There seems to be a little foaming at the mouth going on right there in your own post.

Yes, that it was. And we all like pretty, pretty things.

Thanks for responding to my off-the-cuff question (Talk about Planetary for a bit).

If you don't know that you managed it to anyone's satisfaction you're either stupid or deliberately humble and obtuse. I'm guessing the latter. What you describe is the very reason many people love this work. You scraped away the barnacles and managed to produce something that identified what people love about this stuff. Look, back when I was a kid, I KNEW that Godzilla was a guy in a rubber suit, but it was still cool. The same thinking applies to all popular culture. We KNOW there is a man behind the curtain - we're not stupid. The all powerful OZ is just a sham - we get it. But the illusion he's weaving is kind of cool. That's the part we love. I know I'm never going to be Carson of Venus, Superman, Doc Savage, or Tarzan, Lord of the (Ebola-ridden) Jungle. But the fact that I can imagine those ideals inspires me to be a better person, just a little bit. That's what these stories are all about. When faced with the issue of the day, having these stories in the back of my mind helps me to be just a little better. Given the behavior of many that don't have this kind of value system in this world, I recognize that these stories have brought some good to the world.

So scraping off the barnacles and distilling the essence of what people loved about these stories managed to remind me of why they were interesting and important in the first place. And so I try to be a better person with renewed vigor, thanks to you. You have my gratitude.

You don't have to set anything up - just use the address tag when you supply an email address. It's still a valid email address (see link below), so will still get delivered to your inbox. The extra information in the tag/extension makes the address unique (if you made the tag info unique), so can be used to filter messages, sort them to subfolders etc. depending on what your mail provider supports. Different providers support different separators, Gmail happens to be one that supports the plus.

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...

Mr Ellis,

I enjoy all your work, but I view Planetary as a "love letter to the things I love". I would appreciate it if you just wrote a little bit about what you were thinking/feeling when you were working on Planetary. That work covers a lot of territory, but my reaction on first reading was to weep because you captured so perfectly the essence of all those wonderful stories that I loved as a young man. I didn't think anyone loved that shit as much as I did, but Planetary seemed to capture the essence of all those great stories whilst bringing them in to the modern age and reminding us why they were relevant and maybe still are.

So, if you would, just riff a bit on Planetary and all the things you had in your head when you were working that all out. Planetary as the finished work we have as a reference - I'm interested in the stew in your mind containing all that wonderful stuff that eventually was distilled into Planetary. Talk about that a bit, if you are so inclined.

Thanks.

Because in the case of creator's rights that your analogy is aluding to, it's the relationship of the creator and employer that are the most relevant to the discussion.
It's the creator, or their estates, who often claim control of the rights and demand compensation retroactively for a share of the total profits. That hardly if ever happens with the dozens of people who created new material using the characters after the creator has moved on.

So the players in a relevant analogy are:

The creator who had the original idea for a character = The inventor of the recipe for the burger, nuggets, joyful meal etc.
The people who do the "main work" for decades after the creator stops working on the character (and usually generate more total revenue than the creator ever did alone). Writers, artists, colorists, inkers, letterers, editors = burger flippers, fry cooks, managers, etc.
The employer = The employer.

That last one was spot on, I'll say.

You make no sense, since having only the proprietary driver available sounds to me like "require you to have a specific driver installed". The Gallium3D driver, which supports Radeon cards since the R300 series (Oct 2002), offers an alternative to the required proprietary driver. And since AMD regularly drops support for older hardware in the proprietary driver, the Gallium3D drivers supports a wider variety of hardware, and will continue to do so. Seems like writing for the proprietary driver is the more risky approach with a smaller potential audience.

Yeah, that helps, but I'd like to hear from the original poster, to be honest.

please elaborate ...

Don't trivialize this by ignoring the true nature of the breach.

This is more like obtaining an exclusive unlisted client list detailing who exactly is doing business with a given organization. The phone book doesn't provide that connection - knowing names, addresses and phone numbers doesn't tell you which crucial and vulnerable businesses are associated with a household. Obtaining the same information from a business of interest is a different story entirely. Metadata is crucially important.

Well, that's hardly comforting. So even spending an ENORMOUS amount of money on IT and security can't prevent your system from being breached in a big and spectacular way? Then either that enormous amount of money was spent poorly, or that information should not have been exposed to the internet in the first place until it was properly secured. They were breached, in a big way. So their systems were exactly as weak as I think, enormous expenditure aside. I fail to see your point. "They tried REALLY hard" doesn't count for beans if they don't succeed.

I find this interesting because it shows both the usefullness but ultimate inadequacy of security through obscurity. Had the hackers been unable to obtain this information, the implication is that the breach would not have happened, or at least not happened as soon. Without the ability to create a road map, they would have had to take the less efficient approach of randomly guessing and probing with the hope that something worked. So keeping that list of applications and programs a secret has some value.

On the other hand, it underscores the importance of the point that people have been making about security through obscurity for decades: it's very weak security, and once that layer of the security onion is breached, there had better be stronger security layers underneath. Like patched and updated programs and web applications that close known vulnerabilities. I'm guessing that didn't happen, because the JP Morgan Chase management has probably acted like many other management teams I've had the "pleasure" of working with - they placed higher value on the secrecy than actually fixing stuff, because the former costs less, and it kind of works until it doesn't (and then that policy fails in a big way).

I sincerely hope that these breaches light a fire under the asses of lax management at these large companies and they realize that spending the time and resources to *really* secure their systems is worth it in the long run.

And then I laugh sadly, because that's wishful thinking.

Yep. I've done that too. And that's kind of the point. The benefit of the unlimited plan isn't about the constant baseline level of usage - it's more about when you need more data than normal. If you don't approach the capped limit, Verizon comes out ahead because you used "less" than your alotted limit (if you were capped). but when you exceed the capped limit under the new plans, you pay dearly, because you likely don't just go over a little bit, you go over a lot for the time when you are solely relying on that 4G data stream. And you probably really need it, so there isn't the option of just not using your 4G connection.

I personally find the concept of data caps problematic because unless you consistently exceed them, you can't really be considered to be "abusing" the network when your usage spikes on occasion.

So why the big focus on data caps? Probably because they know that data usage is only going to go up, so what used to be excessive data usage becomes the new normal. And then your risk of exceeding the data cap becomes even greater, and the framework is in place to catch you doing so in order to extract the requisite fees.

One thing I've never heard is the data caps being raised as a function of the average use across the entire customer base so that overages continue to represent spikes of excessive use rather than just evolving with the increase in streaming everything. As more people stream, the idea of what constitutes excessive use should increase.