View 726 Wednesday, May 30, 2012

Over the weekend, we recorded Hemingway and Gellhorn, the HBO movie about Ernest Hemingway and his third wife Martha Gellhorn, and watched it last night. I’m not sorry to have seen it. There was little remarkable about the performances except that Nicole Kidman showed great versatility in being both younger and much older than her present age. If you like sex scenes there were plenty of them, not quite hard core but certainly what would have been called pornography only a few years ago. They went on longer than I cared for, but there were plenty of them with lots of intensity. The real life Martha Gellhorn once made a point of saying in interviews that she didn’t enjoy sex, and Kidman almost says that in her comments to the viewers done, supposedly, thirty years after Hemingway’s death, but that hardly comes through in the sex scenes.

Much of the film takes place during the Spanish Civil War, and much of it purports to be an objective account of the war as seen by Gellman and Hemingway, who were of course Republican sympathizers and dedicated anti-fascists. Neither Gellman nor Hemingway was a member of the Communist Party, but both were ardent supporters of the Republican side during the civil war, and their reporting from Spain contributed to the nearly universal intellectual view that there is only one respectable view of that war, and anyone not for the Republican cause must be a fascist sympathizer. This is of course the communist party line on the war, and it has been so successfully promulgated that few know there is any other possible view.

In the real world matters are not so simple.

The film shows John Dos Passos and other western intellectuals, all supporters of the Republican cause, and it does show, without much emphasis or explanation, some of the actions of the Russian communists who operated as allies of the Republic. It shows Nationalist atrocities in plenty, but barely mentions the communist operations against the anarchists and their frequent purges. There is no mention of George Orwell’s accounts.

It is highly unlikely that neither Hemingway nor Gellhorn was aware of the violent divisions within the Republican cause (at one point a near civil war between POUM and Communist forces). There is some hint of these activities, with John Dos Passsos’ friend shown kidnapped by NKVD agents causing Dos Passos to question the Russian involvement, but it is not given much emphasis. Actually, Dos Passos moved from being a committed left wing writer to a libertarian position. He retained much of his sympathy for the IWW and some of his old comrades, but also recognized that not all good comes from the left, and in fact the old slogan that there is no enemy to the left was false and dangerous. The result of all this, not mentioned in the film at all, is that Dos Passos wrote Midcentury, his last and some would say his greatest novel. Like his earlier trilogy collectively called U.S.A., Midcentury is a “collage”, consisting of many scenes and viewpoints woven together to form a story as seen from many angles. I read it as an undergraduate and it had a great influence on me, presenting a viewpoint I had not seen before. The film merely dismisses Dos Passos as having moved to the right. That too is the standard left view – Dos Passos has become an unperson in modern academia, and Midcentury is never discussed in intellectual society.

But Hemingway and Gellhorn does a reasonable job of showing the standard intellectual view of the Spanish Civil War, and particularly the period before the Hitler-Stalin pact that united the Communists and the Nazis. That happened after the Franco victory in Spain, when Hemingway and Gellhorn were together. The film makes no mention of that pact and what followed with communists proclaiming the fall of Paris to the Wehrmacht as the victory of the working class. If Hemingway or Gellman has ever written of that event I am unaware of it. It was traumatic to many left wing intellectuals, and played a massive role in converting Trotskyite leftists toward libertarianism and what became “neoconservatism”.

The film is, as nearly all major films are, mostly sympathetic to the left wing cause, and while purporting to show a distance between the communists and the anti-fascist popular front, it doesn’t do much of that, and shows none of the stresses that resulted from the massive change in the party line the day after Hitler invaded Russia. Of course there is no reason why a biographical film should cover such intellectual events unless they impacted on the principals: but one does wonder why there is so little information on that period in the lives of Hemingway and Gellhorn. They were certainly together then.

All told it’s a good film with good performances, and shows something of the intellectuals in America in that formative period. And if you like sex scenes, there’s plenty of them. Maybe Julianne Moore will be jealous.

View 726 Sunday, May 27, 2012

Memorial Day Weekend

I found the following at Chaos Manor Views for May 26, 2003.

In Memoriam. RIP

"It was a noble cause."

    Ronald Reagan, on the Viet Nam War.

And indeed, a million people did not flee South Viet Nam until it fell; but for many years, there are those who fled to South Viet Nam from Tonkin.

Freedom is not free. It is bought at a high price. It can be squandered cheaply.

I also found this essay on our Iraqi adventure. When Bush Sr. entered the White House as president he fired every Reagan supporter he could identify, so there were few left to listen to people like me when we went into Iraq the first time, and fewer when Bush II was inaugurated. Even so, I wish someone had listened back then. I suspect the United States would be better off.

We mourn our dead, in Iraq and Afghanistan.

On establishing democracies:

If you establish a democracy, you must in due time reap the fruits of a democracy. You will in due season have great impatience of the public burdens, combined in due season with great increase of the public expenditure. You will in due season have wars entered into from passion and not from reason; and you will in due season submit to peace ignominiously sought and ignominiously obtained, which will diminish your authority and perhaps endanger your independence. You will in due season find your property is less valuable, and your freedom less complete.

Benjamin Disraeli

Government by public opinion poll is about the same as plebiscitary democracy. America was established as a Republic. The States could have democracy if they so chose. The Federal government had not that power and for good reasons, the Framers in 1787 having already known what Disraeli tried to tell Parliament some fifty years later.

On that subject:

U.S. Defense Secretary Leon Panetta on Sunday indirectly confirmed recent remarks by the Ambassador to Israel that the U.S. is “ready from a military perspective’’ to stop Iran from making a nuclear weapon if international pressure fails

http://www.nationaljournal.com/nationalsecurity/panetta-u-s-is-ready-to-stop-iran-from-creating-nuclear-weapons-20120527

It may become a very hot summer.

My 40” Samsung television has developed a strange problem: when you turn it on, it fails to find a valid signal source, and it won’t listen to the controls. Over time, it will suddenly work for a few seconds, then go off again. This continues for about fifteen to twenty minutes after it will suddenly act as if nothing were ever wrong, and operate perfectly after that although it doesn’t always listen to the TV clicker (nor to the cable clicker when it is being told to act as if it were the TV clicker). The cable clicker works, digital recording works, indeed the TV works just fine, and of course the simplest remedy to our problem would be simply not to turn the TV off. For reasons I won’t go into, I’m generally not so comfortable with doing that..

TV’s similar to our four year old Samsung now sell for about $500, and since I doubt that anyone repairs televisions any more I think it is probably time to replace this one. When we went online to look at modern TV we were offered a bewildering variety of High Definition sets at around 40” diagonal (which is plenty big enough for our TV room, some Samsung and some “major brands at prices too low to advertise”, some LED and some Plasma, and I have to say that I now wish I had gone to CES this year.

I thought while we were at it we’d replace the bedroom TV, a very very ancient flatscreen low definition 20” TV with something around 25” HD at whatever low price we can find.

It used to be that the guy I’d ask advice from on this would have been me, but I haven’t paid much attention to that end of the electronics revolution for a while. I’ve never been much use as a judge of audio quality, and as far as I am concerned the 40” Samsung HD we have is at least Good Enough in both size and video quality, so I’, more interested in reliability and price than blacker blacks and other such things. Recommendations appreciated, but please, either know the subject or have personal experience worth sharing; my mailbox is pretty full lately, and every day I have to write yet one more set of rules for my spam filters. Who’d have thought I’d be getting hundreds of emails ostensibly from myself about Rolex watches (or at least they say they are about Rolex watches; whatever they are, they get deleted if they are “from” me and mention Rolex… All the rules slow my mail reception down something awful, but the good part of the computer revolution is that the electronic brainpower keeps getting better and better..

Anyway. If you know much about 20” and 40” TV sets please let me know.

Actually, since I wrote that I sent copies to a few friends and Marty Winston has pretty well brought me up to date on this stuff. LED sets cost about $40 more and last years longer. As I suspected, nobody repairs TV’s now – I can remember going down to the drug store and using the tube tested to find out what was wrong with my old TV and that would take care of its problems as long as the bottle hadn’t died. And I lugged an early color TV to a repair shop. Now it’s just pointless. It costs about the same to repair a TV as to buy new, and new is better. Moore’s Law in action. So we’ll be off to see what looks good and replace the TV with something about the same size but better.

Doesn’t mean I won’t read comments from readers, but there’s no necessity unless you know some reason to challenge Marty on those conclusions.

All this will be in an upcoming column, and yes, that’s overdue. We really like our new Sandy Bridge system built in the stunning Thermaltake box, and we’re set to build an Ivy Bridge system for Windows 8 sometime along the line. I need to write up Alien Artifact (named because of the Thermaltake box, actually). Here are two views of Alien Artifact in action, complete with a solid state USB 3 external drive. The case is well designed for access, convenience, and air flow, and is very quiet. I’ll have a full report presently.

While I was looking for photos I found some shots I took of Sable after she went to a new groomer last week. Her old groomer has lost her lease and closed, and we had to find a new one, which in fact worked out well. Here’s Sable just home telling us about her experience.

The final result was pretty good. Sable likes the place. I used to wash and groom our dogs – Huskies all for the past three decades – myself, but over time that got a bit harder to do, and wasn’t particularly kind to the dog, so we have it done now, not as often as we should probably, but Sable looks pretty good. We sort of judge the quality of the place by her attitude when we take her there – if she doesn’t seem eager to go in after her first experience we look for somewhere else – but this time it was really interesting. As soon as we got to the parking lot, a place she had never been before, she got eager to get out of the car and go in there. We think she must have smelled happy dogs. Whatever it was, she likes the place, and she looks pretty good.

If you were looking for something to worry about, try this:

Backdoor found in Chinese-made US military chip

http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~sps32/sec_news.html#Assurance

–

Eric Smith

I have always wished for my computer to be as easy to use as my telephone; my wish has come true because I can no longer figure out how to use my telephone.

Bjarne Stroustrop, Developer of C++ programming language

View 725 Thursday, May 24, 2012

There is more pressure for the government to get involved in the Facebook Fiasco. I am sure that will build. Government would love to get further involved in regulating IPO transactions since regulation means an opportunity for shakedown. Some “investors” are complaining that they were misinformed about Facebook’s expected revenues. It turns out that the worst misinformation still had the price to earnings ratio of more than thirty.

My only comment remains: anyone who bought stock at more than 30 times earnings, and any financial advisor who touted stocks at more than thirty times earnings, probably has other foolish habits. Facebook may be a wonder, but surely it is not going to grow three times as fast as Apple or Google – or if it is, I at least would like to see an argument more powerful than ‘financial analysts advice”. Why is Facebook going to grow faster? And of course it didn’t. I would still predict that Facebook is going to fall well into the twenties, and probably lower.

scribd – problems and solutions

Regarding problems with scribd takedown notices:

The DMCA almost explicity disclaims any "affirmative duty" (as the lawyers say) to police for copyright infringement, so long as one follows the takedown provisions. The law is perhaps a surprisingly reasonable recognition of the fact that "internet scale" operations cannot possibly police all their content, and is a decent rule for ISPs and web hosts and other general-purpose platform providers. It seems scribd is happy hiding behind this barrier, and is legally, if not ethically, clear in doing so.

The DMCA is pretty old-fashioned, in that it doesn’t recognize (1) the possibility of free and very low-friction copies, and (2) the sheer size of the modern Internet. It also makes no distinction for things like scribd that are not really general-purpose hosts and could, quite reasonably, prohibit the same content from re-appearing, or at least make an effort, especially since it was written before lots of modern pattern-recognition techniques came into common use. But the law, in general, can never keep up with innovation, so none of this is much of a surprise.

So if it’s not reasonable for providers to police and barely possible for owners to police, what’s the legal solution? Possibly providers could be required to prevent material explicitly registered with them; that is not an unreasonable thing for large-ish operations to automate, but it would be a burden on startups and smaller outfits.

Anyway, I’m a tech guy, so I think of tech solutions. It woudn’t be too hard to create a tool to scan scribd (and similar) to automate the search for titles you own, and it could probably even generate the takedown notices. It may be fast and easy for people to post copies of your books, but I bet it’s not fast or easy enough to beat such a tool. Get enough authors on board, and it may actually encourage scribd and similar to put their own solution in place, just to save their time.

There’s probably something like this, but my quick searches haven’t turned it up. Perhaps a more determined effort will show some fruit; if so, I’d like to know, just to take a look. (I don’t think anyone’s re-publishing my book. Both too old and a bit too niche to bother, probably. Though you never know.) If not, and you think it would be of use, I’d like to know that too–in that case I’d probably knock something together, just because someone needs to.

J Cameron Cooper

Thank you for the succinct summary. I have a great deal of mail on this, and most of it will go in the mailbag.

Any individual author can send a list of copyright violations as part of a properly executed DMCA takedown notice, and scribd will very likely act on that in a timely manner. The most onerous part of this process is collecting the exact URL of each copyright violation on scribd. That can be quite a lot of work, since not all mentions of an author or of specific titles are in fact acts of piracy. Some are reviews. Some are copies of Amazon “look inside”. Those latter, of course, are certainly copyright violations since Amazon does not obtain permission to allow others to republish their looks inside. Some are incomplete, like the copy of Lucifer’s Hammer that I referred to yesterday. That too is still a copyright violation. And note that once the takedown notice has been honored, there is generally nothing to prevent the same poster from putting the same stuff back up again, and it’s up to the author to find that out and start the process over again. This can get tedious.

In the Lucifer’s Hammer case has that partial (about a third of the book) republishing of Hammer done sales any harm? Probably not. It could even be argued that it might intrigue someone into buying a properly formatted eBook copy. I understand that argument, and I have mixed data on its accuracy. But there is more here than commercial value. Do note that some authors are simply horrified at the notion that someone has the ‘right’ to publish a badly chopped up, horribly formatted, excerpt of the author’s work without regard to the financial consequences.

I like the notion of a software tool that would automatically find copyright violations and generate a DMCA takedown notice. It would certainly annoy scribd, perhaps sufficiently that someone in authority at scribd would actually try to work with authors, agents, and author associations to come up with some meaningful way to let scribd continue to work its business plan without trampling on author rights. As I have said: it is possible that there is no commercial harm and it’s rather likely that there is no great commercial harm from scribd’s activities; but that’s not the point. Authors should have some control over their works. In particular they ought to be able to insist on well formatted pirate copies!

I have this from an author:

The loathsome scribd.com posts XXYYZZ (the single most

valuable thing that I own, not excepting YYXXZZ whose

movie sale made me financially independent) over and over

and over again.

They allow anybody, without identification, to post

anything, but hide behind every clause in the law to make it

hard for writers to get their work taken down when it’s

illegitimately posted. I have to make them take it down

every single damned time.

I got into a nasty Facebook squabble with one of their

toadies a while back (he was promoting "information wants to

be free" and "being stolen from is good for you so STFU and

lie back and enjoy it"), and after several public go-rounds

he sent me a private message to say he had changed his mind,

I was right, but he couldn’t say so in public.

He sounded scared. I have no idea what was going on there; I

merely report.

It’s time for scribd to have a serious conversation with agents and author associations. This isn’t going away, and their habit of stonewalling isn’t really going to help. And there’s this:

Niven + Pournelle = zipper + heroin

Dr. Pournelle:

Another problem with scribd is that once copyrighted or trademarked materials are left in the public domain, the property holders’ rights can be lost. For instance, both "zipper" and "heroin" were trademarks, but once they had fallen into general use without the property-holders’ objection, they became generic terms. Try using Kleenex without the capitalization in a general publication and a stern letter will arrive from Kimberly-Clark Worldwide.

In a kind of related matter: Much has been made about Elizabeth Warren’s "plagiarism" of recipes. Under copyright law, recipes and jokes cannot be copyrighted. That’s one reason chefs are so jealous of their recipes.

Pete Nofel

I hadn’t even thought of that one.

View 725 Tuesday, May 22, 2012

Probably the most important news of today:

spacex and NASA

Jerry,

SpaceX’s historic demonstration flight to the ISS is well underway, and I had a thought after watching the launch video here: http://www.youtube.com/user/nasatelevision/

Look at the pictures of "mission control", at around 10 minutes. Things sure have changed… Long sleeve button shirts and ties are gone, replaced by t-shirts and jeans. Even more telling, given the commercial nature of the program, is the physical layout of the area. No expensive custom built consoles in sight. The room still has the traditional NASA layout of rows of workstations facing a common front where multiple large displays show common information, but the consoles are now sturdy but moveable desks with multiple monitor workstations. While the capability of this setup must be far beyond what was possible even just a few years ago, it is also trivially reconfigurable and probably cost a mere fraction of the original NASA setup.

Flexible responsiveness to business and operational conditions will be a key to SpaceX’s success and I thought it was interesting that my very first impression of their mission control was how they could completely reconfigure it during a lunch break. It looks like a startup operation, but that startup just put more tech into orbit than any private organization in the world has ever done, demonstrating a capability that maybe 4 organizations in the world could match. These guys are still warming up, and their mission control could probably be completely reconfigured for another mission in an hour. That just feels promising.

Sean

The link is to a NASA site, which is interesting because NASA didn’t have a lot to do with this launch. At the end of the video they switch to NASA Houston mission control for ISS which looks a lot like the old days. The video is real time. There was a time when an uneventful rocket launch and burn was something thrilling to watch, but it does go on for a while. If you like, just after 9:45 seconds into the mission you get the final burn, and the scene changes to the Space-X launch control. When you tire of that you can jump to the end to see the NASA mission control center.

It’s interesting to watch. I was present for some of the early manned spacecraft launches, where we never knew what would happen – as Wolfe says in The Right Stuff, in the early days there was the fear that “ours always blow up.” Of course they didn’t, and we got all our people back, but you never knew. And we had our heroes. I said my piece on that when Columbia went down. That link will lead somewhere to a link to Julia Ecklar’s Phoenix, a fitting memorial to the crew of Capsule 12.

But there was no tragedy in this launch. Significantly it showed the reliability of the engines, which a few days ago were lighted up then shut down because one of the engines had significant overpressure – and the bird was retuned, refueled, and lit up again to make a nominal and uneventful flight. Nominal and uneventful is what’s needed if we are to be a spacefaring nation. When I was in first grade I recall the class being led outside to the schoolyard to watch the American Airlines DC/X fly over. We need space flight to be as routine as air flights are.

It will happen. Space-x has obviously mastered the gas generator engine, running on kerosene and LOX. That sacrifices performance for reliability. One of the features of the SSX proposed by General Graham, Max Hunter, and me to then US Vice President and Space Council Chairman Dan Quayle was that we learn more about designing for savability and reliability, not just for performance; that operation be the driving factor even if that means sacrificing payload. (See the Council Report on SSX.) We favored gas generator and expander engines over staged combustion, precisely because gas generator and expander engines can be shut down and fail gracefully. The cost is lower performance.

Today’s launch by Space-X is a significant step towards becoming a space faring nation again.

(For more on this subject, there’s my old getting to space stuff.)

Of course one wonders why NASA is showing the Space-X liftoff. NASA didn’t build the Merlin engines.  Probably because NASA can’t resupply its own space station, and the Russians are charging for filming their rocket launches? And NASA has all the cameras in place.

If you want less of some activity, fine people for doing it. Taxing the activity has much the same effect. If you want more, stop fining them. Lower taxes.

I would think this elementary logic and fairly obvious. It’s what I had in mind yesterday when I suggested that we give dividend income the same tax break as capital gains. One reason we have economic bubbles is that it’s so much more profitable (after taxes) to have your stock grow than to collect dividends from it. That distorts management strategy toward economic manipulations rather than business operations. It also encourages all kinds of razzle-dazzle and hype, including actions that deliberately encourage bubbles. That’s what happened with the big Internet Bubble, and it’s a good part of the genesis of the housing bubble.

I have never understood why dividend income – which is, after all, based on return from the investment of income that has already been taxed – should be taxed at the ordinary income rate. Indeed, if you want to encourage people to work, it would make sense to keep the fines for working low, but of course there has to be income. On the gripping hand, if income tax were pretty well reserved for the States or for the Federal Government in Time of War, that would have an interesting effect too.

More on this tomorrow, but scribd seems to be at it again.

For the scribd story see http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view481.html#DMCA and

http://www.jerrypournelle.com/archives2/archives2view/view482.html#Monday

I will have more on this shortly. SCRIBD has a policy of allowing anyone to put up anything including the entire oeuvre of an author – including deceased authors, thus harming their widows and orphans – and making it very difficult to get the request to have this taken down submitted in the proper format. And they want a different takedown request for each and every instance, which means that it can be taken down and immediately reposted and that requires another – in other words these profiteers make life fairly difficult for authors.  Their web site makes money largely because it gets a lot of traffic. How much of that traffic is due to their ha having a lot of copyrighted content up that should not be there I don’t know. I refer you to http://wiki.answers.com/Q/Is_scribd_legal

And see  http://www.chaosmanorreviews.com/open_archives/jep_column-326-a.php

View 725 Monday, May 21, 2012

The tumult and the shouting dies, the Goldman Sachs and the Sovereign funds depart…

Which is to say that the Facebook IPO is over, and on today’s trading those who invested money in the notion that Facebook is worth 40 or more times earnings per share have lost money. I don’t know why anyone would be surprised. Think on it: if you bought Facebook at the initial price of $38 (and thus put money in the bank for the founders, employees, and early private investors in Facebook who certainly would like to have your money) you have bought paper that Facebook will need forty years to be able to buy back. The alternative is that Facebook will cleverly invest its earnings in a way that causes other people to buy that paper for what you paid for it. Or that enough people out there will decide that this is such a good deal they have to get in on it, and they will bid more for your paper than you paid.

By contrast, Apple is trading at about ten times earnings, and Google trades at about 12 time earnings.

Of course Facebook can grow. It only has a billion members. It can get more. Surely there is great potential for growth here. And we can advertise to them, and companies will pay to run those ads. Facebook shares will rise, double in value –

And thus are bubbles created, but it didn’t happen that way. Facebook is now down to below the initial offering price, and is likely to fall more. Those whose orders got lost by the buggy NASDAQ software and thus didn’t get in on the IPO turn out to be lucky. Even more lucky – or astute – would be the initial stockholders who sold out at the IPO price – at least it certainly looks that way. I would think that the end of the hype is the end of the Facebook bubble, and the price will continue to fall until Facebook is down in the region of ten times earnings. Even at that it will take Facebook ten years to earn enough to buy your share (just as it takes Apple or Google that long to make enough to earn enough to buy their own shares. Which is to say that given current earnings, Facebook would be worth about $38/4 which is to say less than $10 a share.

Will it fall that far? Who knows, really? But without a lot more expected revenue – either for real, or expected from exciting new ideas in converting that huge membership to a revenue source, either directly or through buying something that can be advertised on Facebook – it’s highly unlikely. Microsoft shot up from its first days after going public because Gates had the vision of a computer on every desk, and in every home, and in every classroom, and Microsoft software running on every one of those computers; and Microsoft pretty well achieved that. Apple almost died until the Return of King Jobs with his visions of smart phones and elegant tablets brought it back from a minor player to a giant worth ten or twelve times earnings, and stays there partly because of momentum and partly because Jobs infused Apple with his vision of how to take the inevitable new technology and make it something everyone wanted. Google is there because – well, that depends on to whom you listen. But for Apple, or Microsoft, or Google to get up above 20 times earnings is going to take a lot of vision along with the razzle-dazzle to sell it.

There was a time when people bought stock based on expected dividends. American tax laws have made it far more worthwhile for corporations to use their revenues to increase the value of their stock rather than concentrate on long term steady profits and dividends. That encourages speculation and bubbles – you pay less tax on money ‘earned’ by razzle-dazzle than on income from making good stuff and selling it at a profit. The result is that companies devour each other, buy their competition, and generally do whatever they can to increase capital gains. One remedy would be to tax interest, dividends, and capital gains at the same rates – after all, they are returns on investments made with money you’ve already paid taxes on – but that doesn’t seem to be in the realm of political possibilities. Thus we have all this focus on growth and razzle-dazzle, and not much on just building a solid company that makes stuff people want and will buy.

That’s not the way capitalism is supposed to work, but it’s what we have.

I’m off to work on fiction. Mail bag tonight, I hope.

https://staticapp.icpsc.com/icp/loadimage.php/mogile/746865/7536220a9d41b0a837a27eb049f22d36/image/png>

Space-X launch tonight.