BT et C

Seven things that probably you may not know about me

2009-01-09T09:38:00.000-08:00

Ow! Tagg'd!!! And also STTPYMNKAM is presently a Google whack.

Much as I hate anything chainletterary, this one's got too many hackers onboard to just ignore.

1. My full name is, sorta, Matthew Wayne Ignatius Crouch, hence "mwic" .. the Ignatius being my self-chosen baptismal name.

2. I gravitate toward ppl like Ross Perot, Ralph Nader, Ron Paul, and Mike Gravel -- basically anyone who "doesn't have a chance."

3. I was a Young Republican once.

4. Like Luke, I converted to Catholicism after a nondemoninational upbringing.

5. I have three boys, named Thelonious Otto, Benjamin Britten, and Sasha Nicholas

6. I stopped reading novels for about 3 years, then started again this year.

7. As a general rule, I dislike eating anything sweet.

On to
1) Michael Mason bro-in-law and sympatico
2) Lorna Jane Mitchell, fellow hacker and as usual way ahead of me since she's already done her 7.
3) Justine Lam of RP fame
4) Mary Kate Rivet, my godmother
5) The great Melanie Bettinelli friend and sometime roomie
6) Tyler Fields coworker and facebooker
7) Josh Calvert. Nuff said.

---

And now the rules:
* Link your original tagger(s), and list these rules on your blog.
* Share seven facts about yourself in the post - some random, some wierd.
* Tag seven people at the end of your post by leaving their names and the links to their blogs.
* Let them know they've been tagged by leaving a comment on their blogs and/or Twitter

Can RP people miss a target?

2007-11-05T20:55:00.000-08:00

For kicks, I think the Ron Paul campaign should say something like this:

"We'd like you to contribute 2 trillion dollars by December 6."

Just see if it happens.

Plug

2007-10-22T12:33:00.001-07:00

An Open Letter to Allen Wastler

2007-10-11T22:22:00.000-07:00

You are smug. Real smug.

You couch your contempt for Ron Paul supporters in mock admiration for our "organization" or some such nonsense, and imply that we have "hacked" your poll in some way. You contend that you "haven't seen [Dr. Paul] pull those kind of numbers in any 'legit' poll" and I consider that a challenge.

Mr. Wastler, define the time, place, and mechanism for a poll you would consider "legit". I guarantee that Ron Paul will get over 50%.

One minor proviso: it has to be similar, in some way, to a free election in a democratic society. You can't just call your 50 closest friends and ask them. Extend an open invitation for people to come express their preference among the GOP candidates and, once again, I guarantee Dr. Paul will come out with over 50%.

Have a ballot box in the middle of Death Valley if you want. Put it outside your office. We don't care. We're coming out and we're going to demonstrate (again, and again, and again) that we are real Americans with rights.

RCP on RPC

2007-09-28T14:02:00.000-07:00

Blake Dvorak of Real Clear Politics amuses and sort of enlightens in a piece called "Ron Paul Country", but makes what seems like a blunder to me, one that is based on a common misunderstanding:

As much as many Republicans might want out of the United Nations, most would balk at abandoning Israel to the mullahs, or Taiwan to the Chinese. In either case, it is not terrorists reacting to some real or imagined slight by the "Great Satan," but sovereign states whose belligerence is checked only by American power.

It is this talk of "abandoning" our allies to which a non-interventionist takes exception. Why look further than Dvorak's two examples? There aren't any US troops in Israel or Taiwan

He is correct that American power is checking belligerent states; he is incorrect to suggest that military power is the only mechanism, or even in these two cases the relevant mechanism, of doing so. Non-interventionists believe that in most cases military interference -- or even presence -- is counterproductive.

Non-interventionists of this stripe are, so far -- and thank God -- apparently in control of our Israel & Taiwan stances.

NB: I'm not a military policy expert by any means; please correct if I'm drastically wrong about something here.

A Pet Peeve

2007-09-07T06:55:00.000-07:00

The respectable and intelligent Hugh Hewitt has some interviews from the Texas Straw Poll, and I think they're great.

One note, though, about one of Hewitt's lines of questioning: he asks nearly everyone whether
-They want Dr. Paul to run as an independent if he fails to get the GOP nomination
-Whether they would support the GOP nominee if it's not Dr. Paul
and/or
-How they'd feel if they didn't get behind the GOP nominee, and Hillary "consequently" wins.

As a sometime Green, I have heard this line before. It was used to try to guilt Nader supporters into abandoning their candidate so that Gore could beat Bush.

The offensive assumption in this line of questioning is that some candidate -- by virtue of belonging to a "major party" -- has a right to my vote, and I have to defend my decision to give it to someone else. Sorry, but I find this abhorrent.

If Ron Paul is not the Republican Party's nominee, and runs as an independent, I become the GOPs political opponent. I am one of their obstacles; they have to try to defeat my candidate, by winning me and others over.

They may think that they have a right to my support because I'm "conservative", but they're just wrong. Giuliani does not have a right to my vote because I'm Catholic, and Hillary does not have a right to my vote because I'm a woman.

Fine, I'm not a woman; you get the idea though.

GOP: Run someone who can win. If you don't, you will lose and it will not be Ron Paul's fault.

Scandal!

2007-08-26T07:29:00.000-07:00

Colin McNickle searches high and low for a genuine conservative to undo the damage done 1994-2006 when the Republicans outright succombed to temptation and betrayed long-held principles.

Unlike most informed Americans, he does *not find what he's looking for in Congressman Ron Paul. Why? McNickle has discovered a scandalous flaw:

... you simply can't put out of your mind his resemblance to Timothy Leary. On paper on many issues Paul doesn't look bad. Watch him in a debate and two words come to mind: blotter acid

Is there a dailywtf for politics?

The other candidates on the GOP side get pretty competent refutations of how their conservative words don't match their records, or in a couple cases how they don't even bother with conservative words. Dr. Paul gets the oddest guilt-by-association attack I've seen (and if you're an RP watcher, you've seen some odd ones).

In fairness, McNickle takes a moment to add that Paul is also "a flop on defense". No explanation of that charge seems necessary to him.

Here's the official platform of the GOP of my state (Texas) on National Defense:

We continue to encourage and support:
1. funding for a strong national defense, which guarantees maintaining a military which stands ready to defend our nation and increases combat readiness;
2. continued funding and development of the Strategic Defense Initiative
3. disengagement from countries in which we have no clear national defense interest;
4. “America First” priority in protecting the citizens and borders of the United States;
5. not entering into any new arms control agreements with any nation that is not currently complying with previous agreements;
6. the military never being deployed except to defend against an invasion or in protection of the United States’ direct, vital interests; and which may include pre-emptive action
7. maintaining our military’s effective combat strength sufficient to defend our nation’s borders and its strategic interests;
8. expiration of the special emergency war powers of the executive branch unless renewed by Congress in 6 month intervals; and,
9. the immediate deployment of the United States of America’s Military Forces to secure America’s southern border.

If you don't have time to read all that, I think it can be summarized as "Ron Paul is pretty much right about everything." We could quibble about things like the definition of "pre-emptive" (google is your friend), but the fact remains that RP is far from a "flop".

He doesn't look all that much like Leary, either.

Ron Paul -- The Perfect Imperfect Candidate

2007-08-20T07:48:00.000-07:00

I've been getting quite annoyed recently with the general tenor of RP discussion by a lot of blogs & zines who ought to be jumping for joy at the fact that Dr. Paul is running for president. It goes like this, usually

"Ron Paul's great -- just what this country needs -- but ..."

And then we get a discussion of some flaw in RP's views, or some election pitfall that could trip him up. We often get an authoritative-sounding discussion of why, alas, he cannot win the nomination or the office. What we do not get, sadly, is cojones. By that I mean an endorsement: "Americans should support Ron Paul". Why not?

Because the writer has discovered action X by Ron Paul isn't fully synchronized with the true libertarian understanding of line 213 of the Constitution, or something. Egad!

Might be true. And we could conceivably argue about it for several days. Meanwhile:

Ed Crane asked Giuliani whether he "believed the president should have the authority to arrest U.S. citizens with no review... The mayor said that he would want to use this authority infrequently."

To summarize, Giuli said "yes, the president has that authority, but trust me I'm a nice guy and won't do it much." In other words, Crane said "should we have habeas corpus?" and Giuli said 'No.' While you argue about the interpretation of line 213, the frontrunners have all more or less burned their copies of the Constitution to the ground.

If Ron Paul "can't win" against these guys, that should make you angry. On a scale of 1 to 10 Ron Paul is about an 8 and no other candidate is above 5. Why keep covering the fact that he isn't a 10? (End rant)

On Scientific Polling

2007-07-23T12:04:00.001-07:00

I'm a little out of practice, but as a once-trained philosopher I thought I'd hold forth on the topic of "scientific" polling that is intended to predict the outcome of an election or primary. Let's begin with a hypothetical situation.

Suppose you would like, for whatever reason, to know which restaurant people are going to go to for dinner. Here are some relevant parameters

-There are six restaurants, and all require reservations. Making a reservation is not very difficult, and is not *more difficult for one restaurant than for any other.
-Three of the six restaurants -- McRomnald's, Julie's, and the Thompson Steak House -- are discussed frequently on the Food Network. The others are rarely mentioned.

You call a few hundred people and ask "At which of the following restaurants would you like to eat?" And you list the six restaurants. The results come in

30% say "Julie's"
30% say "McRomney's"
22% say "Thompson Steak House"
The other 3 each get 6%

You type up your results and call it a day. Congratulations!

Now... I hate to rain on your parade but there's a glaring problem with your method.

A lot of the people you just called are not going to *any restaurant tonight. They're going to eat at home. They might want, or even expect, to go to one of those places ... but if something comes up they won't bother.

Time to blow my cover: I'm talking about presidential primaries. As a matter of fact, a *very small number of respondents are going to vote in the primary they're being asked about. The epistemological problem is that one action (picking up the phone and answering a question) doesn't "map" directly enough onto the second one (making the reservation, getting in the car and going to the restaurant/polling booth).

All is not lost, though. You can try to make your list of phone numbers better by restricting it to to "likely diners". Perhaps you only call people who own a car. Or you might get a list of people who ate out last year. This is the usual method -- but I submit that there's a *much better one.

As it turns out, you have a great source of data that can help you, but before we get to it I have to throw another wrinkle in your survey.

Now you're not calling about tonight; you're calling about "Super Friday" -- a Friday that's occurring next February. So there are more parameters:

-The people you call have to look up, then remember, the date of Super Friday, and go to the restaurant on that day.
-They obviously can change their minds between now and then.

It's starting to sound impossible. Suppose you had a bunch of money to invest in a restaurant, and you got paid back depending on how well they did on Super Friday. You might be inclined to call it a crapshoot, or you might just spread your investment among the top 3 restaurants and consider your bets hedged.

But don't forget I told you about a great source of data that can help you:

You can get the reservations lists from all these restaurants. You can even go tonight and see which one(s) are full and which ones are empty. If you do this every night from now until Super Friday, you discover something astonishing:

People are just packing it in at the Ronpaul cafeteria. The reservation list is as thick as a phone book. There's a line out the door and down the street every night. Clubs are booking their private functions there. Some of the people going there are nuts, but some are good amateur cooks, and a few are professional chefs.

McRomney's and the other restaurants also have some people in them, most of the time.

For whatever reason, the Food Network isn't talking much about the Ronpaul cafeteria. When they do mention it, they postulate that there's a glitch in some people's restaurant behavior, because after all why would they keep going to this place if it's never really mentioned on the Food Network?

I am 100% open to discussion of flaws in my metaphor, but it seems to me that the following activities "map" more closely than the ones mentioned earlier:

1. Going out and talking to people, hanging up signs, etc.
2. Going out and voting in the primary.

I think 90% of the people currently doing #1 are doing it for Ron Paul, even if only 2% of the people answering their phones are in his camp.

As a result, I am one of the (apparently few) who will not actually be that surprised if Ron Paul wins the nomination, which is to say if the current 'shape' of political action continues to go as it is currently going

Open Letter to America, from MSM

2007-07-09T12:02:00.000-07:00

[Note: "MSM", one of the blogosphere's favorite acronyms, stands for "mainstream media"]
[Note2: This isn't really from them; it's a bit of satire]

Despite our many efforts to play nice, and our elaborate production values that bestow upon you the idea that you know something about what's going on in the world, you continue to annoy us. Most recently, you have spammed/messed with/cheated on our scientific presidential-campaign polls, by which we determine whom you would like to elect president.

Here's what you are doing wrong: you are telling your friends and family about Ron Paul. You are writing about him -- in emails and on websites -- and including links to our polls in your various writings. People are reading these things, thinking about them, clicking the links, and so on. Obviously, we cannot allow this to continue.

We understand that your engaging in this activity may have been an honest mistake resulting from your ignorance, so we have decided to issue you this firm-but-gentle reminder of how things work:

1. We will tell you who the frontrunners are. If we have not yet held forth on this topic, compile a list of the people who are about to give us tens of millions of dollars for advertising. Those are the frontrunners.
2. No talking. When we are done telling you things, finish your meat loaf and go to sleep. Or watch American Idol. Whatev. Come back tomorrow.
3. We will occasionally call you and ask which of the frontrunners (see above) is your favorite. Please stay on topic; all we need is the name of a frontrunner, k thanks.
4. Remember: you can't believe everything you see and read on the Internet. You can only believe everything you see and read in newspapers or on TV broadcasts by God-fearing media companies worth at least $750 million.

We sincerely hope this problem can be cleared up quickly, and with civility.

MSM

zomg I was as Smart as Ron Paul for a second there!

2007-07-01T10:36:00.000-07:00

A couple weeks ago a guy on NPR was talking about the inflation scare, saying don't panic 'cause -- once you exclude energy and food -- inflation's actually not really manifest. Hm.

Wait, not "hm"... I laughed out loud. I wanted to call in and say "once you exclude my mortgage, my bills are really low!" Maybe there's a reason to exclude gas and food from this calculation, I don't know. But I was pleased to see Dr. Paul echo my thoughts in the final seconds of this video.

"If you don't eat, and you don't drive, and you don't have any medical bills, you don't have any inflation to worry about!"

Why is this fudging of the numbers allowed? I don't get it. Standard accounting practices reveal that official deficit figures are lower than reality by a factor of four. Tom Coburn and the transparent government movement need to look into this stuff and give us information that means something.

So Very Very Onboard Now

2007-06-24T17:22:00.000-07:00

After about a decade of near-total political nonintervention, I found a guy who wakes me up. Will go into more detail later, but in a nutshell:

This country is almost certain to get into deep military and economic doo-doo in the next decade. Almost. The field I'm surveying is full of men and a woman who are willing to talk about anything and everything *except the critical questions. There are two elepha^H^H^H^H^H^H colossal prehistoric mammoths in the room and they are

-Our disastrous foreign policy and its disastrously incompetent implementation
-Our *absolute, unconditional *love for expanding government spending and either borrowing or printing money to cover this

Ron Paul (I bet a bunch of you guessed it already) is the only one I've seen with political and moral courage to confront these things. And he confronts them with enviable intelligence and historical background.

So I've become an organizer of the Dallas-Fort Worth Midcities meetup group, and I'm 100% not kidding, and I'm not going down without a fight, and I'm not caving in to the CW that says "he has no chance".

And a plug: If you think America could benefit from a return to the mandate-for-government set out quite clearly in our Constitution, or if you even just think these problems should get some airtime, please help our group out with a contribution (paypals below). I met with these people yesterday, and was astonished at the energy and seriousness that they brought to this admittedly-uphill battle.

That's all for now; I'll be expounding more on individual RP positions later.

Donate to DFW-MidCities Ron Paul Meetup

The Categories

2007-05-14T11:06:00.000-07:00

Ballmer has (to his detriment) got a bit more specific with his FUD on free software violations of Microsoft's patents.

He says that the Linux kernel - the deepest layer of the free operating system, which interacts most directly with the computer hardware - violates 42 Microsoft patents. The Linux graphical user interfaces - essentially, the way design elements like menus and toolbars are set up - run afoul of another 65, he claims. The Open Office suite of programs, which is analogous to Microsoft Office, infringes 45 more. E-mail programs infringe 15, while other assorted FOSS programs allegedly transgress 68.

Thanks, Steve. We're going to go ahead and second guess you, because we know it takes awhile before you and your kind get around to telling people why exactly they owe you money.

PS: There are no "Linux graphical user interfaces" -- don't know if this was the reporter's error or yours, but we'll assume you meant KDE and GNOME and, um, change "the way design elements are set up". Hehe. This'll be fun.

PPS: I have just downloaded copies of your 6900+ patents. Some friends and I are going to look them over. We'll get back to you sooner than you probably wanted...

Fisking W

2007-04-27T06:43:00.000-07:00

I hate to kick a guy while he's down, but I just came acroos this letter he offered up last year on World Intellectual Property Day. w00t!

In today's increasingly competitive world, improved enforcement of intellectual property rights is critical to establishing free and fair trade among nations and to protecting consumers and hardworking innovators

This is par for the course: the world is "increasingly competitive" (?) and more enforcement, in the name of "protecting" the poor plebeians, is just what the doctor ordered. No sense of balance.

I was also pleased to sign the Stop Counterfeiting in Manufactured Goods Act. This important piece of legislation will help protect Americans from those who sell illegal products and steal intellectual property

Ye olde "stealing" metaphor, coming as usual from a sloppy conflation of copyright, trademark, and patent law into the term "intellectual property". Mr. B is, of course, using the warm fuzzy feelings we associate with property to hide a fact that would otherwise be painfully obvious:

Unauthoried copying is not theft. Technically, I believe it can be called "criminal conversion" (like when you mooch a person's unsecured WiFi and heshe doesn't notice).

'Course a lot of people will say "whatever, you're splitting hairs". The problem is that if you start allowing this sloppy use of legal terms (by presidents!), you get a regime in which the following BS is occasionally taken seriously:

It's theft. Your contract with the network when you get the show is you're going to watch the spots. Otherwise you couldn't get the show on an ad-supported basis. Any time you skip a commercial or watch the button you're actually stealing the programming. (Src)

No copying is taking place here -- Mr. K is talking about using a PVR. Not only is there "theft" going on but apparently breach of contract! Geez. Better get a lawyer before you turn that thing on.

CW: What if you have to go to the bathroom or get up to get a Coke?
JK: I guess there's a certain amount of tolerance for going to the bathroom.

As you can see, I got bored with the prez 'cause this stuff is much funnier. I actually do not have any contract with Mr. Kellner or his client -- I do not and will not subscribe to cable because the quality of product is terrible. Hell, for all I know it actually does have a clause saying that you will watch all the ads. I suspect it does not actually discuss the bathroom exception, but if it does *please link it -- sounds like a great read.

Hell, two can play at this game. From now on I'm going to refer to copyright overreaching as "terrorism". Maybe then I can persuade W to get on board.

A Whole New World

2007-04-13T08:58:00.000-07:00

If you're an obsessive free-software upgrader like I (sorta) am, you probably come across a line like this frequently:
"Performance-wise you should see a boost..."
-from Linux Format's preview of GIMP 2.4

This reminds me of why I love GNU/Linux. It's approximiately 180 degrees from the planned-obsolescence, forced-upgrade cycle into which assorted nonfree vendors try to lock you.

Surely you've heard, for example, of "Vista". This is an operating system that improves on its predecessor so much that you'll basically need a new computer to run it. For 80% of you, this means you'll be shelling out four figures to be allowed to do what you're currently doing, namely surf the web, check your email, and write the occasional letter.

Let's review:
Vista
-you pay lots of money
-you get almost nothing new*
-what you previously had doesn't work quite as well

GNU/Linux
-you pay nothing
-you get new functionality
-it runs faster

*Just 'cause a (costly) machine says "Vista capable" doesn't mean you're going to be able to do the stuff in the ads. So no skimping by trying to get the cheapest one. Details on an interesting example to follow in this space.

Governor of Disneyland Inflamed by Slashdot Comment

2007-03-31T09:26:00.001-07:00

except not really

Little Tinfoil, for funzies

2007-03-25T04:42:00.000-07:00

Here is Gartner's graph of Vista's expected uptake:

Certainly looks bad for us free-software folks doesn't it? That's fine, though -- I'm used to things looking "bad" and don't particularly care that much whether free software takes over the world. I just want non-free software to leave me alone and stop making my life difficult.

But... there's something funny about that image and I'll give you a few second to guess it

Give up?

Here it is: there's no such thing as a "pernonaginta". It's called "percent" because it goes to 100. Here's Gartner's graph, side by side with my corrected version:

Now, you'll rightly point out that Microsoft still "dominates". Duh. But that's the thing with "marginalization"; it doesn't work through outright lies but by subtly changing our symbolic life. I'm not going to rant and rave about this, but I suspect this kind of itty-bitty distortion is all over the place.

Found a Senator I Like

2007-03-23T08:03:00.000-07:00

There's more complete coverage of the rebirth of SIRA over at a4fs, but I liked an exchange between this guy Rick Boucher and the Copyright registrar: (41:28 in the video. Boucher obv was not speaking in hypertext so I added in links)

Boucher: Well, we don't need an audio flag for HD radio.
Peters: I agree --
Boucher: -- and we don't need to disable the portable devices that XM is putting out to do this [i.e. reform section 115], do we?
Peters: (Pause) ... not through 115, but --
Boucher: Thank you, that ... that --
Peters: The question is --
Boucher: -- pretty well answers --
Peters: No, no, but --
Boucher: That's a great answer...

...Hm. This guy's pretty sharp.

Boucher: Why not just say that these ephemeral copies have no independent value? It's hard for me to imagine that they do, and frankly I'm a little bit surprised this morning to hear you suggest that they do after all and that your footnote was not properly stated. Tell me this: how can they possibly have independent value when all they do is effectuate a transmission that itself is licensed?
Peters: I'm not a guru in the marketplace; I stand by the statement with regard to incidental, temporary copies. The question that has come up, um, and where we actually have seen deals. We've seen contractgs where there is separate money for a server copy. Just raises for me a question of whether or not there is value --
Boucher: Well, Ms. Peters, is it possible those deals were made because of the legal uncertainty, with regard to whether or not this would be termed to be a copy unless we clearly declare that they have no independent value? I think the answer's yes.
Peters: It could be, I --
Boucher: Thank you very much.
Peters: the answer to that --
Boucher: Thank you, Mr. Chairman I yield back.

mmm... more later, I hope

*Sigh

2007-02-25T12:45:00.000-08:00

The first 5 times this happened I didn't even notice. The next 5 times I was like, "dang. Oh well you live and learn". The next 5 times I was like "that's getting *annoying!" And it has happened again and I'm pist enough to blog about it.

Here's what happen(ed)(s): I decide to try something new, find a nice tutorial, and discover an error in the tutorial. Not 3 hours later; not after mastering the material and going back to review it. No, that'd be fine and all part of the learning experience. I can dig. This happen(ed)(s) generall in the first few minutes; one of the *very *first bits of example code fails to do what is promised. ("Hello World" works over 90% of the time).

I'm reading Programming Ruby, one of " the best two technical books I have read these past years" and it says ppl with some experience start w/Chapter 2, so I'm on page one of that.

"hello world" works as does "ruby --copyright". Even a script as complex as

ruby -n -e "print if /wombat/" *.txt
works. Wow. But the next one doesn't.

ruby -p -e "$_.downcase!" *.txt

Now I'm not the kind of guy that expects everyone to do all my work for me. I love doing work; but I'd like to feel as though the work is not futile; that progress is being made. I can't feel this way now, because I don't know if 1) The tutorial is wrong, and a) what else will it be wrong about or 2) My installation of ruby is wrong and thus b) are there going to be a bunch of other things that don't work because of my installation.

And again, I wouldn't even mind if this happened from time to time. Makes you get your hands dirty. But it seems like about 2/3 of the "introductory" material I find on any technology is afflicted by this problem.

End rant.

Have You Sold Your Brain?

2007-02-08T10:22:00.000-08:00

After a couple years of self-employment, I landed what seems to be a decent job: lots of code, friendly environment, good pay. It's been awhile since I signed any employment agreements, so I read this one carefully, and frankly I'm amazed at what is in it.

Since it's a code-writing job, the pertinent section is the one on copyrights and inventions. Patents are included, too, but I don't have or expect to have any of those. The section begins

"All work product ... including, but not limited to, all Employee's inventions and ideas ... that relate in any way to the present or prospective fields of interest of [Staffing Firm] or the Client ... or that are capable of being used in, or in connection with, the business of the Client as conducted now or hereafter shall belong exclusively to [Staffing Firm], whether or not fixed in a tangible medium..."

Hm. I'm not too keen on treating ideas as property, generally speaking, but I'm 100% okay with keeping trade secrets, etc. as a condition of employment. But this goes way beyond that: every idea "capable of being used" by the Client? "Whether or not fixed...?" Sure sounds like the thoughts themselves, and all of them. At the very least, it means any website-related thoughts I have, since this is a job building a website.

But hey, I'm generous and information wants to be free. I'd let 'em use just about anything I dream up during the "period of employment." But that's not enough: they want these ideas to "belong exclusively" to them.

The person "helping" me through this paperwork assured me that the document only says I won't copy code from the client's project and give it to a competitor. Is that how you understand the above? If the verbal description of the Agreement matches the actual agreement so badly, which is binding?

if such Works are not considered "works made for hire" by operation of law, Employee agrees to, and does hereby assign all of Employee's rights to Works exclusively to [Staffing Firm]

My interpretation: the agreement's definition overrides the copyright law's definition of works-for-hire.

any inventions and ideas which (s)he may discuss with anyone within six (6) months after the termination of his/her employment... shall be presumed to have been made during Employee's period of employment... Employee assumes the responsibility of proving that he/she conceived and made any such invention or idea after his/her employment hereunder terminated

Six months of "tail" is appropriate, in my opinion, if the previous section hadn't overreached about what kinds of ideas are covered. I really hope I misinterpreted that. As to the second sentence, I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out how to prove when something -- other than a fetus -- was first conceived. (If you want to do this exercise, NB: say employment ends in January. You must prove that X did not conceive of Y until July. Good luck)

There's one more section I want to touch upon, because it put me at ease for a moment, then pulled the rug out. I have the option of attaching, basically, some Prior Art, which would not belong "exclusively" to the staffing firm (*so generous, since all this Art was created years before I ever heard of them.) I was considering handing over a CD with copies of all the websites I've built in the past. But these attachments

shall be disclosed on a non-confidential basis and Employee agrees that [Staffing Firm] shall have an irrevocable and free right to use such inventions, ideas, and copyrights in any way whatsoever except for such valid patent rights as Employee may have...

So (please, please tell me I'm missing something)

Basically all internet-related ideas that I have during employement and for six-months afterward belong "exclusively" to them
Any ideas I've dreamed up in the past can be exempted
But only if I give them an irrevocable license to use all of that material however they see fit. And with the mention of "copyrights" here it looks like that means copying/distributing any code I disclose..

I am not a lawyer, just a careful reader. All advice is appreciated.

SPP

2007-02-02T06:49:00.000-08:00

I'm going back to the abbreviations for awhile, 'cause they're fun.

Microsoft's "Software Protection Platform" -- the culmination of years of expanding windows-validation schemes -- is an incredible achivement on many levels. (Note: I have not used Vista and hope never to do so. Here is my source)

Misnomer of Orwellian proportions: "Platform" is just a word that one attaches to an application to make it sound bigger, so I'll ignore it. You might initially assume that the 'platform' is protecting your software, but This is not the case. Software is the subject of the protection, not the object, and it is protecting something else (from you). That something else, of course, is Microsoft. But you have to think on it a bit before that becomes apparent. Brilliant.
Undermine, chapter 1: Farbeit from me to give anyone ideas, but it seems that SPP present a fascinating attack vector. This is an application that is designed to make the machine unusable. Formerly the only such system on most machines was the power button. When Windows gets the idea (from SPP, or from __________?) that this is an unpaid-for copy, it goes into "reduced functionality" mode, and then goes downhill from there. I would love to hear a competent security research discuss the tradeoff between this obviously-gaping hole versus UAC and the other security buttresses that have been built in.
Undermine, chapter 2: The irony of it all, of course, is that SPP, like all DRM schemes, only needs to be cracked once -- at which time the major players in the software "piracy" industry will continue on their merry way. The number of pirated copies of Windows might slide a bit before picking up where it left off. The false positives -- and the support for angry customers that ensues -- will almost certainly wipe out any extra revenues from licenses purchased as a result of SPP.

The last irony is that I personally wish SPP would work, and flawlessly. I wish no one on the planet could possibly use Microsoft's "intellectual property" without paying them. The reason should be clear: the vast majority of people using illicit copies of Windows can't afford to buy it, and would thus switch to a free alternative.

New Blogger

2007-01-09T05:49:00.000-08:00

Alright, I've upgraded BT et C and the other blogs to the New Blogger. Also I figured out that I have to moderate comments... so if you left one recently, it just now appeared. Sorry.

Todays shameless plug is the Artists for File Sharing blog, which is also me, and which is also subject of my New Year's resolution to stay on top of my assorted blogs. (In related news, WS-Comments is prolly dead and gone. Confirm?)

Best SLAPP Ever?

2007-01-09T05:33:00.000-08:00

This week saw two front-runners emerge for Best SLAPP of all time (best, in this context, obviously means something like "worst")

Spocko sent clips of pretty-disturbing audio from some radio shows to the advertisers who funded it, and incurrerd the wrath of Disney (who owns the stations)

Anshe Chung goes after gootube for video containing her secondlife avatar (her avatar is the least interesting thing in t he video ;)

Barbra Streisand has nothing on this lot. Votes? Comments?

PS: While we're voting, the MASOTY Awards are coming soon!

Metaphors II

2006-11-17T07:51:00.000-08:00

Mr. Ballmer gives us a textbook example of the danger of relying too much on metaphors, which I just recently spoke about. Let's begin. Microsoft and Novell

agreed on a, we call it an IP bridge, essentially an arrangement under which they pay us some money for the right to tell the customer that anybody who uses Suse Linux is appropriately covered. There will be no patent issues. They've appropriately compensated Microsoft for our intellectual property, which is important to us.

An "IP bridge"... ? Curiouser and curiouser ...

If you didn't know already, descriptions of the MS-Novell deal are weird and getting weirder because telling it like it is would utterly ruin Novell. What's happening is that Novell is licensing software patents from Microsoft. They cannot say this though, because the GPL forbids distributing covered code unless you give the recipient all the freedoms you have. So we will hear about things like "IP bridges". We will hear that "Novell's customers receive a covenant not to sue directly from Microsoft" (src). The last is curiousest since the covenant's terms are not fully disclosed to the customers it is supposedly being given "directly" to.

Metaphors can be tools of enlightenment or of concealment. Take care.

Metaphors

2006-11-15T19:12:00.000-08:00

As an expert in English and Philosophy, sorta, I love a good metaphor. So delicious... at times, so clarifying. One of my faves of all time, which I never get tired of linking to, is Moglen's Metaphorical Corollary to Faraday's Law. Anyway...

A metaphor that I'm kinda iffy about is the "War on Drugs". This, of course, conveys the seriousness of the drug problem in America, the expensiveness maybe, and the determination of our leaders to protect people, etc. etc. But we can all pretty much agree that this metaphor can be carried too far; for example, should dealer, or even just a user, of drugs be considered an enemy combatant in this war, and deprived of hisher rights as a citizen?

Probably not. We instinctively know that the metaphor is being taken too-literally there.

But no one is really suggesting such things, so I'm relatively indifferent to the "War on Drugs" metaphor.

A less "violent" but more pervasive metaphor that I think should basically be discarded is "intelleectual property". This one has wandered so far afield that many people don't even realize it's a metaphor anymore.

To test whether it really is a metaphor, try to prosecute somebody under theft or vandalism laws for (respectively) stealing or damaging your ideas or words. It won't work, because at the very least most of our courts remember that it is a metaphor.

Many of our citizens, and even some senators have forgotten, and this is really pretty unfortunate. A metaphor understood as such is generally not too dangerous, but when a metaphor comes to be taken as reality a curious thing happens: metaphors are built upon it.

Once you've lumped artistic output, "business methods", and trademarks into the "intellectual property" metaphor and forgotten that the symbol doesn't "map" exactly, it's not long before you start speaking of this property's "owners", of buying/selling/renting it. Of "thieves" and so on.

Now I don't contend that one is a horrible person for using these metaphors, but I caution against using them too loosely. I personally avoid them and try to be as exact as possible when talking about this stuff.

EULA FU

2006-11-10T09:30:00.000-08:00

That stands for "Follow Up" (i.e. to the previous article) not .. ahem... the other thing. Although it stands for that too.

Okay, all you guys who are chomping at the bit to agree to Microsoft's terms and "upgrade" your machine (after you buy it) I've got an offer for you:

If you didn't know, you are basically forbidden from telling anyone how that computer performs under scenarios of your choosing. As soon as you click "I agree, install that Vista baby!" (button text subject to change) you are thus forbidden. Well I've got an offer for you:

I'll do it. Because of certain freakish aspects of my professional life and my personality, I will be free of the restrictions of Vista's end-user license agreement forever. That is to say: I'm not going to click that button at any time.

That puts me in a unique position w/r/t your computer: I can study it, see how it performs, tell others about my findings, and learn about how to improve its performance. And this freedom (seriously) just fell into my lap as a result of the above-mentioned non-clicking on Vista's EULA buttons.

Call me up, or post a comment or something. My prices are *very reasonable.

EULAs

2006-11-02T11:46:00.000-08:00

I somehow missed Thurottš recent shot at a topic I find fascinating, viz. the upcoming Vista EULA. As a result, I also missed a scathing response by Ed Bott. Oh well, I'm going to call attention to one bit he didn't focus on much: Thurott'š attempt to explain away the virtualization restrictions as non-restrictions. Referring to the fact that only two of the (most expensive) versions of Vista can become guest OSes, we learn that

as it turns out, there's no massive conspiracy. Currently, the majority of Microsoft's virtualization users fall into exactly two groups: business customers and enthusiasts. Business customers will want Vista Business and enthusiasts will use Vista Ultimate. Simple. And though pundits might like to complain about this apparently arbitrary decision, the reality is that very, very few people can ever come up with a legitimate reason to run, say, Vista Home Basic in a VM

Never mind that what Thurott says here is false (thousands of freelance web developers would put cheap Vistas into Xen to see how their sites look in the latest IE). The problem is the psychology of EULA abuse: Forbid by default even while admitting (as here) when you are placing legal (non-technical accomplishing virtualization is just as easy with any version of Vista) restrictions on some users.

If they dont like these completely superfluous restrictions, defend it by saying there arent very many of them. Fascinating, like I said. This is truly a test of what people will put up with.

Otto's Halloween Mad Lib

2006-10-30T12:27:00.000-08:00

Ben was home alone. It was dark. It was quiet. Suddenly, Ben heard a teacher's whistle. What could it be? Ben worked down the stairs. In the couch room was Otto. He was holding a bed. His bum was bleeding. His chest was black and green, and swollen to the size of a TV. "Boo! What happened?" cried Ben. As Otto went shopping to the floor, he gasped, "Beware the orange triangled pumpkin!"

Windows Penguine Advantage

2006-10-28T11:17:00.000-07:00

Here's the kind of notification I think people would really like:

Just Stopping By

2006-10-20T13:17:00.000-07:00

To say Hi.

Some Questions of Narrative

2006-10-17T09:16:00.000-07:00

This pay-for-play arrangement may be standard operating procedure among high-tech companies and academic labs, but it represents a big change for Linux, which first gained favor among hippie-esque programmers who disdained revenue and profit, advocating a "peace, love and software" vision of Linux as a free operating system developed without regard for corporate interests.
-Daniel Lyons, Peace, Love, and Paychecks

I've been meaning to do a hopefully-comprehensive writeup on the various narratives people (especially, it seems, people in oldguard power centers such as Forbes magazine) use to explain the F/OSS zeitgeist. Lyons's work stands as a sort of epitome. The article quote above has the sub-headline "Linux began as a labor of love by hippies and hackers. Now the suits are cutting checks and running the show". The articles is dated September 20,2004.

Well, it turns out that there is a pretty good book on the influence of 60s counterculture on computer science and especially on the development of personal computers. Alas, the book does not get into the Linux era, so it neither refutes nor denies the Lyons assessment.

One of the pillars of the modern materialistic personality is a belief in a rigid dichotomy: on the one hand, there are ideals and principles; on the other, there is pragmatic daily business, the desire to get things done quickly.
'
This vision of the world informs an assertion I come up against pretty regularly: that "philosophy is useless" or -- what's more offensive -- that philosophy is harmless, a diversion from "the real world", a playful indulgence for which we grownups offer a condescending dose of tolerance.

Makes me ill. But back to Lyons. He adopts the foregoing reductive view of human action as consistently as anyone, and it has occasionally led him into some baffling situations.

Let us take another piece, "Linux's Hit Men". This is a cursory look at the fact that the Free Software Foundation expects users of its software to comply with the GNU General Public License. The article opens with reference to SCO's lawsuit against IBM. This, of course, is irrelevant to the topic at hand; its inclusion and the dubious segue ("But the spread of Linux could be hurt by another group") should probably be chalked up to the need to grab attention by referring to high-profile news.

The article concludes with a line I find downright bizarre: "Such a pity, comrade." Unless I'm missing something, this is supposed to evoke communism.

You see, in the Lyons dichotomy there are basically two groups of people. 1) Proprietary software companies, who can be characterized as pragmatic, business types; and 2) Linux "crunchies" (no, I don't know what a crunchy is), who exhibit in turn the properties of hippies, communists, anarchists, druggies etc. Generally speaking, this is a quick 'n' easy viewpoint from which to describe computer news, at least well enough to satisfy the editors of Forbes.

But when one is covering the "Linux Hit Men" story it becomes problematic. Because what is actually happening is *not an attack on private property (Cisco's LinkSys routers) by "comrades". It is a run-of-the-mill enforcement of the terms of a license. When Lyons discusses SCO's alleged copyright interest in UNIX code, he uses the metaphor "intellectual property rights" to describe these situtations.

Lyons can't believe that

Under the license, if you distribute GPL software in a product, you must also distribute the software's source code. And not just the GPL code, but also the code for any "derivative works" you've created--even if publishing that code means anyone can now make a knockoff of your product.

Imposing *requirements on the distributor of source code doesn't square with -- with what? The Free Software Foundation's principles? No, it doesn't square with Lyons's commanding dichotomy in which free software is more-or-less the same as free love, or world peace, or whatever. Having helped to construct and reinforce the myth of the Linux Hippie, Lyons now finds their pragmatic, realpolitik actions strange. He even suggests that they're hypocritical.

There is a difference between the way that proprietary companies and the FSF handle issues like this, and the difference is described in a clear, sane fashion elsewhere:

"This is nothing new. [Disputes over software licenses] go on every day with proprietary software -- but there, the stakes are so much larger."

"If this were a Microsoft license violation," Perens continues, "Cisco would be in huge hot water. This is very small in comparison. Violating commercial licenses often costs companies millions of dollars. We're just asking them to go forward following the GPL. We don't ask for money, just future compliance."

"I just want this to be resolved peacefully," reiterated Perens.

To be continued...

Back in the Saddle

2006-09-25T13:03:00.000-07:00

Well, I've done it again -- let a couple months go by without a post. Meh. Apologies.

This week I bring you some more problems of language. I generally insist upon a certain specificity when I argue, especially about topics (political ones especially) that elicit strong emotions. For example, I dislike the term "intellectual property" and never use it. When others use it, I gently discourage them from confusing themselves and others in this way.

A number of people I converse with online don't agree and think the term is harmless, so I'd like to throw out an example of how such imprecise terminology leads to muddy thinking. Very muddy thinking.

This is from a Q&A session with Chris Sontag of SCO, in 2004.

Question: Hi, I understand that you insist on the respect of copyrights. And I think everyone in this room would agree with you on the respect of copyrights. However, SCO's currently distributing GPL software products such as Samba in some of own SCO products. Since you believe that the GPL is invalid, I was wondering under what license are you currently distributing Samba and other such products?

Note that the question is specific, and uses the specific term "copyright" which is well defined in the law.

Sontag: We, Darl's mentioned earlier that SCO has participated in many open source projects, has made contributions to open source projects, doesn't have issues with open source projects that the IP basis of that work is sound. Same with our participation with Samba and with other GPL or other open source projects. So we continue to participate in some open source projects, Samba being one of them. And we do have concerns with the GPL, and the GPL may have to be reworked, changed, a new license put in place. But in terms of ... as far we are aware right now there are no issues in terms of IP with Samba that we're aware of right now. And so we continue to participate with that.

Note the plethora of vague terms like "IP" and "issues". Also note that Sontag comes nowhere near the subject matter of the question. A responsive answer to "under what license... ?" would be the name of a license. "We're distributing it under the MIT License" perhaps. A responsive and correct answer would be "we are distributing it without a license."

There are obvious problems with standing in front of a roomful of people and saying "we are distributing other people's copyrighted work without a license" particularly if one hopes to be viewed as a champion of "intellectual property rights" at the dawn of the new millenium, or whatever. I'd like to focus on how Sontag's fuzzy language leads to an unintentionally hilarious statement: "But in terms of ... as far we are aware right now there are no issues in terms of IP with Samba that we're aware of right now" Hilarious not simply because it's replete with stammering and redundancy, but because it's an outright lie on the face of it:

The question stated an 'issue in terms of IP with Samba'. That's what the question was about: "Aren't you violating people's 'intellectual property' when you distribute Samba?" is a good paraphrase of the question. It is as thought someone played a Chopin piece on the piano and said "That's Chopin. Do you like Chopin?" and Sontag replied "I've never heard a Chopin piece."

I view this sort of discourse as a disease in our society. I have ideas about its root cause, and some about its cure, but will save those for another day.

MattSource

2006-07-26T14:05:00.000-07:00

The other day a friend of mine, who is chair of the Source Code Department and MIT, told me there were mountains and mountains of my intellectual property in M. Night Shyamalan's film The Lady in the Water. Actually, she's the former chair. Actually, just a former faculty member, with tenure. Except not with tenure. Actually, she just ran inside the department one day to use their restroom.

The point is, I had to respond, so I naturally issued some press releases that anyone who saw the movie would be infringing on my copyrights, trade secrets, intellectual poverty, and that I may even consider it an act of military aggression. Then a peculiar thing started happening: people began to have concerns about whether seeing the movie might subject them to lawsuits by ... I don't know, someone. There are a lot of litigious people in the world.

Not one to sit around while people were concerned about something, I decided to write up a license for whatever intellectual property I possessed, if any, and indemnifying people, if any, against lawsuits by me for infringing the copyrights, etc. that were violated during the production of the movie, if any.

Each person who would like to see the movie should purchase one license ($10). Families get a bulk rate if they submit to DNA testing that confirms they are, in fact, a family. Then you're free to head out to the theater and give them about $10 per person with a clear conscience.

Here is a detailed list of the intellectual property that has been wrongly included in the film:

1. Source code, except not really
2. Methods
3. Concepts

Hm... now that I think about it Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest has a couple of concepts in it too... I'll look into that and get back to you.

Eek

2006-07-22T08:42:00.000-07:00

Ted is linking to me now, so I guess I better try to keep up a little. Okay: the politically-oriented rants about geeky stuff will appear over there from now on. Here I'll focus on engineering and technical topics. And poker.

I've officially downed the AJAX kool-aid. In addition to providing slick, responsive interfaces, it helps enforce separation of the various application layers. In fact, I'll be recommending it even to beginning programmers, so that they never develop some of the bad habits that make PHP guys infamous.

Other news: good week at the tables, up about $180. Also got PokerStars to run pretty-well in Wine. No chat though... and typing bets in with numbers doesn't work. You have to use the slider. Still a pleasant surprise how far that project has come....

More Others news: I got a hyundai accent and you can have the engine if you bid today, because it's going electric. That's right! No more foreign oil for me, thank you. Except in the other 800 products I use that require it... meh.

Alright, I've got to go email everyone and get my readership (readercanoe, really) back.

Windows Disingenuous Advantage

2006-06-12T08:58:00.000-07:00

Haven't booted the XP partition in quite awhile, so I'm not sure if I got the software everyone's talking about. I'll have a look today and report findings in this post. But I wanted to go ahead and create the stub 'cause it's such a great title.

Inspired

2006-06-05T11:48:00.000-07:00

Working at TND has inspired me to shout out a little more frequently. Today we get half-baked science from Bob Carter of the Telegraph.

"...for the years 1998-2005 global average temperature did not increase (there was actually a slight decrease, though not at a rate that differs significantly from zero). Yes, you did read that right."

Thank you Mr. Carter.

Interlude: I'm personally undecided about the scope and urgency of global warming until I finish reading the Full IPCC report; the competent skeptic Richard Lindzer encourages everyone to do so, rather than relying on the "Summary for PolicyMakers".

Back to Mr. Carter. If you pick the hottest year in the 140-year record as a starting point for a trend, you will get this kind of result something like 99% of the time. Your outburst is exactly as convincing as if you measured the period August-December, 1998 and trumphantly declared scientific victory when you report the 30+ degree temperature drop.

For anyone who would like a useful and much more fun look at that 1998-2005 time period, observe as James Annan attempts to make another bet, this time with World Climate Report on their assertion that 1998-2007 would exhibit a "statistically significant downward trend". What this means is that the previous all-time record is shaping up to be the new average.

EDIT: woops. Forgot to link Carter's article

The Battle Between Evil and Evil

2006-04-05T08:37:00.000-07:00

What's more evil? Stupid business method patents or Blockbuster?. It's a tough call. As a movie lover I have one thing to say to blockbuster: pwnt. As a software guy whose life will (though it hasn't yet) be made very annoying by stupid patents, I have one thing to say to netflix: you're getting distracted. Continue beating the sauce out of 'em in the market not the courtroom.

DB

2006-03-28T07:06:00.000-08:00

Dear Bill,

I use Linux. You can download it here. Please look through the source code and see if it violates any of Microsoft's patents. If so, please bring a lawsuit against the author of the relevant code.

If not...

..is everybody listening?

Please stop threatening to hypothetically sue some conjectural entity about possible IP "issues" that "may pertain" to Linux. You have full access to the source code. Figure out if it infringes and act accordingly.

Since turnabout is fair play, would you consider letting someone examine the source code for Windows for patent or copyright infringement? No?

My Second-Favorite Otto

2006-03-19T21:54:00.000-08:00

The Bettmann Archive. Just thought I should make an appearance. TND coming along nicely...

Ron Wyden is My Boyo!

2006-03-02T13:01:00.000-08:00

As the original author of a mediocre wikipedia article I strongly applaud Mr Wyden's attempt to deflate some of the BS being slung about.

Mr. Wyden was an excellent contributor to the recent hearing. If I remember correctly, it was he who pointed out that he and Google both pay for Internet access, so this garbage about a "free lunch" is ... um ... false. Actually, it's spectacularly false.

Please, please oh please

2006-02-09T06:29:00.000-08:00

Verizon: Please, please try to extort money from google for using "your" network;
Google: Please, please, tell verizon where and in what manner they can stick it.
Verizon: Oooh! What you should do then is deny access to google through "your" network. I am willing to bet the $40/mo. that I currently pay for DSL service that none of your customers will notice that they can't access google anymore. They will stick with you through thick and thin, out of gratitude for having built such a nice network for us all to use.
Please, please oh please take away your customers' access to google. I bet we/they will send you thank-you notes, flowers, copies of How to Win Friends and Influence People. Please!
You morons.

MS

2006-01-13T08:56:00.000-08:00

There are two items at /. that provoke some thought today. And when thought gets provoked, it's usually time to post to yr blog!

The more recent of the two informs us that number & timeliness of system patches are not as important to customers as "which vendor makes the patching and updating experience the least complex, most efficient and easiest to manage" according to Bill Hilf.

I cannot say whether Mr. Hilf is right about that. The question is: is the customer right?. More generally, "is the customer always right?". Keep abstracting away from the issue, and you'll see that the fundamental question is the same as the one behind the Efficient Market Hypothesis and thus touches upon libertarian principles: can the market fail?

We'll do more of that later; let's get back on topic. A reductio ad absurdum of the Hilf principle would suggest that what the customer would prefer Never to Patch Anything. Unlike most reductii ad absurdum this isn't absurd at all. There are two ways to bypass the patching process:
1) build a perfectly airtight operating system
2) conceal the need for patches.

And I think back to an excellent section of Neal Stephenson's In the Beginning was the Command Line
"Commercial OSes have to adopt the same official stance towards errors as Communist countries had towards poverty. For doctrinal reasons it was not possible to admit that poverty was a serious problem in Communist countries, because the whole point of Communism was to eradicate poverty. Likewise, commercial OS companies like Apple and Microsoft can't go around admitting that their software has bugs and that it crashes all the time, any more than Disney can issue press releases stating that Mickey Mouse is an actor in a suit."

History suggests that the open-source software camp have #1 as an ideal, whereas commercial OSes lean toward #2. Both are impossible to achieve completely, though, so in the meantime (which is forever), there are two ways to make the patching process less annoying.

1) have patching be rare
2) have patching be easy

Or, of course, both. This is what the customer would prefer. Wait -- did I say commercial OSes? But there's a commercial OS that does both, and which (near as I can tell) leans toward #1 above, as evidenced by a quote from one of its security response team leader.
"Of course, we could reduce the number of advisories by batching issues into a single update every month, or by not fixing those vulnerabilities rated as low severity, but that is actually detrimental and increases the risk to customers. We're not going to play the numbers game with our customers."

What OS could that be? Whatever it is, it seems to be under the illusion that what the customer prefers is not necessarily what is best for the overall computer security situation.

The second and older item that caught my eye is more interesting still: it is an attempt by Microsoft to disabuse us of the illusion that Linux runs better on older hardware. The method sure looks scientific: install Windows and Linux on old hardware and see what happens. In fact you could say it like this, using just quotes from the article:
hypothesis: "There was this pervasive belief that Linux could run on older PCs and that Windows could not"
procedure: "installing Red Hat Enterprise Linux, SUSE Pro 9.2, Mandrake 10, Linspire 4.5, Xandros Desktop 3.0, Fedora Core 3, Slackware 10.1, Knoppix 3.7, Windows XP and Windows Server 2003 out of the box on older hardware to see what happened."

Well, if your ears haven't perked up yet I'll throw out some fun facts:
-XP released October 2001 ;SUSE 9.2 released October 2004; FC3 released November 2004; Slackware 10.1 not sure exactly but it was 2005; you've probably got the idea already.
-Where's Gentoo, Debian, DSL, PuppyLinux, or one of the many distros that people actually claim run well on old hardware?
-Did you say "out of the box"?

We've got a problem, then: the hypothesis that was actually tested is "What works better on 7-year-old hardware? An out-of-the-box operating system from 5 years ago, or out-of-the-box operating systems from 1 or 2 years ago? For the sake of brevity, let's exclude 1-2 year old operating systems that are intended to be used on older hardware."

They shoulda called me. I coulda saved 'em a lot of trouble. Hilf declares: "the technical capability to modify Linux, to strip it down to run with a minimal set of services and software so that it can run on all sorts of hardware devices, has generated that larger assumption that any type of Linux distribution can run on all sorts of hardware devices."

This is an assumption I have actually not heard voiced, and I wondered how prevalent it really is. So I googled it and all I see besides the original article is a guy whoconfirms my instinct about this BS.

So it's not quite as bad as "proving" that Linux is more expensive than windows by installing Linux on an old mainframe and Windows on a desktop and then comparing the price per megabit per second. But it's pretty bad.

Oh My

2006-01-09T12:25:00.000-08:00

dyne:bolic is pretty much teh pwn and so on. I had no idea. I'll get back to you...

Reorganizing...

2005-11-15T14:08:00.000-08:00

All stuff about Sony is going to move to Artists for File Sharing

Early MASOTY nomination

2005-11-15T02:23:00.000-08:00

You will observe that the annual MASOTY awards just occurred in April of this year, and are not yet due. But I simply have to fire 'em up because a certain individual obviously has his eye on a prize:

Most Annoying Senator of the Year: Marc Pacheco, State Senator of Mass.

Memorable Quotes:

"So you're saying Citizens against Government Waste or Americans for Tax Reform are a wholly owned subsidiary of Microsoft? Is that what you're saying?" ( src)

This in response to a suggestion that since Microsoft provided substantial funding to these groups, one should look critically at their opposition to ODF.

Grover Norquist of ATR, personally received $60,000 from MS in 1999.( src). I have no info on more recent paymentsd, and leave it to the reader to decide how wholly owned they are.

"I am concerned that when I look at proprietary software companies bidding on work under the Open Document standard, if you do have an Open Office format, if you have an Open Office product, and it's an Open Office product which has GPL as one of the elements, then obviously in order to meet the standard then that would mean that proprietary company would have to release its code. That's what I understand. Now tell me where I'm wrong on that."

Let me help you, Marc: Where you're wrong is in getting your notion of what the GPL requires from Microsoft press releases. (e.g. "The GPL is designed to prevent commercial development of software distributed under the license. It does this largely by requiring licensees to make available, at little or no cost, all of the source code for any program that incorporates any amount of GPL code." -- -- which is outright false)

"Again, in keeping faith with what the Open Source community itself has put on the table every time they have approached me about being open, having see-through type of system, democratic process, from what I heard here today we've had far less than a democratic process."

I don't know if he scores a point here or not, because I can't speak about the exact process by which the ETRM was revised. I will say that this illustrates a kinda bad logical leap that I see all the time. Something like "you claim to be all about openness, but look at the front door of your HOUSE! It's closed!" i.e. the fallacy of ambiguous terminology.

It's possible that Kriss et. al. really did sorta conspire to get an ODF-friendly recommendation nto the ETRM. But it's also possible that this was called-for, because public discussion of stuff like this can get noisy and unreliable as people -- even dead people -- spout their usual FUD.

Flock Test

2005-11-12T05:20:00.000-08:00

This is pretty cool (posting through Flock browser). More on this sort of thing later.

Quote of the Month

2005-11-11T12:49:00.000-08:00

"We're not denying people access to the music. We're just trying to help them manage their access."
George Macdonald, director of sales and marketing
First 4 Internet (makers of the aforementioned XCP

OMG can you HELP me MANAGE all of this access that I have to all of this MUSIC?!?! It's overwhelming. There are 11 songs on this CD and I can access all of them! Help! Calgon, take me away!!!!!1

Do whatever it takes!!! PLEASE! Take over my computer if you have to! This ACCESS is just way WAY out of my control!

some credit is due

XCP

2005-11-10T07:01:00.000-08:00

Well, everyone is all abuzz ... guess I'm relatively slow on the uptake, but I'm going to throw in 2 cents:

Trey Anastasio: You are one of the most influential and versatile artists of your generation. I have eagerly anticipated your latest release for some time. As it turns out, I wasn't able to purchase the disc immediately ... and thank God. Now of course I will not. The good news is that Drawing Restraint 9, which I've also been awaiting, is RIAA-free

Sony: HAHAHHAHAHHAHAHA

Mainstream media: Please remember this episode next time industry execs are spouting off about how they're just trying to make sure the artists get paid, etc. Ask them whether they're positive that the way to do this is to infect any computer that plays their CDs with a laughably insecure rootkit. Not that there's such thing as a secure rootkit.

General Public: Join me. Get off the RIAA's grid, permanently. Previously this was a proposal for people who had really unusual (i.e. rational) theories about the meaning of "intellectual property" and the origins of human creativity. Now it's a proposal for anyone who wants their computers to continue working even after they listen to music with them.

FOLLOWUP:
I've killed a couple hours reading up on this story 'cause it's so damn fascinating. It's like a catalog of all the reasons why people need to start making stands against this stuff.

Mark is (correctly) averse to the requirement that you add your email address to Sony's list in order to get their rootkit off your machine. This is because their privacy policy has the standard clause: "we may share the information we collect from you with our affiliates or send you e-mail promotions and special offers from reputable third parties in whose products and services we think you may have an interest. We may also share your information with reputable third-parties who may contact you directly" (Src). Which, of course, means you're on the Oh-Please-Call-Me list.

But wait! Sony says it's not so! "The wording on the web site is the standard Sony BMG corporate privacy policy that is put on all Sony web sites. Sony BMG does nothing with the customer service data (email addresses) other than use them to respond to the consumer."

Paraphrase: "Yes, we make you agree to allow us to do X, Y, and Z. But we aren't going to do those things. Trust us."

-You install a rootkit that phones home, then publically deny that you did this or that it does this.
-When pressed you say that it doesn't matter 'cause no one knows what a rootkit is anyway (Src).
-The uninstaller again fails to disclose what it is doing
-From what I hear, your website instructs the user how to grant herself admin privileges in XP, so that they can run your stuff. (Src -- ? Was mentioned in the Security Now broadcast)

Having therefore done four Very Dangerous things no one gave you permission to do, I am supposed to trust you not to do a moderately-annoying thing that I did give you permission to do?

The Question Is

2005-11-04T07:07:00.000-08:00

If one of these stories just happens to you during your life, are you infringing.

PJ's writeup.

...UPDATE...

I just realized, duh. It'd be God who's infringing.

DB

2005-10-21T07:48:00.000-07:00

Dear Bill,

Hey, what's up! I know you're real busy innovating and stuff, but I felt like I should drop you a line 'cause ... well, to be frank you guys have been annoying me lately.

1. Who was that Stuart McKee guy at the Massachusetts meeting. He sound like a press release; did he think this was just going to be the usual press-conference-type deal where uninformed reporters diligently write down your buzzword-rife gibberish and then applaud. He said this

"we commend the efforts, frankly, to use XML, we think ... uh, SOA Service Oriented Achitectures and data interoperability are incredibly important for the connected world has permeated everything we do. You know, we feel very fortunate that over the last 25 years technology -- personal technology in particular -- has changed the way we live, work and play. It's been a privelege for us to be a part of that.

This was in response (I use the term loosely) to James Palo making the excellent point that XML is not a sufficient guarantor of data availability all by its lonesome, about which I commented earlier.

2. Did one of your guys actually say that Nigerians weren't much concerned about spending a couple years' salary on each copy of windows and office that they need? One of your Nigerian guys?

I'm usually not one of those people that raves about you being doomed, but man this is a pretty weird thing to say and you should look to it.

Love,
Matt

PS: You should try this new browser. Might give you some ideas for IE8? I'm guessing that'll take about 4 years, like IE7 did? Let me know.

Little Tune-up

2005-10-18T10:21:00.000-07:00

Slowly getting over my upgradeophobia, thanks partly to Gentoo

Here's some of my new numbers:
KDE 3.4.1 (on gentoo) ... which by the way sings. KDE ebuilds are now (correctly) split up so that you can pop pieces of it in and out instead of needing the Whole Hog.
xorg-x11-* 6.8.2 (on both fedora and gentoo). I don't know all the advantages of upgrading xorg regularly, but i decided to do it even though it makes me nervous.
Kernel 2.6.12 (on fedora, but i'm not booting it 'cause %^#%^ing ndiswrapper would not fly)

I'm not upgrading GNOME on the fedora box. Too many horror stories, and all my work is sitting there. It was enough headache that one day that Zimbra took me out of commission

...i wonder if Otto would like Mandriva... ?

Edge of My Seat

2005-10-04T12:07:00.000-07:00

Now this is good television. Why are Sun and Google doing a news conference together, and introducing it with comments about Sun & Schmidt's history with open source? I'll know in about 45 minutes...

SOA and Me

2005-10-04T08:23:00.000-07:00

(a followup to a previous post

'Kay, I haven't read a single SOA book, and I'll explain why. It seems there's a standard buzzword cycle that operates pretty predictably at a number of levels:

-A technology gets "hot" and a bunch of people figure it's the solution to every problem anyone has
-These people waste a bunch of time singin' and dancin' about how Wicked Cool this thing is and how it'll take over the world. (nice parody of this mentality -- guy can't wait until the Lx kernel is rewritten in PHP!)
-It is eventually discovered that this tech, like all others, doesn't do everything, and there is a backlash where no one wants to hear about it anymore.
-Some time later, problem-solving types re-analyze the tech, realize it does some things very well, and it takes its proper place in the universe.

e.g.: XML, formerly considered the best way to do everything from configure a CLI to archiving your email, is now -- gasp! -- being used to structure data that needs structure in order to be useful.

e.g.: the "new economy" got hyped all to death, then busted, then got re-invented as a (really, I swear!) way to (really) automate & network a great many disparate types of businesses.

Anyway, I basically wait until the cycle has gone through it's first 2 phases before I get current.

HE

2005-09-29T07:31:00.000-07:00

Well none of you have seen anything on this topic for awhile -- you may even need to consult the "Most Important Abbreviations" in the bottom-right to find out what "HE" is. There's a story behind that. Over the course of June and July I dropped about $700 by playing medium-stakes limit hold'em, and playing it badly. The bonus referred to in my last poker post didn't happen (basically there's a time-limit, and I got punched, so I couldn't clear the bonus). And I withdrew a few hundred to pay bills.

I played a bit more limit HE in August and September, netting $104. Had ups and downs at Richard's game, didn't track that precisely but probably -$50 or so.

The new leaf I turned over yesterday is that I'm back in the no-limit game, partly because I'm helping a friend write a book on NL hold'em. And results were great: +$89 over about 1100 hands of $50 buyin no-limit at Absolute Poker. That's 32.3 BB/100 -- which rocks.

I gotta get off the game and do the dayjob for a couple days, so September's final balance is:
Richard's game: +$44
Limit HE: $92
NL: $139
Bonuses: $50

Total: $324

Will be back up on cloud nine pretty soon at this rate.

a WikFisk

2005-09-28T11:18:00.000-07:00

There's this problem I have, and today I encountered the epitome. Seems like Luke has the same problem from time to time:

I go to my favorite resource, the wikipedia, and decide to get current on definition/discussion of SOA. Here's what I get (begin fisk):

"In computing, the term Service-Oriented Architecture (SOA) expresses a software architectural concept that defines ..."
Warning bells going off already. Why?
A term doesn't express a concept. People express concepts. Using terms. Terms are supposed to just flat-out mean something. What a term means is called its definition. So when you ask for the definition of X, you should be told what it means, e.g.:

Matt: what does SOA mean?
Wik: "SOA means ... " [stuff that it means]

Well, I won't edit the wikipedia there ... they might not understand; I'll do it here:

"In computing, SOA means ..." (and picking up where we left off) "...the use of services to support the requirements of software users."

See I left "in computing" there, in case someone happens to search "service-oriented architecture" without realizing that it's kind-of a computer term.

"Supporting the requirements of software users", if you read carefully, means ...

"being software"

Don't believe me? I stipulate that "supporting" means "fulfilling" (i.e. fulfilling the requirements). Rickety buildings and people with low self-esteem need "support". "Fulfilling the requirements of software users" means "doing stuff with software". QED.

To paraphrase, then, we've learned that service-oriented architecture means "orienting software around services" or maybe "using services to do stuff with software". Yeah. Then

"In a SOA environment, nodes on a network make resources available to other participants in the network as independent services that the participants access in a standardized way"

Questions for the audience:
1) What's an SOA environment? I comprehend metaphors, but you should use one at a time: architecture (principles/etc. by which a thing gets built) or environment (a place where actions occur). This sentence, then describes an SOE.

I swear I'm not just being obtuse. The mind recoils from this kind of metaphor-overload. And if you let this slide, it's not long before you get "SOA solutions" (instead of SO Solutions) then "Enterprise SOA solutions". Then you get people who "deliver Enterprise SOA solutions". You're being expected to fuse the metaphors of service, architecture, problem-solving, delivering, and of course everyone's favorite "the enterprise" (really digging kuro5hin lately)

2) What has this sentence added? You have to dig a bit, but there really is some new info here:
-"services" refers to resources on network nodes.
-there are standards that govern access to these resources.

...so far I've basically got: "In computing, SOA means using standard methods to access services/resources in a network"

Well, I did in fact get a bit of meat out of that, but it was too much work, so I looked elsewhere for further clarification, rather than reading the whole article.

Reynolds is much closer to the mark. Note that he yanks out the ubiquitous "supports" in "the architectural style that supports loosely coupled services" so that we get "architectural style that encourages the creation of loosely ..." This is correct; was that so hard? Note that the architecture metaphor is truly explanatory here: this architectural style encourages these construction methods.

Like so many things in IT, there really is a pony in that pile, but as one of Reynolds's commentors pointed out it often turns out to be an old pony:

"tech marketeers recently 'discovered' this long-known concept, then promptly smothered it in a bunch of buzzwords. That's what they do. Remind [programmers] it is no different than their recent 'discovery' of the simple decorator pattern, which they now shill as AOP. I expect you will get a big sigh of relief out of them.

"Skip the hype. Simply explain that SOA means nothing more than separating business functions into routines, just as they have always done."

Cool

2005-09-15T16:28:00.000-07:00

Try searching for "MASOTY"

-NC

2005-09-14T11:26:00.000-07:00

Kur5hin makes an interesting argument against using the non-commercial (-NC) license for free content. I suspect that this is the license individual artists gravitate toward, out of a fear that allowing commercial uses would make it possible for another party to monetize their content and grab away all the revenue.

I'll admit that's my first impulse with regard to my content...esp. when I saw that's what most of these guys did.

The first point is very well taken; my personal use of wikipedia continues to skyrocket (I'd estimate I visit 15-20 articles per day, even if some people think I'm stupid for doing so) and if your content can't be weaved into their system it's going to be a serious benefit lost.

And as for ye olde argument that other guys will be making money that I should be making off your product, here are the relevant grafs:

The moment you choose any Creative Commons license, you choose to give away your work. Any market built around content which is available for free must either rely on goodwill or ignorance.

The potential to benefit financially from mere distribution is therefore quite small. Where it exists due to a predominance of old media, it is likely to disappear rapidly. The people who are likely to be hurt by an -NC license are not large corporations, but small publications like weblogs, advertising-funded radio stations, or local newspapers.

Eventually, he suggests the obvious step of using the Share-Alike license (bascially a GPL for creative commons content). The other alternative would, of course, be normal rights-restricted copyright.

Personally, I'm undecided. One thing that came up, and seemed smart, is a -NC license that reverts to Share-Alike after 5 years (though I'd be inclined to make it 2 or 3). Maybe I'll ask the Comfort Stand guys for input. Dang, that's a snazzy outfit. (Go to Legal Torrents to get their 10-disc sampler.

You know what we need?

2005-09-12T14:50:00.000-07:00

Longer copyright terms

"The justification from an economic perspective is absolutely baseless."
Lawrence Lessig

And yet ... something tells me it'll go through.

BSE & BS

2005-09-09T12:14:00.000-07:00

In today's post, Bovine Spongiform Encephalopathy, also called "mad cow disease", becomes a starting-point for an exploration into political reality-versus-perception issues.

I think if you asked your average down-to-earth, common-sense oriented conservative what's up with government regulation of business, consumer safety legislation, etc. you'd be told that regulation in modest amounts is defensible, but that it's just gone way too damn far in this country.

Your super-conservatives (the "radical right" (:) would, of course, deny that first part, and yearn for total deregulation of everything. But let's stick with the boring, middle-of-the-road mainstream position for awhile.

The basic idea is that companies (e.g. beef packers) will invest what they can in making their meat safe. They are in fairly constant conflict with bleeding-heart liberals who want them, increasingly, to cut into their profits and do more testing, etc. that the consumer has not explicitly asked for in the market.

And the small-government position is that there isn't any need for all these programs to crawl over the companies' facilities with a microscope, because the information about which companies have the safest meat will get around in the marketplace, and the companies that make the safest meat will reap the benefits, etc. This all makes perfect sense.

Now think for a minute about that picture of things ... how reasonable it is, and how -- with only minor adjustments -- most people would agree that yeah that's pretty-much what's up. The government's too big, and trying to over-regulate stuff is at least part of the problem.

Into this wheel I'm going to throw a spoke:

Two companies in America would like to test ALL of their cattle for BSE and provide this reassurance to their customers. But, alas, they cannot.

How come? Is it technically difficult? No -- the BSE test is pretty straightforward.

Can't afford it? On the contrary, one of them has already invested in the necessary equipment and is just rarin' to go. Largely because much of their (former) business went to Japan, which banned US-imported beef until all animals are tested.

You've got a company in a "free" market that wants to spend its own money to make extra-sure its products are safe, and a bunch of customers who are cool with footing the bill. So what's up?

The USDA forbids the company to do these tests.

Let's read it again: The USDA forbids a private company from testing for BSE at its own expense. The testing equipment is required to sit there, unused.

One of the companies, Creekstone, is losing about $280,000 a week because of unavailability of the Japanese market. "That the USDA is standing in our way makes no sense," Fielding (COO of Creekstone) said. "Their position flies in the face of the basic rule of business -- that the customer is always right, and our job is to meet their demands." (src)

Well, Mr. Fielding is right of course. This post is about what does and does not make sense, or more-to-the-point, whether common sense has anything to do with What Actually Is. Because this picture, of the free market asking for X, and a business deciding to provide X, and the government saying "no way", does not fit in neatly with the common-sense (I would posit: reductionist) view of the situation presented above.

Let us propose three possible ways of organizing a market for beef:
1) "Japan style" - require that 100% of beef sold come from cows tested for BSE.
2) "free market style" - let people know which packages of beef have been tested (i.e. with a label or something) and they can pay extra for these packages, or take their chances. "Americans are willing to fund a higher level of reassurance. A January poll by the Consumers Union showed that 95% of adults would pay 10 cents more a pound for tested beef. Testing every slaughtered cow would cost about six cents per pound." (src)
3) "US style" - make everyone take their chances, even if they don't want to and are willing to shell out cash so that they don't have to. "The U.S. Department of Agriculture (news - web sites) (USDA) currently does not allow such private testing for mad cow disease. And it claims that a new government testing system it approved this month is perfectly adequate. " (IBID)

This leads us to two questions:
1) Why do we have a US style market?
2) Why do we think we have a free market style market?

Well, if you looked through those linked pages enough to solve the mystery, you found yourself right back at common sense: it is because large corporations are not willing to compete fairly. (Bet you're going to have a heart attack and die from that surprise). The "big four" agri/beef companies have put a lot of pressure on the USDA to disallow any private testing. That is to say, it would cost them a Lot of Money to test all their cows, and they don't want to. But they can't very well have their beef sitting on the shelf next to a package of some other company's beef that says "tested for BSE". That would be a #2 style market, and we all know what another word for "number two" is.

Interlude: yes, this is more about beef than anyone wanted to know, but too bad. Japan apparently backed down from the 100% testing requirement, but as of March still hadn't reopened the market. I bring this in only to show that I'm aware of it; it is, however, completely beside the point, viz. my right as a Beefy Entrepreneur to test for Neisseria Meningitidis if I want to and/or if I think my customers want me to. Even though it only affects humans.

Well, I shoulda made the interlude into an Epilogue, 'cause I think that's just about it. I'm not of the opinion that all American industries are under-regulated, just that things are not as simple as they seem. And, emphatically, I believe this:

The influence of major corporations over our governmental institutions is a much larger problem vis-a-vis the free-ness of the market than the (I daresay weak) regulation of industries and standards by government. Much larger.

In short I think the whole business-versus-government thing is a myth, and that it was basically foisted upon an unthinking populace by business-and-government, which are in fact Very Good Buddies.

ESR

2005-09-09T07:40:00.000-07:00

Best Blog Entry Ever

Wirelessless

2005-09-08T11:18:00.000-07:00

Okay, now I've done it about 4 times. And I ^$%^@ing hate it. This failure came after a big and exciting "yum update" which (theoretically) got me the latest versions of 300-something packages. Well, I haven't looked at the actualy yum script but I think it's like this:

--------------------------------
#include

install 150 packages
break wireless networking
install the other 150 packages

--------------------------------
okay, I'm kidding. Was pissed but am able to run wlan0 just by selecting the old kernel in startup. But shucks I want to use the new kernel someday. Ndiswrapper people, any chance for a "it just works" type system? even -- gasp! -- a GUI has been suggested.

Just to keep current...

2005-09-07T19:20:00.000-07:00

Mostly this is because I haven't posted anything in awhile ... explanations for that later. Here's one of the simplest, clearest, and most cogent paragraphs I've read in weeks:

"This book centers in what we call a "propaganda model," an analytical framework that attempts to explain the performance of the U.S. media in terms of the basic institutional structures and relationships within which they operate. It is our view that, among their other functions, the media serve, and propagandize on behalf of, the powerful societal interests that control and finance them. The representatives of these interests have important agendas and principles that they want to advance, and they are well positioned to shape and constrain media policy. This is normally not accomplished by crude intervention, but by the selection of right-thinking personnel and by the editors' and working journalists' internalization of priorities and definitions of news-worthiness that conform to the institution's policy."
Manufacturing Consent, Herman, E. and Chomsky, N.

CMSes

2005-08-25T06:53:00.000-07:00

Don't know why I bother asking for my readership's opinion, since I haven't had a comment in weeks. Oh well.

Lamp5 is getting a revamp (hopefully it'll be done before getting renamed "Lamp6") and it's as good a time as any to get familiar with one or more content management systems. The short list is

Mambo - DPUG uses this, and I don't particularly love it, but it's in wide use and gets good reviews. Must be something I don't know about it.
Drupal - used by Downhill Battle -- one of my favorite music/advocacy sites, and a company I'd like to work for.

Much as I like MySQL, I'm fully 100% all about dB abstraction layers from now on. Black mark #1 for Mambo is that it's apparently MySQL-specific.

Okay, e.g. here's something that could someday go in Xaypole: you hook up a site skeleton, with the production dB ... and you have the option of simultaneously hooking up your Development/Beta/Staging Area a SQLite dB containing the same data, or a subset (for speed). So you can work on your new features/pages/etc. on a fast-responding dB and change Precisely Nothing when you put up the next release.

Slick. But that's for later. For now I just need to get the stupid XREF interface working.

Watch this space for reviews of Mambo and Drupal. Or contribute your own (ha!)

DSL

2005-08-23T12:40:00.000-07:00

What do you do with a 433 MHz Celeron, boasting 4.3 GB of storage, which you bought in '99 immediately after getting married and becoming impoverished?

Load a Damn Small distribution of Linux onto it. (This assumes you don't want to tinker with TinyOS.)

This machine (with fluxbox managing windows) is now more-or-less as responsive as the laptop running XP with 1600 MHz and 512MB of RAM. That's not based on any benchmarks or anything (someone link me an easy-to-run benchmark for basic throughput); just the usual open-firefox-and-surf-around-a-bit and see how it feels.

Also, at <60MB it can be fully loaded into even a modest RAM chip, at which point you can expect it to smoke the XP box and the Gentoo as well. I've gotta try that. I think the last system in which I pulled that off was a Mac SE 'round 1988. I remember that it rocked.

LDLs

2005-08-23T07:01:00.000-07:00

Mine are at 119, and "normal" for men is <100. So I'm already researching the whole thing. Guess my new cookbook will have to go back on the shelf for a bit :(

Let's see ... apples I can do ... beans, good ... garlic I think I'm already on top of. I even like sprouts, this shouldn't be hard. Half a raw onion every day might be asking a bit much...

Well, off to the grocery store, then.

VW

2005-08-17T09:26:00.000-07:00

Neat analogy in /. comment on the fact that Vista will hurt OpenGL's performance. Well, I don't want to talk about OpenGL, 'cause I know so little about it. But Procyon says:

"MS is the volkswagon of software. It's cheap, it gets the minimal job done and it doesn't take much training to know how to drive it."

Hm. Of course, no analogy tells the whole story ... in fact, analogies exist for the purpose of not having to tell the whole story. But this assessment -- i.e. of Windows as the "ordinary" OS for normal folks who don't particularly want to learn to hack -- is so common, and so inaccurate in my opinion, that I'm going to spring off from here.

Like everyone else, I have my own favorite operating-systems-as-cars extended metaphor, but I feel that all of these concede too much already, in treating an operating system like a physical object. Your computer is a car. Its operating system is -- not even the engine -- more like, the laws of internal combustion.

It is fortunate that chemical equations exist, because I can now suggest that the chemical equations describing internal combustion, Maxwell's field equations, etc. are the "software" component of your car, and this will make sense since low-level operating system code consists of equations, too.

But those equations are widely known, and with sufficient skill in chemistry and metallurgy you could apply them and hack together your own engine. So I have really only described an "open source" car.

A car sold with a pre-installed, closed-source operating system would be very different. It would not (necessarily) use internal combustion, electricity, or a combination thereof. It might very well use solar power or nuclear fission. Or geothermal energy. You wouldn't know because the rules by which the engine does what it does to the camshaft/axels are not disclosed.

You might reverse engineer your car to discover some of this stuff; the technique known as "packet sniffing" is analogous to measuring/analyzing the substances that go into the tank and come out the exhaust pipe. But you are Very Unlikely to become qualified to do any repair or maintenance on your car through these means.

All you guys thinking analogically will (and should) now say "Exactly. And most people don't care about learning that stuff. They're fine with paying a mechanic for those services."

But maybe the guys thinking philosophically (w00t) will realize something: your choice of mechanic, in this analogy, is limited by the vendor. Is this a good situation? There are billions of people on this planet, and a great many of them are willing and able to apply the laws of mechanics to a car engine so that it works, or works better. They are appropriately called mechanics.

But if you drive a closed-source car, 99.9% of those mechanics are useless to you -- they don't know and can't discover how your car works. As a further oddity, all of the mechanics who can fix your car have a vested, personal interest in you continuing to buy closed-source cars. Weird.

Y'know how annoying it is that your warranty expires if you don't go to the dealer for your oil changes etc? This is like that, but 1,000 times worse. Because the dealer (analogy being stretched tight here, I like that) does not actually sell any cars. She just does the service. Boy, I hope you can trust her. 'Cause she's the only one who can service your car. The only one. And if she breaks stuff on purpose, so that you keep coming back and paying her, then too bad for you. Weird.

Y'know what really reminds me of a volkswagon? GNU/Linux. Think about it:
-It's compact, resource efficient
-The engine is in back (no particular advantage, it's just unfamiliar at first)
-It's got this cool sorta counter-cultural vibe thing
-There are at least a billion people who can do basic maintenance (oil change) on it, and there are millions who can do more advanced repair work, and there are probably a hundred thousand who basically grok it.

Some more fun points:
Fedora Core reminds me of a Corvette (maybe just the sound?)
SELinux reminds me of an armored car
Knoppix reminds me of those bicycles they have lying around all over Austin, where you can just take one, get where you're going, then go back to your normal mode of transportation. Or keep using the bicycle. Except instead of bicycles it's Corvettes.
Gentoo reminds me of Kit, from Knight Rider

Windows reminds me ...
... of ...
I dunno, a city bus? It goes to predefined spots. It tries to cater to everyone's needs, so it makes all sorts of extra stops that have nothing to do with you. It's usually ugly. It's inefficient (Cf. buses that can hold 80 people and usually have 5 on them). If it's broken, then well you just don't get to use it today, and you hope that whoever's in charge will fix it soon. And you always feel stuck, sitting with a bunch of people who seem unhappy about being on the bus.

Oh, one other thing: the cars are all free, including the armored cars and Lamborghinis. The bus costs $400 for the Home Edition and $1,000 or something for "Pro".

ZCE

2005-08-16T10:35:00.000-07:00

I'm cool. Congratulate me. Also, pay me more money.

H.R.2795

2005-08-11T11:38:00.000-07:00

Introduced 6/8/05 which I think means June 8, not August 6, so I'm a little behind the times.

But not as far behind as Congress, which has seen fit to draft some Patent Reform legislation that ... fasten your seatbelts ... says Precisely Nothing about software patents -- the most controversial, the most critical problem with the current patent system.

So what was so urgently in need of reform? Well, there's good stuff in there. Damages for infringement are limtied, injunctions are harder to obtain, and the best: a "Post-grant Opposition Procedure". (Don't read the bill. Read this.)

mmm... opposition...

I think I'm resolving, from now on, to do more opposition. Dennis Crouch (no relation) parrots the same ol' stance, the Martin Fink stance: viz. "software patents suck, but such is the world, so make sure you get some".

Fink! Crouch! Question in the back from the little guy with the PokerStars hat:
"What if I don't have $200,000+ to assemble a software patent portfolio?"

(sound of crickets chirping)

The actual answer, "Then you can't get in the software business", is something Fink et el. do not want to say. Because they would meet with quite a bit of opposition, I think.

Interlude: Fink's company, HP, is primarily a hardware company, so there is a good chance they're not Too Terribly Evil. I hope that most of the 1500+ patents they acquire each year are for actual machines/devices/hardware, and not for emoticons.

Still, I resolve to stay on top of this. I might even hack up a system to make "opposition" easier. That'd be fun. It'd be like Groklaw II.

DUIEBGAV*

2005-08-05T08:09:00.000-07:00

3

---------------------------------------------------
*"Days Using Internet Explorer Before Getting A Virus"

JoS

2005-08-04T05:18:00.000-07:00

Joel nails it again. Seems like the quality of this guy's pieces started out Very Good and has steadily climbed ever since.

Links in there led me eventually to a pretty authoritative declaration that "incentives" are, as a general rule , counterproductive. Someone needs to tell the econodwarf.

I'm with Joel; the iPod is Amazing Design. Looking at the image, something occurred to me:

It looks like a freaking screenshot of a media player on your desktop. Seamless, the beveled/shadowed sides, the simple and spacious control wheel. I actually have a hard time believing that this is a photograph of a physical object.

What does that do for the user? I think it subconsciously makes himher feel like part of some futuristic world, one that I've fantasized about, with interactive display screens floating in physical space. You use your finger instead of a mouse. Real Minority Report type stuff. More of this, please.

DRM

2005-08-01T04:31:00.000-07:00

*sigh ... looks like my readership has declined by about 100%... well, I have some stuff to say anyway.

Recent news that Apple is hitching their newest wagon to the DRM star foments the usual dumb arguments about how proper and acceptable it is for developers of software/content to try to recoup their investment. So, at the risk of repeating things that have been said before, let's dig in with a fun analogical leap:

He's already licking his ass!

The problem with DRM is not that it's inherently immoral to pursue profits. The problem with DRM is that it's 0% effective at dealing with piracy. The pirate is deliberately copying, maybe reselling, large and sometimes vast amounts of copyrighted material. Heshe is already breaking the law -- the one against breaking copyright.

For fun, I will grant the defenders of DRM something that is ludicrous as hell: that digital goods are as valuable as diamonds. It is illegal to steal diamonds. But people do it anyway! There are several possible responses to this situation:
-Make the punishment for stealing diamonds harsher, until it is no longer worth the risk
-Lock up your diamonds tighter, thereby diminishing their value-in-use, which is to be shown off, perhaps on a necklace, etc.

The first approach maximizes the downside risk of stealing, the second one maximizes the effort required. But both act on the thief-to-be's motivational equation:
Profit (P) - Effort (E) > Risk (R)
When this evaluates to "true", a lawbreaker-type person might steal diamonds.

DRM represents an out-of-the-box (and stupid) third way:
1. Attach an apparatus to every diamond, so that it can be located at all times.
2. Make it illegal to remove this apparatus.

You've solved (salved?) the problem by geolocating every good, honest person who wears or likes diamonds. And by giving thieves a second, and fairly trivial, law to break.

The problem with DRM is that it abridges people's freedom to control their computers, and provides precisely nothing in exchange.

That equation thing was fun ... here's code for the DRM world:
if ($lawbreaker) {
  $upside = $profit - $effort;
  if ($upside > $risk) {
    /*here's the addition that DRM proposes, and that proponents claim is worth the sacrifice of above-mentioned freedom*/
    if (!$lawbreaker) {
      return "curses! ".foiled_by(DRM);
    }else{
      steal(stuff);
    }
  }
}

FAH

2005-07-30T14:39:00.000-07:00

Quick note ... go down a little further for meaty articles.

Been using UDAgent to soak up my laptop's unused cycles, but always wanted them to develop a Linux client. Instead there were directions on how to make it fly in WINE ... I haven't got time for WINE right now.

But I just found Stanford's incarnation, which has a Linux console client. Get crunching.

AMZN

2005-07-30T09:36:00.000-07:00

Was hoping to see something about this at my favorite blog, but I guess I'll have to strike the match.

Might as well fisk...(Source)
"Amazon, in its latest filing, is seeking to patent its idea for creating a marketplace where third-party Web services providers can link up with consumers."
-ideas are not supposed to be patentable
-creating a marketplace where providers of X can link up with consumers is not AMZN's idea. It was invented by Wal Mart in 1962. Before that, there were no marketplaces anywhere. (I'm just kidding)

"In the marketplace, consumers can search for Web services and read comments and reviews from others who have used the service."
-looking for products and reading about them does not strike me as very new.

"Amazon can also provide the suppliers of these services with assurances that only authorized consumers can access their offerings."
-Providing assurances to your vendors that only authorized consumers can buy their products does not strike me as new.
-What's an authorized consumer?
-I think it means that AMZN won't be activating webservices until they know the identity of the purchaser.
-Identifying people before you hand over the things they have purchased does not strike me as new.

"its marketplace technology seeks to address the lack of easy-to-use methods for collecting consumers' Web services payments, as well as to provide Web services companies with ways to manage and monitor their offerings"
-Easy-to-use methods for collecting payments does not strike me as new.
-Providing vendors with editable information about what they are vending does not strike me as new.

This is getting tiresome, but one last point: AMZN has not heard of google, or UDDI, or I guess anything WS-related.
"Current Web services implementations do not typically provide effective means for potential consumers to discover or locate Web services"

This, of course, is not the first time AMZN has gone beyond the pale, so hopefully we're agreed that there's a Problem. Big one. Solutions?

Obvious and Immediate:
1. Cease using AMZN for anything.
Plausibility: piece o' cake. Impact: little
2. Build an interface for convenient consumption/purchasing of registered webservices, and pray to Heaven that AMZN sues you and makes you famous.
Plausibility: not tough (a few days of coding). Impact: could be zero, or huge, depending on AMZN's response.

Larger:
3. I liked the idea of making it a crime (fraud) to attempt to patent something that meets a certain standard of obviousness and frivolousness. Right now there's little to lose (except the $10K application fee) in AMZN's approach of just scatter-shooting patent applications and see what sticks.
Plausibility: dunno. Impact: meh. Might just foment a whole new batch of lawsuits over the standard of frivolousness.
4. Immediate and complete revocation of the USPTO's ability to grant patents on computer-implemented inventions.
Plausibility: slim. Impact: Huge
5. Move to Europe/Asia/????, where this debate is still a going concern.
Plausibility: wavers. Impact: on me, personally, pretty substantial. The American software industry could care less, but is marching steadily toward irrelevance.
6. Go into some other line of work, not related to the Internet, or software, or pretty much computers at all.
Plausibility: wavers. Impact: vis-a-vis software patents, a great deal. But vis-a-vis annoying abuses of power, it'd be six of one half dozen of the other in pretty much any industry.

KDE et C

2005-07-25T08:53:00.000-07:00

I'm now on my first KDE desktop since ... well, I guess since a brief stint with MEPIS on my laptop, but before that it had been since Mandrake 7.3 -- my very first Linux box.

My, how times have changed. I remember KDE being very ugly; it's not. Also it's responsive as hell -- maybe that's the Gentoo behind it, but I also have fluxbox on here and I don't notice a big difference. Will do some tougher crunching and report more later.

Y'know what would probably go over big with hackers looking into PHP5 migration? A simple little set of scripts that could move you from your standard LAMP setup in /var/www/ to a XAMPP one in /opt/lampp. Just a thought. Three times I've done this procedure, moving the databases, the phpmyadmin, getting the permissions right. Kinda tedious. Who wants to help? I think it could be a quick, semi-interactive shell script.

Last: congrats to Maypole, Linux Journal's library-of-the-year, which I am still determined to refactor in P5. Got the code and took the first few baby steps poking around in it. Looks tight. Anyone who knows more about architecture want to help?

You basically send a URL like site.com/company/edit/41 and Maypole does the rest, providing a form to edit company with primary key #41. There is in fact no "company" directory or any of that other stuff, just a URL to be parsed. That is not exactly how I thought it worked, and that is not how Xaypole works ... should it?

Quote of the Month

2005-07-19T17:18:00.000-07:00

"I have begged critics of the system, such as The Register's Andrew Orlowski, to explain to me how Creative Commons works or what it's supposed to do that current copyright law doesn't do. He says, 'It does nothing.'"
John C. Dvorak
http://www.pcmag.com/article2/0,1895,1838244,00.asp

Note to self: if someone's assessment of X is based on statements made by critics of X, raise red flag slightly.

"I have begged critics of formalized religion, such as atheists.org, to explain how the Catholic Church works, and they say "It's a sham".

Dvorak goes on: "Okay, then why are bloggers and do-gooders and various supporters making a point of tagging their material as being covered by Creative Commons? Is it just because it's cool and trendy—a code for being hip amongst a certain elite? There is no other answer."

Um. ...

"then why are do-gooders and [whatev] making a point of getting up every Sunday and praying, etc. Is it just because they have a crush on Richard Roberts? There is no other answer."

...so you're probably picking up on the fact that I'm not real impressed with Dvorak's analysis. He's not done.

"...others have certain rights to reuse the material under a variety of provisos, mostly as long as the reuse is not for commercial purposes. Why not commercial purposes? What difference does it make, if everyone is free and easy about this?"
AH, there it is."CC licensors are anticapitalist, blah blah blah". Never mind that many of the CC licenses allow commercial uses if that's your taste.

"There's another thing that bugs me about Creative Commons. When you see its licenses the wording will say something like 'Creative Commons License: Public domain.' This means that the item is not covered by copyright but is in the public domain"

hm... well, i tried, but the word "public domain" doesn't appear on
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-nc/2.5/legalcode
or
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.5/legalcode
or
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/sampling+/1.0/legalcode

and at this point i got tired and assumed Dvorak was just making stuff up. If he encountered the line "Creative Commons License: Public doman" somewhere, I'd love to see a reference. Also I can go ahead and guess that what it means is that the $%@^ing license -- not the work -- is in the public domain. i.e. Dvorak and anyone else can copy the license and try to make a living off of it.

Um, but hey ... ALL those licenses contain a sentence like this:
"THE WORK IS PROTECTED BY COPYRIGHT AND/OR OTHER APPLICABLE LAW. ANY USE OF THE WORK OTHER THAN AS AUTHORIZED UNDER THIS LICENSE OR COPYRIGHT LAW IS PROHIBITED."

UPDATE: I figured out, I think, that he means that if you go to creative commons and choose "public domain" as the license you want to use, you get this little icon with the creative commons logo in it, and the words "public domain". This is Definitely Something to Get Your Jockstrap in a Gordian Knot About.

Big wrapup coming:
"Apparently simplicity was more than some people could handle, so they invented Creative Commons to add some artificial paperwork and complexity to the mechanism. And it seems to actually weaken the copyrights you have coming to you without Creative Commons. Oh, brother!"

OMG pcmag needs their money back ... every cent they've ever paid this guy. Mr. D, that is the whole and entire point of the whole thing. That -- as opposed to "nothing" -- is what it does. So you didn't need to ask those critics anyway, did you? You found the answer all by your lonesome: CC licenses are a way to give people (and tell them they have) certain rights to use, distribute, and modify your work, while you retain others.

It's not that hard, man. I'm going to explain it to my 3-year-old, and I'm putting even odds that he'll get the idea.

NetFlickin'

2005-07-19T06:01:00.000-07:00

oh dear oh dear this is dangerous. I don't picture myself ever darkening the door of a Blockbuster again. I am a netflix junkie.

Sounds annoying at first: when you want a movie, you want it now, don't you? You don't want to wait for it to arrive in the mail. In actual practice, you don't really notice the wait. Kudos to:
-whoever came up with the idea of the queue ... I put twentysomething DVDs in mine after about 15 minutes of searching
-whoever designed the peel-and-fold-and-stick return envelopes. It seems like such a little point, but it matters. If returning the disc were even the slightest bit unwieldy, the whole business could collapse. I'm not joking.

Criticism:
Like just about EVERY "recommendation system" on the net, this one is dumb as a post. This is because computers are dumb as posts (except for the ones that run Gentoo). Example:

I tell Netflix that I liked the movie "Hero". A lot. This does not mean that I want to watch every Jet Li (or Bruce Lee ?!?!?) movie ever made. What's missing is some communication about why I like "Hero". If I could get that across, even the posts could figure out that I'd like "Raise the Red Lantern" more than "Fists of Fury 3".

Well, this is an example (like REST) where you gotta make do I guess. Improving the intelligence of the algorithm probably requires a serious increase in how much your users have to contribute*, and (like the peel-and-fold-and-stick envelopes) users don't contribute %^##% unless you make it staggeringly easy.

*e.g.: you'd need an Allocation-style assessment of the film/music/whatev instead of a 1-to-5 star rating system.
Acting:          200 ------------- 1000
Writing:      200 ------------- 1000
Production   200 ------------- 1000
Genre           200 ------------- 1000

Maybe the (relatively few) users who are opinionated enough to do this would be sufficient...

HE

2005-07-01T05:49:00.000-07:00

Well, it comes and it goes, doesn't it:

Limit (mostly 2/4 and 3/6) at Pokerchamps: -$121
No-Limit, also at Pokerchamps: -$267

HOWEVER, the pain is alleviated by one thing: I have not mentioned the rolling weekly pokerchamps rakeback program, which they offer in addition to the $500 bonus that I will clear ... someday ... if I don't keep losing like that. Here are the weekly payouts:
June 3: 39
June 10: 47
June 17: 37
June 24: 28
July 1: 41

Total: 192

Doesn't quite put me in the black, but that's poker
Net: -$196

Whoa.

2005-06-17T13:51:00.000-07:00

So a little bird told me that Gentoo makes better use of yr hardware, and I decided to try it out. Ran into some of the usual fun headaches that make life interesting, but finally got going. I'd also heard that fluxbox is a nice little high-speed desktop, so I started that up instead of my usual gnome.

Some numbers:
both boxes have nautilus, a couple of terminals, and a browser open.
Gentoo box is using about 22% of system memory; FC3 is using just over 50%

wanna hear something cool?
the chip that FC3 is using half of is Twice as Big as the chip that Gentoo/fluxbox is using 20% of. Here are the REAL numbers:
Gentoo/fluxbox: 60MB
FC3: 258M

then i realized FC3 was running apache and mysql daemons, so i killed them. Could that be it? New numbers:
Gentoo: 60
FC3: 253

Nope, that's not it. FC3 is just really %$^@^ topheavy. So the question is: do you need a new computer or do you need to use the one you have better?

HE

2005-06-15T09:14:00.000-07:00

Wild swinging this month -- on account of the higher stakes

That's mostly 2/4 and 3/6 at pokerchamps ... goes everywhere but ends up: +$9
No-Limit, also at pokerchamps, fared better: +$101
1/2 Limit, at pokerstars, dropped $8 in play but picked up bonus I think it was $42: net +$34
Haven't been to Richard's recently.

Total: +$144

Why pokerchamps? $500 bonus in the works -- will take another month to clear it though.

DPUG

2005-06-15T06:47:00.000-07:00

Last night's presentation rocketh, and got me inspired to upgrade everything under my power to PHP5.

Hosting companies: offer PHP5. It's time. One of the attendees said his host co. told him they didn't offer P5 'cause it was still so buggy. This is false. P5 is stable -- it is solid.

It will break your apps. Thank God. Speaking for myself, at least, I could use a little breaking of apps to force me into better habits.

To make a long story short, then, Lamp5 lives. i.e. is being resuscitated.

Wireless at Last

2005-06-11T12:11:00.000-07:00

Okay, I try not to be one of those "make it easy on me" types when it comes to Linux. I'm perfectly willing to spend an hour or so getting familiar with GRUB if I want to do something moderately complicated like e.g. install XP, DeMuDi, and FC3 on my laptop.

But ndiswrapper ... I dunno, seems kinda half finished to me sometimes. My thoughts after spending all morning fiddling with it (it flies now):

Hey ndiswrapper, why do you think you're being installed? It's 'cause I want to start using that card. Y'know, the one described by the .inf file I just pointed you to? so how about 1) modprobing yourself; and 2) going ahead and calling 'iwconfig' and/or 'ifup wlan0' ... or at least asking if I want to do that stuff?

That would save me the 30 minutes or so that I spend reading through help forums and so on.

Like I said, I'm willing to meet you halfway and stuff; a guy really ought to be able to add stuff to rc.d/ and the like so that the right stuff activates at boot time and so on. But it just seems that if there's a use to which 99% of yr downloaders are going to put your software, you might anticipate that a little better. That's all.

PS: manufacturers, build some Lx drivers. Just a couple, for the most popular distributions. Release the source. We'll do the rest for our little personalized funky distros. And we'll love you forever. That's gotta be worth something.

HE

2005-05-31T06:14:00.000-07:00

Doing an update every two weeks instead of every week now.

...Well May came in like a lion and went out like whatever animal kicks a lion's butt. Nazgul, I guess. Only one :thing more fun than moving up stakes: moving up stakes and simultaneously hitting a run of hot cards.

Limit Hold'em at gamesgrid: +$42
Limit Hold'em at pokerchamps: +$134
No-limit Hold'em at pokerchamps: +$275
Memorial Day freezeout tournament: -$50 (buyin)
*btw congrats to Richard, who won this thing and $350!
NL at richard's: -$9

Total: +$392

Meh

2005-05-23T05:39:00.000-07:00

Burn me at the stake if you need to, but ick. My ranking for the six films remains:
1. Episode V
2. Episode IV
Tied for last place: all the others

In fact I'm not going to spend much energy analyzing/organizing my thoughts; I'll just scatter 'em around.

(Spoilers Ahead)
-Little or no context for the "political" developments ... I never figured out what was at risk in the Republic's slide into empire/tyranny. "Separatists" are mentioned a couple time ... who are they and what do they want? Do they eventually become the Rebel Alliance? That would be good to know/see. Also: who exactly are the Sith again? Just that one guy? And what are they avenging?
-You will read in many places that Anakin's seduction by the dark side is gradual and believable. It is not. True, if I thought my wife were in danger there's a lot I'd do to protect her. But murdering a dozen or so 8-year-olds in my religion's holiest site would require a little extra somethin'-somethin', as they say.
-I found the allusions to contemporary (real-world) geopolitics & attitudes heavy-handed and incoherent. Obi-Wan to Anakin: "Only a Sith Lord deals in absolutes" ... shortly thereafter (or therebefore, I forget) Anakin to Obi-Wan "From my point of view, the Jedi are evil". So which one is the relativist? And is that bad?

It's now a moot point, but if someone wants to remake the last 3 films, here's two words that could Drastically Improve your Mileage:
Han Solo

I don't mean that we need to see the 10-year-old Solo applying to pilot school, or whatever. I mean that Solo's character provided many of the things that made 4,5, and 6 "work" so much better than 1,2, and 3. Wherever and however you can get them in there, you need:

-Skepticism: everyone in the pre-trilogy is so damn sincere that it's almost impossible to listen to them. Solo provided balance, and an onscreen voice for that part of the viewer that thinks the Force sounds likea a bunch of mumbo-jumbo.
-Arrogance: a cocky bastard onscreen does a tremendous amount for what they call "chemistry" ... Solo making passes at Leia, shooting Greedo, bragging about the Mill. Falcon ... these bits engage the audience with recognizable human behavior.
-Moral Ambivalence: If I remember correctly, Solo was a smuggler, thoroughly egocentric, but intensely loyal. A pirate and a good man, as Johnny Depp would say. I'd rather have him on my side than Mace Windu any day.

What did you think?

Libraries, Lotteries, and again with the Libertarians - Longest Post Ever!

2005-05-19T08:52:00.000-07:00

I. Introductory Remarks on the Work of Philosophy

There are, admittedly, just as many bad philosophers as bad anything-else. I recall the early days of the web, when every nouveau-cyperpunk had a "Philosophy" tab at the top of hisher home page, and that this invariably linked to half-page free-verse poems about how damn mysterious this cup of coffee is if you really think about it, and how nothing is true but Everything is One Great Truth, etc.

Philosophers are not good at finding more absolute truths, or truths more absolute, than other people. And they do not necessarily investigate truths more abstract (less practical) than the other sciences. What good philosophers are good at is quite simple: Showing how truths lead to other truths. When this is done deductively, it can give the impression that philosophy is very abstract/disconeected from the real world. But there is also good inductive philosophy; physics in fact was formerly called natural philosophy, and through Newton's time consisted largely of thinking. When reliable laws of mechanics were in place, the foundation existed for hard and separate experimental study of the world, and natural philosophy began to be called the philosophy of science. This is repeated over and over again with various disciplines: philosophy of mind->psychology, political philosophy->social sciences, logic->mathematics->computer science.

If many philosophers are in the habit of telling you what truths you should hold, I apologize on their behalf. They ought to be showing how truths that you do hold lead to other truths that perhaps you don't realize you hold. Or at least lead to a discussion of other truths you hadn't entertained. A far cry from "philosophical banter which makes discourse completely useless (which seems to be the ultimate goal of all philosophical discussions)"

So when I speak about the "right" definition of property, or of coercion, or anything else, it's not to say everyone must submit to it. Mostly I'm describing what definition ought to be employed by the State, because of its power (established in a social contract) to abridge its citizens' rights under certain circumstances.

II. Libraries
The question of public libraries came up in email. I'm in favor of them, and do not think they constitute a forced purchase of Enlightenment. I think that is what they provide, but not through forced purchase, because enlightenment is not a commodity. Enlightenment is just a normal, public, freely-duplicatable good (like software (: ). There isn't much profit to be had from such goods, except under special, unjust situations: suppose a fascist regime where reading/learning are banned in the case of enlightenment, or an IP regime with artificially high barriers to entry in the case of software. A profit-driven free market isn't the most efficient provider of public goods. That isn't an absolute truth derived from a theory of justice; it's a demonstrable fact of history, analytically explained by the free-rider problem.

Anyway, I think the ideal government is basically a firm, democratically organized, for producing such goods: defense, education, networking infrastructure (in this I include roads as well as broadband). This accords, in part, with libertarian principles, and I am more or less on a quest to see how much so. Perhaps I am a minarchist though I'm not terribly fond of some of the names on their list.

Like libertarians, I distrust state power. I think states -- as authority -- have a mandate ONLY to secure people's rights -- life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness are the first few that come to mind. But states are not simply authorities. They enter into the economic picture as market agents, like it or not, and the difficulty is in defining their role carefully: what can/should the state purchase, and what can/should it produce? How should it do these things?

The public goods mentioned above are examples of things I feel the state should produce -- not because that's the only way to get them produced, but because evidence so far suggests that's the most efficient way, just as well-defined property rights have proven to be the most efficient way to allocate physical property (btw Allocation should be the name of that class we're trying to name).

All this can change. Information and search costs could be reduced so dramatically that barter again becomes the most efficient way to allocate physical property. Taking it further: suppose teleportation becomes feasible. This would support the libertarian-socialist theory of physical property -- i.e. what I am not presently using can by natural right be appropriated and used by someone else. Why not? I can zap whatever right over here whenever I need it, unless it's something really unusual like a fusion reactor, in which case I'll have to join a waiting list maybe.

III. Lotteries
So people should be free to enter into whatever sort of transactions they want to. I agree. When I say this or that property law -- physical or intellectual -- is "right" I don't mean that's the only mode by which people should be allowed to interact. Only that the nature of things -- which is a subject of philosophy -- determines the natural rights that accrue to them. So physical things because they are physical, imply a property right on the principle that something I'm holding onto and using cannot be taken from me without physical violence being done to me. Because I am human, physical violence cannot be done to me unless I started it.

Hence the right of the state to put you in jail if you cold-cock me and take my trophy. But I can freely sell it to you for $1 (if I'm stupid) or $100,000,000 (if you're stupid). Libertarian principles don't care about that -- but they care very much about what the state can do.

Now if I write a song or a blog, and you copy/sell/distribute it, should the state have the power to jail you? We agree that it does not, because no physical coercion is necessary. We also agree that I can sell you a CD with that song on it for $10 (if you're stupid) or $100 (if you're really stupid). As you suggest, the definition of property is irrelevant, as long as the two agents agree. This is pluralism.

Let's see... what was this section called again... oh yeah

Lotteries are big, complex transactions entered into freely by all agents. They are also, in aggregate, a rotten deal for purchasers. Empirically, they end up being basically a voluntary tax on the poor. As voluntary, they are perfectly permissible on libertarian grounds. But from an ethical standpoint they're pretty awful.

Suppose I decide I don't want to work anymore, and instead I set myself up as a lottery, sell tickets, and take 30% off the top. People who buy my tickets are being screwed. In an individual person (me) these actions would ellicit assorted judgments: "he's a bad person," "that's not nice," "wow, he's crafty," "nice job figuring out a way to take advantage of people's wealth-fantasies for your own gain instead of doing any productive work". I'm free, everyone's free, and I might or might not care about any of these judgments about me.

The problem is that the State is the only agent with whom you are compelled to do business as long as you reside there. A "voluntary tax" is oxymoronic if you think about it. The state has a mandate to accomplish X (disagree all you want on what X includes) and permission to impose the compulsory taxes required to accomplish that. If the state is incompetent to balance its budget, it doesn't get to tromp into the marketplace and set up a business (a lottery, a hardware store, or anything else), because it also serves as an authority over that marketplace, and its presence alongside other businesses is inherently anti-competitive.

This is an objection to state-run lotteries on libertarian principles. I'm curious about your reaction, because there are implications beyond the lottery.

HE

2005-05-17T13:31:00.000-07:00

May has been lackluster so far...

1/2 Limit at ********: -$27
.5/1 and 1/2 at EmpirePoker: -$16
Richard's Game: -$15
SNGs at PokerStars: +$30
=-$28

ick... Thank god for bonuses:
********: +$70
Empire: +$97.5

Net: $139.5

"The Unspoken Third"

2005-05-16T07:06:00.000-07:00

Inspiration at last, and from a source I increasingly rely on for exactly that:
Eben Moglen

29:30 -- "every system continues to maintain that government must control how spectrum is used. Sometimes, quite explicitly, for the purpose of remaining itself in power. Sometimes in the claim of some civilizing mission on the belief that government and only government can really artfully determine who ought to speak to the masses in the interest of the expansion of knowledge. And sometimes, as in my society, out of sheer venality: we, the politicians, have taken bribes from you, the media owners, and we will faithfully reflect the interests of our masters who have put us in. But whatever the reason ... spectrum allocation is an evil whose time has come"

Around 35:00 we get a lovely passage [i]contra[/i] the notion that building/supporting free software, even for moral/political reasons, is a mythical realm of academic dreaming

Out of those parts -- free software, free hardware, free culture, and free spectrum -- we build a society of justice, of equality, of liberty. Not in the belief that if we somehow force the aristocrats outs, later society will become perfect. Not out of a belief that there's some class needing liquidation, and then we imagine human beings can change. Not a dream about nowhere, but an attempt to move what we have within our apartments, within our workplaces, within our schools, out into the karger world where it can begin to fulfill its perfectly legitimate, necessary, inevitable work of liberation.

And the usual high quality humor: "It is true that up until now we have dealth with unshrewd opposition. The Microsoft monopoly was not smart in its dealings with free software. More stupid than the recording industry it would be difficult to get."

Imm. following (46:25): a hilarious tale of Moglen liberating a Starbucks.

And then the meat -- the stuff I want to talk to the libertarians about.

"Security is one aspect of the claim made in support of [trusted computing] hardware. Privacy, the control of personal data from inappropriate use is yet another. And of course the protection of the content manufacturers against distribution competition is the unspoken third."

shortly thereafter "it is less about 'can we make manufacturers do what we want?' than about whether we can make consumers demand what they need."

"The problem for the telecoms companies is they have very high fixed costs of construction and we can build more cheaply than they can. This is the fundamental difficulty in their model. I grant you that their model is smarter than the recording industry model -- they have not yet decided that the way to deal with this is to put children in jail. But we can make them go that way, you understand, by building over them, and that's what we're gonna do. And then they will face, ultimately, the same problem that is now faced by the dead distribution businesses: how much coercion can they get the state to apply in support of their business model."

PWNT!

2005-05-06T10:29:00.000-07:00

pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt pwnt

I think I'm going to collect and post here some links and quotes for every Congressional representative who has something to say about this. Next election cycle we can review these notes and throw out the correct persons. Just a thought.

HE

2005-05-01T14:18:00.000-07:00

Just a tiny bit ... as a break from hacking...

1/2 Limit at ********: +$24
games at Richard's house: +$94
Multitable tourney at stars -$22

total +$96

DD is Dead! Long Live DB

2005-04-26T06:22:00.000-07:00

"DD" stands for "Dear Darl" and was going to be a column here consisting of open letters to the CEO of The SCO Group. I wrote one, and it was so-so, but before I could turn around thrashing SCO went old hat. Blogologically, it's about as interesting as discussing the Florida recount (or the Ohio one, if that's your taste).

So on we go with the first installment of a column called "DB", which stands for "Dear Bill". I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out the rest.

Dear Bill,

You recently had an interview that existed partially to correct your strange statements from a previous interview. In case you've forgotten, here's a refresher

Gizmodo: When you talked to CNet (I believe that was yesterday), you sort of ticked off some of the blog world with some of the comments… a specific comment that was made, about some of the IP advocates—people that are advocating more… not necessarily open source, but Creative Commons and things like that. A less restrictive IP environment. You made an analogy and called them “communist.”

Do you feel that’s necessarily a fair judgment to make, to call those people ‘communists,’ as opposed to someone who adopts DRM as maybe… a ‘capitalist?’ (I don’t know what you’re thinking the opposite would be).

Gates: No, no, no. I didn’t say those people were ‘communists.’ I did say that they’re… The question is: what incentive systems should exist in the world? Call ‘communism’ a system where [in] the extreme case you believe that the idea of the individual getting lots of wealth in return for the things they do… that that’s wrong. If you have no incentive for individual excellence and it’s just sort of, you know, banned. All the way up to an extreme that nobody would believe in, that there’s no redistribution of wealth and that’s there’s no expiration of rights and control. So you have this huge spectrum.

Well, Bill, you're right about one thing: that is, indeed, the question. You didn't answer it, so Greg London answered it for you. (Since that page is very long, I'll sum it up even though it's worth reading: the incentive systems that should exist are the ones that are most efficient, obtaining e.g. "the promotion of science and the useful arts" at the least expense to society.)

You are, however, wrong about another thing, and it happens to be something I know a little bit about.

Gates: Well, ignore DRM for a second. Should an artist that creates a great song be paid for that song? That’s where you have to start. You don’t start with DRM. DRM is just like a speed bump that reminds you whether you’re staying within the scope of rights that you have or you don’t. So you don’t start with DRM. That’s like saying, ‘Do you believe in speed bumps?’ You have to say, ‘Should people drive at 80mph in parking lots?’ If you think they should, then of course you don’t like speed bumps.

It is clear, here and elsewhere in your interviews, that you don't go very deep into questions, or analogies, to figure out whether they are meaningful.* Suppose someone decides actually to ponder this question: should an artist that creates a great song be paid for that song?

As an artist who has created several good songs and half of a great one, I immediately think "yes". Then I think

Will the aforementioned artist be paid?

That, alas, depends on a great number of things, the most important of which is the collective economic decision-making power of the free market, which I assume you've heard of.

As for your speedbumps metaphor, I don't mind issuing you a gentle correction.

-Speedbumps are minor inconveniences, placed on roads, that reduce the chance of a driver hurting people

The differences between this set of relations and DRM are numerous
-Making copies of digital works & ideas does not hurt anyone. So it is more like a technology that prevents people from driving, say, east than from driving too fast.
-DRM does not slow down the making of copies -- it stops it outright. So it is more like a wall than a bump
-DRM technology is placed in the computer -- i.e. in the car. So it is more like having every car come with an RIAA executive who is in charge of operating the radio. You can, I guess, still control the power button, but when you turn it on she gets to pick the station.

I'm sure you would like people not to think too much about DRM, because it changes, fundamentally, the act of operating a computer. It becomes a collaborative effort. Now, if I use Windows I have outsourced -- voluntarily -- a lot of low-level OS functions because I don't want to worry about them. The trade-off is that I don't control every aspect of my computer's behavior. As it turns out, I use Linux, so the level of control I have over my machine depends solely on my willingness to learn about it.

You and the other DRM advocates propose that we change that. You would like there to be a component of my computer, required by law, that I do not control. Why? Because an artist should be paid for writing a great song. DRM opponents reply that, indeed, they should -- but this is too high a price to pay.

Sincerely,
Matthew Crouch

PS: Artists for File Sharing believes that artists should and can be paid for their work without surrendering control over their computers or the Internet to the established content-providing institutions.
----------------------------------------------------------

*I have a theory that Windows users tend toward a mild form of ADD, because their reading/writing/surfing activities are so frequently interrupted by crashes, annoyware, etc. Just a theory. (Also, just a joke ... but it's one of those jokes that makes you think)

The MASOTY awards

2005-04-22T12:53:00.000-07:00

BTetC is now accepting nominations for the annual MASOTY awards.

There are currently 3 awards, with plans to add more until damn near every noun that starts with "S" is accounted for.

Most Annoying Software Of The Year
Most Annoying Song Of The Year
Most Annoying Senator Of The Year

Winners will be decided by, well ... me, but feel free to try to influence me however you want. The prize will be that I rip into the winners on my blog for, like, I dunno a day or so.

Post nominees in the comments here.

HE

2005-04-20T09:51:00.000-07:00

as per "my own personal conclave" below, I'm not playing right now, but last week when I was I did goot

cleared $150 bonus at empire. lost $30 in play.
deposited at TheGamingClub to take advantage of a bonus. Had my facts wrong... no bonus for me. Played a bit, cashed out and moved on, net +$50
really tasty session at *********** +$73
single solitary $10 S&G at stars: PWNT! First place +$34
assorted MTT buyins: -$45

Total: +$232

Ratz

2005-04-19T11:52:00.000-07:00

It's not disappointing that Ratzinger turns out to be the man, but that, as usual, the coverage is all about the conflict, all about the controversy. So, when there are so many helpful things that could be said we get bites like "Ratzinger was head of the office formerly known as the Inquisition." and "He was chief of the Vatican Thought Police."

Ick, I could go on and on but still have work to do.

14 hours later...

2005-04-18T13:01:00.000-07:00

tux root #emerge --pretend gnome | grep -c ebuild
7

I leave it as an exercise for the reader to figure out what that means. Back to work.

My own personal conclave

2005-04-17T06:47:00.000-07:00

Okay, I've gotta finish this front-end pronto. No bloggery & no poker 'til it's at version 1.0. Anyone wanna help? Yes, I'll pay you. Yes, I know you're busy. No, it won't take days and days -- two phat ones oughta do it. If I can't get this thing live soon I think the account is in peril. And I love this account.

Ick.

Oh, and I don't know how I missed this. Dang.

Jeb Hensarling, Federalist?

2005-04-15T05:54:00.000-07:00

Too bad this act is necessary, or perceived to be so:
OFSA

Many of my readers might be unaware that there was an anti-bill-of-rights contingent in the public square at the time of the Constitution's drafting. Were these proto-fascists, bent on exploiting and abusing basic human rights? How could they be opposed to such fundamental protections? What sort of sick mind operates like that?

Alas, nothing too exciting to see here; it was just the Federalist The argument was thus: since the Constitution does not grant Congress the right to abridge free speech, there is no reason to prohibit it from doing so. In fact there is a danger in it -- it implicity widens the scope of government action, thus:
-I say you can do A,B, and C
-I then say you cannot do D nor E
All of a sudden F & G come back NULL -- can you do them or not?

Contrast with a simpler situation:
-I say you can do A,B, and C
-That's all I say
Not only are D & E just as off-limits as before, but there is no longer any doubt about F & G. And any other powers you might be tempted to snatch up over the next couple hundred years.

Well, that's the argument at least. Libertarians should love it.

Now the quote from Hensarling's letter:
"Unfortunately, a federal judge has ruled that the FEC's previous broad exemption of the Internet was impermissible absent clear direction from Congress. Within the next sixty days, the FEC is expected to finalize rules and regulations that could squash not only free speech and citizen activism, but could well impede innovation and technology"

Now I'm in favor of Campaign Finance Reform Done Right (CFRDR), and haven't studied up whether the '02 law is part of that, but this sequence is a little odd
-CFR bill regulates certain acts of speech and activism
-FEC makes an exception for this stuff when it occurs on the Net
-Judge rules that FEC needs an explicit exclusion of Net speech; that gov can regulate there until told otherwise.

Ick.

IP

2005-04-12T05:02:00.000-07:00

I was recently informed that

"a copyright creates ownership by NATURAL right of a thing AND the copies of that thing"

which, plainly, is buncombe. So I was encouraged when I saw from the same writer that "the concept of intellectual property, which itself is an oxymoron, is not sound...". This, plainly, is not buncombe.

Rather than continue that discussion in comments, I thought I'd start afresh, clarifying my position and hopefully that of my collocutor. Eureka: he says "BUT, as I said, if an idea or theory or thought has been put into a physical form, and by that I mean a form physical enough that it can contain a self-evident notice of ownership (ie, digital objects with copyrights), then ownership of that particular object IS valid"

This seems to mean only that when I produce physical manifestations of my ideas, I own those objects. True enough. But this is because I own all the physical objects I produce. Copyright and patent are about the right to control subsequent copies, manifestations, and derivative works. They are invalid vis-a-vis natural law because the ideas standing behind the manifestation are non-scarce & non-alienable. Obtaining them does not diminish their original owner, or constitute any sort of aggression against that owner. I have said all this before.

Since I have read a good chunk of Rothbard's book, I feel fine linking An Alternate View. Incidentally, I was well pleased to find, partway through that article, that Rothbard is counted among the opponents of patent & copyright (he holds the view that a copyright owner can reserve rights and therefore holds sway over use of his work by contractual agreement -- note, not by natural right; an analysis of this view and its problems also occurs in the linked article).

The critical thing there is that:

"..creation and labor-mixing indicate when one has occupied -- and, thus, homesteaded, -- unowned scarce resources." (p. 29)

Which is to say, the rights of ownership arise from first-occupancy, not from the labor. The labor admixture is simply a good indicator of who the first occupant was. Furthermore, in this property theory the tangibility of the owned thing is assumed. Applying it without further reflection to non-scarce resources is foolhardy. The reason you can't take the first occupant's property is because you must aggress against him or her to do so.

In anything that you create, you have a sort of abstract ownership -- so we refer to "Shakespeare's MacBeth" or say that I'm my mother's son. But I can surely make copies of MacBeth or of myself, derivative works, if you please (and cute ones at that), without any permission from Shakespeare or my mother. It is because you do NOT -- by natural right -- have any control over the allocation of property unless it constitutes an agression against you.

In America, in 2005, I can make and sell all the copies of MacBeth that I want. But not Ship of Fools. It is not because the latter action does anything to Katherine Porter. Both writers being dead, my actions do nothing to them. It is merely by convention; we have a theory (growing weaker all the time) that no one will write books unless the government promises to employ its monopoly on physical force on their behalf, fining or jailing anyone that copies their book even though they suffer no harm from the copying, for 75 years.

We have also decided, as it turns out, that it's a good idea to get together every couple decades and extend the scope of that promise.

One might be tempted to suggest that if I write a book and am selling it on the market, and people make copies and sell them, I am harmed by the lost sales. This is the RIAA/MPAA's theory, and there is food for thought in it. "Lost sales" are a kind of harm, I suppose. But do not confuse it with the actual, physical violence that must be done to you in order to take away your tangible property.

HE

2005-04-11T07:24:00.000-07:00

Another above-average week; either that or (here's hoping) I have a new average:

.5/1 limit at empire: +$150
1/2 at *****(a site I won't name 'cause i don't want the word getting out): +$55
cleared $100 bonus at empire
alas, every silver lining has a cloud: dropped $50 in stars multitable tournaments
and i lost $20 at richard's house

Total: $235

Germany's Slipping

2005-04-08T17:43:00.000-07:00

The News

Windows open, gang. Top 'em off and let's take 'em over!

It Lives

2005-04-08T09:35:00.000-07:00

A4FS.net

It is just emerging from the womb, crying and stretching its arms, making weird faces and not yet opening its eyes with very impressive reliability, but nevertheless it lives.

It is not a high horse. It is a problem&solution-oriented community that wants -- in terms my economic colocutors might enjoy -- smooth out the search and transaction costs for all kinds of creative work. Hope you enjoy it.

Good and Bad Libertarians

2005-04-08T04:47:00.000-07:00

Bad libertarians are easy to spot: in any current event or conflict, they take the side of the corporation. If no corporation is involved, it'll be the more conservative public official. Maybe at least the official with the most conservative rhetoric.

I want to address the good libertarians out there. Hell, I'm practically one of you ... meh ... as much as I am a Green, or anything else. There's great stuff in the theory, but there are also complexities in action. The critical difference is between being good and bad whatever-you-are: acknowledging the complexities and the other points of view in the public square, and sincerely trying to navigate them.

Violent Crime. Why Not?
We have seen fit to criminalize an act that comes quite naturally to human animals -- the destruction of other human animals. Applying, reductio ad absurdum as it were, the laissez-faire principle, this wouldn't be necessary, would it? Eventually, people will wise up to how much cooler/better the non-murderous folks are, mate with them, and we'll just evolve ourselves a nice path out of violence.

Can't quite go that far?

Bribery. Why Not?
It is illegal to give a public official money who can make a law that favors you, or can allow you to skirt an existing law. How come? When I'm wearing my Very Libertarian hat, I say why not? Legalize it. Eventually, you'll see one of two outcomes:
1. The demos will come to see the advantages of electing non-bribable officials
2. Corporocracy. And are we sure that's bad?

Bribery is a simple transaction, from which both parties receive a benefit. But any normal person gets a whiff of this-can't-be-right at this point, so what's wrong? I submit to the good libertarians:

-The free market is not the current state of affairs, to be protected from government intrusion. Free markets are the goal.

The problem with the bribery transaction is that it tends to make the market less free; two agents in a system (whatever constituency the official represents) are conducting a deal that has effects far beyond themselves. Now I'll return to the topic of software.

The open source movement is in need of a philosopher, and I'll volunteer. I love him to death but think rms is more of a political ethicist than a "real" philosopher.

Concerning freedom, Kant pointed out that there is a negative and a positive understanding of the term. Freedom in the "negative" (that's not pejorative, btw) sense is absence-of-restriction on one's actions. In the positive sense, freedom is the faculty of initiating a causal series; freedom is creativity.

The superiority of the GPL to the X11 or the modified BSD license is in an implicit recognition of this, and of the points above regarding free markets. To place no restrictions on anyone, throw your code into the public domain. BUT ... to extend the causal series that has created the greatest technical reference library on earth, GPL it.

To trust the (presumed free) market to make most-efficient use of your code, license it "BSD-style". But to contribute to steady progress toward a free market and away from one choking on weird patents backed by weird senators, GPL it.

Ick. Blogs are supposed to be short. More later.