary software is bad. (This is pretty easy to establish; you can start with "Why Software Should Not Have Owners".) Glass disapproves of the FSF's use of the word "proprietary" for various reasons; for purposes of this discussion, we can say that the controversy is about software for which copyright is used in the traditional way that the 1980s and 1990s software industry used it. Stallman thinks that this use of copyright was and is immoral; Glass thinks that it's perfectly moral. Stallman's strategy to fight against proprietary software was not to encourage copyright infringement, but rather to try to make proprietary software obsolete:

GNU is not in the public domain. Everyone will be permitted to modify and redistribute GNU, but no distributor will be allowed to restrict its further redistribution. That is to say, proprietary modifications will not be allowed. I want to make sure that all versions of GNU remain free.

[...]

Many programmers are unhappy about the commercialization of system software. It may enable them to make more money, but it requires them to feel in conflict with other programmers in general rather than feel as comrades. The fundamental act of friendship among programmers is the sharing of programs; marketing arrangements now typically used essentially forbid programmers to treat others as friends. The purchaser of software must choose between friendship and obeying the law. Naturally, many decide that friendship is more important. But those who believe in law often do not feel at ease with either choice. They become cynical and think that programming is just a way of making money.

By working on and using GNU rather than proprietary programs, we can be hospitable to everyone and obey the law. In addition, GNU serves as an example to inspire and a banner to rally others to join us in sharing. This can give us a feeling of harmony which is impossible if we use software that is not free. For about half the programmers I talk to, this is an important happiness that money cannot replace.

Stallman thought that free software developers could outcompete proprietary vendors, by undercutting them in the marketplace with volunteer labor and royalty-free distribution. In addition, his license terms would provide an incentive for others not to use copyright in the typical software industry style.

These are serious problems for Glass, who feels that the typical industry practices ("marketing arrangements now typically used") are moral and that fighting to drive them out of the market is a very bad thing.

So Glass will talk about how the GPL discriminates against commercial software vendors. And people who are talking to him will say, what do you mean? Doesn't the GPL provide exactly the same terms to those vendors as it provides to everyone else?

(Actually, it doesn't: 3(c) says "(This alternative is allowed only for noncommercial distribution and only if you received the program in object code or executable form with such an offer, in accord with Subsection b above.)" But it's extremely unusual for anybody to use the option in 3(c) at all, so it doesn't seem like a big deal to people.)

But Glass counters that the terms the GPL offers are by design only useful to people who aren't commercial software vendors! So such people get the same offer, but it's an offer that was set up bearing in mind that it would be an impossible offer for them to accept.

It's interesting to think about whether this should be called discrimination. The easiest argument to make is that it is not formal discrimination, because it does give the same treatment to everyone. But it could be substantive discrimination, because it's intended to favor the interests of one group (people who want to publish programs which provide Stallman's Four Freedoms) over another (people who want to publish programs which use copyright in accordance with the "marketing arrangements now typically used").

GPL supports don't tend to think of this discrimination as bad; in Stallman's view, those who are trying to sell proprietary software via typical marketing arrangements are doing something bad already, and so creating inconveniences for them is hardly a problem. In Glass's view, the same people are doing something perfectly honest, by way of earning a living, and Stallman's roadblocks are a terrible form of bigotry against them.

This discussion came up in the context of Craig Mundie's comments that he wanted end-users to have "choice" between free and proprietary software. This word is tricky: on the one hand it conjures up some of the antitrust issues which have been raised against Microsoft (and I will say nothing about the great old Windows Refund Day). On the other hand it is a clever attack against those who say, as Stallman does, that Microsoft by its perfectly legal use of copyright is already doing something bad to the public. Thus Mundie appears as the great defender of consumer choice -- saying that the free software movement has its way, and Microsoft has its own way, and neither way is better or worse than they other, they are just different.

That general message is one I think Brett Glass would endorse (as a supporter of both free and nonfree software, in the senses used by the FSF), but it's a clever trick, it seems to me, as a response to a criticism that has moral overtones.

That is, if you criticize an institution and say that people should behave differently than that institution does, or at least that it's particularly virtuous to behave in a different way, the institution can respond with the very broad-minded, open-minded, pluralist, pro-diversity message "Well, there are lots of different ways of doing things -- we just want to make sure that people have a choice".

And actually the institution may or may not care whether people have a choice (I don't think Microsoft feels that it's important that people can choose free software instead of Microsoft products, but I do think Microsoft feels that it's OK). But now its critics look bad -- "We don't want to ban your way of doing things, but you seem to want to ban ours!".

And this tactic can be used whether or not critics actually think the institution's behavior should be illegal, because there are lots of ways to criticize something without calling for laws to ban it. (A few people have wished that Declan McCullagh would bear this possibility in mind in his news reporting, although certainly plenty of the people he reports on really are trying to ban things.) You can think that something is obsolete and wish that it would fade away or that it would reform itself or that its relevance would diminish; it doesn't mean that the thing ought to be a crime. And there is clearly an interpretation, if you read Stallman carefully, that proprietary software is an unfortunate historical accident, and not exactly a vicious crime, but really a big mistake, and if the programmers would only be reconciled to their traditional cultural values, they could keep on programming in a much brighter future...

That phrasing might sound arrogant to some people, but I'm confident that Richard Stallman respects and honors the programmers at Microsoft and wants them to have freedom along with everyone else, and generally holds marketing strategists like Bill Gates responsible for what Microsoft has been doing.

Back to the "make sure that people have a choice" argument: I think this comes up a lot in environmental activism and also in criticism of the content of mainstream television and movies. A company which has been criticized for its products will say "We want to make sure that customers have a choice". (As opposed to our critics, who do not want customers to have a choice!)

It's easy to understand this complaint in the regulatory environment we know and love or don't love, in that a lot of people are, in fact, trying to get certain products banned at any given moment. But a result of this environment is that a spokesman for some company will interpret any criticism as a call for regulation, which is not always accurate.

Jerry Mander's book Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television is fascinating, not just because of the "proposing to eliminate a technology" angle. I mean, I agree with several of his arguments (he actually has many more than four of them), but I would hardly want to suggest that the elimination of television should be effected through government regulation. (I did suggest in a high school debate tournament that the FCC's long-time policies on spectrum treated television broadcasters quite favorably, at the expense of other possible spectrum users.) I think of TV as having fewer harms and more redeeming qualities than drugs, which I think should be legal. There again there is something of the same issue -- why do drug prohibitionists own the "drugs are bad for you" territory and why are decriminalization supporters so often expected to be found saying "Oh, drug X isn't actually that bad for you"?

Well, I think I would not cry if drugs went away, or broadcast television as we know it went away, but certainly I think of the things I can do about either as very limited. But if I said (as Jerry Mander does) broadly critical things about TV, people might feel threatened by this, defensive -- "Are you saying TV should be banned?" "Are you saying we're bad if we watch TV?" "Are you saying TV should go away entirely?" Mander wouldn't be unhappy if TV went away entirely. It doesn't mean that he knows a way to get there or has a political program around banning TV. (I remember next to nothing from his book about political agendas, whether they're present or absent.)

From my very limited experience of Jerry Mander in that one book, he reminds me of Richard Stallman. (They are certainly very different; Mander is not an enthusiast of computing, to put it mildly, and Stallman is so much an enthusiast of computing that he has dedicated his life to preserving a particular set of traditions and practices within the computing world.) They seem like men of comparably high intelligence who are willing to make really broad criticisms when they think something in the status quo is harmful.

They both say that, if something looks bad, they're going to point out why it looks bad, however prevalent it is, however many people are making a living from it nowadays, and whatever else. I think there is a certain sense of anachronism that you get when you read this kind of criticism, as though Stallman and Mander really belong to a bygone era. One part of this is the way in which they each defend something from the past (a world of free software, a world of immediate experience) and criticize a well-established trend (the software industry, the TV industry; and extensive public experience as consumers, frequently highly satisfied consumers, of each industry's products). So Stallman is saying that we should go back to a world from the 1970s in computing (though transformed in the light of subsequent experience and cultural changes) and Mander is saying that we should go back to a world from even longer ago in media (though also transformed in the light of subsequent experience and cultural changes). In this way we can see each as a conservative, although each is also a radical. But the other anachronism that I was thinking of is that Stallman and Mander are not cynical.

(Of course, there is much more to Mander than his opposition to television; he's kept working since the 1970s, and I know very little about what he's been up to.)

In the passage I quoted above from the GNU Manifesto, Stallman says that many programmers, faced with the dominance of programming by the "marketing arrangements now typically used",

become cynical and think that programming is just a way of making money.

Note that Stallman isn't saying that these programmers like the industry or value what it has done. But he's saying that they grow cynical and abandon their previous hopes about what programming was or what it could accomplish or how it could be integrated with their other values; we could say again that they become alienated.

Not only does Stallman not become cynical in this way, but it's clear that he feels sorry for those who do, and wants to rescue them from their cynicism (by reviving the free software community of old). And his lack of cynicism is the other thing that feels funny these days; it's a matter of taking things seriously, including values and social criticism. So Stallman also feels that he is fighting against the greater darkness of programmers' disallusionment and disaffectation with their practice and with their communities. This is a big deal; this is a reason for him to take really seriously the criticisms he lodges against the industry.

How do you dig out from under the "we just want people to have a choice" argument if you really do object to what somebody is doing, and want it to stop, and think of it as obsolete or counterproductive? I mean, even people in the great wilds of Southern California may not be too happy with car culture, but it doesn't mean that any one of them is prepared to turn in his or her automobile.

A status quo is a tricky thing. Richard Stallman is careful to use only measures that are legal, and only measures that he thinks are moral, to try to change the status quo in software dramatically. Brett Glass thinks that the status quo, in broad outline, is fine. They really ultimately disagree about ends, about whether or not it is OK when people use copyright law in the common software industry way, about whether the status quo is seriously defective. And what could bridge that difference?

High school and college debate, once upon a time, were fascinating experiences.

While you're reading that Barlow (you are reading Barlow's Declaration, aren't you?), look at what Paul Treanor said about Internet ideology:

Net-ism is wrong because it is coercively expansionist. There is no inherent or inevitable technical or historical trend to a single communication network. On the contrary: never before in history, have so many separate networks been technically possible. Linking all networks together is a conscious choice by some people, a choice then imposed on others. The logic is identical to that of colonial governments, which forced peasants into the agricultural market, by imposing cash taxes. (To pay the tax, the peasants had to sell cash crops such as sugar). This logic says in effect: 'no one is free to stay outside the free market'. Today, not just governments, but business, social movements, intellectuals and artists, all want to impose the Net. This broad movement is obviously more than profit-seeking (and a non-profit Net would also be wrong). It is an ideological movement seeking ideological imposition. That imposition itself, the universalism, the expansionism, their involuntary nature, the basic unfreedom to exit - that is what makes liberal structures wrong. That applies to the free market, and it applies inherently to the Internet.

I don't think hyperliberals are all so fond of colonial taxes (I know some people who would disagree), but "no one is free to stay outside the free market" makes sense in liberal context. The free market broadly conceived is considered a neutral context in which all kinds of voluntary economic interactions exist, and in which different kinds of interactions compete for mind share (much like the "marketplace of ideas"; I wish I could think of all the different writers who've commented on how interesting it is that a marketplace is used as a metaphor for free speech). In that sense competition and retail of goods are only some of a large number of possibilities which might be present; in that sense people who decide to arrange their economic affairs in a different way, like a commune, are not opting out of the free market but only out of certain transactions.

Many members of the Internet community would argue that there is no architecture, but only a tradition, which was not written down for the first 25 years (or at least not by the IAB). However, in very general terms, the community believes that the goal is connectivity, the tool is the Internet Protocol, and the intelligence is end to end rather than hidden in the network.

The current exponential growth of the network seems to show that connectivity is its own reward, and is more valuable than any individual application such as mail or the World-Wide Web. This connectivity requires technical cooperation between service providers, and flourishes in the increasingly liberal and competitive commercial telecommunications environment.

The key to global connectivity is the inter-networking layer. The key to exploiting this layer over diverse hardware providing global connectivity is the "end to end argument".

[...] It is generally felt that in an ideal situation there should be one, and only one, protocol at the Internet level. This allows for uniform and relatively seamless operations in a competitive, multi- vendor, multi-provider public network. There can of course be multiple protocols to satisfy different requirements at other levels, and there are many successful examples of large private networks with multiple network layer protocols in use.

(Brian Carpenter, RFC 1958, "Architectural Principles of the Internet", June 1996, section 2: "Is There an Internet Architecture?"; emphasis added)

Similarly:

Encouragement of cooperation between networks: Connectivity is its own reward, therefore network providers are rewarded by cooperation with each other.

(Internet Society Guiding Principles)

And then of course

The nature of people and their use of networking technology provides a strong natural drive towards universal interconnection. Because the flow of information on the Net transcends national boundaries, any restrictions within a single country may act to limit the freedom of those in other countries as well.

The true value of the Internet is found in people, not in technology. Since each new user increases the value of the Net for all, the potential of the Net will only be reached when all who desire can openly and freely use the Net.

(Nathaniel Borenstein et al., "One Planet, One Net: Principles for the Internet Era", in CPSR's One Planet, One Net Campaign)

Connectivity being its own reward is too generic for Nortel, but not because Nortel agrees with Paul Treanor, just because connectivity being its own reward isn't exciting enough as a business agenda.

I was up very late and I wrote various things, including a long discussion of privacy.

Duncan brought a new computer by here. I'm not sure what to call it. In the past, I've named computers

(as in a home automation project, as in a requiem, as in a requiem or other mass, as in Moby Dick, as in Klein, as in a requiem or other mass, as in American, as in a requiem, as in a requiem, and as Ludwig, respectively).

Years later, I managed to recover (using the BBC and this machine from Duncan) the hard drive of requiem, which had been lost in a crash (my fault) in late spring 1998.

What I was most looking for there were a number of poems I wrote in the beginning of 1998, none of which I had saved elsewhere. I've found dozens of these so far, along with old logs, e-mail, source code, and other materials.

What happened was that I tried to plug in a serial mouse or something on my IDE card, when the case was open and I hadn't even screwed in the IDE card. The IDE card came unseated, and that was the end of that hard drive's ability to boot. I saved the hard drive for three years (the accident happened June 29, 1998) and even took it on vacation with me, then carried it along when I moved. I knew that I wanted those poems and other materials. Those poems were very important to me.

Only the Bootable Business Card and this new machine from Duncan gave me a convenient opportunity to rescue the disk. I'm happy to say that the BBC did work extremely well for this task, between things like lde (a Linux clone of Norton Disk Editor), scp, ssh, and dd. I was ultimately able to make a complete image backup of my data partition onto a huge disk on another machine, and then make a backup of that image and then fsck it there. The result was almost all of my files intact, including things I never thought I'd see again.

A valuable piece of advice I got from my first-ever boss: if you have a seriously-corrupted disk containing important data, don't just run your equivalent of Norton Disk Editor or ScanDisk (in the Linux world, lde and e2fsck). Make an image backup of the hard drive onto a separate hard drive first, and then attempt your recovery. Some steps, like fsck, are potentially destructive, and can't be undone (without magnetic force microscopy or other techniques you probably can't afford). This is really valuable advice; keep it in mind for your own future disk crashes. Better safe than sorry.

Those poems are powerful.

I hurt my arms a lot today and thought about that for a while. A lot of fireworks got set off all around our house.

I had an interesting dream that took place in a mall. As with many other recent dreams, there was a lot of drama going on; I don't remember much of what happened. The mall was huge, like the Mall of America, which I've only once visited in real life. Possibly the mall in my dream was even bigger than that.

With the poems I found on requiem's hard drive, I now have the astonishing number of 109 poems and songs I have written from 1996 to the present (although 89 of those were written in 1998). I've certainly still lost a number of other poems, but not on requiem's hard drive.

Having wc handy, I found that the single epic "Existence and Uniqueness" is twice as long as all the poems I wrote in 1998 put together. I'm not sure which is sadder.

I think one song there is pretty funny, though. Actually, it's really funny. Maybe I should do some more research and produce an updated version.

It is really interesting how many of those poems are parallel to things that happened later. In some cases, you could also call them prophetic. Recently I was writing about Aeneid II and the Fall of Troy; I thought that some of the aspects I mentioned were new (in that I hadn't written about them before, not that nobody had written about them before). But there they are, in my poems "Aeneas" and "Fuit Ilium" from 1998.

I posted a resume on Craig's List.

I've been having a lot of trouble with my arms.

Peter Junger and Ian Goldberg had the following exchange about the "false" program on dvd-discuss: 

In article <200106151833.OAA01441@samsara.law.cwru.edu>,
Peter D. Junger <dvd-discuss@eon.law.harvard.edu> wrote:
>You might want to contrast that with the GNU version of ``false'':
>
>
>
>File: sh-utils.info,  Node: false invocation,  Next: true invocation,
>Up: Cond\itions
>
>`false': Do nothing, unsuccessfully
>===================================
>
>   `false' does nothing except return an exit status of 1, meaning
>"failure".  It can be used as a place holder in shell scripts where an
>unsuccessful command is needed.
>
>   `false' ignores _all_ command line arguments, even `--help' and
>`--version', since to do otherwise would change expected behavior that
>some programmers may be relying on.
>
>   This version of `false' is implemented as a C program, and is thus
>more secure and faster than a shell script implementation, and may
>safely be used as a dummy shell for the purpose of disabling accounts.

Not the version I've got:

$ false --help
Usage: false [ignored command line arguments]
  or:  false OPTION
Exit with a status code indicating failure.

These option names may not be abbreviated.

  --help      display this help and exit
  --version   output version information and exit

Report bugs to <bug-sh-utils@gnu.org>.
$ false --version
false (GNU sh-utils) 2.0
Written by no one.

Copyright (C) 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
This is free software; see the source for copying conditions.  There is NO
warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE.

To which Richard Hartman replied: 

> -----Original Message-----
> From: iang@abraham.cs.berkeley.edu 
...
> $ false --version
> false (GNU sh-utils) 2.0
> Written by no one.
> 
> Copyright (C) 1999 Free Software Foundation, Inc.
> This is free software; see the source for copying conditions. 
>  There is NO
> warranty; not even for MERCHANTABILITY or FITNESS FOR A 
> PARTICULAR PURPOSE.
> 

You mean if "false" _doesn't_ fail, it's not their fault? ;-)

We got the Kernel Traffic search engine up.

There is now an infrastructure for downloadable packages, although there are no packages to download. :-)

Wow!

This reminds me of the long theological debate among Christian churches about whether miracles have ceased. Thanks to Nick for the link to "Cadaeic Cadenza".

Zack and Andrew and I made sushi, something I hadn't done in almost two years.

I was inspired to memorize pi out to 58 decimal places. This wasn't particularly difficult, because I had already memorized it to 53 places. I would like to reach 100 places, but I haven't really applied myself to memorizing pi since I was in high school.

I used to have some more geek talents, but I've stopped counting in binary on my fingers since I got wrist injuries. I used to be able to reach 32 (all combinations of five bits) in five seconds, but last of practice has pushed that out around seven or eight seconds nowadays.

While I was still keeping up my diary on Advogato, I was also practicing doing the Towers of Hanoi with everyday objects (since I unfortunately don't have a nice 64-disc set wherewith to hasten the end of the material universe, or, indeed, any nice Towers of Hanoi set). In January of this year I set my personal records:

Towers of Hanoi: 6 objects in 55 seconds. 7 objects in 121 seconds. (I really want to shave a second off of that.) You see my list of potential geek party stunts is fast expanding. In theory, if I didn't have to look, I could be a lot faster.

My original geek party stunt concept was memorizing the Nicene Creed and the MIT License and reciting them to show that they are almost exactly the same length. However, I have yet to memorize the MIT License. I do know some fairly long passages from the GNU GPL.

Speaking of the Towers of Hanoi, Sumana mentions

the logic puzzle of the Christian trying to cross a river and bring across a wolf, a goat, and some cabbage.

I heard it was a farmer with a fox, a goose, and some grain (or corn), but fair enough.

Either Gardner or Dewdeney somewhere mentions an interesting geometrical interpretation of this puzzle which makes it very easy to solve. I'm trying to reconstruct that interpretation so I can explain it. I think the positions of the three items were represented by the vertices of a cube. The difficult part would be how to show which transitions are prohibited (because just being in a certain state is OK temporarily, as long as you don't try to leave that state in a way which results in two incompatible items being left alone together).

The plaintiffs (wow, the plaintiffs are the good guys for once!) filed their first amended complaint. It was interesting to do a diff of a text dump of the original against a text dump of this amended complaint. Among other things, the new complaint adds some more background about the research of the various individual plaintiffs, corrects typos (I'm afraid it creates some new ones...) and adds new causes of action and prayers for relief, including the explicit facial challenge to the DMCA as a whole:

WHEREFORE, Plaintiffs request the following relief:

[...]

F. A declaration that the DMCA is unconstitutional on its face because it violates the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

G. A declaration that the application of the DMCA to the publication or presentation of scientific, academic or technical speech, including the publication of computer programs, violates the First Amendment to the United States Constitution.

These folks mean business. :-)

Oh, there's a new enumerated powers argument, too:

I. A declaration that the DMCA is unconstitutional because it is not a valid exercise of any of Congress' enumerated powers.

There are also corresponding prayers for injunctions corresponding to these declarations (enjoing the defendants against enforcing the DMCA against plaintiffs).

Although my arms hurt in the morning, my chiropractic appointment, the break from typing, and the exercise of making sushi seemed to help, so that they felt pretty well in the evening. Unfortunately, just as my arms started to feel well, some back pain popped up, as though to take the place of my arm pain.

"It means," said Aslan, "that though the Witch knew the Deep Magic, there is a magic deeper still which she did not know. Her knowledge goes back only to the dawn of Time. But if she could have looked a little further back, into the stillness and the darkness before Time dawned, she would have read there a different incantation."

(C. S. Lewis, The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe)

It is always upsetting to rely on the Deep Magic and to be defeated by a magic deeper still.

I wrote a poem about that this evening.

I got up early in the morning and went off to Oakland Airport to meet Michelle, just back from Southern California. How nice!

After visiting with her and her housemates, I went off to Walnut Square and met up with Ben, got some bread at the Cheeseboard, got the hiccups, and saw Ben's new apartment. I ended up staying there for about twelve hours, as we talked, assembled Ikea furniture, went to a health food store, continued to have hiccups (well, I did), had dinner, and got Debian working on his laptop.

Ben cooked some nice stuff, with the help of Shane, who joined us for dinner and also helped out with the Debian setup.

The Debian installation was a nice piece of technical work because that laptop can't boot CDs or floppy disks, and was originally running Red Hat. Ben had a swap partition of 128 megabytes, and we managed to manually extract the Debian base system into the swap partition (newly reformatted as ext2fs), then chroot in, do a bunch of configuration, mess around with boot loader stuff, and finally copy the resulting Debian installation back out onto his main partition. It works, and it has networking now. Installing Linux without any installation media is a fun challenge.

My shoulders were sore all day; my back didn't really hurt until the evening, and still wasn't as bad as last night. But since I didn't feel any back pain at all until last night, that's still not ideal.

Ben gave me a bunch of neat books he was trying to get rid of.

I still have the hiccups, some hours later.

Some people are staying with us this week.

After I made an effort to fix the doorbell, which finally worked (hmmmm, screwdrivers, pliers, electrical tape, and multimeters are handy sometimes, but luck is even more useful), Anirvan came by and visited for a while.

I liked the EFF's response to the Barney letter. I'd like to work on the new Chilling Effects Clearinghouse project; I'd do well to go back by EFF and proverbially sign myself up. For those of you in the Bay Area, remember that there is an EFF Open House on Tuesday night.

Brad Templeton says that big mother may be watching you.

Seen on Kuro5hin: Walk for Capitalism.

Monday is the birthday of Crummy diarist Leonard. Many other people I know also have July birthdays, except I don't remember which day anybody's birthday is. Maybe if more people had web diaries, more people would be aware of people's birthdays.

Hey, somebody else noticed the big blue cross!

Anirvan and I ate dinner on Sunday at the Mediterranean place across from that church. Then a number of us ate there the following day.

I had a chiropractic appointment and a sore arm, and I worked at EFF for a bit. Various other things happened, too.

I had a bunch of interesting dreams recently, and didn't write them down in time to remember them in detail.

One of them involved playing a board game on the subject of growing up. It's extremely difficult to explain; the object of the game was to grow up, and growing up was represented as a particular one-time event that happens once you have accomplished four specific "themes" (this was kind of like Trivial Pursuit, where you have to collect those pie-shaped wedges, each representing knowledge of a particular area).

Unlike Trivial Pursuit, here the themes were very serious life-experience things -- I wish I had made a list of what they were. I think one of them was "Sexual Experience" or "Romantic Experience" and another was "Death" or "Consciousness of Mortality" or something. And so if you could get all four of these things, then in the context of this board game you would win and grow up.

The way that you got the themes was by experiencing and "completing" certain scenarios, which somehow presented themselves as actual experience (maybe it was like a scavenger hunt: "Go out and find some Consciousness of Mortality and Romantic Experience, and don't come back until you've achieved both!" or maybe it was like a video game, in that holographic scenarios like a Star Trek holodeck would pop up around us when we started a particular theme).

So the result was that I, in the board-game character of a small child, had four successive upsetting experiences and collected all of the themes. The scenarios were frightening, something like the scene in Star Wars where Luke Skywalker has to fight images which are supposed to represent his own fears.

I did eventually "win" and grow up; there was a strong element of magic in the board game, kind of like the movie Jumanji. So let us say that this dream was kind of a pastiche of Jumanji, Trivial Pursuit, the Holodeck, and the scene of Luke Skywalker in the cave. I think it was closest to Jumanji, of these.

After that dream, I had another dream in which I was accused of doing something wrong. And I know I've had another dream recently that I didn't remember.

I went for a walk in Golden Gate Park with Ronnie and then went to dinner with a number of people.

Ronnie gave me letters my mother wrote to her between 1978 and 1983, one of which includes a newspaper photograph of me from when I was about four. I'll try to scan that and put it up on the web.

My arm is extremely sore -- very, very sore.

I bought plane tickets for my trip to the East Coast for Eric's wedding. It was an elaborate process on the phone with a travel agent. One conclusion: travel agents are better at searching for a variety of possible itineraries than you are. Another: if you are being a good patent opponent and boycotting these folks, you will probably get the lowest rate by calling a travel agent and being flexible. The various web sites that sell plane tickets are very convenient but may not give you the absolute lowest possible fare. (Of course, the absolute lowest possible fare involves things like being on standby, or deliberately getting bumped, or other really inconvenient things. So let's say "the absolute lowest fare where you actually know when you are going to be traveling".)

Shouldn't

Whee! You're 3 22!

better be

Whee Woohoo! You're 3 22!

or something similar?

Happy birthday to EE (not Electrical Engineering).

The minor trials and tribulations of being an adult -- they are many and stressful.

Personalized receipts showing the name of the person doing the checkout, combined with general