News You Can Bruise for 2002 October 15

I wrote a little piece of doggerel about the idea of a deposit requirement for copyright, inspired by Seth's comments on the subject. Aaron Schwartz responded with another bit of doggerel, and I just polished off a third in response to it. All of this is taking place via email, which feels pretty weird to me, but most likely it will eventually go onto the web and I'll feel better. (Is this some new psychosomatic ailment? Phantom weblog entry?)

I sort of got sound to work on my computer. I got ARTS and ESD to stop fighting over control of my sound card. The big problem now is that the sound card they were fighting over is the lame sound card welded to my motherboard, and not my real sound card.

My American Science and Surplus catalog arrived today. I haven't read it yet. I haven't made much progress on Baudolino, either.

I have been thinking a lot about shipping containers. I want to write a near-future science fiction thriller dealing with a fiendish plot to do with shipping containers. I've been coming up with interesting things someone sneaky could do with them, but they're getting pretty silly, the sort of thing you would see if there were a Batman villain whose gimmick was shipping containers. "Now, Batman, I'll crush you slowly... between two shipping containers! Then I'll make my escape in my boat... made of jerry-rigged shipping containers! Gotham City will be mine... I'll ship it to Singapore!"