Not THAT button...

My parents - and my old man in particular - were affected pretty deeply by a burglary about 20 years ago. One of the aftereffects of that event was the installation of a fairly comprehensive alarm system (that included alarm circuits inside the house that would trip, say, if a person not sleeping in the master bedroom, i.e., me, went to the bathroom in the middle of the night). Needless to say, The Code™ to deactivate the blessed thing in case it went off was never shared with me. Need to know, and all that.

Today, while cleaning my parents' bedroom, Galina took it into her head to find out what a certain button does by... pressing it.

Whooo-eeeee! (as we say in Texas). It turned out to be the "panic" button.

The monitoring company didn't do (or couldn't do) anything, except to tell me that the alarm would time out after about 20 minutes. So, I went up into the attic and into the basement and physically, um, disconnected the alarm horns. Meanwhile, Nassau County's finest showed up, which wasn't a problem (and if they ran my ID to check on any outstanding warrants, they at least did it out of my sight, without asking me to get in the patrol car first, as happened once with the Webster cops).

* * *There's a pretty interesting article out there by John Tehranian ("Infringement Nation: Copyright Reform and the Law/Norm Gap") that discusses a number of issues related to copyright in the 21st century, along with a description of some guy going about his daily business that results in the following:

By the end of the day, John has infringed the copyrights of twenty emails, three legal articles, an architectural rendering, a poem, five photographs, an animated character, a musical composition, a painting, and fifty notes and drawings. All told, he has committed at least eighty-three acts of infringement and faces liability in the amount of $12.45 million (to say nothing of potential criminal charges). There is nothing particularly extraordinary about John’s activities. Yet if copyright holders were inclined to enforce their rights to the maximum extent allowed by law, barring last minute salvation from the notoriously ambiguous fair use defense, he would be liable for a mind-boggling $4.544 billion in potential damages each year. And, surprisingly, he has not even committed a single act of infringement through P2P file sharing.

I particularly liked the speculation about the possibility, in theory, of equipping car radios with voice recognition software so as to catch you infringing on copyright as you hum along with a tune you're listening to (or, presumably, sing/hum/whatever any copyrighted work).

* * *I sent off the third of three items and invoiced them for a nice payday (in theory). Then I knocked off the 4-pages I accepted yesterday (1200 words) and a shortie that came in over the transom (400 words).

I'm well and truly tired. Shiloh is chewing something (with gusto). Galina is scraping the carpet. I should go help.

Cheers...