From the Anarchist Book Fair to a Federal courtroom in two days
-- what a contrast! I went down to San Jose on Monday morning
to see a pre-trial hearing in United States v. Elcomsoft.
It was my first time in Federal court. (I've been in a state
court before.) One lawyer said: "If you're ever bored, go down
to the nearest Federal court and sit in the gallery. There's
always something going on."
So, actually, there's a sort of a chain connecting these days one to
another:
Saturday: I buy three books at a book fair.
Sunday: I buy three books at a flea market, including Der Prozeß
Monday: I see a criminal trial.
Aside from the Elcomsoft argument, there was a guilty plea in an
immigration case. I'd like to write more about that at some point.
I haven't written here in a few days, so let me give a quick summary.
On Sunday, I saw Sumana and Leonard, and in the evening had my
traditional Western Easter Dinner with Nick (walking from Sumana's
place over to the Elmwood/Rockridge neighborhood), and Nick filled
me in on some BBC stuff. Sumana and Leonard and I also went to
the Ashby Flea Market, where I got Kafka's Der Prozeß in
German, Gibson's All Tomorrow's Parties, and a book
by Stanislaw Lem.
Peter Christopher
came to town and stayed with me.
We went to SVLUG with Marc and
Biella to hear Larry Wall speak about Perl 6.
A high school student got CSS decryption code published in his
yearbook, but I'm not allowed to tell you where to find a picture of it.
I had an acupuncture appointment, something I haven't done
since August.
An article about
the Alien Tort Claims Act and a list of cases, mainly international
human rights cases, brought under it.
There seems to be
a
growing consensus that patents are necessary to the development
of new drugs. Is this consensus like the consensus that objects
fall when dropped, or like the consensus that
Coca-Cola is the Real Thing?
This is real:
Today's AWAD is sponsored by NannyTax, Inc., offering on-line tax preparation
and payroll tax compliance services to employers of domestic help. Please
visit http://www.nannytax.com
I finished God and Golem, Inc., by Norbert Wiener, the
sixth book on my reading list.
That acupuncture appointment seemed to do me some good -- my arms
are feeling the best they've been in about two weeks. They're
still a little sore, but I think there's some improvement which is
particular easy to notice. I'm going back on Thursday, and I have
to try to find some insurance papers, because treatment over there
might be covered by insurance.
Our Consensus At
Lawyerpoint BPDG web log has been a big hit, with regular
articles; there is RSS
for syndication if you want Consensus At Lawyerpoint to appear
on your own web diary or wherever you tend to collect RSS. Of course,
we need all the publicity help we can get.
We're trying to get ahold of Valenti's 1982 testimony (the "Boston
strangler" bit) and publish it on the web. Amazingly, it's nowhere
to be found, unless you happen to have the Congressional
Record around. Our law library is not quite there yet.
I had lunch with Danny O'Brien
on Wednesday and talked about the prospect of a "computer literacy"
in which most everyone is taught to program a computer (as most
everyone is taught to read and write, and to do arithmetic and
algebra). I talked a lot about how I came to be a programmer, and
what programming meant to me, and how I thought other people
thought about programming, and what might be some of the political
implications resulting from the relatively obscure place of
programming in our culture. Also, what would be different if
programming ability were widespread. Also, what kinds of
"digital divides" exist, and why the percentage of students
who have an opportunity to use computers in schools may be a
red herring.
I'm getting increasingly sympathetic to Cliff Stoll's ideas about
computers in education. Or maybe I'm not particularly sympathetic
to them, if I can wish that every student might be taught to
program. Maybe I'm just unhappy with the status quo and with
the fixed-function device and the compromises which have
made a computer into a fixed-function device in so many lives and
so many classrooms.
(A thought now races through my mind of a January morning and a
sermon I seem to have preached. She was wearing blue jeans, if
I remember anything at such a distance, and I know I had on
slacks with funny pockets, that some people might keep tools
inside of. In the morning, putting off what I really had to
say, postponing it, fearing it, I preached about tinkering,
technology, community, generality, the long-lost ideals of
scientists and hobbyists, about what we had to lose if we lost
generality. I preached about the end-to-end model
and, as Alan Perlis said, "the ability to see the machine as
more than when you were first led up to it, that you can make
it more". I preached about what the advance of technology
meant to me as a person and where it touched me and who wanted
to threaten it, and the wickedness, the spiritual deadness
which was prepared to stand up against that light, to obstruct
it... O techne, o techne! And that was
self-expression, so that she might see me properly for a moment.)
Later on, Peter talked to me about explicit and implicit curricula.
The explicit curriculum is what's being taught -- what subjects --
and the implicit curriculum is how, and what associated
skills and attitudes and behaviors are being taught along with
it, and through it. It seems to be a kind of meta-curriculum.
This is an interesting idea. To compare one implicit curriculum
with another, I guess you'd need (SICP joke coming
up!) a metacurricular evaluator.
All this reminds me that Doctor Dobbs Journal has
printed my letter to the editor in the most current print
edition. Good news! Now I must be a real programmer, or
something.
My letter contemplates the impossibility of doing DRM in
software on a general-purpose computer. This is such a
frequent topic that maybe it should be a button: "Ask Me
About the Impossibility of Digital Rights Management in
Software on a General-Purpose Computer!"
Wired still hasn't printed my DRM-related
letter to the editors. Maybe they were scared off by the
shrink-wrap contract on the envelope it was mailed in.
Freudian slip this morning: typing "Serial Copy Mandate System"
instead of "Serial Copy Management System".
Something I think Freudian slips should be called Markovian slips.
I watched Sex, Lies, and Videotape with Zack. The
most astonishing line in that movie:
This isn't supposed to happen. I've spent nine years
structuring my life so this didn't happen.
Written out, this looks almost comical. It looks like the speaker
is being made to look ridiculous on account of some minor,
overblown, failed obsession.
Spoken in the movie, it's not comical, it's anguished.
So
go volunteer
if you're a kernel and Python hacker.
Michelle introduced me to a great PlayStation game called
Dance Dance Revolution. It uses a floor pad-style
controller (somewhat reminiscent of the old Nintendo mat
controller which had -- I think -- sixteen numbered buttons).
The PlayStation floor pad controller has all of the same
buttons as a standard PlayStation controller, but you stand on
it and press them with your feet.
In the game, the PlayStation will play dance music and flash
arrows corresponding to dance steps. You have to step on the
appropriate controller button at exactly the right moment.
I played for a long time and got lots of exercise.
I think I'm forming a plan to make a new collage -- for Sarah. My
old collage took months to complete, so if I do a new collage, it
could take a similar amount of time.
We went onto Pacific Daylight Time out here, and I haven't quite
adjusted yet.
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Cory gave me a few cans of OpenCola (the soda) earlier this week.
It's
not
available in any store!
There's
more
than one "digital divide", and it's not just about having
access to a computer.
I've sent my second unusual EFF letter; the first was to
Wired and the second is to the
Random
House Permissions Department.
I write to request permission to use 544 bytes from the Adobe eBook
Edition of The Future of Ideas: The Fate of the Commons in a
Connected World by Lawrence Lessig. These bytes begin at
byte position 160,737 within the eBook and are (in hexadecimal
notation) ...
Speaking of letters and copyrights, here's
Thomas
Jefferson's famous letter (how many people have read the whole
thing?) which compares ideas to fire. It's more interesting than my
letter to Random House, which compares ideas to random numbers.
BPDG blog work continues
apace.
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The
new EFF Pioneer Award winners have been announced, and they are
Dan Gillmor, Beth Givens, and the authors of DeCSS.
I saw Aubrey this week; she was visiting from Southern California
on her spring break. We met at City Lights, and I bought a couple
of books there. My Jane Jacobs book turned up at home, but, most
interestingly, I picked up Double Fold: Libraries and the
Assault on Paper by Nicholson Baker, which I've been reading
over the past few days.
I seem to have several friends in Southern California now, which is
nice, because I'm probably going to be going there pretty regularly
to fight against a few of the troubles with the movies. (For
instance, I'll be there on Tuesday and Wednesday, missing a bit of
CFP.)
On Thursday of this week, I went to Rachel and Jeremy's place for
another installment in their philosophy lecture series. This
included a lecture on whether virtue can be taught (a question
presented by Plato's Republic). In the ensuing
discussion, I tried to distinguish several contrasting aspects
of the question:
- is virtue real?
- is virtue universal?
- is virtue attainable?
- has anyone attained virtue?
- is virtue knowable?
- does anyone know virtue?
- is virtue expressible in language?
- has anyone expressed virtue in language? (completely?
partially?)
- can virtue be acquired?
- can virtue be acquired deliberately?
- can virtue be imparted deliberately from one
person who possesses it to another?
- ... by means of language?
- can virtue be learned directly (propositionally,
"in one sitting", etc.) or is it a matter of acquiring
particular habits, perceptions, concepts, etc., which
are likely to be developed gradually (or experientially)?
These questions reach out further into how we think about the
world, and how we think about a human being.
I saw Ben on Saturday, and we walked up Bernal Hill and around
the Mission.
Klaus Knopper released a
new
version of cloop (0.64).
Google decided to publish DMCA takedown notices it receives!
They're being published at
Chilling Effects, and
Google's added a new feature so that, if your search results were
affected by a takedown, you'll be notified and given the option
to view the particular takedown letter which resulted in the
alteration of your results!
For example, a search for
site:xenu.net scientology will show, at the bottom of affected pages,
a legend showing what Google has done, and letting you find out more
about who was responsible. See Don Marti's article
"Google
Begins Making DMCA Takedowns Public" and
Google's DMCA policy.
"It is our policy to send copies of all notices of alleged infringement
to third parties who will make
them available to the public." Wow!
Google's API was also
announced and published; you can use SOAP to create your own Google
applications (Googlewhacking, SROMs,
reverse links, statistical analysis, much else).
Here's a suggestion that publishing virus code is
wrong; I've already disagreed with that piece, long before it
was written, and I can't even imagine that anybody who knows me
would think that I agree. Maybe it's sufficient merely to link to
it and let people draw their own conclusions about the article and
what I think about it.
Large File Support is cool!
My acupuncture treatment seems to be working pretty well.
Carlos Laviola points out that there is an Internet host called
3.14159265358979323846264338327950288419716939937510582097.org.
That's slightly more digits of pi than I know.
I tried again. What about the centralized storage of health
information, as Oracle was proposing to do with the Leaders system.
Would Ellison want government officials to have access to personally
identifiable genetic information?
"I feel like Alice has fallen through the looking glass," Ellison
said. His voice rose; he was starting to get a little testy. "Does
this other database bother you here? We can't touch that database
because I won't be able to use my credit card. Like, I won't be able
to go to the mall!" He took on the voice of Sean Penn's stoner from
"Fast Times at Ridgemont High." "Like, that's really disturbing.
Like, don't mess with my mall experience. O.K., so people have to die
over here without this, but that's not going to affect my experience
going to the mall." He exhaled, and in his regular billionaire voice
asked, "I mean, what the hell is going on?"
(Jeffrey Rosen, "Silicon
Valley's Spy Game")
I watched The Truman Show with Zack on Saturday, and
after that I was tempted to find my poem "Of Non-Existing Country",
which I wrote in November, and I tell you that it has so many points
in common with The Truman Show, or so many points
inspiring reflection, and that it is one of the saddest things
I have ever written.
I wrote that poem when I saw its epigraph on
Brian Gaeke's
home page:
Once upon a time I was a member of the University of Cincinnati Linux
Users' Group, but that group seems to have disappeared. It's kind of
like Andrei [Moutchkine]'s "I am a citizen of non-existing country",
only somehow less ...urgent?
The poem itself has no connection with either Andrei or Brian, or
with any actual non-existing country (does that make
sense)? It is an elaboration of that line, "I am a citizen of
non-existing country", for myself, and brings in the
Aeneid, Jewish and Christian scriptures, the
Odyssey, John Donne, the Iliad,
the Somnium Scipionis, and at least six other
sources I've forgotten, and likely didn't identify as I was
writing it.
One interesting thing is that it's almost all about mental states,
emotions, and beliefs: the poem takes place almost entirely in
what some people would call interior monologue. There isn't any
action in the physical world -- except an action at the end which
is doubly removed from reality by being not only metaphorical
but also hypothetical. That is, I hypothesize about
performing a metaphorical act.
I wore a temporary blue ribbon
tattoo. We've had a number of them around the office, and I
decided to put one on and see how long it would last.
Zack is having a nice time with XSLT for
Kernel Traffic.
Zack and I filled out tax forms together. I have a net refund, but
it's likely to be delayed because I realized I never sent in the
paperwork after getting an extension last year. (I sent in the money,
but not the "supporting documentation".) My taxes from last year
are thus technically late, and I wouldn't be surprised if the State
of California decided to hold off on sending me a refund for this
year.
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Briefly noted:
Tim O'Reilly on used
books;
Scientific
American on the decline of tinkering;
Cory on related issues;
security through obscurity considered harmful (Internet Draft);
and, of course, the
U.S. patent for a "Method of Swinging on a
Swing" (via Lisa
Rein):
TECHNICAL FIELD
The present invention relates to a method of swinging on a swing.
BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION
A few basic types of swings have been around for generations. Perhaps
the most common is one that includes a seat suspended between two
ropes or chains that are hung from a tree branch or other
substantially horizontal support. These swings are often found in
side-by-side sets of two or three or more on, for example, a school
playground.
Young children often need help to climb onto a swing, and may need a
push (sometimes even an "underdog" push) to begin swinging. Others may
be able to begin the swinging movement on their own by pushing with
their feet against the ground, and once moving may coordinate the
motion of their legs and body in what may be called "pumping" to
sustain the movement of the swing. When swinging in this manner, the
user travels along a path as generally shown in the cross-section of
FIG. 1. Another method of swinging on a swing involves twisting the
seat around repeatedly so that the chains or ropes are wound in a
double helix. When allowed to unwind, the swing spins quickly, which
can be entertaining for the user.
What a contrast between the Copy Protection Technical Working Group
in the morning and the EFF Pioneer Awards that same evening! John
Hoy was there in L.A. in the morning and Jon Johansen there in S.F.
that night. (Jon appeared via MPEG-2 because he was afraid of being
arrested or sued if he came to the U.S. I have it on good authority
that the MPEG-2 file was not encrypted with CSS.)
The Pioneer Awards were given to Dan Gillmor, Beth Givens, and Jon
Johansen and the other authors of DeCSS. A terribly distinguished
and interesting crowd turned out for the ceremony and the great
dessert which accompanied it. I knew dozens of people there and
had never met most of them face-to-face.
I'll have to write more soon.
I was tempted to say
"We haven't had that spirit here since 1999". I can actually think
of two other times we've had that spirit here: the first-ever
LinuxWorld conference, in 1998, and the RSA Patent Expiration Party,
in 2000.
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Itinerant EFF reps, ricocheting from LA's
Copy Protection Technology Working Group, struggling with
the culture-shock: blank-faced Hollywood apparatchiks
plotting the downfall of open computing there, geeks
open-mouthed with horror here.
(Need To Know, April 19, 2002, on the sights and sounds of
Computers, Freedom, and Privacy)
How come I move to California and end up moving away from
the earthquakes shaking Massachusetts? If I'd stayed home, I would
have experienced more and bigger earthquakes than I have out here.
Bill Gates on the GPL vs. "the capitalistic approach":
And I think you will see some countries who
really believe in the capitalistic approach; that is, that software
should generate jobs, and government R&D should generate jobs, so that
government R&D should be done on a basis that it can be
commercialized. There's a faction against that, the so-called general
GPL source license free software foundation, that says that these
other countries other than the U.S. should devote R&D dollars in the
so-called open approach, that means you can never commercialize that
software. And it is an interesting choice to deny -- for a country to
deny itself the benefits of these high-paying jobs and the kind of
taxes that let countries fund their universities, and fund general
research that then goes to renew that pool of commercial R&D. Clearly
there's an ecosystem there that has worked extremely well in the
United States, and has probably been the unique thing that has let
that push forward. And there is now a recognition that it's really a
question of policy of allowing the so-called capitalistic approach to
win the day there.
I had a very busy weekend, including a visit with Katy, a trip back
to the swimming pool, and another trip to Berkeley to visit Michelle
and Karen Coyle, a librarian
of some distinction who gave me interesting advice on copyright and
preservation issues. She also let me borrow a documentary called
Into the Future, on the subject of digital preservation.
I finished Double Fold just before the weekend --
speaking of preservation issues -- and Lessig's
The Future of Ideas on Sunday, just before Biella's
reading group meeting. The reading group was a lot of fun, and
featured a diverse, talented, and interesting bunch of readers,
all friends of Biella's. They included journalists, programmers,
lawyers, and some who fit into more than one of those categories.
I finally met Annalee Newitz, whom I
suggested a year ago was like the Cumaean Sybil, but she didn't
seem very Sybiline (Sybilish?) in person. Color unus, comptae
mansere comae, shall we say?
Anyway, I still haven't gotten around to writing up much about
CFP, but I don't know just
what to say about it, other than listing people I finally met face
to face, and other than praising the encouraging spirit which
prevailed throughout the conference. (Some reports described the
mood as "subdued"; if that was "subdued", I wish I'd seen earlier
CFPs!)
Just two of the many heroes and heroines I encountered this past
week were the human rights statistician
Patrick Ball and
the copyright law professor
Jessica Litman.
And here I don't mean to slight any of the other remarkable people
I encountered at the conference, but if I were to try to list
everyone I'd been excited to meet, I'd be here long past when
I ought to go to sleep.
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Poor Jack
Valenti, caught in a film loop with a 20-year cycle! Here in
testimony to the House Judiciary Committee, he repeats the claims,
rhetoric, arguments, and even analogies ("avalanche!") he made in
1982 before the House Judiciary Committee. Of course, then it
was about the VCR avalanche; this time through the loop, it's
the digital avalanche.
My arms are sore again. I'm behind on exercise and acupuncture,
which may have something to do with this.
I'm off to the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop tomorrow (to speak
on "The DRM Dark Age: Copy Controls and Cultural Continuity").
I'll be back Friday, and maybe my arms will feel better by then.
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So, I just got back from the Asilomar Microcomputer Workshop, at
the Asilomar Conference Center, just south of Monterey, on the
Pacific coast.
I had a nice time, and gave a presentation on "The DRM Dark
Age: Copy Controls and Cultural Continuity" (as well as speaking
on BPDG and the
LNX-BBC).
The workshop had a variety of extraordinarily geeky people and
talks (sample lunch conversation: is the universe actually a
computer simulation, as
Wolfram and
Fredkin seem to
suggest?). I was given a genuine fragment of a (failed)
communications satellite, not to mention some punched paper tape
(by the hobbyist who'd programmed the tape with programs for
controlling his serial-port-based LAN full of refurbished classic
communications equipment -- such as a genuine teletype!). I
heard about the adult entertainment industry, the end-to-end
model, software-defined radio, how touchpads work (with a wild
story about free-space capacitance), what risks beset
satellites in geosynchronous orbit, the open spectrum
movement, how academics might be able to break the journal
publishers' hold on their research, and all sorts of anecdotes
out of various eras in computing history.
I saw some really neat mechanical stuff, and also the movie
Brazil, which I'd never seen before and which has
got to me the most distressing movie I've ever seen. It's
especially eerie if you watch it all alone after midnight
in an empty hall in a house by yourself on a huge projection
screen with gigantic speakers -- and then the janitors begin
to enter the building and unlock the doors one by one as they
work their way toward the room where you are watching the
movie...
Brazil is the first movie I've seen in ages which
doesn't have a happy ending. I find it surprising to see movies
with even vaguely ambiguous endings, let alone endings full of
pain and despair. I'm thoroughly accustomed to the Hollywood
conventions in which everything is required to work out, the hero
protagonist to survive and triumph, evil to be punished, and in
general the old Comics Code requirements to be followed in broad
outline.
And Brazil kept on having moments where it could
have ended, credits could have rolled, and the happy-ending
or optimistic-ending conventions could have been fulfilled. (In
fact, in one scene, I was completely convinced that the movie had
ended, as the camera panned upward and the scene began to fade
from our view -- the triumph and union of the hero and heroine
seemed complete, and maybe even secure. And here the movie
suddenly began in earnest.)
It's strange that I should expect the movie format in particular
to work this way. Other formats don't work this way; plays are
certainly allowed to end on thoroughly sad notes:
A glooming peace this morning with it brings;
The sun, for sorrow, will not show his head.
Go hence to have more talk of these sad things;
Some shall be pardon'd, and some punishèd.
(And the tradition of plays with sad endings is centuries older
yet.)
Maybe the cinematic form contributed to this, but I found
Brazil harrowing and terrifying.
On our way back from Asilomar, we went through Monterey, and I got
to see Cannery Row, dramatically different from what it must have
been like when Steinbeck wrote about it.
Leonard says of me:
Boy, that Seth David Schoen. When
he's not talking about the devious plans of The Man to reduce us all
to digital chattel, he's complaining that his arms hurt. I tell ya,
it's always arms and The Man with Seth.
This (past) week is Copyright Awareness Week, and this (coming)
day is World Intellectual Property Day.
WIPOUT's announced its essay
contest winners, and WIPO seems
poised to do the same.
But, more exciting to me, Random House granted me permission to use
544 bytes from the Adobe eBook edition of Lessig's The Future
of Ideas in my forthcoming "DRM Dark Age" paper.
This is good news (and discussed briefly now at
Consensus At Lawyerpoint).
I went out to HSC in Santa
Clara with Nick and Don on Saturday, and had a nice time. I ate all
I could at the all-you-can-eat restaurant called Sweet Tomatoes, and
picked up a high-speed motor, some LCD displays, a key switch, and
jumper wire.
On Sunday, I lost a large sum of money suddenly to what I think
(and hope) was a bank error.
I'm off to L.A. for the day on Monday, and I'll be back in the
evening.
I have a few extended comments which I meant to make here and
then postponed or forgot about. One of them is the "Skepticism
Is Not Fun" essay. I had another which has totally slipped my
mind.
I spent all day, and I mean all day, in Los Angeles at the
Broadcast Protection Discussion Group meeting. That was quite
an experience, and there are many interesting quotations
scribbled in my notebook. Maybe some of what I heard will
appear on Consensus
At Lawyerpoint.
I had spirited discussions with several entertainment lawyers --
in some cases about whether DeCSS should be legal. My "Free
Mickey" and "Free Jon Johansen" button and sticker probably
made some of my opinions evident.
I got back Monday evening and am at home now.
Thoughts in L.A.: socialization into a culture; laws and
sausages; fundamental rights and "moral trumps"; contrasting
political philosophies; defaults and baselines; the
Treaty
of Tordesillas; historical contingency; legislation as
strategy versus legislation as moral statement; "if you won't
support effective means to fight terrorism, you must support
terrorism" (oops, I mean piracy).
Most wonderful moment in the meeting:
Group co-chair [at front of room]: Has everyone had a chance to
review the new proposal?
MPAA attorney [sitting near me]: I got my copy off the EFF web
site.
I immediately replied "We're always glad to be of assistance".
Lawyer: I was one of the lead attorneys in that action!
Seth: I've read a great deal of your writing.
Lawyer: Don't believe everything you read.
Seth: Don't worry, I didn't.
Later on that day:
Another entertainment lawyer: I don't understand why all of these
academics are so anti-copyright. I mean, they sell textbooks. I
don't think they would think it was fair use if somebody copied
their textbooks on the Internet.
So, that huge bank charge was made by an actual creditor of mine,
but I didn't authorize them to and they didn't seem to have any
record of having made it. (That's kind of scary.) I managed to
stop payment on the charge, and the creditor didn't seem to object,
but now I'm worried that there's one office out there which thinks I
should have paid and another office which thinks I didn't need to
pay. Did you ever have the experience of calling a creditor and
having several representatives disagree about the status of your
account? That's what I'm afraid of.
So maybe in two months I'm going to get a call saying "You stopped
payment on money you owed us! We're going to report you to a
credit bureau!" or maybe someone will just do it without telling
me and I'll have no idea.
At http://www.andrew.cmu.edu/~twm/embed/dmca.html:
The OS/2 chunk
has a bit for embedding.
Set it to zero.
I finished The Castle, by Franza Kafka, the
seventh book on my reading list.
It didn't do much for me at this point, I'm afraid.
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Contact: Seth David Schoen