Inkwell: Authors and Artists

    
Saturday, technically, but we may as well celebrate on All Fools Eve, too.
  

    

re: posts by former WELL member <hadrian>, now scribbled

Date: Wed, 29 Mar 2000 14:18:37 -0500
From: Chris Hagin <XXXX@XXXXX>
To: Gail Ann Williams <gail@well.com>
Cc: confteam@well.com
Subject: RE: scribble

I have asked the Well management to scribble all of my posts. I am no longer
part of The Well and do not wish to have my posts part of it.

Chris Hagin
  

    
Thanks for the explanation, Cynthia.
  

    

(i know this really isn't the place, but shouldn't he be responsible for
scribbling his own words? did well staff actually scribble them??)
  

    
It's not fair to anyone who reads CYBER RIGHTS and feels uncomfortable just
dropping in, but what the hey.  The only reason we did not insist on his
deleting the posts himself is that he attempted to log in on the last day of
access before his account was to be billed for a second month, and we were
having connectivity troubles, due to a bad router at our colocation
facility. I told him I wanted to post his request, because it was unusual,
but we wanted to respect his desire to get on with other things and not
leave that bad taste hanging around.
  

    

couldn't a couple days have been added to his account so he could scribble?
if he wanted to move on, he should move on, and take care of what he did
here himself.
  

    
Normally we would ask that the person scribble his/her own posts. In this
case, the amount of time and attention it would take to instruct hadrian on
how to accomplish the scribbling made it an impractical option, Brady.
  

    

Scribbling is not a common occurance.  It has unpleasant associations, all
the way from burning books to suicide, in some contexts.  But the member
agreement says the poster has a right to remove posts, so it's an important
if wrenching option.
  

    

Got the following note from MIT Press this afternoon:

--------

X-From_: vgeary@MIT.EDU  Tue Jun 17 14:35:41 2003
X-Original-To: mnemonic@panix.com
X-Sender: vgeary@hesiod (Unverified)
Date: Tue, 17 Jun 2003 14:32:42 -0400
To: mnemonic@well.com
From: Valerie Geary <vgeary@MIT.EDU>
Subject: Cyber Rights published!

Dear Mike:

I am pleased to inform you that your book, Cyber Rights: Defending Free
Speech in the Digital Age, has been published. Congratulations!
You are to receive 25 copies of the book per your contract agreement. Can
you please let me know to which address I should send these books?

Thanks, and again, congratulations!

Valerie

Valerie Geary
Acquisitions Assistant
Computer Science & New Media

The MIT Press | 5 Cambridge Center | Cambridge, MA 02142-1493
tel:  617.253.1585 | fax: 617.258.6779
vgeary@mit.edu | http://mitpress.mit.edu/

--------

The note of course refers to the updated and expanded edition --
Cyber Rights 2.0, as it were.
  

    
Got a snailmail address yet?   They're awesome.   So little spam.
  

    
Yeah.  I don't know why people didn't think of this centuries ago.
  

    
That makes no sense. They'd have to pay people to, like, walk to every
house -- every house in the world! -- carrying bundles of paper, each
of them marked with the recipient's name. Each house would have to be
given a number, almost like IP addresses -- except since more than one
person can live in a house, you'd still need to sort each piece of
"p-mail" by the person's name. If you got one small part of it wrong,
the paper would never make it there. Can you imagine the man-hours it
would take if every person on earth started writing p-mail to each
other? It'd take scores of people working at local router offices to
sort all the p-mail, and you'd have to use a sort of store-and-forward
system to bundle all the p-mail for each house together until you
could get a delivery vehicle going that way to make a drop-off. Oh
amn, then there's the whole traveling salesman problem of getting the
p-mail truck to take the most efficient route. 

The idea is just ludicrous. Completely unworkable. The budgets of
multiple goverments couldn't be combined to make such a
labor-intensive, error-prone, inefficient system to work. 
  

    
LOL!!
  

    
Jesus, he's right.  I don't know what I was thinking.
  

    

It's easy to imagine some of the sorters overheating under the stress and 
taking out a bunch of surrounding sorters. 
  

    
Well, there's something wrong here.  Nearly all of my snailmail is spam.
  

    
Sure is.  You shold have someone check into that.  Try customer service at
the post office.
  

    

You people.
  

    
Oh, and while we're at it, congratulations on the second publishing!
  

    

congrats, mike!
  

    
Indeed! Good going, Mike!
  

    

Thanks! I even got a second advance for it!
  

    
& who said there are no 2nd acts in america
  

    
Have you set a date for a book signing at BookPeople?