AAARRGGGHHHH ... people still stealing my work

I think it's pretty much a given that anything that hits the web may appear days or months or years later in some form, either an exact mirror or hacked up and without attribution to original sources. I'm pretty sure that what you see was not actually cloned and included by an actual person but by some sort of web-mirror-bot whose purpose is to drive search engines to a site to rack up some clicks and earn some bucks. I've seen some of the stuff that I've written or synthesized get translated, garbled, or even quoted by patent examiners. (The patent examiner thing is weird... what he quoted from my Usenet post has absolutely no applicability to the actual patent. But my words are somehow backing him up even though I actually disagree.) Maybe my years in academia have twisted me, because I still strongly feel that any citation (even cloning or mangling) is in some way a form a citation that will somehow help me get my next job even though that hasn't been true for a long time. I think it's also true that sometimes we get too wrapped up in what we ourselves have done, and sometimes can lose track of the big picture of the larger classic computer community, some of which is not so able at writing or running websites or giving attribution where it is legally needed or just morally deserved. Certainly you are at the top 1 percent at coming up with original work on the subject and making it available; the top 10 percent is good at taking pictures of their stuff and putting it on the web; the rest of us are just sort of plowing through the research others have done. Just being at the top of the heap makes web-cloning inevitable, and I think you should take it as a compliment. And even more... I think that we often forget that the web is "just the web" and someday will seem minor and inconsequential compared to whatever new technology comes down the pike. If you've ever heard the BBC's production of the Hitchhiker's guide to the galaxy I'm trying to intone in the same voice as Deep Thought when he tells everyone that his work is truly minor compared to the work that will have to be done by the computer that actually computes The Question. Really we're pretty minor compared to The Ancients (the ones that actually constructed the classic computers) and compared to The Future (the ways in which the web will be superseded by something we can't even imagine.) I'm sometimes surprised that the web has been around as long as it has and still is kicking along so well and dominately. I think that someday some little guy in some obscure corner will come up with the next wave, and it won't look AT ALL like Web 2.0 or "The Cloud" or anything that is getting money today. Tim.