Letters to the Editor
Published Letters: 34 Editor's Choice: 7
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Four episodes into Season 5.
[Read the article: Will you miss "The West Wing"?]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]I started watching The West Wing religiously amid the second season. I caught up with what I had missed when the show was released on DVD. And found the 25th Amendment story arc (involving John Goodman, the kidnapping of Zoey, Toby buying the house for Andy, etc.) some of the best television I've ever seen. Shortly after the fifth season started, I got bored. I am not someone who follows television news, so I wasn't even aware at the time that Aaron Sorkin had left. But I noticed the writing quality had been significantly reduced. The spark was gone. And so I drifted off to Gilmore Girls and Six Feet Under. But I'll always hold a special place in my heart for West Wing. And I'm a little sad to see it go.
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Trade secret law.
[Read the article: A twisted tale of Chinese porcelain]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Obviously this is nitpickery and not central to the thrust of this post, but I felt I must point out that in addition to copyright and patent law, there exists a separate, largely non-statutory body of law that deals with trade secrets. And trade secret rights are are, in theory, protectable indefinitely.
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Primer.
[Read the article: Beyond the Multiplex]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]To suggest Spanking the Monkey had greater "cultural power" than Primer strikes me as a rather misguided thought. Yes, Spanking has had an impact on a certain subset of the moviegoing community. An important subset, to be sure. After all, Spanking's success led to David O. Russell being able to create Three Kings and Huckabees. But what explains Mr. O'Hehir's implicit prediction that Shane Carruth will not, ten years after Primer, also have a couple of widely-seen pictures under his belt?
I think it is worth pointing out that Primer has roughly 3600 votes on IMDb, whereas Spanking the Monkey has just shy of 1600. Which may indicate that Primer's audience size has already exceeded Spanking's audience size. Despite the fact that Carruth has not yet made other pictures, contributing to the backwards-looking phenomenon that I'm sure accounts for a substantial portion of Spanking's viewership. And despite the fact that Spanking has been watchable for an extra ten years.
Given just how groundbreaking Primer was, I suspect that if anything, Primer will be more influential than Spanking ever was, both because it will likely lead to Carruth's entry into the mainstream, and because it will influencing other pictures.
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Land use.
[Read the article: Bring on the biofuels]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]About a year ago, Wired Magazine ran a piece extolling the virtues of nuclear power. Therein, the authors seemed to suggest that in addition to biofuel being an energy sink--a charge addressed by Farrell's study--it also uses an impractical amount of land. Peter Schwartz and Spencer Reiss wrote, "What about biomass? Ethanol is clean, but growing the amount of cellulose required to shift US electricity production to biomass would require farming - no wilting organics, please - an area the size of 10 Iowas." [See http://wired-vig.wired.com/wired/archive/13.02/nuclear.html?pg=2.]
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Lemony-lime?
[Read the article: Brokeback Mountain Dew]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]The subheadline here makes me think the author has never actually tasted Mountain Dew. Lemony-lime? What, did Sprite and Sierra Mist fail so spectacularly in their attempt to emulate citrus that anything not the color of mud is automatically assumed to be another failed attempt? Mountain Dew is flavored with, among other things, orange juice. And while it is almost certainly the case that Mountain Dew is supposed to taste like "citrus," it doesn't seem fair to lump it with the lemon-lime beverages. Mountain Dew tastes like Mountain Dew. 7-Up is no substitute.
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Internet2.
[Read the article: The corporate toll on the Internet]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]"As [Internet2] developed, though, all of our research and practical experience supported the conclusion that it was far more cost effective to simply provide more bandwidth."
If AT&T is truly worried about how it is going to justify the expense of laying fiber, why don't they charge for using more bandwidth? Let every start and stop point have a certain level of bandwidth included with their connection fee, then bump it up when that level of bandwidth is exceeded. Compare to cell phones giving 400 minutes per month with the phone, then charging a per minute fee for excess. That seems like the egalitarian solution to their worry about how to recoup their costs.
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So funny, they forgot to laugh.
[Read the article: The truthiness hurts]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Usually when someone busts out the phrase, "so funny, [they] forgot to laugh," the implication is that the comedian wasn't funny. It is an insult.
Here, however, it is an apt description of what Colbert accomplished at the White House Correspondents' Association Dinner. He was fantastically amusing, in a mean-spirited sort of way. And the response he received from most of the audience (heartening exceptions included Antonin Scalia, Joe Wilson, and Helen Thomas) was tepid at best. Part of it was that they were the butt of his jokes, and it is hard for anyone to really laugh at herself. But part of Colbert's brilliance was that it was almost too funny for the audience. As Scherer points out, irony is a dangerous form of comedy. But when done right, it leaves the audience with the odd state of being: it was so funny, they forgot to laugh.
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Trademark law.
[Read the article: Freecycle folly]
[Read more letters about this article: Here]Under U.S. trademark law, a "generic" term is completely unprotectable, and a primarily "descriptive" term is afforded less protection than merely "suggestive," "arbitrary," or "fanciful" terms. I agree that Freecycle is going about it in the wrong way, but there is some danger of losing intellectual property rights if names become too widely used.
Example: The Coca-Cola Company has employees who visit restaurants and bars, order Cokes, then complain if brought a Pepsi. Reason? Coke wants to ensure "cola" remains the generic so that other soft drink companies cannot legally start calling their product "coke."