I've been looking at background discussion on Wikipedia, and it seems to be doing a fair job of tearing itself to shreds.

There is a set of intertangled disputes involving two camps. The Request for Arbitration to which I earlier linked seems to be illustrative; it's certainly not the only example. See also Wikipedia:Administrators' noticeboard/Incidents/Tony Sidaway and the resulting request for more arbitration. [(2008:07/24) I have up-dated the previous link.]

The requests for arbitration between these camps don't seem to be producing actual arbitration, even when the Arbitration Committee had earlier agreed to take a case. The Arbitration Committee is beginning to be hammered for failing to reach any decisions in that case to which I earlier linked. One member of the Arbitration Committee is trying to get the others to agree to just dismiss the case, but the Committee isn't even deciding to flee from responsibility. (There are grumblings that the Arbitration Committee should be abolished if it does flee.)

Now, as to that case, I'm not sufficiently informed to condemn all of the parties, nor to exonerate any of the parties, but I am sufficiently informed to identify the behavior of some of the parties as egregious. And those parties all happen to be in one of those two camps, which camp has strongly allied itself with Jimmy Donal Wales — that's right, the Jimbo Wales who provided the funding that launched Wikipedia, the Jimbo Wales who reserved the general right to over-turn any decision of the Arbitration Committee.

If the Arbitration Committee fails to come down on those parties hard, then those parties are going to become even more out-of-hand, and the committee will lose a lot of respect all-around (though one camp may prize them as fine toad-eaters). On the other hand, if the Arbitration Committee does come down on those parties, then they may alienate Jimbo Wales, who may even over-rule their decisions or so weaken the measures taken that they become not so much meaningless as ironic.

I don't recall 28bytes mentioning the PhoneLabs Dock-N-Talk: This device intermediates between a subscriber set designed for use with a land-line and a cell-phone,
so that the land-line set can be used to place and receive calls by way of the mobile phone. (The land-line set can remain connected to the land-line, and even put a cellular call on-hold while taking a land-line call. To connect the Dock-N-Talk to a cell-phone hand-set, one needs either an adapter cable (which will vary based upon the hand-set) or the Bluetooth module.)

Now, many people might ask

Uhm, why?

The answer that has potential relevance for me is that I have a collection of vintage phones that I would like to have in service in some future home (and the Woman of Interest has a red WECo Model 500 that she probably won't want to retire to the attic), but I'm not entirely sure that I will have a land-line. It would seem less frivolous to buy an adapter than to lease a land-line connection just to be able to put the vintage phones to use.

Now, the product page and the FAQ make no mention of pulse dialing, and my presumption is that the Dock-N-Talk requires tone dialing from the land-line set. But there are commercially available devices that can be placed in-line with a pulse-dialing phone to convert the pulses to tones; and there are other devices, which can be held to the microphone to produce the sounds for tone-dialing.

LiveJournal has announced the return of Basic Accounts. Unfortunately, what they are actually going to do is

1. Introduce a new sort of account, with advertising, though with less than Sponsored Accounts have.
2. Eliminate all existing Basic Accounts, moving every user who presently has a Basic Account to this new sort of account.
3. Give the new sort of account the name Basic Account.

For example, if one now has a Basic Account, then starting in August one's LJ will probably present ads to visitors who are not logged-in. (I'll let readers know whether ads are also present to those logged-in with registered external identities.)

Most of the comments that I saw to the announcement were the usual, clueless words of thanks, and I'll wager that most holders (even most active holders) of present Basic Accounts will either have missed the announcement altogether, or simply have taken it at face value where it says

Back by popular demand, Basic Accounts will be available to all users again by the end of the (northern hemisphere) summer.

There will be anger in August, when the changes are put into effect and thus discovered, but СУП will claim that users should have voiced their objections during the two-week feed-back period.

Famously, HDRC has a large campaign debt, which she and her husband are demanding Obama help retire. I'm not sure, then, how it is that she would be in a position to offer refunds. In any event, she is asking that money which would otherwise be refunded be contributed towards her 2012 Senate campaign, instead of being used to retire her debt.

It isn't really plausible that HDRC will pay-off her Presidential campaign debts in-full; instead, creditors will receive pennies-on-the-dollar, with the Clintons representing such settlements as-if they are payment in-full. If the Clintons channel monies that could have gone to the repayment of debt instead to her 2012 Senate campaign, then those creditors will in effect have been compelled to contribute towards that Senate campaign.

Yester-day morning, I watched King of the Rocket Men (1949), the Republic serial whence flowed Radar Men from the Moon (1952), Zombies of the Stratosphere (1952), and Commando Cody: Sky Marshal of the Universe (1953) (the last being written and filmed as a television series, but released first in theaters). King of the Rocket Men (or one of its sequels) was also the principal influence on the Rocketeer, though Bulletman (who appeared in 1940) is probably another direct influence on the Rocketeer, and was surely a direct influence on King of the Rocket Men. (Republic Pictures, who produced Rocket Men, had earlier produced the serial Adventures of Captain Marvel (1941), based upon another Fawcett character, and with the same special effects team.)

It is, frankly, a bit of a surprise that King of the Rocket Men managed to inspire much beyond derision.

The male lead, Tristam Coffin, looks notably older than his 40 years, as if from hard living or merely from a hard life. (Coffin has one of those pencil mustaches which are more make-up than facial hair.) The female lead, Mae Clark, was 39, but looks even older than does Coffin, perhaps from harder living or from harder life. (Mae Clark is notable as Kitty, the girl who gets a grapefruit in her face, in The Public Enemy (1931), and as Elizabeth, the fiancée of Henry Frankenstein, in Frankenstein (1931).)

But the real problem with King of the the Rocket Men is that the protagonists, including Jeff King (Coffin's character, the Rocket Man), are worse than ineffectual.

A villain named Dr. Vulcan is trying to get control of the inventions of Science Associates, including King and a Professor Millard. King repeatedly fails to capture criminals, or captures them and then leaves them to escape, and he fails to prevent killings with almost perfect consistency. At one point, King takes a guard's gun, directing the guard to phone the police, and then fails to provide anything like adequate cover-fire for the guard, who is thus gut-shot.

King and Millard have been working on the Decimator for the benefit of mankind. The Decimator is named and consistently described as a weapon — indeed it is described as the most powerful weapon ever designed — which might lead one to ask how King and Millard conceptualize its benefits. King and his side-kick, Burt Winslow, leave the Decimator unguarded, so that they can pursue a suspicious motorcycle. Naturally, the Bad Guys take the Decimator. When King and the side-kick return, King doesn't notice that the Decimator is gone, but the side-kick does. With the aid of a photograph, King is able to tell the police the plate number of the truck being used by the villains. The police locate the truck in a mountain pass. King tells the police to stay back so that Rocket Man can deal with them. The villains try to blow Rocket Man up with a bomb, but he escapes uninjured, and then flies away, not even bothering to follow them as they drive off in a car with the Decimator. The police might have done a better job.

Eventually, King &alii have allowed Dr. Vulcan to fly to the east coast, where he plans to use the Decimator to black-mail New York City. Dr. Vulcan secretly sets-up the Decimator on Fisherman's Island, a little more than 300 miles south-east of New York, and gives the mayor a dead-line of a few hours to agree to paying a ransom of $1 billion. The mayor ignores the dead-line (G_d only knows how a mayor could come up with $1 billion in 1949, let alone in a few hours), and Dr. Vulcan uses the Decimator to trigger the Amsterdam Fault, which lies between New York City and Fisherman's Island. Earthquakes and waves begin to destroy the city. King figures-out where Dr Vulcan must be, and the Rocket Man flies to Fisherman's Island. The city is, for the most part, destroyed. King gets to the island, and blasts the Decimator with his ray-gun (something that he might have considered doing back in that mountain pass). Meanwhile, the mayor has had bombers sent to pulverize Fisherman's Island. King and Dr. Vulcan and Dr. Vulcan's henchman battle. The henchman is accidentally killed by Vulcan. The bombs begin to drop; the Rocket Man gets away just before the house from which Dr Vulcan has been operating is blown-up. Later, the mayor takes credit for saving the ruined city, and promises to rebuild (no Naginesque declarations about restoring the dominance of an ethnic group). Jeff King and his pals think the mayor ridiculous for not giving more credit to the Rocket Man. BTW, did you know that, if you jump out of a speeding car, all that happens to you is that you get a little dusty? Well, neither did I.

Sari draws her readers' attention to

(I guess that Bizarre has confused the Canadian dollar with a Canadian pound of some sort, and thinks that the Internet is the only internet. In any case, this story came to my attention by way of an entry at the Horrors of It All.)

Knife crime is such a problem in the UK because violent crime is a problem. In fact, per capita, there are more incidents of most sorts of violent crime in the UK than in the US, though this fact is generally hidden by the British using different data reporting protocols. Violent crime is at greater levels in the UK in spite of their having gun control, because guns aren't the cause. Nor are knives. The prohibition of guns has largely resulted in a substitution of knives. A prohibition of knives will largely result in some other substitution. And innocent people who aren't protected by the police will be ever more at the mercy of criminals.

Haha!

I attempted to log out of a web-site, and was logged-out of my local Linux session! This logging-out baffled me, because there shouldn't have been any way for a log-out command to have been passed to the local shell, and none of the associated strings from the site were valid log-out commands for that shell.

Well, the joint logging-out was basically chance coïncidental. An inspection of a log file suggested that, in the wake of the most recent up-dates to the Red Hat software, I needed to get a new driver for my graphics adapter. I should have reälized this sooner, as various processes had become far less responsive, and all of these involved display.

I am not, properly speaking, a fan of Metropolis; I have considered its message to be fascistic, and don't see it as plausible that its fascism was an artefact of the scenes in question having been dropped. But Metropolis is none-the-less a very important film, and I am actively pleased that this material has been found.

(I went looking for this story after reading an entry at the Horrors of It All.)