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168-hour days at Dell

Last night I turned on my Dell XPS laptop to a rude surprise.  Instead of the normal Dell logo followed by bootup screens, I got a black screen that slowly grew a weird streaky rainbow of colors, then abruptly blacked out again and stayed that way.  I could hear Ubuntu booting, and see the lights come on for Bluetooth and Wi-Fi.  But no video. Reboot, and again, same and same.

Well, crap.

So, I went looking on the Dell support website, and to my amazement, I found the machine is still under warranty and will be until fall 2011.  I had forgotten I’d bought a 3-year care package with Next Day Onsite Service.  Sa-weet!  And to make matters even better, that package includes 24-hour support.  Double sa-weet!  1:30 in the morning, I called them up and got a warranty support tech who was quite efficient, though a bit difficult to understand through his unplaceable accent.  We did a little diagnosis with an external monitor and determined it was the video “card” (actually motherboard video support) that had failed, not the panel.  So they’re replacing my motherboard.

All good so far, but you have to know Dell would find a way to trip themselves up and ruin it somehow, and they did.

Apparently “Next Day Onsite Service” can take up to a week to happen.

They allow themselves three business days to ship the part to the field technicians, and another day for the technician to call you and set up an appointment, which can then be the following day after the call.  So, in my case, I called them on Monday morning.  They have until Thursday to get the part to the field.  If they take the full time, the tech has a day to call me; if he calls me on Friday, the earliest appointment would be next business day, or next Monday.  One full week.

Now, granted, I don’t know if it will actually take that long.  And I understand the need to ship a part.  But still, when you sign up for “Next Day Onsite Service,” no reasonable person would think that actually means “a week later.”  I expect they should overnight the part to the field (or keep it in stock), call me the day it arrives to set up an appointment, and be there the next day – which in this case should be Wednesday, not next Monday.

Let’s see how long it actually takes.

My ride’s here

Time to mock another church sign.

JESUS!  DON’T LEAVE EARTH WITHOUT HIM

This, for those who don’t remember, is a takeoff on the American Express slogan “Don’t leave home without it.”  The church that put this up should check their facts first, of course, because since the financial meltdown American Express has been exactly the card you should leave at home – unless being a stranded traveler with a credit card that’s been unexpectedly shut down appeals to you.  But that wasn’t the first thing that popped to mind when I saw that sign.  It was Jesus, wandering around aimless and dejected because once again, he missed his ride.  “Hey, wait… I was supposed to go with you!  What do you mean you’re leaving?  No wait… hold on a second… ah crap, it happened again!  Everybody keeps ditching me.  Is it my breath?”

Pop psych and the trivialization of grief

People cry at funerals.

This is so obvious that it really doesn’t need any pointing out.  But I’ve been having conversations with people about why we do that, and the more I hear about the current way of explaining it, the more offended I get at what I see as trivializing of grief.

The modern theory, with us in the popular understanding since about the 1970s, goes like this: You’re sad when someone dies because you’re feeling sorry for yourself – sorry that they won’t be in your life any more, sorry because you’ll miss them.  You can’t logically be sorry for the dead person, because that person is gone and there’s no one to be sorry for (or they’re in the afterlife and not gone, so there’s no reason to be sorry, if that’s your belief).  So you must actually be sorry for you.

I think that is a huge load of self-centered self-help-book crap.

When I have dealt with the death of someone I knew, I felt sad and sorry for the person who died.  It never had anything to do with my own loss; I can get along on my own, that’s just how things are.  I was sad that that person didn’t get the chance to live out his or her life, missed out on things, got cut short.  Sad for the person, not for myself.  And yes, I know that the person is gone and there’s no one there to feel sorry for.  I know that consciously, anyway.  But for a while, when someone dies, you feel different about it.  It takes a while to adjust to the person not being there any more, and during that time you’re going to emotionally react as if they were not gone, because your emotional state hasn’t adjusted yet.  How long is it before you stop unconsciously expecting the dead person to walk in the door?  Certainly that lasts a lot longer than it takes to have a funeral.  So even though you know consciously that the person is gone, your emotional sadness and sympathy for that person still seem to have an object.

The idea that sadness over a dead person is all based in selfishness, that we are only sad because of how that person’s death negatively affects us, takes one of the more noble and powerful human traits – empathy – and just wipes it out of consideration like a dry eraser on a whiteboard.  It reduces empathy and genuine compassion for others to the self-centered whining of a child who has dropped her ice cream cone on the sidewalk.  It cheapens us, paints us as small and mean and petty to the core.  I think we’re better than that; not all the time, but sometimes, and more often at those times.

You might think this is all just conjecture, but I have two pieces of evidence in favor of my position: tearjerker movies and media tragedies, especially those involving children.  People watch a tearjerker and cry when someone dies.  Even grown men can be brought to tears if the movie is skillfully done.  So where do these tears come from?  The popular explanation that we cry for our own loss has no answer for the tearjerker movie.  Not only is the dead movie character someone you’re not going to miss in your real life, it’s not even a real person at all. Similarly, when the news reports some child dead or missing, people are moved to sympathetic reactions in droves.  For what?  If grief were purely selfish, why would thousands of people care about a dead child whom they had never met and will never miss?

This has bothered me for a long time, ever since someone tried to explain away my grief over a dead friend this way in 1982.  It offended me then and it offends me now, and I’ve had a long time to think about it in the intervening years.  Every time I hear it, I want to retort: How dare you trivialize my sadness that way?  How dare you try to take away one of the bonds that make us human, and replace it with glib Oprah self-esteem nonsense?  Maybe you’re self-absorbed enough to make someone else’s death all about you, but not everyone can be so shallow.  So speak for yourself and leave me out of it.

In case you’re wondering after reading this, no one close to me has recently died.  But some people are getting close to it, so it’s been on my mind.

Windows partisans get touchy

Two days ago I posted a fairly innocuous bit of self-analysis, looking at the change in my own attitudes about the cost of software over the last few years of being a Linux user.  It’s critical of the Windows ecosystem, and to a lesser extent the Mac ecosystem, but it’s pretty mild criticism as I go.  I’ve written far harsher posts on that subject.  But for some reason this one is attracting some fairly vitriolic Windows defenders in the comments section.  One guy came in from the link on tuxmachines.org; I don’t know how the others found me.  But this particular article seemed to bring out some strong defensive reactions, including some categorical exaggerations or outright falsehoods: There is free software OR good software; all apps run better under Windows; Windows is more stable than Linux; and so forth.  These people are riled up.

Why is this?  I can think of three possible reasons:

  1. The issue of high cost is a sore spot with Windows users, and they feel a psychological need to defend it.
  2. Windows partisans see this particular post (wrongly) as an argument that one should use Linux only because it’s free, and think this position is vulnerable to attack.
  3. Sheer coincidence that I just happened to get a few extra pissed-off drive-by commenters this time.

I’m not sure which if any of these is the correct explanation.  But it certainly seems to have hit a nerve.

Update: Comments are now closed on this post and the one that preceded it.  This is to prevent myself from continuing to argue to no further effect.  I regret that I allowed myself to be drawn into the argument in the first place.  You may interpret this lack of self-control as a character flaw if you choose; draw whatever conclusions you like.

Update 02/01/2010: Now that things have cooled down, I’m reopening the comments.

How much is that software in the Windows?

Or the Mac?

Recently I’ve been trading geekery with a gent in Pennsylvania who is in the process of moving a personal website from remote hosting to self-hosting.  He’s a Mac guy and he bought a copy of OS X Server to run on his Mac Mini.

I was curious about this server software, so I looked into it.  Seems like a nicely packaged product, typical Mac ease of use and polished user interface.  The web server part of it runs on a modified version of Apache.  List price is $499 and the best street price I could find after a brief search was $349.99.

Three hundred fifty bucks.  Three.  Hundred.  Fifty.  Dollars.

And that’s the discount price.  I’m sure there are lots of people paying five benjamins to buy it directly from Apple.

My reaction to this reminds me of when Windows Vista was first released, and to buy the full (i.e. non-upgrade) system at retail cost up to $400 – and the way Microsoft controls their prices, discounters were practically nonexistent.  I’d walk into, say, Office Depot, and they’d have retail boxed versions of Vista Ultimate on display, and I’d just gape at the $400 price tag.  Four hundred bucks, for software, and not even very good software.  Eventually they dropped that by 20%, and the Windows 7 pricing is the same, but still.  That’s just for the OS.  If you want to run a Microsoft office suite, you’d shell out another $400 to $680.  And don’t get me started on what server software costs from them.

I have been a Linux user for years now, and mostly I don’t think about the cost of software anymore.  Just about everything I want to do has a free software app that does it.  I only run one piece of paid proprietary software: TwonkyMedia UPNP server, which cost me $29 about four years ago.  Considering how much I do with computers all day long, that is a trivial amount of paid software.  Contrast that with a Windows box, where you can wind up paying over $1000 just to have an operating system and an office suite.

After all this time with Linux, I find I’ve stopped thinking of software as something you pay for.  Increasingly software is something you just download and use, part of the virtual environment like air and water in the real world.  It actually gives me a shock to see someone paying significant money for OS X Server, which while slick and attractive is really just Apache and Unix with a pretty interface.  I don’t mean to say that they’re being foolish; I imagine the support and the slick interface are worthwhile for users with different priorities.  It’s an individual choice.  The shock comes from the idea of paying for software, and it brings along an aftershock of, “Wow, have I changed!  When did that happen?”  But it has.  Paying for software feels wrong.

Back before I started using Linux, I bought into the Microsoft ecosystem, literally.  I have three or four (can’t remember anymore) legitimate paid licenses for retail Windows XP, not counting the ones that came with computers I acquired used.  At that time, I had no problem paying for software.  I used to shop the aisles of shiny boxes with pretty pictures, looking for cool things, and it didn’t faze me that I was buying mostly an empty box; one CD and a lot of air.  Now I go to Fry’s, for instance, and I barely even glance at them; or else I wander the software aisles for a few minutes and look at price tags.  Here’s the PowerDVD player app for $50, there’s Nero to burn CDs with for $70, here’s a virus scanner and firewall for $50, and so on, and I look at them and think what I paid for the equivalent apps – free, free, and free.  It’s a source of strange amusement, but it doesn’t really hit with the same impact as seeing an operating system or an office suite that costs more than most people’s car payments.

Most expert Windows users are irritated by the condescending attitude Linux users have toward them, but this is one of the big reasons why that attitude exists.  The majority of web and mail servers use free software.  I don’t see a compelling reason to buy software for these uses when I can do everything for free.  Ditto with my desktop machines; all the things I need to do, I can do with free software.  So I probably do come across a little condescending to people who are still in the paid-software paradigm.  They’re not used to having people regard them the same way they regard AOL users: people who are paying to have someone bring them something they could get for free.

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Clarification: A friend of mine commented to me privately that he thought this article could be construed as advocating piracy.  That’s not the intent.  When I say “Paying for software feels wrong,” that’s not in the moral sense as in “Adultery feels wrong,” but in the much milder sense of “Wearing your shorts backward feels wrong.”  So, not wrong in the sense of immoral, just wrong in the sense of funny and strange.
—–

Update: Comments are now closed on this post and the one that follows it.  This is to prevent myself from continuing to argue to no further effect.  I regret that I allowed myself to be drawn into the argument in the first place.  You may interpret this lack of self-control as a character flaw if you choose; draw whatever conclusions you like.

Update 02/01/2010: Now that things have cooled down, I’m reopening the comments.

The current tagline explained

I’ve had several inquiries about the current tagline, “Pear pimples for hairy fishnuts.”  It’s from this comic:

So now you know.

Ignorance is bless

Update: Since writing this blog entry, I have determined that the comment writer, “404,” was posting from Slovakia.  Obviously this explains the broken English.  So I retract those portions of the following where I make fun of his language errors.  But I stand by the rest of it.

I got this comment yesterday on the Vultures for Jesus post, by someone calling himself 404:

Have you ever heard about the fact to respect the way the people think? That doesn’t mean that you’ve to agree. I’m christian, and to be honest you don’t know too much about it. If you haven ‘t got faith, doesn’t mean that who believe in something is a moron. Do not judge someone if you don’t want to be judged. If I’m a salesman or worse, what sort of people are you? I could be rude now as all of you have been. That is too easy for me… next time you start to comment on something count till 10, then start to think about if what you’re going to write is not going to be offensive… As someone once said, sometimes ignorance is bless!

Oh man, where do I start with this clown?

Let’s start at the end: “Sometimes ignorance is bless!” 404, you are righter than you know. “Bless” and “ignorance” frequently appear together, as in your comment.

Now let’s move to the beginning. “Have you ever heard about the fact to respect the way the people think?” Well, no, I haven’t heard about that fact, probably because I can’t quite be sure what that question even means. I stretch it and pull it and push it, but I can’t quite twist it into anything coherent. I’m guessing – and this is just taking a flyer – that what 404 means here is that all opinions are entitled to respect. Which is complete bullshit, of course, but not at all uncommon coming from the religious. Religion is accustomed to demanding (and receiving) immunity from criticism; “respect all faiths” is code for tacitly agreeing to give religion in general a pass on explaining or justifying itself. This results in people who don’t even know how to form a coherent sentence, let alone a convincing argument, but nonetheless are sure their opinions have just as much validity as those who have actually thought their positions through. Exhibit A is our new friend 404, who is perfectly willing to parade his muddled ideas and tortured syntax here and demand it be considered equal to actual thinking.

“I’m christian, and to be honest you don’t know too much about it.” Friend, I know a great deal about it, probably more than you. Would you care to try me? It’s one of the great ironies of living in America that atheists are usually more aware of christianity than christians are. Why? Because it’s a christian culture, and christians can live their whole lives in it without their beliefs being seriously challenged; whereas an atheist is always acutely conscious of the christian culture all around and is regularly challenged to explain himself.

“If you haven’t got faith, doesn’t mean that who believe in something is a moron.” No, you’re right; my lack of faith doesn’t mean you’re a moron. I think you’re a moron for other, much more visible reasons, ranging from “you believe in silly superstitions that five minutes’ hard thinking should dispel” to “you can’t even write a clear sentence.”

“Do not judge someone if you don’t want to be judged.” Well, at least this one’s an actual sentence. But it also sums up the problem with 404’s mindset. He assumes that because he does not want to be judged (and for good reason, it appears), no one else wants to be judged either. But I do want to be judged. Specifically, I want people to read what I write and judge its value. If I am full of shit, I want people to point that out and show where I have gone wrong. I want my ideas to stand on their merits, not ride on some bullshit unearned “respect.” I wouldn’t post on the internet if I were afraid of being judged.

404’s point here, such as it is, seems to be that I – well, we – shouldn’t criticize religion because it offends people. Well, tough. I don’t respect your religion, I don’t think much of your argument, and I don’t care if you’re offended. In fact, I’m glad you’re offended, because if you recognize yourself in some category I mocked, then the criticism was aimed directly at you – and I know it’s hit its target.

The death of CDs

Looks like the music CD is sliding toward oblivion.

The recording industry has been living in denial about this for years now, for a variety of reasons.  Partly it’s because once CDs finally die, they’ll lose their rationale for all that legislation they get pushed through to protect CD sales.  For a long time they’ve been arguing that file sharing is hurting CD sales, but that’s a harder and harder argument to sell as it becomes more and more obvious that people just don’t want CDs anymore.  But I think it’s more because without a physical product to sell, it’s hard to justify their existence.  Manufacturing these pieces of plastic and getting them into hundreds of thousands of stores around the world requires factories, warehouses, trucks, all the infrastructure of a product distribution organization.  They paid the entry fee to do business that way, and they want to keep doing business that way.  But distributing digital files doesn’t require any of that; just some computers and some internet bandwidth.  They’ve stayed willfully blindered to that, so grassroots networks grew up to fill that gap in their absence.  They ignored the market for digital music distribution, thinking they owned the distribution channel forever, and now it’s too late; the free distribution model pre-empted them.  No amount of legislation will save them now; a whole generation of customers grew up understanding that music is free on the internet.  Young people are their market – always have been – and they’ve lost them.

DRM has been a complete failure, and for good reason.  The recording companies thought they could take advantage of the technology to tighten their grasp, but the restrictions were so draconian and so poorly implemented that it quickly became the Edsel of the tech world.  DRM made sure the only way you could count on keeping your music was to pirate it; people who trusted DRM systems inevitably wound up finding they’d paid for unplayable files, when the authorization changed or they lost the computer it was registered to.

Now that it’s inescapable that CDs are obsolete, maybe it’s time for a new model for artists.  Stay away from the labels and their last-century ideas.  Treat the recorded music not as the product, but as the advertisement for the live shows.  That’s been the only way artists have been able to make any money for years anyway.  Let the recordings go; it’s impossible to keep ownership of them anymore anyway.  Artists have to find something else to sell now, and it’s pointless to try to sell something people expect for free, so the labels and their old way are no help.  Sell the live performances, and give away the recordings.

If the labels still want to have a reason to live, there’s always back catalog.  That won’t keep them going forever, but it will at least give them something to do for a while before they chain the doors closed.

Do we live in a police state?

Maybe we do.

Here’s a confluence of several conversations I’ve been having with various people, mostly not started by me:

  • Free speech zones. People usually can’t stage a protest any more if it’s near the object of the protest.  Instead, they are herded into tiny “free speech zones,” far from where they need to be seen, guaranteeing the media will not record the event; and for further incentive to ignore them, the media are threatened with “lack of access” if they displease the government.  Between the two, protests don’t get a lot of coverage, and in the modern world, if it’s not on TV news, it didn’t happen.  I thought the free speech zone extended from the Atlantic to the Pacific, with a couple of outliers.  Didn’t we fight a war about that once?
  • Full body scanners at airports. These basically strip-search you with video imaging, without the hassle of actually removing your clothes.  It took approximately twelve minutes for the government to start capitalizing on the recent terror attempt, beginning a PR push for these machines.  Never mind that the average risk per passenger mile of terrorist attacks under the current system, inept as it is, is still roughly equivalent to 0.5 attempts per round trip to Neptune.  (That’s a real figure, by the way, not my usual sarcastic hyperbole.)  I thought Article Four of the Constitution guaranteed freedom of movement; when did we get to the point where innocent citizens not suspected of any crime can be strip searched by government agents as a condition of perfectly lawful travel?  And what’s next?
  • Police “reality” shows on TV. The best you can say about them is that they appeal to vile base instincts – schadenfreude and holier-than-thou superiority, giving even the coarsest slob with a La-Z-Boy and a double-wide someone to watch and feel better than.  But I think they have a far worse effect; they condition viewers to accept constant police supervision and believe it’s a good thing to want police looking at everything, all the time.  Everyone the police stop in these shows is a criminal.  You never see them make a mistake and arrest the wrong guy, never see them hassling someone just because they don’t like his looks, and the underlying message is that if the police think someone did it, then by golly they must be guilty.  Is this deliberate?  Maybe not at first, but it’d be hard to convince me it isn’t by now.
  • Authoritarian cheerleaders in the general public. One of the most consistently depressing experiences in my daily webreading is the web comments section of our local newspaper, the Daily Herald.  They’re heavy on crime reporting, light on details most of the time, but that doesn’t stop a core crowd of sentence-first, trial-afterward-if-we-feel-like-it pinheads from weighing in on every crime story to make snide comments about the mug shots, recommend severe punishment (life in prison for passing a $300 bad check, in one recent typical example), and/or blame it on Obama.  As an experiment, I occasionally offer the opinion that perhaps we should wait for a trial and a verdict before getting out the pitchforks and torches, which invariably results in my being hysterically accused of wishing to commit the same crime, whatever it happens to be.  No surprise that the same people are willing to submit not only to strip searches but also blood tests, warrantless FBI investigations, and retina scans to board a plane.  I wish I were kidding.

The strangest thing about this is the spectacle of right-wing protesters massing with hand-lettered misspelled signs to demand even more authoritarian government, on the grounds that this constitutes more freedom.  It’s so bizarre that contemplating it makes my head hurt.  Please take away our civil rights, they’re far too dangerous.  Once we’re all safe from that menace, then we can live in “freedom” – under the watchful eye of the government, of course, or maybe Jesus.  Not that those would be much different in that inverted utopia.

We like to congratulate ourselves for being the model of liberty for the world, and it’s true that our constitution was once the template for freedom and liberty the world over, to greater or lesser effect depending on how well it was understood.  But now we’ve become something entirely different.  Once we showed the world how to enact liberty; now we’re showing the world exactly how to subvert it while still paying lip service to the guarantees that supposedly safeguard it, imperceptibly sliding it past the people who should be objecting, and making jackbooted Barney Fifes out of the ones who wouldn’t.

How else would we have come to the point where you need to choose between peeing your pants on an airplane or being arrested as a terrorist by a stewardess?

Plagiarism and the Creative Commons license

Everything I publish here is covered under the Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial license. Basically this means anyone is free to use it, share it, or adapt it as they like, as long as they credit me for the original work and don’t use it commercially.

I bring this up because I had a plagiarism issue arise recently, for the first time in almost two years of blogging here.

A reader notified me in the comments of one of my Ubuntu how-to tutorials that he believed someone had “ripped me off.”  I followed the link and found an article in a forum that was clearly my work with a little bit of rewording and some spelling errors added.  Same structure, same paragraph breaks, same sentence sequence, and the code sections were letter-for-letter identical.  When I was a kid, students used to copy articles from the Encyclopedia Britannica and just change words here and there to make it not identical.  I imagine kids today do it with Wikipedia.  Anyway, it looked like that, and there was no attribution given; the guy was presenting it as his own work.  So I posted a message in that thread complaining about it and giving a link to my original article.  The writer shot back with indignant claims that he had never seen my article and didn’t appreciate being accused.  We knocked it back and forth for a post or two and then I finally said, I’m not buying it, and other people can read both links, look at the posting dates, and draw their own conclusions.  Five minutes later the entire thread was gone.

That would probably have been the end of it, except that I shortly discovered the guy had also posted it to a different area on the forum, and that post was still there.  So I sent him email saying, look, this stuff is CC licensed, all you need to do is add attribution and everything will be fine.  After sending that, I starting getting tired of the whole thing.  I figured, screw it; these tutorials are meant to help people, and even if he is a jerk, his derivative work is helping spread the information.  So I sent him a second email telling him I was letting it go and he had permission to use the work.

And that probably would have been the end of it, except that he couldn’t let it go.  I’m guessing he saw my willingness to compromise as evidence that I had doubts, and he fired back with a big ol’ hate-mail full of indignant blustering and threats.  He reiterated his claim that his work was original, and that he had never seen my article before writing it.  He told me he had just visited my blog and was upset about the “defamatory” comments he found there.  He claimed he had removed the first thread so that it wouldn’t sully his reputation.  (My feeling about that is, if he really believed the articles were unrelated and I was full of shit, then he should have left the thread in place with the link to my article, and everyone could have seen how full of shit I was for themselves.)  Then he started yammering about bringing attorneys into it, to sue me for slander and defamation of character.  He instructed me to direct any further communication to his attorney, without actually telling me who that might be.

This is always where things get funny.

First of all, it’s my experience that threats to sue are almost always empty.  People who are going to sue you just sue. The rest is just talk.  But even if he were serious, people have no idea what the law actually allows for when it comes to these kinds of civil cases.  They think you can just sue anyone who says anything bad about you and win.  Actually the bar is much higher.  First, you have to prove that what was said about you was false.  Then you have to prove that the person who said it knew it was false, and said it maliciously.  Finally, you have to prove actual damages.  It’s not enough to claim your reputation was damaged; you have to prove that you suffered physical or financial loss as a result.  This guy doesn’t know any of that.  He doesn’t even know the difference between slander and libel.

He’d have a hard time with any of those requirements.  First, he can’t prove it’s false, because it isn’t.  Therefore I have a right to say it.  Truth is an absolute defense against charges of slander or libel.  And even if it weren’t true, it would still be hard for him to show actual damages from a couple of forum comments that were only up for a few minutes before being deleted, or comments on my blog that don’t name him specifically and contain only a dead link to the deleted thread.

Anyway, back to the story.  I was sick of the bluster and bluff from this blowhard and decided to play my ace.  I sent him back an email informing him that although he was still free to use his adapted work, he should stop jabbering about lawyers, because I had his IP address, and my server logs showed that he had accessed my article five days before he posted his. Thus, his claim never to have seen my article before was a provable lie.  (Yes, I know someone’s going to say something about dynamic IPs; I don’t want to go into how I know that’s not the case here, but I do know.)  I advised him to shut up and go away and be happy I was letting him get away with it.  I have not heard anything since.

The bottom line is that this guy tried to pass off my work as his, got caught, lied himself into a corner, then tried to bluff his way out.  Didn’t work.  I’m not surprised at how it went down, in retrospect; after reading some of the things in his online profile, I should have known this was not a man who would ever admit a mistake even if he was walking around with a bucket of shit stuck on his foot.  I’ll admit to one, though: it was a mistake for me to offer a compromise.  To someone like that, a compromise offer is seen as admission of weakness.

I find myself analyzing my own reactions.  Why was I so protective of my work?  What did it matter if he swiped it?  It’s not like it cost me money.  I would have been fine with it if he had followed the attribution requirements of the CC license.  At least some of it was Flame War Syndrome, wherein internet arguments spiral out of control with astonishing swiftness.  But there has to be more to it than that, or I’d have led off less aggressively than I did.  I’m not really sure.

One final note: the user comments on the article in question, including the link to his adaptation, have been removed now.  The link is dead, which makes them comments about nothing, and I don’t want people getting curious about it after reading this post, finding them, and tracking him and his other posting down.  That’s not what this post is about.  I don’t want to reopen the issue with him, but it is an amusing story that I think was worth telling, and it illustrates the larger point that CC licensed work is still licensed.  You don’t have to pay me, but I want my damn attributions!