frig

- you have a right to trial by a jury of one's peers, but people have better things to do than sit around and listen to you defend yourself or slag on the accused...you don't see people clamoring at the bit for jury duty, do you?

Totally blanking on the name, it had a pretty similar kit: it seemed like you wrote the raw code in C or a C-like lang, then there was some software assist for laying out dataflow between cores.

Edit: I was thinking of Tilera.

That's a fancy way of saying that, eg., even though the predestination thing is a mainly Calvinist outlook, the knock-on effects of that belief -- working hard but hoping for some 'answer from above' to arrive in the form of earthly success -- have pretty much permeated the deep subconscious of the American outlook.

You can see it manifest all the time, with people attributing success to innate characteristics -- eg, smarts or talent or whatnot -- and not to the work and training that developed those characteristics; this is a more-rational take on the same basic idea (earthly success == sign of grace, not earthly success == mix of lucky breaks and hard effort).

It probably originates 50% from the urban/rural divide and 50% from the underlying outlook of protestantism. In brief:

- much of american history consists of pioneers going and settling the land, then -- decades later -- the 'experts' show up (these could be anything from farm scientists to law enforcement to general government busybodies). So there's this weird split between respect for learning and accomplishment (no, really!) but on the other hand the belief that you can really boostrap yourself / figure things out by yourself just fine. Anything that plays into the belief you could perform at an 'expert' level with only a very minimal amount of training is therefore good entertainment.

- the basic protestant outlook is that your (personal) salvation is predetermined (though perhaps you can mess it up), and that consequently nothing you do can earn salvation if you weren't already gifted it; however, there's a parallel belief that God will show favor upon the saved, eg by granting them success in their worldly endeavors...and so, loosely speaking, a protestant-minded person would interpret someone attaining expert-level performance in a very short period of time as a sign that that person had been gifted with salvation.

At this point in time I'd say neither of those reasons is self-consciously driving the meme's dominance, but those are some of the deep roots of that particular outlook, most likely.

If you want to point at past interventions that're more-directly responsible for triggering today's problems you might start by mapping out the intersection between:

(i) pension funds, the size of their assets under management, the legal restrictions on what they can invest in, and the performance window they need to hit

(ii) how fed interest rate policies can impact bond yields across the broader bond market

(iii) how securitization works, including some comparison (before securitization/after securitization) of attributes like yield and 'ratings', and in particular paying attention to drawing connections here with point (i)

That's a lot more work and it's still almost certainly not "the whole story", but there's a definite story there that (in fact) adds a lot of color to the picture, even if it's a lot less pithy than the CRA.

I think the strategy around bandwidth and latency is going to wind up being parking container datacenters near various isp's so everything but long-distance game state syncing stays on the local network; not perfect, and higher upfront, but it works.

Soderburgh certainly improved a lot on the cinematography, no argument.

For people with a lot vested in their critical opinions I'm sure criticism of solaris is a no-go; for a lot of others, though, it's one of those films where you can see how it could be so much better if remade with less budgetary constraints (we don't need a cgi planet, really, but just a second-draft to get it right)...and Soderburgh being Soderburgh he got his chance.

One thing that's worth remembering is just how narrow Tarkovsky cut the book: the book goes on at great length, but Tarkovsky cut everything down to the core human drama:

- you're sent to investigate the mental health of people out on this space station investigating this incomprehensible object, b/c they've basically stopped communicating

- you get there and instead of anything you expect to find, you find your long-dead wife

- that's a pretty incomprehensible thing, no? It's something Lem included as a pretty smart move, but you could -- literally -- write a whole novel or make a whole film just trying to work through the psychological reactions that'd produce

By restricting that attention it humanizes the encounter with the incomprehensible:

- you get to 'cheat'; a cgi orange planet is obviously a cgi orange planet, and thus not really 'mysterious'; using interpersonal relationships for your mystery lets you tap into very primal emotional hooks

- but at the end it's still left deliberately opaque enough to remain an encounter with the incomprehensible

If you have read more by Lem you'll see his pet peeve is comprehensible mysteries -- just about every story he's written can be interpreted in some way as a kind of parable of how even 'explorers' are mostly uninterested in or incapable of encountering or appreciating anything they didn't already know or understand.

Fiasco fits the bill, as does 'Return from the Stars' (though it's harder to pick out, there). Lem was pretty prolific.

But a lot of what makes Tarkovsky's film sometimes bombastic is also what makes it work.

Solaris is ultimately about encountering something that you don't understand. The ppl studying it have theories, and draw conclusions, but its nature is ultimately a mystery that resists investigation.

Edit: so much so that essentially it's just a mirror (as mentioned)...the theories people have expose much about their own thoughts and preferences but don't seem to be getting any closer to understanding it...

The film is pretty obviously constructed to make you really appreciate the experience of interacting with the incomprehensible, by being deliberately obtuse and devoid of explanation.

Watching the film is as close as most of us might come to being stuck alone on a spacestation dealing with a high mystery; it's long, uncomfortable, wearying, and ultimately unsatisfying, as you don't come away from it with anything resembling a sense of closure...you end up knowing perhaps less than you came in with.

On the one hand, this makes it a crap movie in some ways: you never find out what 'the answer' is (what is solaris? why is it doing this?) or even a comfortable sense of the end (what happens to kris?). On the other hand, if the point of the film was not so much to tell a story as to communicate an experience, then many of the drawbacks and flaws can be seen as working towards that goal.

Contrast with say the monoliths from 2001: there's some kind of 'mystery' in the sense of 'who built them, how do they work', etc., but that's a very shallow mystery; it's understood / hinted at / explained (in the books, at least) almost exactly that they're artifacts that look for conscious life or the possibility of it, and then give it 'forward nudges' as needed.

So there's still a small mystery: 'who, exactly, built these things? how, exactly, do they work?' but for supposedly incomprehensibly advanced artifacts constructed by incomprehensibly advanced beings the reader walks away comprehending almost everything...

You have to decide upfront: is a film something that tells a story, or is it something that provides an experience...assessment will vary depending your choice there.

The same idea rules out the possibility of a universal computer (barring magic), too, except in the heads of theoreticians: any particular real-world computer is just a finite state machine, and a turing machine with eg 32 gb of space on the tape isn't actually universal, either (or even a turing machine).

There's a reasonable argument that APL and derivatives are more expressive than lisp and its derivatives, at the expensive of having a much larger startup cost in terms of things you have to know.

I suspect that in another few years the old-school APL alphabet will be positioned to start making a comeback, via in-software, touch-screen 'keyboards' (thereby eliminating the expense of a very small run of 'funny symbol' keyboards).

Edit: to correct...it's always true that unique_libary_size # needs less storage than library_size except under very unlikely circumstances (...circumstances which get ruled out anyways if you do a more-granular calculation for when this strategy would make sense to consider).

When it's developed it's usually stated as that a column store encompasses a multiplication of metadata (eg: suppose each row has some kind of row id; you want to support lookup of the value in a given column for a given row; thus in a rowstore you minimally only need one lookup aide (to get you to where that row is) to handle a lookup for any column, but in a column store you arguably need one lookup aide per column (to tell you how to find the point in that column's column store where the value for that row is).

It's never been an amazingly compelling argument to me, either, but there it is; the whole thing strikes me as 'semantical confusion', as what we're really talking about (row-vs-column) is a consequence of not taking the relational model to its logical conclusion:

- a "table" like this:

the table T with row = (unique #, column A, column B, column C, ..., column )

- is really a materialized view of this view (V):

table_A has row (unique #, column A), ...,table_N has (unique #, column N);

V = join table_A,...,table_N on 'unique #' in the obvious way

...and a column-oriented data store is just a DB that stores data in a more-fully normalized form (often with tricks to minimize or eliminate the need to include the unique# in some or all of the table_Is, keeping just some sort of index).

OR: the distinction between row and column stores -- at a high enough level of abstraction -- boils down to questions of how fully-normalized the physical storage's data model is vis-a-vis how normalized the user-facing data model is.

In the hard-disk world your choice of physical layout matters a lot; it's possible the evolution of ssds will make the difference between 'row' and 'column' orientation a lot less material (as we've already talked about).

The really crazy thing you could consider doing is go one step further and do something like:

say T = (unique #, customer_name, library_size (integer)). (library size is like 'how many books does this dude own')

Step 1:

T -> V like above ( table_a = (unique #, customer_name), table_b = (unique #, library_size))

Step 2:

- let table_c = (unique_library_size #, library_size), constructed from table_b as basically 'select distinct library_size into table_c'

- then let table_b' = (unique #, unique_library_size #)

(and a similar transform for table_a, but we'll stick with table_b for now)

Doing this is crazy talk on a disk-based system: you're adding a lookup, but for what?

But if lookups are essentially free, this has the potential to heavily cut down on the amount of data you need to store (in cases where you have N rows but only K << N distinct values) even before you start applying the obvious compression techniques to the stored data.

As datasets grow very large, it'll often be the case that we have K << N; this won't be the case for, eg, google's index of web page contents, but for something like 'how many cases of X did walmart W sell on day D' or 'how many billable seconds was call #1234567 on date DDMMYYYY' it's hard to imagine K isn't << N much of the time for some of the columns.

I think that's what the author's trying to very obliquely get at; petabytes might be a stretch, but with sufficiently-cheap lookups a lot of compression-by-indirection may become feasible, which might let you really reduce the amount of persistent storage you need, which'd make ssds extend into workloads you might expect to remain out of cost-effectiveness for much longer. Speculative; heck yes.

Column-oriented dbs are essentially a "heroic engineering" way to optimize a datastore for a particular workload -- continuous-read-heavy-batch-processing -- by engineering around the performance peculiarities of traditional hard drives.

Clearly this is a sensible strategy for optimizing a datastore for certain workloads: at the moment that strategy delivers material performance improvements in the scenarios it's designed for (material enough that if the performance of your system on those workloads is economically important to you, it's worth the cost to build or buy a system that'd significantly speed things up).

What I think he's saying is that the rise of ssd may make this engineering effort essentially useless outside of a handful of niches (essentially, the niches reduce to: data volumes too large to economically fit into ssd within the foreseeable future):

- in a storage medium with heavy seek times, the engineering effort to implement a column store (instead of just using an off-the-shelf rdbms) can pay off in a somewhat broad range of usages

- in ssd-ish storage media, the engineering effort isn't going to be worth the benefit, most of the time, compared to just using a stock rdbms

The mention of the TRM fits into this picture of his intended claim.

If you're not familiar the TRM is a mystery shrouded in an enigma: a bunch of big, credible names in the database world claimed have invented a radical new way of implementing the backend of a relational database that would've offered radically better performance characteristics (essentially it made joins so unbelievably 'cheap' that it was no longer necessary to denormalize for performance; supposedly the more-normalized you went the better TRM would perform).

The issue with the TRM (transrelational model) is that:

- the supposed core concept is patented, but doesn't explain en toto how it'd work (for obvious reason)

- there's a ton of secrecy and ndas and so on surrounding anyone and everyone who got a good glimpse of the full picture -- the core inventors seem extremely protective of their ip, to the point pretty much nothing material has leaked about it's supposed workings

- the company that was supposedly doing the first commercial implementation folded, ostensibly for non-technical reasons but again it's so secretive no one really knows what happened

So it's a big mystery. There's basically a couple schools of thought on it:

- it does actually work, but a comedy of errors / business climate / personality conflicts / whatever have prevented it from either being commercially implemented or from having a fuller picture of its workings disclosed publicly. Things have been quiet since then due to the protectiveness and penchant for secrecy on part of the principals.

- it looked good on paper, but in doing the actual implementation some unavoidable complication turned up that prevented it from obtaining the needed performance (either at the time -- 2005ish -- or forever). The big names associated with it have kept quiet since then partly out of embarrassment (publicly endorsing a flop, kinda like hawking endorsing a free energy machine) and partly again out of concern for the principals' protectiveness

- it was some kind of hypey thing that blew up in their faces; essentially a belief they could attract funding and customers by virtue of their reputations and claims of a revolutionary approach, combined with a belief that they could do an awesome-enough imlpementation of a non-revolutionary datastore approach -- basically do a best-practices, clean-room build of the current state of the art -- that no one would be the wiser

I tend to think the second option is the likeliest story.

All of that is a long windup for a very quick pitch:

Assuming the TRM wasn't just bunk it would then be one of two things:

- heroic engineering to bring revolutionary performance gains to systems built around disk-based storage

- some kind of heroic datastore engineering that'd work better with a more ram-like storage system (eg ssds)

That's a bit of a non-answer answer, but the connection to his main line of reasoning is something like:

- if it's the former, then it's another example of heroic engineering made irrelevant by ssds, as even a 'traditional' rdbms can be made similarly performant on an ssd without all that effort; this is my take on the author's opinion

- if it's the latter, then maybe there's something to be gleaned from it; I don't think this is what the author thinks

So, yeah: from reading the rest of his blog (posts are wordy, but there's not that many of them) I think he's got the following idea:

- implementing a traditional rdbms is hard, but mainly b/c of all the work you have to do to make it not perform like a dog under

- ssds radically shake up the assumed performance contours of your persistent storage, enough so that a lot of the specifics designing an rdbms for performance might change

- additionally, this guy has the impression this implementation might be "easy"; that is, a lot less work to do compared to writing a traditional rdbms from scratch

There you have it, I think.

I was commenting specifically because I hate sloppy language and sloppy thought: there's just no meaningful sense in which "a particular kind of contract becoming non-enforceable" simplifies into "not being able to sign a particular kind of contract"; the latter implies some kind of intrusive intervention -- a noncompete gestapo slapping pen-from-hand should you try to sign such a contract -- which clearly wouldn't be the case under the proposal.

All a decision like this would mean is: the state of MA has decided it's not in the interests of the state of MA to enforce noncompete clauses, so from here on out it will not enforce them.

You can still sign whatever you want.

Edit: for the unfamiliar, http://ed-thelen.org/comp-hist/APL-hist.html .

Edit: and for the other side: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Criticism_of_the_APL_programmin...

Strategy-to-win is step 1: get a jury trial going.

Step 2: build an argument that the notion of "fair use" is one of those constitutional notions that can be inferred from the constitution even when not mentioned explicitly (eg some notion of privacy being inferred from 4th amendment, etc.)

Step 3: argue that stuff like the "4 factors" test are not definitive but merely illustrative -- they serve to illustrate the considerations that one ought to consider when making a judgement of fair use, but do not define the notion of fair use, which is inferred directly from the constitution and thus precedes any later developments like "4 factors"

Step 4: argue that b/c "fair use" is an affirmative defense (meaning, a defense you can make when you're brought to trial, as opposed to an explicit grant of rights to the "fair user") the meaning of fair use is always and everywhere up to a specific jury in a specific case to decide. Remind jury of step 3 (that stuff like 4 factors is actually only illustrative and not definitive) and that at the end of the day whether or not the defendant is making "fair use" is entirely up to the jury and the jury's conscience.

Step 5: argue from conscience that there's no way the current set of file-sharing penalties are in any sense "fair", and again remind that it is ultimately the jury's responsibility to make a decision as to what is or is not "fair use" and thereby ensure fairness.

This is a better strategy than it sounds in summary, though it only stands a chance of working if Nesson's hopes for a hollywood-type free-ranging trial come about; the threat of such a thing may be all he needs to get this case to settle, which counts as a win for his client, even if it's a sub-optimal way to win for Nesson himself.

The argument for "illustrativeness" is genius if fully developed; it's basically an attempt to transform the restrictions on the grant of authority to Congress to institute copyright and patent laws ("to promote the progress of science and useful arts") from dead letters to the source of a notion of "fair use":

- on the one hand, if such-and-such a use is shown to promote the progress of science and useful arts then laws restricting such a use require scrutiny (to ensure the net effect of the restriction balances out to promotion of progress of science and useful arts)

- on the other hand, if a restriction on a particular use does nothing to promote science or useful arts, then it's perhaps consitutional

...and in this picture the "4 factor" test would just be a useful set of guidelines for determining when a law-as-written is unconstitutional as applied to a particular set of circumstances.

It's also clever for its effect on the judiciary: Nesson's hardest targets there will hail from the right-wing, who typically lean towards strict constructionism (supposedly, only considering the raw language of some law) or an originalist (supposedly only considering the original intent of the writers of some law). However, it'd be difficult for either of those two schools to straightfacedly argue that the constitutional language about the "progress of science and useful arts" is just decorative fluff -- it'd put them in the position of having to argue that "yes, that language does mean something, we just disagree about what", which is in-and-of-itself a huge win.

And, secondly, if he can get this to a jury all he has to do is get done with steps 2 and 3 and then he's converted the trial from a nitpicky study of specific statutes to a general debate on "fairness", and then he's on much stronger ground.

He could, from there, abstract from the specifics of the case at hand to arguing that from the position of someone who isn't that familiar with the law -- eg, a 10 y/o -- it literally would make no sense for copying a cd for a friend or downloading something from the internet to carry fines in the 6 figure range, using argumentation along the following:

- tv ads for isps are always emphasizing download speeds for downloading music and movies etc. and sending files, etc.

- tv ads for computers always talk about how easy it is to send files or burn cds and dvds, etc.

- blank cds and dvds are available at supermarkets and 7-11 and all that

- stuff like ipods or cellphones with music capacity are source-agnostic; even with the itunes store it doesn't stop you from loading mp3s from elsewhere

- youtube, etc is full of music videos and so on, often with hundreds of thousands of views and not uploaded by anyone "official"

- tv and radio and internet radio stream free content over the air and it's legal to record it

- school projects often involve xeroxing stuff and making collages and so on

- there's libraries (run by the government) that loan stuff out for free, it's fine to let friends borrow stuff, and if you're going to loan to friends it's more convenient to just burn a copy than actually loan the disc

...but then wtf? I downloaded some tunes and now my parents are being sued for $150k+?

It's not an airtight argument, but on grounds of pure fairness it's not unconvincing.

I doubt Nesson'll get his day in court to argue this line of reasoning -- and if he does it'll probably be shut down earlier rather than later -- but the apparent strategy (once fleshed-out) is an inspired mix both of legal interpretation and lawyerly strategy.

One of the most distasteful aspects of legal practice is that most legal arguments take the form of factual statements (or at least claims of fact), but the factual content of the speech is secondary to the effects it's hoped to have (on its listeners).

So put yourself in Nesson's shoes; he's doing this case pro-bono, and therefore has no real worried about being paid for his time. Thus, Nesson has no incentive to artificially shorten the length of his defense (out of concern for working longer than his client can afford).

Nesson also wants to win this case.

So you've got someone for whom: time is no real object, and winning is a goal.

In that circumstance, what's the harm in trying a "fair use" defense? It probably won't fly, but it's one more thing to try, and one more thing for the plaintiff to have to argue against (thereby further draining plaintiff's resources, because plaintiff is paying for their representation's time here).

It's not entirely harmless, sure -- a few too many wild conjectures and Nesson's credibility in court may be somewhat tarnished (though, even there, keep in mind Nesson's (1) something of a legend and (2) already known as a loose cannon, so compared to a run of the mill attorney the impact of one or two wild arguments on his in-courtroom credibility is harder to calculate) -- but it's one more thing that might work and it's one more way to try and exhaust the plaintiff's will to proceed (and I guarantee you this is not the only line of defense Nesson's got).

So, regardless of whether (1) Nesson thinks file-sharing is actually fair use and (2) Nesson thinks he can convince anyone else file-sharing is actually fair use (note: (2) is independent of (1)) it's possible to reverse-engineer the thinking that might make the risk/reward calculation on advancing this line of argument look promising.

But, due to the practical constraints of legal speech, you'll never see any of these statements:

- your honor, I personally don't think file sharing is fair use and I actually don't think I'll be able to convince anyone else in this courtroom that filesharing is fair use, but in the interest of exhausting my opponents with every hare-brained scheme I can conceive I'm going to spend a couple days arguing the point. Let's proceed.

- your honor, I personally think file sharing is fair use and am savvy enough to understand I won't convince anyone here of that via any amount of argumentation, but I am cocksure enough of my argumentative abilities that I won't say anything so immediately laughable that all y'all will be hard-pressed to give a reasoned explanation for why you should shut this line of argumentation down prematurely so you should plan on hearing me out over the next several days.

...or anything similarly candid, ever. Instead, you'll just hear something like what you've heard, which is a straight-faced assertion with no qualifications or caveats; it might be more honest to give a statement like one of the impossible statements above, but giving the statement such a form would be self-defeating in light of the intended effect of making any such statement.

It was clear from the outset you weren't interested in or thinking about "existing law" (because you were claiming to have rights that you don't, under existing law).

It was also pretty clear that you had a pretty strong opinion as to exactly what level of control you'd want to have: I would take the controversial opinion that if somebody's going to make a Sparknotes for a novel I wrote, they need my permission.

I asked you a couple different times why you would want it to be that way -- what's your motivation for wanting the world to be such that, if someone's going to make a Sparknotes for a novel you'd wrote, then they'd need your permission -- and you'd never give a straight answer.

You clarified your position slightly -- some kinds of works referencing yours would be ok (like the bible according to harry potter), but others (like sparknotes) wouldn't -- but never actually explained why you adopted that particular position.

From what you did write I could probably infer your underlying outlook: it's a little hazy, sure, but basically there's some objective sense in which the contents of works by a particular author are or are creative, and when a work is (1) insufficiently creative and (2) heavily dependent on some other, actually-creative work then control of the work is forfeited to the actual creator of the work's underlying content; under such a system authors would have considerably more control over the actions of others than they would in the present system.

If that's not your outlook, no worries: I said I was trying not to put words in your mouth, and that's why I never brought the above up and instead waited for you to explain the connection between your ramblings about relative amounts of creativity and the amount of legal control you wished you had over what other people (hypothetically) did that referenced your (hypothetical) works.

I got more and more exasperated when you failed to explicitly draw the connection: why ought such-and-such notion of creativity ought to be granted legal protection above and beyond what it has now and why not this other kind of creative effort?

And I got more and more exasperated because, on top of all that, you never even answered the question I asked from my very first post: not "why do you think such-and-such amount of control is justified" -- though you never answered that, either -- but "why would you (personally) want such-and-such control?"

I even proffered some hypothetical explanations: maybe you'd "get something" (economic) if you had that level of control; maybe you just wanted it on account of aesthetics or moral code; but, why?

I'd even have been happy with some self-awareness of the "yeah, I just would prefer that level of control, and don't have a strong sense why I want that" sort, but no dice.

So: color me disappointed, and hence the exasperation. I will say that, if I've gotten your outlook approximately correct it's pretty alien to me, as any attempt to establish even a quasi-objective notion of creativity involves making a lot of decisions that themselves will depend upon heavily on unstated assumptions.

For example, elsewhere you describe a (hypothetical) sparknotes for one of your (hypothetical) writings as entirely dependent upon your work, adding nothing and (possibly) taking much away.

That's your opinion; but, like the dude says, "that's just, like, your opinion, man." Here's some of the stuff that that outlook minimizes:

(1) someone writing a sparknotes for your novel is writing it because your novel has become studied sufficiently often for there to be a healthy market for study aides; that your novel has become studied sufficiently often for their to be a healthy market is NOT solely on account of your novel...it's a complicated byproduct of the specific contents of your market, the dynamics of reviewers and academics, the cultural mores of the time, and so forth.

So, already we have a complication: you want to claim that the sparknotes only has value on account of your novel; rather, it has value on account of your novel and the socio-cultural dynamics surrounding your novel, not all of which (to put it mildly) are within your control.

I can understand that you might want to have veto ability over the sparknotes on account of some vague notion that "it's entirely dependent upon my novel for existing", but to go from that being "just your opinion, man" to some kind of enforceable quasi-objective fact means completely discounting the responsibility that the reading and critical audience had upon your works' status; if they hated it, there'd be no sparknotes either.

(2) someone writing a sparknotes can easily claim they're more like the "bible for teens" (the one that has Jesus saying like "be awesome to each other" and "party on, dudes!" when he comes down from the mount): they adapt a particular work (your novel) intended for a particular audience (the general reading public) in a particular context (the general social setting of "literature", or some genre fiction market if that's your call) for another audience (students) in a different context (educational courses).

Your notion of "creative" may not square with what they're doing, but for that difference of opinion to become legally enforceable is essentially equivalent to legally drawing a distinction between some platonic realm (that's where art lives) and the practical world, and granting claims into the platonic realm priority over claims of utility.

It's akin to when the nose-to-the-grindstone geeks claim "twitter's just email lists on the web" -- they're right, but they're right only by ignoring the particularities of the audience and the presentation and the overall framing -- except it'd be codified as law.

(3) there's yet another assumptional axis on which creativity might hinge: the notion of what're ideas that're novel and what aren't have huge unstated underpinnings.

I'll beat up on JK Rowling a bit. For her work to be creative, all of the following ideas must be deemed freely copyable (in the sense of not calling into question the notion of the extent of creativity of the underlying work):

- the notion of crafting a limited-duration children's book series with a coherent plot arc. As long as I've been alive scholastic et al have loved the notion of book series (and for adults there's stuff like fantasy novel series), because by not finishing the entire plot all at once they create an audience eager for sequels. viz, the Prydain books, the Darkness Rising series, literally hundreds more.

- the notion of children with special powers going off to a parallel, hidden world for training in those powers, and eventually going on adventures and so forth, with the development and mastery of those powers -- and their eventual use in matters of significance -- making the book some sort of sublimated bildungsroman. Also old hat; the l'Engle books, possibly Narnia (though that lacks powers it otherwise fits the bill), plenty more.

- the notion of boarding schools with "houses" of distinctive character, etc., which is a mishmash of the boarding school tradition and the oxbrige system

...and I could go on. All of those notions are currently "fair game", sure, but the point is (1) to start ranking things by creativity you have to draw lines between what's fair game and what isn't and (2) there's too many such decisions to ever explicitly make them all and thus (3) any such ranking-by-creativity will have plenty of those "decisions" made implicitly but (4) in your scheme those implicit, never-debated "decisions" would have vastly increased legal heft.

And stuff like the above is why I don't cotton to an outlook in which creativity not only gets somehow "ranked" but in which that ranking takes on a great deal of legal heft (in the form of lawsuits and cease-and-decists and so forth); have all the aesthetic preference you want, plz, but keep them out of my laws if you don't mind sir.

This is my absolutely final participation for a few days; gettin' too heated in these here parts.

I am interested in a very simple question: why do want "final control over your creation" (in the sense that, if you had your way, you could say NO to someone writing a sparknotes of it, and the state would step in and prevent that person from publishing the sparknotes)?

All I get back from you are either non-sequiturs (such as your opinion on what is or is not creative work, or the mechanics of fantasy writing, and so on) or reassertions of what you want, without explanation.

We're talking past each other so this is my last comment to you.

I'm ignoring your first two paragraphs because they don't even address what I'm asking you: "why do you want final control over your creation" (in the sense that, if you had your way, you could say NO to someone writing a sparknotes of it)?

Answers that would be sensible:

(a) "I place an extremely high value on notions of purity-of-vision, and believe that a creator should be given a wide 'breather' during which time they may elaborate upon their vision without outside interference; third-party works run the risk of polluting the original creator's vision and thus the creator should be protected from those works unless explicitly opting out of them"

(b) "I place an extremely high value on notions of purity-of-vision, and believe that only the original author of some work knows what that work was intended to accomplish and whether or not some related third-party work poses a risk to the work's ability to accomplish that"

(c) "I believe an overly laissez-faire outlook towards the production of third-party 'add-ons' around a particular work may have a deleterious effect upon the incentives of creatives to create; in addition to the economic incentives that third party works might compromise, there's also the risk of inducing psychological disincentives to publish one's creations"

...none of the above are explanations I'd necessarily agree with -- and all of the above would ideally be tempered by an appeal to some kind of utility metric ("I believe the benefit of granting such abilities would outweigh the costs such abilities would impose") -- but all of the above are sensible explanations for why you might want such control over the actions of others.

What I have gotten back from you in the way of "explanation" is materially the same statement repeated thrice (if at first you don't succeed, say it diff'rent!):

(1) I should have final control over my creation because it's mine.

Yeah, and I've been asking you why. LOL. I think everyone knows that's what you want.

(2) I have every right to it.

Which in context is an emphatic re-assertion of the preceeding claim ("THEY ARE!" to the previous sentence's "The beatles are the best band ever!"). It contains no elaboration or additional justification of your claim.

(3) I support the actions of people who want to maintain their creative control.

Strike the third! I think (1) and (2) already established (3); what did you think you were communicating in (3) that wasn't already contained in (1) and "YES, INDEED"-ed in (2)?

What other explanation is sensible?

I've given you examples of sensible explanations; you've given me no explanation, along with some ramblings as to how you rate the kinds of creativity you see as being involved in various tasks.

Rowling had sensible explanations in her complaint: you can find it here

http://online.wsj.com/public/resources/documents/harrypotter...

She asserts: various and sundry claims of copyright infringement, but she also gives explanations for why she wants to enforce her rights (cf paras 2+3):

- concern for confusion on the part of the reading public (they might think she was involved in the lexicon or endorsed the lexicon, when that wasn't the case) (solved; publisher changed title and cover design)

- concern that her own plans to write an encyclopedia might be hampered by the existence of the lexicon (found not to be an actionable item)

And, contrary to your aesthetics, even though her team won the "lexicon" case, the decision came down not as some kind of broad assertion of the principle that creators of fantasy worlds can exclude others from those worlds at whim; it came down to what amounts to "this would've been fair use if only the lexicon hadn't lifted quite so much in verbatim" (my interpretation, you can find the full judgment here: http://cyberlaw.stanford.edu/system/files/Lexicon+Order.pdf ; it's a very good read).

You remind me of nothing else than Oscar Crease; good-day, sir!

Your opinion is: "I feel that I should have final control over my creation" (which, apparently, extends to summaries and commentaries, etc.).

When asked "why do you feel you should have final control over your creation", your answer appears to be (dissapointingly) "because it's my creation, and I feel like I should have final control over my creation" (in the broad sense, apparently).

I feel I should be allowed to deny people who want to take my hard work and simplify it while removing its merits.

I've cut away some filler, so I'll ask again: do you have a reason to want this -- some enforceable veto ability over sparknotes -- that doesn't reduce to wanting it because you want it?

I would take the controversial opinion that if somebody's going to make a Sparknotes for a novel I wrote, they need my permission.

Why would you want this?

3rd party how-to-use X guides? Software training videos? The content at gamefaqs? Microsoft office for dummies? Cliffnotes? Sparknotes? Test prep? Movie reviews?

  When the floor was opened for questions, one member of the 
  audience questioned Dr Conway's use of the term "Free 
  Will". She asked whether Dr Conway was "confusing 
  randomness and free will".

  In a passionate reply, Dr Conway said that what he
  had shown, with mathematical precision, that if a  
  given property was exhibited by an experimenter than 
  that same property was exhibited by particles. He had 
  been careful when constructing his theorem to use the same 
  term "free will" in the antecedent and consequent of his
  theorem. He said he did not really care what people chose
  to call it. Some people choose to call it "free will" only
  when there is some judgment involved. He said he felt that
  "free will" was freer if it was unhampered by judgment - 
  that it was almost a whim. "If you don't like the term Free 
  Will, call it Free Whim - this is the Free Whim Theorem".

Here's from a few weeks back:

http://www.washingtontimes.com/news/2009/feb/17/dc-bar-fight...

It's worth reading for details.

Bystander verdict:

- there's almost no conceivable way the data in question is proprietary (beneficiary: avvo)

- it's established avvo got their info by scraping the dc bar's website (beneficiary: dc bar)

- after seeing that avvo was scraping them, a terms of service got put up prohibiting said scraping, but avvo didn't quit scraping until receiving a cease-and-desist (beneficiary: dc bar)

But summary-for-the-lazy is almost unchanged:

- underlying data not proprietary (essentially: public records)

- avvo obtained public records from a source that didn't want avvo using them the way avvo did (point of fact now)

Even the quotes from the DC Bar support this:

taking this information without authorization

If it was "their" information 'this' would -> 'our' for more impact; prepared quotes tend to be vetted.

No predictions how this turns out.