The self-same moment I could pray;
And from my neck so free
The Albatross fell off, and sank
Like lead into the sea.
("The Rime of the Ancient Mariner", 288-91)
Gardner has a long note on "so free" on p. 74 of the Annotated
Ancient Mariner.
So free: It is hard to say exactly what Coleridge intended
by this phrase. Most commentators have taken it to mean
"thus made free." The albatross is freed as a result
of the Mariner's ability to pray. The word
"so" is sometimes used, however, in the sense of "then" or
"thereafter," in which case the phrase may mean nothing
more than that the albatross was freed after the
Mariner found himself able to pray.
It also is possible that "so" is intended to intensify
the word "free," which in turn may modify either
"albatross" or "neck." The Mariner may be saying: After
I found I could pray, the albatross was so free that it
dropped from my neck; or, from my neck, which suddenly
felt extremely free, dropped the albatross.
That reminds me:
This was called "writing a commentary" -- that was a common thing to do --
and these commentaries were appreciated.
(Richard M. Stallman, Copyright and Globalization in the Age of Computer Networks)
We made a release of LNX-BBC 2.1 on Friday, but we're still writing
the announcement. I'll write more here once the announcement is
finished and posted. (If you're very impatient, just go to the
home page and download.)
Dan Bricklin
on
shoplifting vs. illicit copying.
Bricklin makes a memorable comparison:
Pirating works online is really more like kids watching a baseball
game through a hole in the outfield wall, or listening to a concert
just outside the gate.
In fact the desire to capture all
positive externalities resulting from one's labor or property is so
pervasive that the Chicago Cubs sued owners of buildings surrounding
Wrigley Field because the building owners made money operating rooftop
bars with views into the baseball stadium. (Do a Google search for
"Wrigley Field rooftop lawsuit" or similar.) Bricklin assumes that
people will feel that it is legitimate to derive enjoyment from being
nearby a concert or game without paying -- but not all stadium owners
agree!
It seems to be an awfully appealing strategy to make money by taxing
other people for the use of positive externalities resulting from
your activity, while trying to avoid incurring costs for the
negative externalities. (Some people, like entertainers' managers
and publishers, may focus on capturing more positive externalities,
while others, like polluters, may focus on avoiding paying for
the negative externalities.)
If we can find examples of traditional activities which produce
benefits for others (sic vos non vobis!) and where there has
not yet been a successful lobbying effort to create property rights
in those benefits, these might turn out to be interesting sources of
metaphors for the copyright debates.
The interesting fact is that there is probably no absolutely consistent
single obvious moral principle about externalities -- but lots of
people feel as if there is one.
My friend David Alpert visited.
I hadn't seen him for about nine years, and he's working for
Google now, living in New York,
etc. It was a nice visit, and David accidentally did me a huge
favor by finding the place in Sam Loyd's Cyclopedia of 5,000
Puzzles, Tricks and Conundrums where Loyd attempts to
answer Lewis Carroll's question "Why is a raven like a writing-desk?".
[T]here is no absolute certainty of any answer having been
intended, as Lewis Carroll never vouchsafed any replies to
the curious problem pertaining to Alice's trip through
Wonderland; nevertheless, my acquaintance with Carroll and
his peculiar traits, convinced me that it was not altogether
a haphazard query. My own guess, following the alliterative
style which characterizes the entire work, would be "that the
notes for which they are noted are not noted for being musical
notes"; nevertheless, there is considerable scope for
ingenuity and cleverness, as other answers, equally as good
or better, might be suggested, like "because Poe wrote on
both," "Bills and tales are among their characteristics,"
"Because they stand on their legs," "Because they conceal
their steels" or "Ought to be made to shut up," etc., etc.
We also got to climb up Bernal Hill.
Make BitTorrent accept torrent filenames and URLs on the command-line
as the final (or only) argument without --url and --responsefile, so
that you can just say "btdownloadcurses foo.torrent" or
"btdownloadcurses https://www.example.net/bar.torrent":
--- BitTorrent-3.2.1b/BitTorrent/download.py.orig 2003-05-03 23:50:30.000000000 -0700
+++ BitTorrent-3.2.1b/BitTorrent/download.py 2003-05-04 13:16:31.000000000 -0700
@@ -2,7 +2,7 @@
# see LICENSE.txt for license information
from zurllib import urlopen
-from urlparse import urljoin
+from urlparse import urljoin, urlparse
from btformats import check_message
from Choker import Choker
from Storage import Storage
@@ -89,10 +89,13 @@
if len(params) == 0:
errorfunc('arguments are -\n' + formatDefinitions(defaults, cols))
return
- if len(params) == 1:
- params = ['--responsefile'] + params
try:
- config, garbage = parseargs(params, defaults, 0, 0)
+ config, garbage = parseargs(params, defaults, 0, 1)
+ if garbage:
+ if urlparse(garbage[0])[0] in ( 'http', 'https', 'ftp', 'file' ):
+ config['url'] = garbage[0]
+ else:
+ config['responsefile'] = garbage[0]
if (config['responsefile'] == '') == (config['url'] == ''):
raise ValueError, 'need responsefile or url'
except ValueError, e:
Zooko read my comment on externalities and said
I strongly feel that there is a single consistent moral position on
externalities.
I think that all externalities that can be internalized without too much social
cost should be and that society as a whole benefits thereby.
I feel so strongly about it because I suspect that successful internalizations
are the root of almost all progress, historically. People might not notice
because successful internalizations are "normal property" if you were born in a
culture that had already internalized it.
This sounds good, but how do we know what "too much social cost" is? In a
sense the idea is almost tautologically true if you accept a kind of
cost-benefit analysis with regard to externalities.
It seems to me that Zooko's position is kind of like saying that virtue
consists in behaving virtuously, or that rational behavior is a matter
of doing what's reasonable. It's more interesting than those kinds
of assertions, but it still seems to have an element of circularity.
At the Noe Venable concert (mentioned below), I was thinking that
every human activity may have some externality -- a frightening
thought, a terrifying thought.
In addition to Sam Loyd's answers, quoted yesterday, there are
other
answers to Lewis Carroll's question.
I got to go to the Noe Venable
concert at the Great American Music Hall
with Riana. It was great (like the hall itself)! We ran into Cindy and
Fred there.
I feel like a proper fan if I can detect minor changes in a song, and I
did notice three changes in "Juniper": "the harrowing walk down the
narrowing streets" (for "a harrowing walk down a narrowing street");
"my father the thinker, my daughter the song" (for "my father the
preacher, my daughter the song"); and a substantial change in the melody
Noe sings in between verses. It was still a fantastic performance of
"Juniper".
I like "my father the preacher" better; compare the song "Son of a Preacher
Man". (My friend Micah is actually the son of a preacher man and was
always amused by that song.)
I need to get Noe's CDs.
One of the oddities I noticed when I went to the Supreme Court in October
was that the general public was not allowed to take notes on the argument.
(Members of the Bar of the Supreme Court, and reporters, were allowed to
take notes.)
Lodrina reports from the East Coast that the Supreme Court has finally
changed
this unpopular policy.
Here's the picture of me dressed up as the Rambam, which, as I said, is
the first-ever picture of me with a beard:
It's a shame to give up the ability to say, with Thoreau, that
"[i]t is not my business to be petitioning the Governor or the
Legislature any more than it is theirs to petition me".
I read a galley of The Bug, thanks to Sumana, and on
Wednesday I went with Will to hear Ellen Ullman read from it at
City Lights.
In answering questions, she revealed that the bug described in the book
was a real bug in a real system, that it was a bug she herself had
encountered as a programmer.
I said
"Ethan Levin's name is very phonetically similar to yours -- it
would be a good soundex match."
(This turns out not to be clearly right -- I ran them both through
soundex and they didn't look as alike as I'd thought.)
But Ellen Ullman went on to say that Ethan Levin's character is based
on her, and many of the character's experiences are based on her own.
I was quoted at some length in
a Wired
News article about the technology formerly known as Palladium. I
worry that I was too long-winded because I was interviewed by e-mail
instead of on the telephone. I was also a bit formal.
Here are two superstitions you have to deal with in order to make an
informed criticism of this technology:
- People can't be harmed by being given a new choice or ability, or
benefitted by having a choice or ability taken away from them.
- Harms are done to people on purpose, or as a result of some
individual's nefarious intent.
As to the latter, I think of the phrase "damnum absque iniuria".
(I heard about it in
a very old court case last fall,
when I went to hear the Pavlovich argument; then I went to hear the
Eldred argument, and soon I'm going to hear the Bunner argument.)
Maybe these aren't even the right superstitions to be worried about.
I'm pretty confident that the first one is important; I have a list
of about a dozen metaphors to try to make this point (from time-lock
safes to St. Basil's Cathedral to collective bargaining to the
game of Chicken on out), but I doubt any of them are immediately
intuitive, and I think I'm going to need something much more intuitive.
I missed Dar Williams (alas! the first time in over two years, I
think), but I saw the total lunar eclipse from Bernal Hill. If I
were looking for a literary device, I would pass back in time to
the solar eclipse of May 10, 1994, and the lunar eclipse of
January 20, 2000, and describe all the things which happened to
me as a result of each eclipse.
On top of Bernal Hill, over a hundred people
gathered, and little children ran back and forth.
Boy: I want to look at the town!
Boy 2: It's a country, not a city. We're so high up we
can see the whole country.
Boy: We live in a city, not in a country.
Boy 2: We live in a country too, and we can see the
country from here.
Girl: Do you even know how big a country is?
The skeptical girl was the first person on the whole hilltop to
spot the moon, quite some time after it had risen. (The fog
and the sunlight made it hard to make out at first.)
I wonder if people in D.C. went out to the Ellipse to watch
the eclipse.
I'm going to Germany in August for the
CCC's (blocked by N2H2 as "Illegal"!)
biennial
Chaos Communication Camp.
I've never been to Europe at all. One of my priorities, I hope, will
be to visit my grandmother's home town,
Herborn. (I didn't know
that J. A.
Comenius, the human rights and peace advocate, studied there,
but I did know about "annihilation of the Jewish Community (1942)".)
I have a recent postcard of Herborn on my wall; the main street looks
practically unchanged from the 1920s. I'll have to go see if that's
still true.
I've fallen into the famous old trap of writing a really long diary
entry covering a long time period, and being unable to finish the
descriptions of earlier events before new events popped up.
In the past, this problem once led me to make a collage instead of writing
a letter. But in this case, I expect to finish the long diary entry any
day now.
[Main]
Contact: Seth David Schoen
