Blackmoor Vituperative

I’m watching the first episode of The Time Tunnel, a show I have heard of but never actually seen. Two observations: 1) you don’t see this combination of sets, forced perspective, and miniatures on TV anymore — the early scenes of the facility are breathtaking on a 46″ screen, 2) I think fully half of the passengers on the Titanic must have been time travelers. Seriously, the Titanic is to time travelers what Kinkaku-ji is to Japanese tourists.

By the way, when I say 46″ screen, I do *not* mean that I have the image stretched to the whole screen (why would anyone do that? STOP DOING THAT). This is the equivalent of a 37″ screen on an old-fashioned 4:3 television.

When Steven Vicinanza got a letter in the mail earlier this year informing him that he needed to pay $1,000 per employee for a license to some “distributed computer architecture” patents, he didn’t quite believe it at first. The letter seemed to be saying anyone using a modern office scanner to scan documents to e-mail would have to pay—which is to say, just about any business, period.

If he’d paid up, the IT services provider that Vicinanza founded, BlueWave Computing, would have owed $130,000.

[…]

Vicinanza made the unusual choice to fight back against Hill and “Project Paperless”—and actually ended up with a pretty resounding victory. But the Project Paperless patents haven’t gone away. Instead, they’ve been passed on to a network of at least eight different shell companies with six-letter names like AdzPro, GosNel, and FasLan. Those entities are now sending out hundreds, if not thousands, of copies of the same demand letter to small businesses from New Hampshire to Minnesota. (For simplicity, I’ll just refer to one of those entities, AdzPro.)

Ars has acquired several copies of the AdzPro demand letter; the only variations are the six-letter name of the shell company and the royalty demands, which range from $900 to $1,200 per employee.

(from Patent trolls want $1,000—for using scanners, Ars Technica)

More than half of all black men without a high-school diploma go to prison at some time in their lives. Mass incarceration on a scale almost unexampled in human history is a fundamental fact of our country today—perhaps the fundamental fact, as slavery was the fundamental fact of 1850. In truth, there are more black men in the grip of the criminal-justice system—in prison, on probation, or on parole—than were in slavery then. Over all, there are now more people under “correctional supervision” in America — more than six million — than were in the Gulag Archipelago under Stalin at its height. That city of the confined and the controlled, Lockuptown, is now the second largest in the United States.

(From The Caging of America, The New Yorker)

Some tragedies receive more media attention than others.

There’s a section of the article regarding the Bill Of Rights that some of my allies and adversaries in the realm of civil rights might find interesting. It’s something I would like to read more about.

…Stuntz startlingly suggests that the Bill of Rights is a terrible document with which to start a justice system — much inferior to the exactly contemporary French Declaration of the Rights of Man, which Jefferson, he points out, may have helped shape while his protégé Madison was writing ours.

The trouble with the Bill of Rights, he argues, is that it emphasizes process and procedure rather than principles. […] Instead of announcing general principles — no one should be accused of something that wasn’t a crime when he did it; cruel punishments are always wrong; the goal of justice is, above all, that justice be done — it talks procedurally. You can’t search someone without a reason; you can’t accuse him without allowing him to see the evidence; and so on. This emphasis, Stuntz thinks, has led to the current mess, where accused criminals get laboriously articulated protection against procedural errors and no protection at all against outrageous and obvious violations of simple justice.

People who blame weapons for crime or movies for violence have no interest in criminology, any more than people blame homosexuals for hurricanes have any interest in meteorology.