Qwertisms

Still don't get the fuss about SOPA?

2012-01-28T09:29:00.000-08:00

The one video everyone should see about SOPA is this one by Clay Shirky.

And if you think SOPA is going away, think again. It will change its name and be back again. In fact, the controversial ACTA treaty, which has similar goals to SOPA, is already marching toward becoming law. ACTA stands for "Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement" but it is largely focused on policing the internet and punishing individual internet users. ACTA is arguably worse than SOPA, and was known among activists even before SOPA, although the text of the treaty has been kept secret from the public until recently. The fight between citizens and Big Copyright is one that we will have to keep fighting--right now, and for a long time to come.

Warrantless wiretapping lives on

2012-01-28T08:25:00.000-08:00

It was over six years ago that people who care about the U.S. constitution were dismayed to learn about a secret U.S. government program to monitor phone and internet communications inside the U.S. and not just abroad, without regard for the fourth amendment which normally prevents blanket spying.

Of course, organizations that care about privacy, like the EFF, launched lawsuits against telecomms and the government in order to learn more about the program (discovery) and hopefully shut it down when it is proven unconstitutional. I had assumed that this program was a Bush or neoconservative thing, but then Obama voted "yes" on the bill that gave retroactive immunity to companies participating in the program, and when he became president he continued every tactic that made us complain about the Bush administration.

The retroactive immunity bill blocked the EFF's lawsuit against AT&T, including the discovery process, which leaves one lawsuit against the NSA which seems to have been stalled for a very long time. I think it's been a couple of years since I heard any news on the topic, but EFF now says their lawsuit can proceed once more. In the meantime, the program is presumably operating as before. I wonder what U.S. government spying algorithms think of my personal emails...

"The government has been using its secrecy system in absurd ways for decades, but 2011 was particularly egregious. Here are a few examples."

Against SOPA, Part 2

2012-01-15T09:36:00.000-08:00

Read part one

A few companies, but not the ones pushing SOPA, understand the right way to make money in the digital age. Valve, makers of the video game distribution system called Steam, understand. Back on slashdot, 'hairyfeet' explains:

Steam DRM is trivial to bypass for anyone but the simplest Billy Joe Bob (which is what the original DRM like CD checks was for, to get rid of casual piracy) and hacked Steam games are all over P2P yet Gabe from Valve is singing "Merry Xmas to me" while swimming in a giant pool full of money like Scrooge McDuck, why? Because he learned the way to turn pirates into customers isn't pile on the DRM and hoop jumps but to make it easy, simple, and cheap. We humans are lazy creatures by nature and if you make something simple enough and cheap enough it becomes more of a PITA to pirate than it does to simply buy it and Valve seems to get that.

Take my own case for example, I probably spent a good $200 this Steam Xmas sale between me and my two boys. Now was there a SINGLE game, even one, that I couldn't have pirated trivially? Nope in fact I could have simply used the listings on Steam and went and downloaded every single one if i desired, so why didn't I? Because Valve has made it as simple as "whip out CC, push button, get game" and their download speeds are insanely fast compared to most P2P, most of the games i bought were bundle packs where I got a pile of games in a series for one low price (such as FEAR 1 & 2 & the DLC extras for $5)or a game with ALL the DLC (which the pirated version never has, such as Just Cause II with all the DLC included for $7) and unlike the pirated version I can enjoy full MP support, I get the game automatically updated to current, I get Valve's excellent long tail game support (Such as their throwing in HL:DM when I bought the complete HL2 series which is STILL highly populated after all these years) and it even keeps my graphics drivers updated without me having to bother.

[...]

So if companies would just accept the mantra of keep it simple, easy, and cheap, put in the most simple of DRM, just to keep Billy Joe Bob from passing around copies to all his buddies, they could be making mad piles o' cash instead or trying to assrape the entire Internet with SOPA and the like. For an example of a company that didn't "get it" look at MSFT, for about 7 months I saw NOTHING but legit versions of Windows and in a small shop that's unheard of, so why did it happen? At $50 a copy the win 7 HP upgrade made it cheaper and less hassle to buy Windows than it was to pirate and $50 appears to be the sweet spot for Windows Home. Sure enough Ballmer kills the program and not 30 days later I start seeing Win 7 Ultimate everywhere because folks simply weren't willing to pay $100 for home and if they are gonna pirate why not get the biggest SKU? Make it simple, easy, and cheap, find the sweet spot on price and people WILL buy simply because its the easiest route. Throw in a couple of bonuses that pirates don't get like DLC and MP and it becomes a no brainer. I mean when I get both Max Paynes for $2.75, Butcher Bay remade in HD AND Dark Athena for $5, and JC II with over a pages worth of DLC for $7 why would I bother to pirate?

Actually, buying stuff on Steam is so easy it's scary. I don't even have to enter my credit card info; they already have it. Just a couple of clicks and you can start downloading your game (which is also automatic, no manual installation!) No wonder I've probably bought $200 in games over the past year. Because it's easier than piracy.

Look, I have a well-paying job and plenty of disposable income; why would I waste my time pirating when it's so easy not to? And as for people that don't have much disposable income, why should big companies waste so much time trying to prevent them from copying? It won't increase their bottom line that much.

(The only thing that ticks me off about Steam is that I can't return a game (*cough* F1 2010) if it won't run on my computer.)

Steam also uses sales, just like any physical store. They often put games on sale for 33%, 50%, or even 75% off. New games may not be put on sale for as much as a year, but when you go to the game store you can get a good deal on something pretty much every day. So when I'm a fan of a franchise I tend to buy at full price (e.g. Portal 2 for $50), but I also buy games I've never heard of for rock-bottom prices. I got Flatout: Ultimate Carnage for $5, which turned out to be such a terrific racing game that I bought a $90 racing wheel for it. (Sometimes I wish I could give an extra "tip" for a game that I paid very little for, if it turns out to be really good.)

Netflix is another obvious example of doing things the "right" way. $8 per month buys us access to Netflix's entire movie catalog.

Thanks to Steam, we don't pirate games at our place anymore. Thanks to Netflix, we almost never pirate movies and we don't need cable, either.

However, we are huge Dr. Who fans. As far as we know, as Canadians we don't get Dr. Who on broadcast TV and we don't know a place where we can buy it to watch at the same time it becomes available on TV. So we pirate it.

Likewise, I want to buy my music in the form of MP3s, but I am boycotting Apple and iTunes. Amazon sells MP3s, but (last I checked) they won't sell to Canadians. So guess what? I haven't bought any music for about a year. My music collection is stagnant and I feel bad about that, but it's entirely the music industry's fault (I assume it wasn't Amazon's idea to refuse sale to Canadians).

Companies that push laws like SOPA, including the three biggest record companies (Universal Music Group, Sony Music Entertainment and Warner Music Group) are not willing to adapt to what customers want. They refuse to sell the customer what they want, are dismayed that this hurts their bottom line, and then use their immense lobbying power to demand laws to fix the problem.

This behavior, unfortunately, forces our discussions to be about how bad some new bill in congress is, and how to organize against it, instead of talking about alternatives to copyright and different business models that customers like and that actually work.

The problem with copyright is that it's backwards. Copyright can't pay you a dime for actually doing the work, it only pays people by preventing other people from making copies, which, indirectly, allows authors to charge money for copies. Copyright acts as though the work that authors do is worthless, and that only the copies have value. In my opinion the opposite is true; it is the work that deserves payment, it is the product of the work that has value to society, and making copies is a necessary mechanism to let society enjoy the work. If a work actually has value to society--whether it's a "free" work like OpenOffice or a billion-dollar hit like Avatar--the value to society is increased, not diminished, by making copies and using them. So copyright's fundamental approach of banning unauthorized copies just feels wrong.

And when we look at copyright, I think we should use the right perspective. Yes, we want authors to be paid. And maybe there's an argument to be made that we should pay them for their work alone, separate from its value to society. But that should not be the fundamental goal. The fundamental goal should be to enrich society. Why should authors be paid? Because what they do is valuable to society. Because it makes the world a better place. We should pay authors not for their sake, but for our sake. If they don't get paid, authors would do much less authoring! That would be bad for society. We pay them so that we can have software, music, movies and games.

When you look at the matter this way, restricting the freedom to copy looks even more wrongheaded. Why?

First, because society is enriched the most when something can be copied freely. There are many examples of this in the software world where I work: OpenOffice, Linux, SharpDevelop and thousands of other programs and code libraries are not only free to copy, but free to modify too. Moreover, when software is truly free, all of us developers have the freedom to take useful pieces of that software and re-use it in new software, with or without customizing it to our needs. This freedom has tremendous value and is a major contributor to the rapid progress we enjoy in the software industry. But as I have discussed before, free software authors are mostly unpaid for their "free" work because there are no laws that are financially favorable to us. And unlike Viacom or Sony Pictures, we have little power to lobby congress for laws favorable to us, or to influence public discourse.

Second, because civil liberties, including the freedom to copy, are good for humanity. Quite simply, free people are happy people. So let's be skeptical of "solutions" to society's problems when the solutions involve taking away our freedoms. Some freedoms, like the freedom to kill, must be taken away, but let us not destroy more freedoms than we absolutely have to.

But of course, we can't reduce copyright's reach without proposing an alternative. I've already discussed how business models based on convenience and low or variable prices can help authors without strengthening copyright; these buniness models would continue to work equally well under weaker copyright regimes and shorter copyright terms. And over six years ago I talked about how useful a micropayment system would be. Basically, we need a system in which digital goods can be sold for prices we all can afford: 25 cents or less. And we need to be able to pay for 25-cent goods and 10-cent goods with just one click, with instant delivery.

Instead of only selling a 20-chapter paper book for $10, it could easily be more profitable to give away the first chapter and sell the others online for 25 cents each, or allow each page be read for free with a prominent advertisement and a message like "Just 25 cents to hide ads!". I suspect that per-chapter or per-page business models would work best for nonfiction and reference books, such as programming books and textbooks. If authors insist on selling the paper book for full price, they are missing out on a huge number of possible customers that are only interested in one or two chapters and wouldn't consider paying full price. If they like the chapter they buy, they may come back later to buy the rest. And authors must allow search engines to index their books, otherwise most customers will never find them.

We also need a system that teenagers can use; people without credit cards should be able to buy digital goods.

Of course, I have more radical ideas, such as directly paying authors for their work (if authors so choose) and then letting everyone worldwide to copy and remix the work for free, but for some reason a lot of people are vehemently opposed to this kind of approach, probably because it would involve taxpayer money.

In any case, bills like SOPA and PIPA are absolutely wrong. These bills should be rejected in their entirety. Ideally we would replace them with far more progressive bills, but that won't happen because most of the lobbying money comes from the old guard, the big companies that are used to easy money and only care about protecting their obsolete business methods.

Oh, and let's stop concentrating on how we can make George Lucas richer. George Lucas already made billions of dollars; why should it still be illegal after 35 years to make copies of the original Star Wars? George is free to tweak the original Star Wars (yet again!) and charge us to see the new version, but why should we still have to pay him for the old version? Most of the profits were made long time ago in a century far, far away. It's time to reduce copyright to 30 years or less. I look forward to the day when every new Smartphone comes with a built-in library of a thousand classic movies and a million out-of-print books.

Update Jan 17: Eric Cantor is "[stopping] all action on SOPA", but its Senate twin, PIPA, still lives and English Wikipedia is planning a protest blackout for tomorrow.

I'd like to add some last words from Slashdot:

We now have the technology for everyone in the world with an internet connection to access basically the entire wealth of human culture. I don't think there is ethical case to be made that this should be artificially restricted. The question we need to solve is not how we can maintain outdated business models under these circumstances, but how we can make that happen and still enable content creators to make a living. - Asic Eng

I've not been a fan of stealing content, but I'm coming around to that point of view. Copyright is a social contract where creators get something (a monopoly) in return for something (the improvement of the public domain when the monopoly expires). They're using the corruption of law to get their something without paying the something by preventing the expiration of the monopoly. Complying with this encourages corruption of law. So in the interest of good citizenship until they restore the balance of getting something in return for something, violating copyright isn't a sin: it's your civic duty. - symbolset

The right answer, if you are a copyright supporter like me, is to ease back to something that the public will be less likely to revolt against while we do some serious objective research on the problem. The right answer is to find out how we can fund the progress of science and the useful arts under this new reality. Copying does not cost any money any more. That is a fundamental change that we need to adapt to. Copyright was invented based on a premise that is no longer true. Failing to consider the new reality and research how to adapt to it is as stupid as Krushchev insisting on Communism. Nice theory, except it does not work.

We need to think about that and come up with a solution, not just fire wildly into the dark. None of the legislation over the past 15 years has made a hint of a dent in infringement. Same thing we've been saying ever since the DMCA was just a twinkle in the RIAA's eye. These laws cannot work, mathematically speaking, because reality has changed. We need to stop the wishful madness and think of how to turn free copying into a win. Seeing as how it is a massive boon to society to be able to reproduce things for free, that shouldn't be too hard. We are making this harder than it needs to be. - bob9113

So, what's right? Laws that serve the people.

Put strict limits on lobbyism, campaign contributions and the rights of large corporations. Don't fix the symptoms of a bad system, fix the system. - Tom

Against SOPA, Part 1

2012-01-15T07:40:00.000-08:00

In response to a couple of petitions against the "Stop Online Piracy Act" (SOPA) on whitehouse.gov, the official White House response, while somewhat balanced, included strong anti-piracy language and insisted that we need new legislation to combat piracy. Somehow, they insist, we need new legislation even though the entertainment industries already got the strong anti-piracy law that they wanted passed in 1998, the Digital Millenium Copyright Act... alongside the other law they wanted, the 1998 Copyright Term Extension Act, which retroactively extended corporate copyrights (as well as personal copyrights) by 20 years to nearly 100 years, to allow Disney and other companies to make slightly more money on films that their grandfathers made in the 1920s.

The White House response did had something constructive to say:

So, rather than just look at how legislation can be stopped, ask yourself: Where do we go from here? Don’t limit your opinion to what’s the wrong thing to do, ask yourself what’s right. Already, many of members of Congress are asking for public input around the issue. We are paying close attention to those opportunities, as well as to public input to the Administration. The organizer of this petition and a random sample of the signers will be invited to a conference call to discuss this issue further with Administration officials and soon after that, we will host an online event to get more input and answer your questions.

I enjoyed some of the responses on Slashdot. I'll post a couple that I think deserve reading.

But first, why is there a controversy about copyright? Part of the controversy is manufactured by those who have the most to gain from copyright laws, and especially those who have gained the most in the past from copyright laws and are annoyed that they are not getting as much money as they used to. The Time-Warners and Disneys of the world used to have total control over film and music distribution, and they could charge a lot for their services and make a continuously large and safe income. In the age of the internet people can legitimately look elsewhere for entertainment--YouTube, Reddit, StumbleUpon, and thousands of other web sites provide interesting low-priced and noncommercial entertainment. And, of course, people can easily copy commercial content without permission from the big companies. Ever since the internet became popular in 1996 or so, the Time-Warners and Disneys have been terrified of the potential piracy and alternate distribution channels that it enables, and they have been using their large influence in the U.S. congress and elsewhere to get more anti-piracy and strong-copyright laws passed.

These big companies want nothing less than the easy, safe income they used to enjoy. Unfortunately, they can only do this by fighting the free flow of information that makes the internet so wonderful. But the fight against piracy is technically unwinnable as long as an open internet exists, so they invent things like SOPA which contain provisions that are more likely to shut down legitimate sites like YouTube than stop piracy. For example, until two days ago SOPA allowed companies to get DNS entries blocked in the U.S. Any technologist will tell you that this does nothing to stop habitual pirates, it only affects 'casual' users who don't know how to get around the DNS block.

But, part of the controversy is more legitimate, and both sides have very valid points. On the one hand, people absolutely deserve to be paid for their work, and historically copyright has been the mechanism that allowed authors and artists to be paid for their work. Since copyright is almost the only mechanism that the law provides to help people make money for making movies, books, software and music, many people understandably want strong copyright protections. On the other hand, pirate-friendly people point out that copying a work costs virtually nothing, and it doesn't seem fair to be forced to pay for something that actually costs nothing.

Brain-fu says:

If the economy depends on the imposition of artificial scarcity on an abundant good, then the terms have to be reasonable.

20 year copyright term limits are very reasonable. The current term limits + options to extend are absolutely unreasonable, and they drive people to rebellion.

Also, while it is true that a punishment should be a deterrent to crime, the punishment must also be within the order-of-magnitude of actual damages in order to be just. The current punishments are outright ridiculous, and they also drive people to rebellion.

Make fair laws and enforce them fairly, and watch the people happily fall in line.

That's why we should reject SOPA. Copyright laws already punish the fundamental building block of digital technology, copying, in unreasonable ways. So pushing copyright laws further in the same direction is wrongheaded at this point. Instead, we should be looking at how to help authors get paid when they do good work, work that others find useful or worthwhile. And in particular I think we should focus more on paying people more for their work rather than for copies of the final result. Listen to Solandri:

Some industries have already made this transition. Wedding photographers used to shoot weddings for a minimal fee, the charged a large amount for prints and reprints. If you wanted extra copies of your wedding photos for your extended family, you had to pay for the extra prints.

With the advent of scanners and dirt-cheap photo printers, they've transitioned to a model where they charge a lot for shooting the wedding, but charge little for the prints or even give them away for free. Technically they can charge for the prints as they did before, but realistically they know it's so easy to make copies there's no possible way they'd be able to enforce their copyright for every photo the take. So they've just restructured their payment system to reflect reality, rather than copyright laws.

Forget for a moment everything about copyright, publishing, movie/music production, etc. Think of this purely in terms of work vs. compensation. I shoot photos of a wedding and process the photos. That's a lot of work. I print pictures of said wedding. That's very little work. Under the old model, the payment system did not reflect my costs - I charged very little for the part which required a lot of work on my part, but charged a lot for the part which required almost no effort. The new system fixes this. I now charge a lot for the part which requires a lot of work, and charge little for the part which requires little work.

The same thing has got to happen to books, music, and movies. In the old days, musicians and actors were paid for live performances. That is the norm.

In the 20th century there was a bit less than 100 years where technology was good enough to allow mass duplication, but not good enough to lower cost of duplication to the point where individuals could duplicate. This allowed a business model to flourish in which payment did not reflect costs. Musicians and actors were able to work once, then sit back and make money over and over based on that single performance. This is not normal. No other business is like that - you have to constantly work if you want to keep making money.

Now in the 21st century, the cost of mass duplication has fallen far enough that it's now easily within grasp of the individual. No longer does it make sense for people to be charged large amounts of money for what is a nearly free service (duplication). People may be stuck on the morality of it because the 20th century way is all they've ever known. But strictly in terms of work invested vs. compensation, the 20th century way was clearly wrong since the most money was being made for the step which cost the least money.

The transition to a model where content creators are not paid for duplication services is not some new journey into unexplored territory. It is a return to what was the norm for millenia. For most of history, duplication was impossible (performances) or nearly impossible (books), so the only way to get paid was for the actual content creation. During the 20th century, duplication became possible, and content creators leveraged it to get paid multiple times over for the same work. Now in the 21st century duplication has become so cheap that people are starting to question if it's really fair for content creators to be paid multiple times for the same job. That is the true crux of the matter, not who owns the work or whether copying is stealing.

I do believe in copyright - the temporary monopoly does encourage creation. But the terms have to be reasonable. With duplication costs having dropped to almost zero, preventing society from making copies simply because of archaic laws does more harm than good. Something like 10-20 years for copyright seems about right to me. Copyright is fundamentally about encouraging creativity and creation of new content. A copyright term of life + 70 years discourages creativity, and instead encourages trying to figure out how to create something new once and live off it for the rest of your life.

Read part two

Software Patents: Please Die

2012-01-12T11:54:00.000-08:00

Here's why we software developers hate the patent system. We write software for a living. We write tens of thousands of lines of computer code, including some algorithms and techniques that we think are clever and that we are rightly proud of. We go through all the work of testing it, fixing the bugs in it, writing documentation for it, and packaging it up for our users.

Then we find out later that some shmuck wrote several pages of legalese and submitted it to the patent office. This "patent" describes a similar technique to something we did in our software. The shmuck that wrote it didn't have to write tens of thousands of lines of code, didn't have to test it or fix bugs in it, didn't have to package it up for anyone else to use, and only wrote documentation in language that is not intended for the rest of us to understand. But, because he merely described something that we did (as long as he wrote his description before we wrote and packaged up our software), he's entitled to enormous legal damages against us.

Software developers work their asses off to think of ideas and make them reality. But the patent system says it's illegal for me to use the same idea that one single shmuck (among hundreds of millions of other shmucks in this world!) thought of first, as long as that other person earned the name "shmuck" by submitting a patent application. The patent system says I am liable for huge amounts for doing so. And even if you wrote your software before the shmuck wrote his description of it, it might be very costly to prove that in court.

I am proud to have never submitted a patent application, although I don't blame companies for doing so or for buying patents from other companies at great cost. When a company like Apple accuses another company of patent infringement, naturally that other company would like to have their own portfolio of patents with which to fight back. The best defense is a good offense, as they say, which is why all the tech giants are stockpiling patents like never before. The hope is that if one large company accuses you of patent infringement, you can search through your portfolio looking for an idea you "own" that your opponent has also used, and then countersue them.

But then there's the patent trolls, especially non-practising entities. These are companies that buy and own patents and launch lawsuits, but do not make any actual products. They exist specifically to make money from the patent system without contributing anything whatsoever to society. Since they have no products, nobody can countersue them.

Both patent trolls and tech giants like Microsoft often employ a "protection racket" approach to making money on patents. Actually suing someone in court for patent infringement can be risky, since a court battle is expensive to wage, you might lose the case, and if you are a big company, you risk harm to your reputation by trying to make money through lawsuits instead of by making products and innovating. So instead, they seek out companies that make software and basically tell them: you are infringing one or more of our patents. If you pay us, we'll sign this agreement not to sue you.

But if you're a patent troll, there is generally no need to identify a specific patent that the other company is infringing. In fact, it's better if you don't tell them which patent they are infringing! If you tell them, they may simply change their software so that it doesn't infringe the patent. Or worse, they may examine their software and realise that the patent covers something slightly different than what their software actually does, so there never was any infringement, so there is no way you could win a lawsuit against them. That would destroy any possibility of taking their money. So instead, the patent troll or big company will say: we have a giant patent portfolio. For a monthly fee, we will let you use any of the ideas in our patents! Great deal, huh? Of course, if you don't pay us... we can't be held responsible for what will happen to you.

Even better, if you take this approach, you don't even have to figure out whether a target company is infringing your patents or not! You can simply deliver your veiled threats and if they pay you, great! If not, THEN you can do a search through their products and your patents looking for a match. If you find a match, you can pursue them more aggressively. But in any case, you don't legally have to reveal which patent is infringed until you actually file a lawsuit.

This approach need not be limited to software. And the patent system isn't only broken for software. It's just that software is the most obvious field where patents aren't necessary. Software is already protected by strong copyright laws. And the behavior of most software is difficult to analyze and modify because companies (at least the ones that make money selling software) typically use compilers, and possibly obfuscation systems, to transform code from a human-readable code to a merely machine-readable code that is very difficult for anyone to understand. Meanwhile, the original source code is kept secret behind company firewalls. Finally, companies that really don't want their software copied can employ "DRM" copy-protection schemes or (in extreme cases) hardware dongles.

Because we have all these legal and practical protections in place, the most practical way for company A to make software that does the same thing as company B's is to re-implement the software from scratch: company A makes its engineers actually put in the effort to create a totally separate software system. Often the new "software A" is better than the "software B" against which it is competing; or in the case of China it's a low-quality knockoff that isn't very good. The point is, patents simply aren't necessary at all in the software industry. Our intellectual property is protected more than adequately already. The patent system only adds overhead costs, strikes fear into the hearts of individual developers and companies too, and impedes innovation.

Patents are bad for users, too. The costs of patent lawsuits are ultimately passed on to consumers, either because goods cost more to pay for "patent licensing", or because goods cost more to pay for patent lawsuits and lawyers, or because you decide to pay more so you can use features that are exclusive to one company.

An example is Apple's U.S. patent #7,469,381 on elastic bounce-back. You know how, when you swipe your finger in a list on the iPhone, the list keeps scrolling but slows down? That's called kinetic scrolling; luckily it's rumored that it was done in the 90s or earlier, so Apple can't patent that. But when you reach the end of the list, scrolling doesn't stop abruptly; instead it goes a little way beyond the end of the list and "snaps back", and you can even pull a list beyond the normal limit with your finger. Apple does have a patent on that.

Apple is fully within its legal rights to declare that no other phone or computer can offer this same feature. That way they can sell more iPhones because some people will decide to buy iPhone instead of Android because it has a nicer, more polished user interface. But people should understand that if Android doesn't offer this feature, it's only because Apple has a 20-year patent monopoly. Alternately, Apple can allow other companies to offer the feature... for a price. This approach makes competitors' devices cost more, so they make money both on licensing fees and also because more people will buy iPhones when the price of alternatives is a little higher. At first Apple took the first approach, but now they are switching to the second. Apple has dozens of other user-interface patents, on various little "finishing touches" in the iPhone that make its user interface so nice (e.g. a refinement of pinch-and-zoom), but this patent is one of the most valuable.

Another example is Microsoft's patent on long filenames (that is, file names longer than 8 characters). Now Microsoft doesn't have a patent on the mere idea of long filenames; that would be too obvious and predates Microsoft itself. But Microsoft's first operating system, MS-DOS, only supported 8-character filenames with a 3-character extension (such as .txt, .doc or .exe) and no lowercase letters or spaces. Microsoft found a way to overcome this limitation, while maintaining compatibility with MS-DOS. So if you name your file "Super long name", MS-DOS will see a file called "SUPERL~1" while Windows sees the "real" file name. Microsoft has a patent on this technique in their "FAT16" and "FAT32" file systems. Since most removable media use the FAT32 file system, Microsoft can charge for the "priveledge" of supporting long filenames! So, for example, I used to have a DVD player with a USB port. You could plug in a USB stick into this DVD player and play MP3s or show pictures from the USB stick. But the filenames were all 8 characters or less! I guess the company that made the DVD player just saved a little money by not paying Microsoft for their patent. Or more likely I myself saved some money, as the DVD player was pretty inexpensive.

Why isn't this fair? It's not fair because the company probably cannot "innovate around" this problem. If they want to support USB sticks, they have to support FAT32 because everybody uses it. And if they want to support long filenames, there is no way to do that without dealing with Microsoft's patent*. So if a company wants their DVD player to support USB sticks, their choice is either to pay Microsoft (and raise the price of the DVD player by the licensing fee), or not to support long filenames (so the customer pays less, but wonders why the hell the his filenames are messed up.)

* Today I stumbled upon an interesting fact, though: the Samba people have actually innovated around this problem, although they had to break compatibility with MS-DOS to do it. Sometimes there are ways around these patents, but in principle it is possible to make patents that are inescapable--patents on features that can only be implemented one way.

For example, patents recently expired on the compression methods (to reduce file sizes) in the GIF image format and MP3 sound formats (both developed a little over 20 years ago, whereas patents in the U.S. last 20 years). These formats required a specific, patented algorithm, and the algorithm was not licensed for free. Consequently, if you had a way to make GIF files or MP3 files for free, it meant that either you pirated commercial software, or you used free software that used a patented technique illegally.

The GIF case especially angered a lot of software people. The GIF format was intended to be free for use by the people at CompuServe who developed it, and the developers of GIF didn't realize that they had chosen a patented compression technique. The patent owners remained silent for about 7 years, until the GIF format was well-entrenched and popular on the internet, then suddenly declared that everyone would have to pay license fees to them in order to use the format.

When this happened, some angry developers immediately began work on a new file format to replace GIF, called PNG, that did not use the patented technique. The PNG format has more features than GIF and employs new techniques to improve compression, but its core compression algorithm is slightly inferior.

So, I encourage everyone to be suspicious of the patent system, and especially to oppose software patents. G'day.

Samsung-Apple patent war infographic
Samsung-Apple patent lawsuit tally hits 21
To keep operating, BlackBerry maker pays NTP $612,000,000 (I was unable to quickly ascertain the nature of the patents at issue in this case)
Microsoft charges Android makers for patents
Why We Need To Abolish Software Patents - different perspective, same conclusion
EFF patent-busting project
More links

Government drug deal

2011-11-18T19:04:00.000-08:00

Something new to flow your anger juices! Although Smallpox has been eradicated throughout the world and it sounds like the U.S. government already has enough vaccine for every man, woman and child in the U.S., it's now supplementing its $3-per-dose stockpile with an experimental $255-per-dose stockpile bought from a company led by a heavy Democratic party donator.

Its effectiveness can't be legally tested on humans, but hey, this isn't really about treating smallpox anyway, now, is it?

Kill Switch

2011-11-05T15:21:00.000-07:00

In case you hadn't heard, there are some bad intellectual-property laws coming down the pipes. First up we have the so-called PROTECT-IP act in the U.S.; read all about it in this article, which is called "Kill Switch" because the bill gives companies a "kill switch" to block websites (I don't know the details... I'm too tired to look into it further today.)

Then of course there's ACTA, the so-called Anti-Counterfeiting Trade Agreement, which was recently signed by 8 countries and, naturally, has little to do with counterfeiting. Some of ACTA's anti-citizen provisions have been toned down since the days when ACTA was a strictly secret document, but it's still an ugly mofo. Signatories include Canada, the U.S. and Australia, but the fight isn't over since For more, read EFF's recent post on the subject.

And finally, the Conservatives have reintroduced a copyright reform bill, bill C-11 (replacing bill C-32 that existed before the election). While not as bad as its predecessor, bill C-11 makes bypassing digital locks illegal, even if you have an otherwise legitimate and legal reason for doing so. For instance, if C-11 becomes law you can still legally copy a CD (that you purchased) to your computer or to an MP3 player for personal use, but it will become illegal to copy any part of a DVD or Blu-Ray disc (that you purchased) for any reason, including legitimate reasons such as making an excerpt for commentary (as news programs do when they play a few seconds from a music video to introduce a story about the artist in the video). It will be illegal solely on the basis that DVDs use digital locks (i.e. encryption) while CDs don't. The Canadian Coalition for Electronic Rights (CCER) is urging everyone to send letters in opposition to this bill.

Contractor Corruption

2011-11-05T11:52:00.000-07:00

If you have your ear open for corruption in the US government, you will have noticed that contractors seem to be a big part of the problem, because they not only cost a lot of money, but frequently allow their projects to fail or go vastly overbudget--especially when it comes to software, my specialty. Consider the New York CityTime software system for managing the city's payroll. Initially budgeted at $63 million, this ballooned to $600 million over time, until the city realized that the project was plauged by corruption and decided that it wanted its money back.

During the same time that New York was paying hundreds of millions of dollars for their software system, my own employer paid one employee (me) well under half a million dollars to produce a GPS navigation system that is probably deployed in thousands of commercial vehicles across North America (I mean, I think so; I don't have figures). So, I am at a loss to understand how some of these software systems end up costing hundreds of millions of dollars.

In the federal sphere, meanwhile, corruption seems to be standardized and entrenched through a network of government contractors. I had the impression that these government contractors were a giant rip-off of taxpayers, but what I didn't know was that despite the high price to the government, the individual contract workers enjoy no more in benefits than their government worker bretheren. "ideonexus" explains in his must-read posting:

A study by the Project on Government Oversight (POGO) found the Government pays IT Contractors nearly twice as much as its own IT Workers.

Why so much? The government also pays for office space, equipment, utility bills, and even employs its own management. Yet the contract workers temselves are paid no more than government employees:

Whenever a government position would open up in our department, contractor employees would jump at the opportunity for stability and better benefits.

That is, the government pays double for contractors, but only half of that money actually goes to the workers they are paying for, and none of it pays for office space or equipment. So where does that extra money go? Corruption, my dear boy! Corruption!

Slashdot's post on the topic

Ostracization

2011-07-26T10:45:00.000-07:00

I'd just like to repost an insightful comment by "fyngyrz" that I read on Slashdot today. The topic was how some people become huge jerks when granted online anonymity. But sometimes society can be a big jerk, too. Sometimes when a person does something wrong, and crosses a certain line--or is wrongly convicted of doing so--collectively we are never willing to forgive, nor forget.

There's another important issue here: Anonymity can be a worthy tool for social reaction and revolution when the individual expresses a minority or otherwise unpopular opinion; some of the other nasty habits of society include ostracization; limiting availability of jobs; sabotaging retirement; false accusations, false imprisonment, inappropriate listing on the no-fly, no-buy, and the sexual/violent offender (AKA as the you're-fucked) lists; singling out for "attention" from the local (or not local) cops; vandalism; burning crosses on the lawn; DOS, etc.

While true free speech cloaked in anonymity definitely opens the door for the proverbial "Internet Superturd", suppressing it isn't something that uniformly does good. For instance, Google+'s recent insistence on "real id" effectively eliminates any viewpoint that is sufficiently off-center to present a personal risk at a level unacceptable to the speaker. This in turn means that as the speaker's social load and dependencies increase - family, depending upon keeping one's job, political position, etc. - the more effectively they are muzzled in a "real id" environment.

Another example is Facebook's TOS where they forbid anyone on the s/v offender's list from joining; anyone put on that list is now locked out and locked to the bottom level of society; doesn't matter that they've paid their debt to society by serving time, paying fines, whatever the judge decided: they're permanently locked out, not to mention often having to live under a bridge or in a camp. That kind of ostracism is way too powerful a tool to use against someone who is supposedly free to walk around; they'll never re-integrate, they can't. If you're going to treat someone that badly, you'd better have the sense to put them in jail and keep them there or else you're just grooming a very, very angry person whom someone will unhappily meet on a dark and stormy night. Unfortunately, this only treats the unfairly listed -- kids having sex across age lines, polygamists, pee-ers in bushes, etc. -- even worse. By far the best solution is to treat payment of sentencing debt as 100% presumed rehabilitation unless shown otherwise. The government shows no sign of being responsible here either, nor forcing corporations like facebook to be responsible, which again brings us back to the need for pushback. And given the lynch mob mentality associated with these matters, anonymity is definitely called for.

In general right now, our government is doing a lot of things it shouldn't be doing, and these activities are currently pushing hard against individual rights of free speech, free travel and privacy. IMHO, anything that does away with anonymity under these circumstances is extremely unwise.

Micropayments please

2011-06-11T01:59:00.000-07:00

Like I said over 5 years ago, I wish the internet had a good micropayment system (not controlled by evil companies that claim to be our pal) that allows people to pay in amounts of 1-99 cents in a couple of clicks, without security risks or giving away any personal information. Clearly, millions of individuals and businesses could directly benefit. Getting people to click a couple of times to donate 25 cents is a heck of a lot easier than getting them to input their credit card number or to log in to PayPal. So why hasn't it happened yet?

I have no idea. I'm just thinking out loud. I wonder if it could somehow be built around that Bitcoin thingy (I'm sure it could, but I'd be more impressed to see it based on "normal" currency, I think.)

Anyway, hey, good news in the the Thomas Drake case. I hear he won't face 35 years in prison for accidentally still having copies of a classified document or two in his basement, or whatever it was. Yay. (Link 2)

Bradley Manning is Still Screwed

2011-06-05T21:01:00.000-07:00

I heard a rumor (I forget where) that Bradley Manning (alleged leaker of the Collateral Murder videos and a large number of confidential government documents) is no longer being tortured, but my Google News search isn't turning up a confirmation. Instead it appears that President Obama decided to let the 23-hour-per-day solitary confinement and daily nude inspections to continue, even though Pfc. Manning has not been convicted of any crime:

Obama registered his approval of Manning’s torture in characteristically vague and noncommittal terms: “I’ve actually asked the Pentagon whether or not the procedures … are appropriate. They assured me they are.”

He's been in solitary confinement for about a year now. You should ask yourself this question: can you imagine living in solitary confinement for a year? You sure as hell can't. Like the distance between stars, I think it is simply beyond the power of the human imagination. Maybe if you've been in solitary for a couple months you could start to imagine it. But normal people cannot.

To be sure, I wouldn't call for his release. If he did what he is accused of doing then it's probably very illegal and some sort of punishment is to be expected. But what his captors have done is worse: inflicting an unconstitutionally harsh punishment on an individual who has not even had a trial yet. It's a clear case of "setting an example". They know the punishment is unreasonable and illegal, but they do it to send a message to anyone else who would consider leaking confidential documents to the public.

Their message is this: You will suffer a fate worse than death. Being an American citizen offers no protection. We don't need enough evidence for a trial. And no amount of protestors can help you.

Spanish Quick Reference updated

2011-06-05T20:24:00.000-07:00

I just updated the "Referencia Rápida de Español" to v2.11. Again, sorry about the dumb filename, I can't control it. Anyway, I just added some stars (*) on some homonyms, and added a couple of new "short phrases" (deleting a couple of less important "reverse verbs" to make room):

It makes sense. = Tiene sentido.
I don't understand. = No entiendo.
..that which (what).. = ..lo que..

Perhaps the last one needs explanation. You'll see the word-combo "lo que" sometimes. It's used as a connector that usually translates as "what" in English. However, the English word "what" should not be translated as "lo que" unless it can be replaced with "that which". For example, "What are you doing?" translates as "¿Qué haces?", not "¿Lo que haces?" because "That which you are doing?" makes no sense. However, the sentence "I want what I want" translates to "Quiero lo que quiero" because "I want that which I want" does make sense and means the same thing. ¿Entiendes? (You understand?)

I wonder if I should write some more blog entries about some of the interesting/important bits of Spanish grammar I have learned. For instance I could explain the preterite tense and reflexive verbs better now. I could also explain why you don't really have to learn about "strong" and "weak" vowels.

Also, under verb chains: I try to see = Trato de ver.

The Prosecution of Thomas Drake

2011-05-18T12:17:00.000-07:00

“I feel I’m living in the very country I worked for years to defeat: the Soviet Union. We’re turning into a police state.” - J. Kirk Wiebe, retired NSA Analyst

ThinThread, the “little program” that he invented to track enemies outside the U.S., “got twisted,” and was used for both foreign and domestic spying: “I should apologize to the American people. It’s violated everyone’s rights. It can be used to eavesdrop on the whole world.” - Bill Binney, crypto-mathematician

On October 31, 2001, soon after Binney concluded that the N.S.A. was headed in an unethical direction, he retired. He had served for thirty-six years. [...] Binney said of his decision, “I couldn’t be an accessory to subverting the Constitution.”

“It was my duty to oppose it,” she told me. “That is why oversight existed, so that these things didn’t happen again. I’m not an attorney, but I thought that there was no way it was constitutional.” - Diane Roark, former staff member on the House Permanent Select Committee on Intelligence, which oversees the NSA

“strange things were happening. Equipment was being moved. People were coming to me and saying, ‘We’re now targeting our own country!’ ” - Thomas Drake, linguist and computer expert

Today I learned about Thomas Drake, father of five, who has become a target in the U.S. government's war on transparency. As this must-read article explains, the Obama administration is prosecuting five people under the 1917 Espionage Act, more than all previous Administrations combined; and the article focuses on Thomas Drake, who told the Baltimore Sun about wasteful spending at the NSA and privacy violations.

It's interesting that three of the people quoted above were registered Republicans. In the Bush years, most people that followed the story of the warrantless wiretapping program thought that these invasions of privacy, and the vast increases in military and so-called "national security" spending, were driven by Republicans--but once Democrats got control over the House, Senate and White House, approximately nothing changed. If anything, Obama has been even tougher against whistleblowers than his predecessor, I have seen no indications that the warrantless wiretapping program is winding down, and in most other ways I doubt Obama acts differently beyond his rhetoric. So what's really going on here? I really don't know--but I'm pretty sure the administration would like to keep it that way.

Meanwhile, while it's nice that Bin Laden is finally dead, we should question whether it was worth three trillion dollars.

On a related note, I saw Fair Game on Netflix the other day. I recommend that, too. And Recount.

China criticizes USA internet freedom?

2011-04-15T11:36:00.001-07:00

The Chinese do have a point, but it's almost too absurd to believe. The government that developed the Great Firewall of China is criticizing the US for its double standards? China, of course, has a history of "hidden" internet censorship--making websites appear to be offline, randomly dropping connections, forcing search engines to silently remove search results for queries that the government considers sensitive, and regularly deleting posts made on domestic websites. It's not too hidden, though--the government wouldn't want citizens to actually end up believing that they have free speech; then the government would have to lock a lot of them up for speaking the wrong opinion. I don't imagine they can afford to have as many prisons as the US, and it's impractical to execute all of them, too. So it's a good thing they do explicit censorship, too.

Anyway, it a comical case of the pot calling the kettle black. When you see that China is blocking reports and internet searches about the middle east uprisings, and even about time travel, it sort of makes you feel better about the U.S. government private industry harassing Wikileaks and its supporters. Or seizing laptops at the border without official suspicion or warrant. Or the whole Guantanamo Bay thing. Or any number of other policies. Surely, human rights activists in China wish they had our problems.

Avaaz supports Bradley Manning

2011-04-09T09:23:00.001-07:00

I was delighted to find out that one of my favorite organizations, Avaaz, is starting a campaign to stop the torture of Bradley Manning. I signed the petition and donated to the Washington, DC ad campaign immediately.

Last time I went on vacation to the U.S., the self-checkin kiosk wouldn't work for us and the check-in agent said there was some sort of "flag" on me. On her screen I saw a bright red box with a message containing a three-letter acronym that I neglected to memorize. She explained that she'd have to make a call, went away for fifteen minutes, then came back and said I was cleared. On the way back to Canada, the same thing happened again, and the agent informed me that I could expect this to happen every time I crossed the border.

What sort of list am I on? Was I put on a list because of opinions on my blog (the blog's probably not prominent enough for that), or because I donated money to WikiLeaks in response to the Collateral Murder video? Bradley Manning is the person accused of giving that video to WikiLeaks, and given his harsh and unconstitutional treatment, I wonder if I should be worried for myself, too. Obviously, they can't imprison everyone that supports the cause of truth and transparency in government, but they can harass them a little bit at the border, and like lawsuits against people that share a couple of albums on the internet, they could pick a few targets at random just to create fear and discourage activism.

Software Patents Suck

2011-04-02T10:18:00.000-07:00

Thanks to "Chris" at stormdriver.com for this PSA:

If you develop an application and want it to be fully legal, I have to disappoint you. You have no chance to come up with anything, that won’t be in breach of at least one patent, as they now exclude you from use of most basic techniques. Most likely, you’ve already broken a dozen patents just by thinking about your app. Every Tuesday, the US Patent Office publishes some 3,000 new patents, many overbroad, generic, or just plain ridiculous. Piles of them created a legal maze, impossible to navigate even for companies employing armies of cloned, genetically engineered super-lawyers.

Maxed Out

2011-03-25T13:31:00.000-07:00

Well, maybe we should all just step back and look at the bigger picture. Last night my best friend and I watched a movie called Maxed Out, a movie made before the financial crisis. In it there is a picture of the National Debt Clock sitting at 7.3 trillion dollars. About 6 years later, it's nearly doubled to 14 trillion, increasing at well over one trillion dollars per year. The link above has another number that I also wonder about, the "US Total Debt" which "includes household, business, state and local governments, financial institutions, and the Federal Government" and is sitting at $55.2 trillion or $676,000 per family. With a debt and deficit so unfathomably large, is there really any hope of paying it off? I don't see any signs of deficit reduction either: it seems like Democrats don't want to talk about it because they don't want to threaten any government programs; meanwhile, Republicans might talk about cutting programs, but in reality they won't touch most of the core budget including national "defense", and any spending cuts they do make will be cancelled out by tax cuts.

U.S. federal politicians, for the most part, seem not to care about the big picture. Oh, they might say they care for the cameras. But I think they believe that their jobs in the House and Senate are just that--jobs. They are not there primarily to serve Americans; rather their main concern is to keep their jobs, and it's hard to do that without serving their corporate sponsors. The sponsors don't want spending cuts--after all, every spending program benefits the private sector somehow. The sponsors do want tax cuts--especially corporate tax cuts and Bush tax cuts.

Surely this can't continue forever. Sooner or later, creditors will demand their pound of flesh. My guess is that China can already dictate US foreign policy toward it. I haven't studied history enough to guess what will come next, but you know the saying, "Those who do not study history are doomed to repeat it"? The "doomed" part has me worried.

Aww, heck. The big picture sucks. Let's stop looking at it again.

My life sucks.

2011-03-25T06:01:00.000-07:00

Things haven't been going my way recently. My own life seems like train wreck about to happen. And the news lately, oh Lord it's depressing, isn't it? I mean, obviously there's the gigantic earthquake and tsunami in Japan. Then there's all this crazy stuff that happened while I was on vacation last month... the violence in Libya and Bahrain... and there were a bunch of stories I saw on Slashdot I thought were important enough to blog about, but I can no longer find the stories, as Slashdot seems to have deleted its front-page archive. The only way to go a month in the past would be to click "many more" on the main page about 60 times, waiting for the older stories to load between each click. And thanks to my awful memory, I cannot remember a single one of the stories I wanted to blog about.

Which brings me to my own life. Which sucks. I met a sweet girl on the nude cruise last month. We became so close, I think she loved me. I knew that she wasn't "the one", so I avoided using the word "love" myself, but I did love her, just not in a I-want-to-spend-my-life-with-you kind of way. She just wasn't intellectual at all, and I really need someone that can explore issues with me intellectually. Nor was she interested in programming or linguistics or anything geeky. I don't know if she was interested in politics, but--while the evidence is ambiguous--I suspect now that however she leans politically, it's probably quite far from me. But I enjoyed the way she talked about the ordinary things that happened in her day, and about her family and extended family. She seemed to really enjoy the simple things in life. In that way I wish I was more like her. While I worry constantly about whether I'm accomplishing anything with my life, and whether I can manage to give to the world enough more than I take, and while I am pained by the evil and suffering in the world, and while I wonder why people don't strive more to build a better society, and love strangers more, and be more rational and less biased, and more willing to question...

Well, she just lives her own life and doesn't seem to worry about anything else. I love seeing her smile and laugh and talk, even if my crap memory forgets most of what she says. She just started a blog with the most adorable font ever... I'd like to link to it, but I don't know if she would want that. But you know, while I religiously avoid wasting anything, she has no problem ordering more food than she can eat and throwing the rest away. I disagree with doing that, pretty strongly, but I think it may indicate why she seemed so happy. It's Hakuna Matata in practice: living without worries.

After the cruise she announced she was going to fly to Calgary to see me, choosing, a little while later, 10 days in July. I offered to pay half.

But then we had a little fight. Over something so embarrasingly trivial. Not trivial to me, mind you, but to most people the issue of the inhumane conditions of Bradley Manning's detention probably isn't worth ruining a relationship over. It's just that to me the idea of solitary confinement for seven months is absolutely terrifying; unless he's at least given an ample supply of books to read, it absolutely qualifies as torture. (Unfortunately there is no word on what he's provided with in there.) I personally relate to Bradley Manning, because although I've never leaked classified information, I probably would consider becoming a whistleblower if I discovered evidence of criminal activity that my employer was covering up. While I do question the wisdom of publicly releasing 1,100 to 250,000 classified diplomatic cables (depending on how you count them), I do believe that releasing the Collateral Murder video was fully justified, after the military took the position that the pilots had done nothing wrong. I told her the story of what happened in the video, of how about 12 people were killed (including a pair of reporters) and how two children were wounded.

In addition to solitary confinement, he's reportedly not allowed to exercise (I know that would drive me insane--my body hates to be inactive for long periods of time) and made to sleep naked without a blanket or pillow, which might also be tough to tolerate. My outrage over this treatment of an American prisoner in America, and my active imagination about what permanent solitary confinement would feel like, kept me awake for perhaps three hours one night and another three on a different morning. I explained this to her, but she was unmoved. She couldn't get past the fact that what he had done was illegal. Nor did it matter that he hadn't had a trial or been convicted--she said something about some Iraqi or Iraqis having brutally and repeatedly raped an American soldier, as if to provide some justification. I was baffled.

Her dad, evesdropping on the conversation, jumped in to support the way Manning was treated. They agreed that what he had done was treason, and entertained the notion that death was an appropriate punishment. Her dad began to talk about how people were treated like Manning all the time, and how you could be imprisoned in the US indefinitely for "contempt" of something... contempt of court? I forget what he said exactly, but his tone of voice was unmistakably dismissive. His message seemed to be "big whoop, this is how we do things in America, get over it". He decried the release of any information deemed secret by the US government, but he also said he wouldn't believe that Manning was really forced to sleep naked unless he saw a "video" of it. I pointed out that a video of that, besides not being fit for public release anyway, might well be classified. At the time, though, I wasn't sure how to convey the irony that he considered the release of secret material to be a serious crime, while simultaneously demanding to see material that might be secret before he would believe that the government/military was doing something wrong. Heck, I still don't know what to say. If you don't get it, you don't get it. Personally I'd love to see a long time-lapse video of a week of his detention. It might clear up this controversy nicely.

I did make a mistake about him being naked, by the way. Reports actually say that he is stripped nude only temporarily for some sort of embarrassing inspection every night, and he was only made to sleep semi-nude (with underwear) for two nights. Anyway...

As I had explained to her earlier, my new CPAP machine didn't seem to be working for me, and I was especially tired because this issue kept me awake a couple of extra hours that morning. Certainly, I was too tired for a charged political/moral conversation directed against my beliefs. At some point I felt the anger rising, announced that I'd talk to them later, and cut off the conversation out of frustration. A little while later I sent a text message: "Talking to you and your dad is really disheartening. Get back to me when you learn empathy."

Well, as you might imagine she didn't take that very well.

We've exchanged several emails since then, mine long and explanatory--but not apologetic--hers short and terse. Her latest reads, "Thanks for the invite to to Calgary, but at this time I need to pass on it. [...] my parents don't want me traveling by myself since i had the surgery."

My instinct tells me that's not the real reason, though. I think what this really means is "our relationship is over".

I have been tired almost every day since last September or so. Productivity at work has been way down, especially after I returned from the cruise. The thing I'm supposed to be working on is an intersection of technologies I've never really used: WCF or TcpClient/TcpListener and/or DCOM (I'm still not sure which to use; I'd prefer WCF but I can't seem to comprehend it), and Visual FoxPro. With my low mental capacity and depression over the fight with Hillary (that's her name), it's just not working and I'm falling ever further behind. For a separate project, I have some really cool ideas about how to write a universal "flick list" control sort of like the iPhone has, but in the form of a Windows Forms control, with automatic animations of changes to the list. But I'm having trouble fleshing out some key ideas.

Meanwhile, I think I have enough health problems for a 50-year old. Everything from a weird knee that makes crackling noises, to a tight ass, to thin skin. Well, one of those is not actually a medical condition. I was at the dentist for a filling the other day, and as the dentist had my mouth held open he announced "oh, I see a shadow. We'll have to do another filling" and proceeded to charge me double price to put two holes in my tooth instead of one. That's a total of 7 to 9 fillings (I forget) since I started going to this dentist about 3 years ago, compared with 0 fillings prior to that time. Finally, I have moderate to severe mixed sleep apnea, two-thirds central, for which the $2200 machine I'm trialling is only partially able to correct.

Finally, it's starting to look like I'll never get to have a wife and kids like I wanted. Who really wants to marry an introverted naturist that never cleans his room, hates doing chores, is tired all the time, depressed half the time, has one of the worst-quality memories in the world, and complains about his life on his blog? Who knows, maybe I have bad breath too. I just don't have a woman to tell me so (hmm, I think I phrased that wrong).

Update: I sent a proper apology. She was glad to receive it. But we're still out of touch with each other.

Spanish Quick Reference v2

2011-01-30T11:56:00.000-08:00

The four-page Spanish course

When you go to a foreign country it's comforting to know that you have a way to communicate if you need to. To this end, I looked online for a Spanish Quick Reference and didn't find one. Then a friend went to Cuba, and I decided to make one myself. Later, a hard drive crashed and I lost the original document (only the PDF remains), but I wanted to make a new-and-improved reference with more information.

The new reference requires two double-sided sheets of paper, but the first sheet is most important (the second sheet contains supplemental information, so you can generally go without it). My reference goes well beyond the usual pleasantries like "buenos dias" and "¿Donde está el baño?", and will hopefully allow you to express almost any thought in "pidgeon Spanish". It is designed primarily to help you learn and speak Spanish rather than understand it; for the purpose of understanding Spanish, perhaps later I should make a mini-dictionary so you can look up the most common words.

Sorry about the strange file name. The reference is hosted on freepdfhosting.com, which requires the name to be scrambled. Updated to v2.1 Feb. 8 with various minor revisions, such as a new list of "no translation needed" adjectives, and a few more words and phrases such as "mucho gusto" (pleased to meet you) and "probablemente" (probably).

I used various techniques to pack a lot of words into a small space. For example, the verb table on page one is divided into three columns. Each column is a different size, and I divided the entries into columns according to how much space each one required. I put the widest entries in the large left column, and the smallest entries in the thin right column. The nouns, adjectives and adverbs are divided the same way, except with two columns instead of three.

This blog entry is a combination of the tips I wrote for the first quick reference, plus the final page of the new quick reference, which is a very quick introduction to grammar in general and Spanish in particular.

My ambitious goal with this reference is that you can go to any Spanish-speaking country with a double-sided sheet of paper and engage in basic pidgeon conversation. To do this, you need to understand basic Spanish grammar and how to use this reference. Good eyesight also helps!

To say something in pidgeon Spanish, don't try to translate word-for-word. Instead, try to boil your idea down to simple, independent components, and translate those. Also, study the reference sheet in advance, and look specifically for things that are said differently in Spanish than English. Some examples:

As I will mention again later, object pronouns typically appear before the verb, so someone might say "yo te invito" for "I invite you", (where yo = I, te = you).
"An hour ago" translates to "hace una hora" (literally "ago an hour"; "hace" also means "do").
Never leave out the word "that" (que): say "I think that we're going to eat" (Creo que vamos a comer), not "I think we're going to eat". Say "the boy that I saw" (el niño que vi), not "the boy I saw". And watch out, "que" has many different meanings.
Some verbs are spoken in a reverse style: "It pleases me" (me gusta) instead of "I like it", "the face hurts me" (me duele la cara) instead of "My face hurts", and so on. There is a small section on this topic on p.2
One says "I have 15 years" ("tengo quince años") instead of "I am 15 years old".
There are many "fixed phrases" in Spanish (little phrases one should memorize). For example, "aquí tienes" ("here you have") is equivalent to the English fixed phrase "Here you are", meaning "I present this to you". Far too many of these exist to list them on the quick reference, but a few are provided in the "Small phrases" section on p.2. It is not uncommon that a fixed phrase in Spanish has a different meaning than its direct translation suggests. For example, "otra vez" ("another time") actually means "again" (because Spanish has no word for "again"). Another example is "Dar la mano" ("to give the hand"), meaning "give a handshake".

If you can't find a translation with my quick reference sheet, look for a different way to say the same thing. For example, it doesn't include the noun for "work" (trabajo), but it does include the verb for "work". You won't find "thirsty" or "to drink", but you can find the words "quiero", "agua", and "bebida" ("I want", "water", and the noun for "drink"). I didn't include the word for "clean" ("limpio") but "dirty" ("sucio") is on there, so after you review the "small phrases" section, you could ask someone: "¿Cómo se dice (how to say) lo contrario de sucio (the opposite of dirty)?"

If you use Google Translate, give it a whole sentence at once (including the period!) to get its best translation. Be careful: Google Translate often does not translate correctly or faithfully. SpanishDict.com has a good dictionary.

The reference can only be so tiny because Spanish is phonetic. The spelling of any word tells you how to say it! Study the rules on p.2. Practice pronunciation as much as possible, and remember: H is silent! Note: “y” (and) is pronounced “i” as in “sí”. Ordinarily "y" can sound like "j" in "joy", but it must makes more of an "i" sound if it appears at the end of a word.

Languages are never translated word-for-word, but all languages have the same basic elements: nouns, pronouns, verbs, descriptive words (adjectives, determiners and adverbs) and connective words (conjunctions and prepositions). The reference is packed with all of these.

Nouns (people, places, concepts) are the things we talk about. For example, a boat (un bote) is a noun.
Pronouns (e.g. he, they, it) refer to nouns introduced elsewhere.
Verbs (e.g. jump, speak, seem, be) combine with nouns to make sentences: un bote va (a boat goes).
Adjectives (e.g. tall, happy, late) describe nouns: bote pequeño rápido (fast little boat). Note that Spanish adjectives normally come after the noun, but a few are normally placed before it, e.g. otro (other), bueno (good), mejor (better), pocos (a few). Put numbers in front, too.
Determiners (e.g. the, an, each) are little words that come before nouns: el bote (the boat).
Adverbs (e.g. today, there, happily, very) describe the time, location, or manner of verbs (llueve hoy = it rains today) or adjectives (muy mojado = very wet) Conjunctions (and, or, if) combine two phrases of the same type: estes y esos (these and those), ver o ser (see or be).
Prepositions (e.g. to, for, on, except) serve the same purpose as adverbs, but are followed by a noun: a casa (to home), en la piscina (at the pool)

In the examples section,

Verbs are underlined,
Nouns/pronouns are bold, and
Descriptive words are italicized
(In parenthesis: literal translations and words needed in only one language).

This is to help you to see how the English and Spanish sentences are related. (Ésto es para ayudarte a ver cómo las frases Inglés y españoles están relacionados.)

Spanish grammar is more complex than English. Firstly, all nouns have a gender (masculine “m” or feminine “f”) that affects nearby words:

Un hombre bueno: a good man
Una mujer buena: a good woman
El otro horno: the other oven
La otra esquina: the other corner

Feminine forms most often end in “a”, masculine forms most often end in “o”. When space permits, this guide marks masculine nouns “el” and feminine ones “la”. The word “the” can also be plural (e.g. los hornos, las esquinas). To make a plural noun, just add -s (or -es if the word does not end in a vowel.) Even adjectives have plural forms: palabras importantes = important words.

Luckily, the order of words in Spanish is often the same as English. For example, the order of the words in this sentence is exactly the same in both English and Spanish: Por ejemplo, el orden de las palabras en esta frase es exactamente el mismo en ambos Inglés y español.

However, pronouns tend to be in different places in Spanish. The pronoun table is on p.1. Here are three rows from it:

Pronouns	Subject	Direct	Indirect	Prepositional
I/me	yo	me	me	mí*
you (fam.)	tú*	te	te	ti
he/him	él*	lo	le	él*

The star * marks words with multiple meanings. Pronouns are complicated, so study this well:

There is no word for “it”, so it is usually translated as “lo” or “la” (him or her): lo for masculine “it”, la for feminine “it”. Use lo if you are unsure.
Subject pronouns are the ones that come before the verb in English, e.g. “I, we, he, she”. So “él cocina” means “he cooks” or possibly “it (m) cooks” (as in “the oven cooks”). One can move a subject pronoun to the end (“cocina él”).
The direct object comes after the verb in English, e.g. “me, us, him, her”; however, in Spanish it often comes before the verb. So “él cocina” means “he cooks”, but “lo cocina” means “sb. cooks him/it.” (“sb.” is short for “somebody/something”) An indirect object corresponds to the third, middle noun in English sentences. For example, “I give him a bird” translates to “Yo le doy un ave”, and “He gives it to me” translates to “Él me lo da”. The direct object may not be present, so “le voy a mostrar” means “I'm going to show (something to) him/her”, but “lo voy a mostrar” means “I'm going to show him/it (to someone)”. However, notice that “te” or “me” can be a direct or indirect object. So “te voy a mostrar” means “I'm going to show you”—either “show you something”, or “show you to somebody”.
Prepositional pronouns come after prepositions, e.g. a mi = to me, para ti = for you, como él = like him.
There are also “formal” ways of saying “you”. It's very confusing; just remember, use “le” or “usted” when saying “you” to old people.

By far the most complex issue is verbs. The system of Spanish verbs is terrifyingly complex, no doubt one of the most complex in the world. Spanish verbs have around a hundred regular forms (called conjugations) in total. Verb forms depends on tense (present, past, conditional...), person (first person “I”, second person “you”, third person “he/she”), number (plural or not) and mood (indicative/ subjunctive). Moreover, regular forms may vary depending on whether the infinitive ends in -ar, -er or -ir. Basically, a table of conjugations for one verb can fill a page. Finally, some verbs are irregular, meaning they have their own special conjugations. And Spanish speakers often leave out the subject pronoun (“yo”, “tú”, “él” etc.) because the verb already encodes it!

The first thing to know is that there are two verbs for to be (is): estar and ser. Both have dozens of forms, but the most important are estoy/soy (I am), estas/eres (you are), esta/es (someone or something is), and estan/son (they are). A table on p.1 lists some of these:

tense	I do	Sb. does	I did	Sb. did
be - ser	soy	es	fui*	fue*
be - estar	estoy	está	estuve	estuvo

ser describes the time or date (es lunes = it's monday; son las tres = it's three (3:00); ella es tarde = she is late).
ser also describes qualities that are innate or expected: soy blanco = I'm white, ella es feliz = she is happy (normally), él es malo (he is a bad guy)
estar describes location or present status: está aquí = it's here, estoy feliz = I'm happy (at present), él está malo = he is ill (a few adjectives can change meaning when you change from estar to ser.)

Other than that, don't worry too much about verbs at first: just use the infinitive form (which ends in -r) so that people know you aren't any good at Spanish yet. Tell them, “hable muy despacio, por favor” (speak very slowly please) and “no hablo español” (I don't speak Spanish). You could also ask for "una palabra a la vez" (one word at a time). Use time phrases when appropriate: “ahora” now, “hoy” today, “ayer” yesterday, “próximo mes” next month, "mañana" tomorrow, "esta mañana" this morning, "en la mañana" in the morning (yes, mañana means both "tomorrow" and "morning"), "en el pasado" in the past, "en el futuro" in the future.

When you're ready, memorize the “important conjugations” on page 1, so you can say correct phrases such as “tengo una idea” (I have an idea) or “ella debe salir” (she should leave).

Also, you should learn that “-o” endings usually mean “I (present tense)”, and “-es” endings usually mean “you (present tense)”. After you have practiced Spanish for a long time, you should start using the verb table on p.3. Note: a lot of related nouns also end in “o”; e.g. “almuerzo” can mean either “lunch” or “I eat lunch”; “trabajo” is “work” or “I work”.

A pronoun after the verb may merge with it to form one word, e.g. dime (tell me), llamarse (to call oneself). Some Spanish verbs are “reflexive”, typically involving the word “se”; these are different from the “Reverse verbs” listed on p.2. I'll explain those briefly in the list of "tips" below.

A word's range of meaning varies a lot between languages, e.g. sentence normally becomes "frase" in Spanish, but a punishment for a crime is a "sentencia". "to work" is trabajar, but if you want to say "This thing doesn't work", it should be "esta cosa no funciona". I carefully picked translations, but watch out for variations of meaning, especially when entries are marked with a star (*) or tilde (~).

Here are some more tips:

When a woman describes herself, she uses feminine adjectives, but when a man describes himself, he uses masculine adjectives. For example, "Soy rico" means "I am rich", but it also indicates that I am a man. A woman should say "Soy rica". The adjectives on the reference sheet are in masculine form; change any -o ending to -a for feminine.
Watch out for words with multiple unrelated meanings. Common examples are el/él (the/he), la (the/her), si/sí (if/whether/yes), está/ésta (is/this), se/sé (meaning itself, himself, herself, themselves, or "I know"), que/qué (meaning "that", "than", or "what", among other things). Often, the presence of an accent mark (or in spoken Spanish, different emphasis or rhythm) conveys the difference.
Be sure to review the "No translation needed" section on p.1, bottom-right corner. This is divided into two halves: masculine nouns on the left, feminine ones on the right. To save space, these Spanish nouns, which are spelled similarly to English nouns that mean the same thing, are not listed elsewhere on the reference. At the bottom are nouns for people, which do not happen to change form depending on gender: "el doctor" the (male) doctor, "la doctor" the (female) doctor. Remember, although spelled like English words, you must pronounce them according to Spanish rules! For example, "doctor" is pronounced "doke-TOR", not "DAHK-ter".
Likewise there is a section on p.2 for adjectives that need no translation. I recently discovered a large number of these adjectives, and included them in microprint: correcto, incorrecto, importante, final, falso, diferente, decente, delicioso, digital, elegante, evidente, extra, extremo, fatal, familiar, fantástico, favorito, federal, flexible, genérico, genético, glorioso, ilegal, ilegible, imaginario, histórico, honesto, horrible, humano, ignorante, impenetrable, incalculable, imprudente, incoherente, injusto, incomparable, incompatible, incompetente, incompleto, inconveniente, inteligente, invisible, irritable, lamentable, paternal, perfecto, permanente, persuasivo, popular, público, radial, receptivo, redundante, regional, repugnante, resonante, ridículo, robusto, romántico, selecto, transparente
As in English, words can have many synonyms; usually I did not list them on the quick reference unless there was unused space. I can only hope that a Spanish person doesn't have to continue learning new words into adulthood like an English person (as the English language contains around a million words).
When you want to use a verb pair like "I can say", "I want to eat", "He learns to swim", etc., the first verb gets the tense information and the second verb is simply the infinitive, e.g. "Puedo decir hola"(I can say hello), "Quiero comer" (I want to eat), "He learns to swim" (Él aprende a nadar). Roughly like English, some verbs require the "to" (Spanish "a") after the first verb while others do not. The reference has a list of these "verb chains" in small print on p.2. Luckily, Spanish doesn't seem to have the helping verbs that make English grammar more complex (except for the many forms of "have"--haya, hubiere, etc.--which the quick reference does not cover at all).
Verbs that end in "s" usually mean "you" or "we", e.g. comes = You eat, comemos = We eat, comías = you used to eat, comimos = we ate. Some "you/we" conjugations do not end in "s", but if it does end in "s" then you know that the verb includes the concept of "you" or "we". The "we" verbs usually end in "mos" so you can tell them apart from the "you" verbs.
"you" plural familiar (vosotros) and its many conjugations are only required in Spain. Latin America uses "ustedes", which conjugates the same way as third-person plurals like ellas/ellos.
The Spanish equivalent of "ing" endings is "iendo" or "ando": está comiendo = is eating, está hablando = is speaking. However, after a preposition, an infinitive is used instead: "antes de comer" (before eating).
If you need past, future or some other tense, I hypothesize that you will be understood if you just use the infinitive form (hablar, comer, vivir) plus a time phrase (en el pasado, en el futuro, hace poco, pronto). When possible, use "va a" (El va a comer = He is-going to eat) or "voy" (I am going) so that you can speak about the future correctly without conjugating the verb. "va" or "voy" can be used by themselves to mean "going" (Voy ahora = I am going now). Oh, by the way, a common phrase is "vamos"--literally "we are going", but it usually means "let's go".
Occasionally, the word "lo" (which should mean "him" or "it") means "the" instead. This occurs in idioms (fixed expressions) such as "lo mismo" (the same), "lo contrario de" (the opposite of). "lo" also appears, without any apparent meaning, in fixed expressions such as "por lo tanto" (therefore) and "a lo mejor" (probably).
Finally, a word about the reflexive verbs. Most often, reflexive verbs are actions that you do to yourself: levarse (wash oneself), llamarse (call oneself; be named), ducharse (shower oneself; take a shower), quitarse la ropa (undress, literally "remove oneself the clothing"). So I might say "me ducho" (I shower myself), or "se ducha" (he/she showers themself). There are many reflexive verbs, so "se" (self, not to be confused with sé "I know") is much more common in Spanish than English. In fact, the concept of reflexive verbs goes well beyond what makes logical sense; many reflexive verbs are not actions that we think of as doing to ourselves. For example, "despertarse" means to wake up oneself, although English speakers don't think of this as something we do to ourselves because we are unconscious when it happens. Similarly, we may say about a baby "el bebé se llamo Gloria" (the baby calls herself Gloria), although the baby may not even know its name yet. Finally, some reflexive verbs even describe actions we clearly do to something else. For example, "estacionarse", meaning to park a car, literally means "to station oneself". However, a reflexive verb is never between two people: the object of the reflexive verb can involve inanimate objects (like clothes being removed or a car being parked) but not a person. At least that's my working theory.

Finally, study the examples, watch the excelente BBC online course “Mi Vida Loca”, read this page repeatedly, and practice as much as you can. ¡Buena suerte! (good luck!)

Learning Spanish

2011-01-03T08:25:00.001-08:00

My Spanish learning is coming along fairly nicely. I still can't understand most spoken Spanish (Hable muy lento, por favor... ¡soy un principiante!), but given a little time to examine, I can understand a significant amount of written Spanish.

I'm using Livemocha.com and BBC Languages ("mi vida loca"). The BBC's lessons are free and more entertaining, but don't teach as much; and you can learn a lot on Livemocha.com for free if you rely on peer review. Livemocha is sort of a low-quality version of Rosetta Stone, without a computer to check your pronounciation, with lazy translations (e.g. "entregando" translated as "giving" [dando] instead of "deliver", "submit" or "surrender"; "tomando" translated as "eat" [comer] instead of "taking in" which would be more accurate), and poor teaching practices: failing to introduce the gender of many new nouns, failing to introduce the infinitive form of new verbs, and using present continuous probably far more than real Spanish speakers do. Plus there is absolutely no explanation of spelling rules, grammar rules, or differences between different Spanish-speaking countries. And their word choices seem off; for example they always use "automóvil" for a car instead of the more common "coche" or "carro". Still, when combined with other sources of information such as this grammar tutorial and verb reference, you can learn a lot from Livemocha.

I wish they'd focus on breadth rather than depth though. Livemocha seems to have introduced three or four verbs each that all mean "take" and "put", two words each for "pour", "hair", "hot" and "rough"... and after dozens of lessons they still haven't introduced important words such as: make (as in, he makes me happy!), know, learn, seem, understand, find, hear, say, try, maybe, probably, together, too much, slow, therefore/so, if.... They also haven't introduced conversational phrases such as "I don't understand", "I know/I don't know", "anything else?", "say again?", "pleased to meet you", "How much does it cost?", "The bill please", "for example", "my name is ____", "come here", "let's go", "how do you say?", "wow", "yay", "really?", "are you sure?", etc.

After studying Esperanto awhile, I realized that you can express a good percentage of your thoughts with only a few hundred words--but when it comes to natural languages, which are a minefield of ambiguity and strange rules, only someone that knows the language well can choose "safe" words that are not likely to cause confusion. For example, in Spanish there are at least two words for "hot", "caluroso" and "caliente", used in different contexts. If you only have time to learn one of those words, which one should you learn? I heard that if a person is described as "caliente", it means horny. Hot food is supposed to be described as "caliente", but if it also means horny, it's probably better to teach beginners "caluroso" and risk that they will call food "caluroso", rather than risk that they will ask a woman if she is "caliente". ¡¿Qué?!

Google translate constantly ticks me off for various reasons. Its dictionary, for example. Quite often there is one very good translation for a word, for example, "difícil" means "difficult". But when you put "difícil" in Google translate, it offers "difficult" first plus 18 other possibilities: hard, tough, tricky, complicated, awkward, arduous, problem, painful, heavy, delicate, difficile, grave, picky, off-putting, complicative, tender, wild, touch-and-go. Damn it, I want a translation, not a thesaurus. Most of these translations are very misleading, of course. Rocks are "hard", Leather is "tough", magicians are "tricky", women are "complicated", nerds are "awkward", circumcisions are "painful", and pidgeons are "wild", but probably "difícil" is the wrong translation in all of these cases. When they give me 19 possibilities, how am I supposed to know which ones are important enough to worry about? Because "difícil" is spelled like "difficult", it's probably safe to assume that "difficult" is the only translation that matters. But what if the word had been something unrecognizable like "falpike"--how would I know which translations are relevant? Spanish-English dictionaries, I fear, might be even worse than Esperanto-English ones. And not only is the dictionary terrible, Google's translation engine sucks and cannot be trusted either, but I have better things to do right now than to investigate why.

Oh dictionary writers, why don't you give some examples that would clearly show what a word means in different contexts? Or why not explain with complete sentences? Especially on the internet, you have enough space.

Anyway, I plan to make a new version of my Spanish Quick Reference that incorporates some corrections, some new words, and a third page with common conjugations of 25 verbs. I might have to expand it to four pages actually; perhaps I'll dedicate a page to examples or something.

The Election Process

2010-11-08T13:48:00.001-08:00

In an American election, you are given a choice between Coke and Pepsi, when what you really want is a glass of water: transparent with no artificial additives.

Lawrence Lessig on 'The Social Network'

2010-10-04T13:40:00.000-07:00

You will see this movie, and you should. As a film, visually and rhythmically, and as a story, dramatically, the work earns its place in the history of the field.

But as a story about Facebook, it is deeply, deeply flawed.

Do you understand why the internet is so different from technologies of the past, and why it is in danger of losing its greatness? Lawrence Lessig explains in this review of "The Social Network" on The New Republic.

Update: Ezra Klein makes another interesting narrative based on The Social Network:

Much like a Facebook profile, "The Social Network" is made more appealing through some artful lies, well-chosen omissions and careful shading.

Co-founder Eduardo Saverin's ejection from the company, for instance, is turned from a story of inattentive financial management into a senseless betrayal of a friend. And though the movie portrays Facebook founder Mark Zuckerberg as a pining loner, he has actually dated the same girl since 2003.

But it's not the details of Zuckerberg's life that mislead so much as the decision to focus on Zuckerberg at all. The movie recasts a story of inevitable technological change as the saga of a socially inept genius, two or three of his most important relationships and the social pressures of Harvard University. That makes for a better film, of course. But it misses the richer drama behind transformative innovations like Facebook, and it's part and parcel of the way we misunderstand, and thus impede, innovation.

"The idea of the lone genius who has the eureka moment where they suddenly get a great idea that changes the world is not just the exception," says Steven Johnson, author of "Where Good Ideas Come From: The Natural History of Innovation," "but almost nonexistent."

And that's because innovation isn't really about individuals.

The article reinforces my view that software patents are bad both for society and for innovative software developers, because a patent grants a monopoly to just one individual or company at a time when multiple other individuals are developing the very same idea.

Spanish quick reference

2010-09-06T11:31:00.000-07:00

Update: please use the new version.

When I went to Mexico recently, it would have been useful to have a Spanish quick reference. I looked online and didn't find one. Then a friend went to Cuba, and I decided to make one myself. My reference requires only one sheet of paper (two-sided), but it goes well beyond the usual pleasantries like "buenos dias" and "¿Donde está el baño?", and will hopefully allow you to express almost any thought in "pidgeon Spanish".

The reference has been updated since this blog entry was posted (last update: Sept 25, 2010). I rearranged it so the English words are first rather than second and sorted by the English word, as my friend wanted. I have also added various new words and phrases and replaced "world" with "money", thinking the latter to be a more important noun for a tourist. I also noticed that a lot of Spanish common verbs conjugate irregularly, so I now provide the irregular first person present form beside every verb, e.g. tener (tengo). Probably the gerund form (teniendo) would be more useful, but the verb table is really full and wouldn't have room for those extra letters. Unlike English, Spanish gerunds may have irregular conjugations too.

Before using this reference, I recommend that you take some Spanish lessons first. Here are some essential points to know about Spanish.

Spanish is phonetic, but you must learn and practice the Spanish pronunciation rules. No one will understand you if you use English spelling rules to pronounce Spanish. There is a pronunciation section in the quick reference, but you need a few hours of careful practice to get the hang of it.
The basic word order of Spanish is SVO (subject-verb-object), like English. However, occasionally the pronoun will come before the verb and other word orders often occur in Spanish that are invalid in English.
All Spanish nouns are masculine or feminine, including inanimate objects and concepts. "The" and "a" translate as "el" and "un" when used with masculine nouns, but "la" and "una" when used with feminine nouns. Nouns ending in "o" (but not "ó") are usually masculine; nouns ending in "a" are usually feminine. Nouns not ending in "a" or "o" do not reveal their gender, but such words are more likely to be masculine than feminine.
Usually, Spanish adjectives come after the noun, and must match the gender and number of the noun that they are attached to: mesa roja = red table, ojo rojo = red eye, mesas rojas = red tables, ojos rojos = red eyes.
As for any foreign language, Spanish does not translate word-for-word from/to English. To say something in pidgeon Spanish, try to boil your idea down to simple, independent components. Don't try to translate "I have just eaten the whole thing" word-for-word, instead identify the concepts and translate them: I, eat (recent past), all-of-this => yo, comer, hace poco, todo de esto. Conjugate if you can: yo, comí, todo de esto. Your Spanish grammar will probably be wrong, but there is a greater chance that it will be understood than a word-for-word translation like "Yo tener comido el todo cosa" (I can probably think of a better example).
If you can't find a translation with my quick reference sheet, look for a different way to say the same thing. If you use Google Translate, give it a whole sentence at once to get its best translation.
The system of Spanish verbs is terrifyingly complex, no doubt one of the most complex in the world. There are three types of verbs, each with their own set of conjugations: verbs that end in -ir, verbs that end in -ar and verbs that end in -er. Some, but not all, conjugations are the same between the three types.

There is a different conjugation for each combination of tense, person and number; for example, there are separate words for "I eat", "we eat", "you eat", "you will eat", "you ate", "he/she ate", "they ate", "they would eat" and so forth. There are also special conjugations for imperative (eat this!), negative imperative (don't eat this), gerund (eating), and past participle (eaten). Finally, some verbs are irregular, meaning they have their own special conjugations.

There are 17 verb tenses (give or take depending on how you count them), and 6 combinations of person and number; basically, a table of conjugations for one verb fills a page. A verb contains so much information that the pronoun is often dropped from the sentence.
Learning the pronouns is a smaller crushing burden. English has two categories of pronouns (I/she/he/they and me/her/him/them), but Spanish has about five. My reference sheet shows three of those categories. "Subject" means before the verb, "Object" means after the verb, and "Prepositional" means after a preposition (in a prepositional phrase, e.g. para mi = for me, fuera de ti = outside of you). Tip: all pronouns that start with "t" mean "you".
There are a ton of words that mean "is", plus the "va" family of words that mean "is going". "is" is the most complex verb in English, too, but in English it has only seven forms.
As in English, words can have many synonyms; usually I did not list them on the quick reference unless there was unused space. I can only hope that a Spanish person doesn't have to continue learning new words into adulthood like an English person (as the English language contains around a million words).

Here are some patterns I've noticed for all three verb types:

When you want to use a verb pair like "I can say", "I want to eat", "He learns to swim", etc., the first verb gets the tense information and the second verb is simply the infinitive, e.g. "Puedo decir hola"(I can say hello), "Quiero comer" (I want to eat), "He learns to swim" (Él aprende a nadar). Roughly like English, some verbs require the "to" (Spanish "a") after the first verb while others do not.

On the plus side, Spanish doesn't seem to have the helping verbs that make English grammar more complex (except for the many forms of "have"--haya, hubiere, etc.--which I counted as part of the 17 verb tenses, but which my quick reference does not cover at all).
"er" and "ir" verbs conjugate similarly, so on my quick reference I only show conjugations for an "er" verb, not an "ir" verb.
For most verbs, a simple "-o" ending means "I" + present tense, e.g. como = I eat
Verbs that end in "s" usually mean "you" or "we", e.g. comes = You eat, comemos = We eat, comías = you used to eat, comimos = we ate. Some "you/we" conjugations do not end in "s", but if it does end in "s" then you know that the verb includes the concept of "you" or "we". The "we" verbs usually end in "mos" so you can tell them apart from the "you" verbs.
"you" plural familiar (vosotros) and its many conjugations are only required in Spain. Latin America uses "ustedes", which conjugates the same way as third-person plurals like ellas/ellos.
"-a" and "-e"verb endings (habla = speak, come = eat, vive = live) are the closest thing Spanish has to "generic" present-tense verbs. If you want present tense but do not know what conjugation to use, I hypothesize that you will be understood if you just drop the "r" from -ar and -er verbs, or replace -ir with -e. You could also try the Spanish equivalent of "ing", which is "iendo" or "ando": está comiendo = is eating, está hablando = is speaking.
If you need past, future or some other tense, I hypothesize that you will be understood if you just use the infinitive form (hablar, comer, vivir) plus a time phrase (en el pasado, en el futuro, hace poco, pronto). When possible, use "va a" (El va a comer = He is-going to eat) or "voy" (I am going) so that you do not need to conjugate the verb.

By the way, "va" or "voy" themselves can be used like a verb that means "going" (Voy ahora = I am going now).
There are two different verb groups for be (is/am/are): estar (estoy, está, ...) and ser (soy, es, ...). I haven't figured out all the details, but as a rule of thumb, I you should use estar with "ing" verbs and prepositional phrases (él está comiendo = he is eating, él está en el tren = he is in the train), and use ser with adjectives (él es alto = he is tall, ella es bonita = she is pretty).

There are, of course, thousands of nouns to learn. The ones I selected for the quick reference are optimized for the needs of a tourist.

I'm a beginner at Spanish so there may be some mistakes. Let me know if you see any. If you use this quick reference, let the Spanish person see you use it--maybe they will be more patient with you.

OKCupid's fascinating blog

2010-06-05T10:18:00.000-07:00

While I continue to wonder where I am going to find a date, I will definitely be following the best free dating site's blog. Lots of good stuff on there with mathematical analysis, from politics vs. age to what profile picture will make people interested in you.

This blog will also help me set my expectations. I didn't realize to what degree I was "expected" to send messages to women: now I know that men send nearly 4 times as many first messages as women. Now I need to figure out what to say in my messages, and get over my aversion to messaging people when I can't tell if I like them from their profile alone.

How The U.S. Government Killed The Safest Car Ever Built

2010-05-29T07:38:00.000-07:00

Click the title for something fascinating.

Rethinking copyright

2010-05-29T06:54:00.001-07:00

What if there were "replicators" with which you could make any object at minimal expense? Someone responding to a Slashdot article seemed to think this would be a bad thing:

And once everyone had a replicator - everyone would replicate the newest, coolest, best car. [...] And all of the advancement and innovation that we've seen since the first car and now would grind to a halt.

Others pointed out how flawed this is:

Since you can duplicate everything, including food and shelter, the whole idea of working to survive goes out the window. If such a device existed, you would be free to do whatever you please with your time. For many, this would be designing amazing cars. For others it would be building amazing cars. Everyone has a hobby, and a replicator would enable everyone to pursue their hobbies; hobbies that are often out of reach of the average person today.

But really the topic of the article was copyright, so I made the following argument.

Reality disagrees with you. Almost everybody now has a replicator--of bits and bytes. Yet somehow the companies that make brand new songs, software, movies and TV shows stay in business while continuing to make major profits. The biggest stars still make millions of dollars per year, and Big Content spends as much on blockbuster films as ever. The cable companies manage to get upwards of $600 per year from typical customers, and for all that money you still have to put up with 15 minutes of ads per hour and you still don't get to watch shows on-demand.

Somehow, people are still willing to pay for things they could copy for free. Partly this is because of Big Content's success in lobbying for powerful laws in their favor, and in using those laws to shut down networks and individuals that share files. Partly it may be that sheeple actually do believe ads that compare copying a song to stealing a car (it's frustrating how many people think this way!) For me, it is sense that those who make the best movies and music deserve to get paid, and I pay for those works that I like (provided that the price is reasonable and the DRM is not excessive).

Our society greatly benefits from the fact that people do not steal from a supermarket just because they can avoid getting caught. Recently I read about an incident where the staff of a grocery store were missing, but customers generally left money to pay for their purchases. That people are generally good means less resources must be wasted on security and prisons (which themselves produce nothing useful), people are less afraid of other people, and people less often have the unpleasant experience of being robbed.

Because people are generally good, they are willing to pay for copyrighted works even though copying them (unlike stealing physical objects) technically does not hurt anyone. Generally good people (GGP) know that these things must be paid for or they will not be produced in the first place. It's a principle we all understand, except perhaps Big Content, who assume their customers are criminals. And so, we the GGP have some willingness to do our part by paying for copyrighted works, just as we are willing to pay taxes and do occasional volunteer work and give a bit to charity and not steal from the supermarket.

Big Content, however, does not want merely to have enough money to pay for a healthy music and film market--they always want to increase profits if possible, regardless of what they get now. Consider how much smaller the market for films was in 1960: the world population was only 3 billion and American films would probably have had a very small market beyond North America. Did the movie companies ever complain then that there were not enough humans available to buy copies? Today the potential market is nearly 7 billion and the actual market is probably several times larger than it was in 1960, yet film companies complain very loudly if, say, 1/6 of that market (China) is not paying them enough. Do they really need the money? Of course not: if money was tight they would simply scale back movie budgets, just as budgets were necessarily small in 1960. Certainly low-income pirates in no way prevent them from making movies, and the actual movie budgets of today prove that they are doing very well for themselves. Even if you took away the entire third world market, the would still have a good billion potential customers left.

But in copyright markets, the cost of "buying" a work has almost nothing to do with covering the cost of production: a movie DVD that costs $10 may be for something expected to take a heavy loss like Waterworld, or for something that has already made billions of dollars in profit like Star Wars, and certainly doesn't "need" more. Likewise, their rhetoric about people losing their livelihoods from "piracy" does not necessarily bear any resemblance to their actual financial health. Maybe copying is a serious threat, maybe not, but their rhetoric is always the same regardless of the truth.

Big Content, unlike generally good people, have no sense of fairness. While sometimes they take losses, the potential for "jackpots" like Star Wars means they would surely oppose anything to make copyright more fair, like limiting copyright to 28 years, or that takes advantage of humans' natural goodness (like removing DRM and repealing the DMCA, or my personal favorite, a more radical rethinking of copyright that would let citizens buy the right to copy works for free, paying some minimum amount yearly for this privilege based on income level).

I am tired of this stubborn belief that restricting our civil liberties (specifically, the personal right to copy) is the only way to ensure new works are created. I am also tired of the argument that Big Content "deserves" every penny it makes and that people don't "deserve" the freedom to copy. "Deserves" is a moral judgement. Big Content doesn't use morality to make business decisions or to decide what laws they will lobby for. Big Content doesn't use morality to select prices. Big Content doesn't use morality to select DRM schemes. Why should the rest of us, therefore, make a moral judgment that they "deserve" the profit they get from us?

...That was what I posted. But let me add something.

Copyright is not a right

The most common and annoying perceptual error people make with copyright is that they consider it a "right" - like the right to life, the right of free speech, or the right to move freely throughout the country. Copyright, however, is the exact opposite of these important rights. Normal rights prevent certain parties (especially the government) from doing bad things to you--no matter who "you" are. Normal rights limit the amount of control others have over you. For the most part, they allow you to be left alone. Copyright, however, is not a right to copy; rather, it is the right for an "owner" to prevent other people from copying. To prevent you from copying. In an age where copying is as natural as eating or sleeping, it prevents you, the commoner, from being left alone.

Some authors will claim they have the "right" to make money from their work and that this justifies ever-expanding copyright law. Wrong. You only have the right to try to make money. Laws that help you make money are provided by the government, and they should not be considered rights, any more than subsidies on corn or government science grants. And if you ask me, the 300-year-old copyright model is just plain wrong for the modern age. Copyright itself doesn't grant you the "right" to make money, only the power (if you have the lawyers for it!) to restrict copying, and this only helps you make money in a roundabout way: typically, you prevent all copies except the ones you make, then charge money for those. This system sucks because it denies money to authors of some of the most valuable works society produces: open source software.

Open source software provides tons of value to society precisely because it is copied so freely, yet copyright provides no money whatsoever to authors of said software. While free software refutes the claim that "no one would make music/video/software if they weren't paid", the fact is that without monetary benefit, the free software ecosystem usually produces software of lower quality than commercial rivals (with a few exceptions such as Firefox, or cases where commercial software is of low quality due to niche status or a monopoly market). Open source is a better model of software development, but because there is usually no funding for extensive testing or documentation and, since free software authors must have a "day job" to make money, free software gets much less time put into it than it needs. If the government provided some way for these authors to be paid for their work, open source might well explode in quantity and quality. I, for one, would give up my $44K-a-year job doing closed source, if I could do open source software of my choosing at minimum wage.

Intellectual property is imaginary property. I wish I could persuade society that copyright is neither the only nor the best system to pay authors for their work. But the ones who benefit most from copyright are the same people involved in writing copyright and related laws, evangelizing it (you've seen the anti-piracy ads), and thrusting it upon the world through international treaties. Supporters of true freedom--real rights--have no such financial or political clout, and so our ideas are censored by glut.

Dreams as simulations

2010-05-27T12:50:00.001-07:00

Now that I drive to work, sometimes I wonder: what if an emergency happens? A car hits me from behind, or someone changes into my lane... this never happens, so how can I be prepared for it? Are my dreams helping out?

For centuries people people have wondered about the meaning of dreams. Some time ago I decided that the likely primary purpose of dreaming is to train us for potential future situations: a sort of virtual reality where the brain creates a random situation, we react to it in the dream state, and then the brain attempts to predict the outcome. By doing this every night, we learn, while asleep, how to react to waking situations before they ever happen.

This article I just found lends credence to my pet theory. Of course, it is widely reported that we learn better if we sleep after studying. So perhaps dreams also exist to give the brain a chance to examine what has recently happened, and make better sense of it.

Peter Watts

2010-05-02T10:28:00.000-07:00

Several months ago, sci-fi writer Peter Watts was assaulted by US border patrol guards. He was then charged with assaulting a federal officer, who claimed that Peter choked him. Apparently there was a video of the event that (along with a witness) proved the choking claim was false.

Peter Watts' blog is kind of a mess and so far I haven't been able to find the information I was looking for (such as: was the whole thing captured on video or was the car out-of-frame? did he give the guards his keys at some point before the altercation?), but the jist of the story is: while attempting to return to Canada, US border guards began to search his car without telling him. Upon noticing that they were doing something, he got out of his car and asked what they were doing. The guard didn't answer, but instead told him to get back in the car. He made the mistake of repeating his question, at which point one or more border guards punched him in the face and sprayed mace in his nose. Apparently he was outside his car for just 10-12 seconds, but nevertheless was convicted with a felony for failing to obey the instruction.

Like the Iraq story I wrote about in my last post, what we have here is a clear case of abuse of power. And like the last story, the most shocking thing to me is not so much that somebody abused their power (a common failing among people with power), but rather what the consequences were for that abuse. Instead of the guards being fired, fined, or reprimanded for their behavior, the government not only protected the perpetrators, but formally charged the victim with a felony for being a few seconds too slow. Just as amazing, the jury found that the law was on the government's side, and they had to convict (see "DVD Extras" link below).

Doesn't this lack of consequences lead directly to more abuse of power? Spare the rod, spoil the adult, you might say.

And as with the Iraq incident, I fear that cases like this happen more often than we know. A relatively well-known individual with media-savvy friends like Peter Watts can make the news (even if the news doesn't care to talk to him). But for every Peter Watts there may be hundred ordinary joes seriously mistreated by people with power, who don't have enough connections to get their story heard.

While writing about the Iraq incident I read all the high-rated comments at Slashdot, some of which were very interesting, such as Mondorescue's comments about rules of engagement, and insightful quotables like "the difference between a murderer and a soldier is that a murderer wants to kill".

Likewise there are some good comments on the Peter Watts case, so I'll quote them if you don't mind.

"This law includes offenses ranging from assault and battery to simply standing too close to an officer..."

"Standing too close to an officer" is a crime? OK, that's about the walking definition of a bad law.

What was Watts' crime? He asked the officers what they were doing.

He didn't strike anyone. He didn't kick anyone. According to the record he didn't even use harsh language. Apparently our law enforcement community has become so vicious and cowardly they'll beat people bloody just for looking at them wrong.

Peter Watts is a geek scifi writer. Judging from his photos, he weighs about 160. My wife could smack him around. He's about as threatening as a tuna sandwich.
-jeko

I recently took a defensive driving course (because my insurance offered me a sizeable discount for doing so) and they pointed out that in the little book given for drivers for the written test, it explicitly states that should you be pulled over, at no time should you exit your vehicle unless instructed to do so by the officer. There really is no excuse.

Then you are an idiot. You don't understand why it's in there. It was never for the protection of the police. It was for your own protection. Think about it (I know, hard for you). You pull over on the right side of the road. Your door is on the left. You open it, and you are standing out in traffic. Safety is the one and only one reason that rule was ever started. However, since then, they've asserted that to be "normal" behavior and any abnormal behavior at all is dangerous. So now, it's an issue, not because of the police's safety, but for your own for not playing in traffic, and for your own because it will be seen as unusual behavior. There's nothing aggressive about getting out of the car. There was never an issue about it being bad for cops when the recommendation was created.

[....] -AK Marc

I visited the US and drove around as a tourist once, got stopped by the police and did what folk in the UK do - I got out of the car to wait by the side of it to show the police that I wasn't going to do a runner. I didn't know that you sit inside the car until the police come to you in the USA, nobody told me this when I got my tourist visa stamped at immigration or when I picked up the hire car.

Things escalated very fast and I found myself surrounding by two or three police cars with people shouting stuff and pointing guns at me. Very scary when you're not quite sure why this is all happening. Fair play to the police officers, after a couple of minutes of me putting my hands in the air and shouting "Sorry, I am a tourist, I don't know what I've done" things calmed down to the point that we could have a chat and sort things out pleasantly (we all shook hands at the end of it and the cops pointed out where a local hotel was, my mission of the moment).

Not sure what the answer is, should foreign nationals have to read the local written driving test / read the handbooks before being allowed to drive a car in another country?
-fantomas

(Does an official handbook even exist that says you can't get out of the car when pulled over?)

A jury found him guilty of felony non-compliance, so he must have done more than just stepped out of his car.

Actually, from the reports, that's EXACTLY what he did, and the judge basically cut him loose for it.

he did so at border patrol, which by definition carries a higher risk for officers,

I am so sick of hearing this. Cowardice is no excuse for brutality. I grew up military. Come to one of my family dinners and let the Vietnam veterans in my family explain what a dangerous job is.

Looking at the Department of Labor statistics, being a cop is a VERY safe job. You know who gets killed on the job more often than police officers? Construction workers. Cab drivers. Fast food workers. Hotel clerks.

Hop over to the forums on "Officer.com" and listen to the boys on blue in their own words for a while. They'll tell you quite openly they feel absolutely no obligation to put themselves in harm's way for the "sheeple," and they proudly proclaim "I AM GOING HOME TONIGHT" no matter how many receptionists and secretaries have to die to make that happen.

I spent some time with the State Fire Association. Seems like everyone last one of those guys is missing an eye, ear or finger, and has a quietly proud story of how they traded that part of their body for some stranger's kid. I stand in awe of their dedication, sacrifice and courage.

The institutional cowardice and crutality of law enforcement stands in stark contrast.
- jeko

(I don't entirely agree with this comment but I love the one-liner: Cowardice is no excuse for brutality! Mind you, I'm not sure it's fair to say that bullies are cowards. If somebody might be a threat so you beat them up just in case--to guarantee your own safety by hurting an innocent--that's cowardice. Hurting someone because you're a bully--that's just evil.)

[....]
Perspective anecdote: one of my personal "unknown heroes" is a highway cop who stood there calmly listening to this frustrated motorist he pulled over deliver this obscene tirade of vitriol. He just asked questions, wrote the ticket, and let the guy vent. No shouting, no arrest for disorderly conduct, no mace, no "he tripped in the car and hit his face on the steering wheel", nothing. Totally kept his cool. You could have balanced tigers on his cool. So when I read of situations like this, where a guard flies off the handle and beats the crap out of a tourist for daring to ask what the problem is, I know one bad cop doesn't mean all bad cops - I've seen the proof otherwise.

When an officer of the law resorts to the use of violence (and I mean bloody violence, not some wrestling lock or whatever) on a non-violent "offender" (regardless of any verbal aggressiveness), I consider that officer has failed in his duty. But what truly disturbs me is not that it inevitably happens - we're all human - but that it can be excused and abetted when it happens so blatantly. When the testimonies of those guards present not only don't match but contradict, when the guy laying on the ground covered in mace and his own blood gets dragged through the courts and convicted of a felony, when the officer who put him there does not even get an official reprimand let alone arrested himself... it has gone way past one officer losing his temper and making a mistake.
- Sabriel

(e.g. http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=PNNz5kl4w-A)

[....]
The fault with the statements above is that they equate police officers with DHS guards. Despite having been on the wrong side of the law many times, I do believe that the vast majority of police officers are honest folks who foster good relations with their citizens and have honest intent(the only bad publicity seems to come from Los Angeles, with its officers up against crotch-grabbers [cnn.com] and coked-up madmen using babies for human shields [policeone.com]). I also agree that they're not out to cause trouble because they want to go home to their families without any bullshit.
However - DHS guards are not police officers. They are glorified security guards gone mad with the power they attained in the wake of 9/11. The vast majority of them face no danger, and the last one to be shot to death(since the '80's) passed under mysterious circumstances with his gun stolen, an obvious cover-up. [....]
- Ethanol-fueled

but what trained officers are supposed to do is expect the subject to do the worst possible thing...

No. Not even soldiers are trained to do that. Civilian law enforcement is trained to use good judgement. It is more important to know when NOT to shoot than it is to know when TO shoot. Keep running Mad Max fantasies through your head like anyone who COULD pull a gun WILL pull a gun, and you end up shooting a kid for no good reason like one ex-officer I personally know.

If you haven't been in a situation where a person wants to argue with cops and then for some unknown reason pulls out a gun,

Here's another nonsense argument I'm sick of. Since you're pressing the point, yes, I have been shot at. No, it's not pleasant at all. No, the fear that someone MIGHT take a shot at you is no excuse for beating civilians bloody. -jeko

All this reminds me of this interesting 40-minute educational video: 10 Rules for Dealing with Police. Stay safe out there!

DVD Extras and Director Commentary

It's Hard To Watch

2010-04-08T08:41:00.000-07:00

A collage of thoughts.

On my cruise in March, I met a friend, Tom, who believes the U.S. will fall like Rome of old, because corruption will rot its core until, finally, everything falls apart.

We'll see. But whatever happens, it's painful to watch. U.S. politics seems to have become utterly nuts. I had hoped Barack Obama would help bring people together, but to my astonishment the polarization that the Bush administration seemed to revel in only seemed to get worse under Obama, despite the new president's attempts to establish bipartisanship. It seems these days like straw men are a thousand feet high.

Listening to the right--now the majority, if the ratings of Fox News mean anything--the policies of the great Ronald Reagan (or was that George W. Bush? who's can remember, it was so long ago) have been swept aside by the tyrant Barack Hussein Obama, who will bring socialism (or has already done so) and take the unprecedented step of drowning the country in debt.

From where I sit, the new boss looks too much like the old boss. The Bush Administration started a warrantless wiretapping program and passed a bill (with Obama's vote) to give immunity to cooperating telecomms; Obama is continuing to prevent information about the program from leaking. Bush passed a stimulus package for megacorporations worth hundreds of billions; Obama passed another one. Neither bailout had conditions to prevent excessive executive compensation. Bush started two wars; Obama is continuing them. Bush raised the debt over $4 trillion; Obama ambitiously continues the trend. Bush catered to big business interests; so does Obama.

How is Obama different? Well, he passed a health care bill. Or as Dennis Kucinich called it, "insurance care": a plan only barely better than the status quo, that takes care to protect big insurance company profits. Oh, and he's more intelligent... but less experienced. His skin color is slightly different... that's gotta be worth something. He's pledged government transparency... but half the country will find reasons ("talking points") why this and every single thing he ever does is A Bad Thing.

What's scariest to me about American politics is not what's going on at the top, but at the bottom. The country seems saturated with extremists. People watching Fox News and MSNBC instead of CNN. People listening to Glenn Beck, O'Reilly and Limbaugh as if they were Walter Cronkite, Larry King, and 60 minutes. Shouting matches instead of debates. And above all a disregard for truth, honesty, and ethics. Too many Americans seem to be confusing "right" and "left" with "right" and "wrong", while many others would rather just watch American Idol and, when they get to the polling booth, punch a chad beside the first name they recognize. Damn sheeple everywhere.

I'm really worried that corruption is killing the United States. Not just at the top, but at the grass roots too. Why does it look like the fringes are taking over, like mold spreading across a slice of bread? If the grass roots were healthy--if the common man were ethical and did not tolerate lies--maybe they could reign-in the craziness in the federal government and the mainstream media. But without people that cherish truth, balance, love and reason... maybe American politics is the result.

WikiLeaks recently released a video from the point of view of a U.S. gunship that shows it mowing down a group of people including 2 Reuters journalists and two children in a van. They say at least 12 people died (the children survived). I wonder if the mainstream media will give it much coverage.

If you're one of those war-monger types, please do watch the video (17 or 39 minute version), lest you brush it off again as no big deal. Around 2:00 (39 min version) when the guy says "Have five to six individuals with AK-47s", I challenge you to find a single AK-47 on the screen, let alone any evidence of hostility (unless I'm mistaken, in war-torn countries it is not uncommon for individuals to be armed, so merely possessing a weapon shouldn't get you killed by our tax dollars.) For those with softer hearts, there is a transcript (now if only there was one with pictures.)

The only thing in this video for which the attackers could be forgiven is at 2:34, where they mistake a large camera for an R.P.G., probably because they only see it for a few seconds and the way the man leans against a building looks rather like taking cover or preparing to fire. Hell, maybe some RPGs do look like that.

Anyway, on the whole it's truly amazing. A group of people calmly walking around--no sign of hostility toward anyone, most of them appear unarmed, no weapons in-hand, standing on the street, none of them near cover, most of them seeming unaware of the gunship's presence--and they just "light em up".

"Keep shootin'".
...
"Keep shootin'".
...
"Keep shootin'".

The bullets take a full two seconds to reach their targets, and the helicopter may have been up to 800 metres away (source), explaining why the civvies seemed to take little notice of it at first.

Later a van comes by, which apparently had been picking up bodies or wounded, and tried to rescue one of the journalists. No sign that the van's occupants are armed or hostile, but god damn how the gunship guys chomp at the bit!

"Let me engage"
"Can I shoot?"
"Request permission to engage..."
"Picking up the wounded?"
"Yeah, we're trying to get permission to engage."
"What's goin' on, let us shoot!"
"Request permission to engage."
"This is bushmaster 7, roger, engage."

After that I'd had enough. I didn't need to watch that shit.

According to WikiLeaks,

After demands by Reuters, the incident was investigated and the U.S. military concluded that the actions of the soldiers were in accordance with the law of armed conflict and its own "Rules of Engagement".

I'm ashamed to say I have seen several short "snuff films", graphic videos of real people actually dying by accident or by murder. By the numbers this is the worst snuff film I have ever seen, but it has a low-quality black and white picture, and given what evil I have exposed myself to before, it doesn't leave quite as vivid an impression on the memory as a close up full-color death. Still. It's keeping me awake.

So what does this have to do with American politics? Since 9/11 I've seen several Americans on the internet posting filthy tirades against foreigners. Afghanistan? Bomb it! Iraqis? Bomb them! Maybe we'll hit a terrorist or two by chance and that will make it worthwhile. And I am reminded of how they--we?--treat a human life as worth so much less if it's an Iraqi, or any foreigner not from a wealthy western nation. What comfort it is that we need not even try to measure the death toll in these places. Is it 200,000 dead in Iraq or a million? Who knows, who cares. What really matters is that 4287 U.S. soldiers died and 139 journalists. Mind you, one dead Micheal Jackson gets more press than 1000 dead soldiers. Some Americans have leftover appetite for war, but maybe less appetite for news about it.

We ruined Iraq. After keeping the country poor with onerous sanctions for many years, we downgraded it from a ruthless dictatorship to a lawless cesspool of poverty, evil and death, and finally, tired of letting the suicide bombers get all the kills, we join the party, pop open a few civilians ourselves, and don't worry about it too much because the rules of engagement were followed. The bad guys kill so many civilians, what's the big deal if we get a few too?

When I saw that group of 9 civvies in the crosshairs it reminded me very much of the online video games I sometimes play. It's such a great feeling to blow up three or four other players with a single group of stickybombs in TF2, or sneak up on a group of enemies in CS and light 'em all up with a grenade. I wonder if these fucking murderers in a real gunship got the same feeling when they saw all "five to six" of their supposedly AK-armed targets, plus a few bonus points, all clumped together out in the open where they could kill them all in a matter of seconds.

It's hard to watch. So for the most part we don't watch it, and we allow the government to censor it indefinitely. But once in awhile a WikiLeak comes along, and you're forced to wonder how many other events like this have occurred. When the official word is that the U.S. killed X number of insurgents--as it was in this case--how often is it true, and how often does "insurgent" mean "unidentified civilians walking down the street"?

I must admit though, I really can't focus on the worst of it most of the time. To dwell on it too long destroys one's happiness. And yet my birth country did commit this atrocity and cover it up. They did cause the whole mess in Iraq. And I just can't believe people would think it's okay to just start a war and destabilize a country because ... because what? My mother could list a hundred reasons. Iraq had aluminum tubes for making nukes! They had secret trucks filled with chemical weapons! Even if the reasons weren't complete fabrications, we still shouldn't have been buying the war.

But the truth is, I think about Iraq very little. There's nothing anyone can do about it now; for all I know, withdrawing the troops could make the situation worse there. Dwelling on unsolvable problems is very draining, trust me, I do it a lot. But before this WikiLeaks thing, I gave no thought to Iraq for quite some time.

We have this nice little feature in our brains that lets us ignore things that we're used to. Like the dirty clothes blanketing my bedroom floor. But people seem to think this absolves them of responsibility for evil in society, family and government that they could eliminate, but don't because they're used to it. Damn it, everybody, stop being sheeple. Mind you, I have to admit, I don't change society much myself. I want to, but the evil is piling up and I feel as though it's crushing my will. What can I do? It's just little me and a few nonprofits versus the big bad world. Over time I have been shrinking from it more and more, save for a few outbursts like this one when, for once, I feel like something needs to be said.

I understand that it is easier not to try to improve the world. It's less painful. So understandably there is this group of non-political people just living out their own lives and ignoring the wider world. But I'm afraid--maybe justified, maybe not--that time is running out. While so many people concern themselves with family values and fiscal responsibility (to be accomplished by replacing Democrats with Republicans, I guess), they allow dangerous trends to go unchecked: rhetoric is getting more extreme. Lies are tolerated. Wars are tolerated. Investigative journalism is replaced with punditry. Every man can now choose facts to fit their opinion.

I'm sort of a pundit, you know. One that almost no one reads, but still. Punditry is easy: all you have to do is have an opinion and share it in an entertaining way. It helps if you know some facts but it's by no means required (just make them up or find an official-looking page on Google), and you don't have to spend much money to produce a story that grabs eyeballs. You can't blame pundits for being cheap, I mean, it costs less. But they are no substitute for more substantive news, where money has been spent to gather data, and to carefully analyze it, and editors have tried to make sure a story is fair and balanced. They say traditional news is too expensive to produce when the internet makes everything free. Can't we find a way to fund it? Or is it too late, now that so many think it is enough to take the word of their favorite pundit as gospel?

I'm committed to giving 10% of my income to good causes. I have plenty of money after all, provided I keep my job. So recently I gave 1200 or so to United Way, 500 to Red Cross Haiti Relief, 500 to the EFF, 500 or so to Avaaz, and I'm thinking of giving 500 to WikiLeaks after seeing this video and hearing about threats to this vital source of truth, such as the U.S. government. I have to get over a little mental barrier when giving to my favorite charities though, because they are not tax deductable. EFF and WikiLeaks are based in the U.S. so Canada (yeah, I'm up North) doesn't recognize them, and Avaaz wouldn't be tax-deductable anyway because it "engages in political lobbying". I'm sure the regular tax-deductable charities like United Way and Red Cross do good things, but aren't they kind of like Advil, easing the symptoms instead of curing the disease?

It's been hard to reach the full 10%. Not because I am unwilling, but because like so many other people I'm so wrapped up in my own life. Just about every night I escape the world with a video game or a TV show. All that real-life stuff is either boring or depressing. A lot of important goings-on are probably slipping by unperceived as I do this, but dammit, where's the encouragement? I don't have a lot of energy to do things on my own when no one else seems to care.

So please, if you're reading this, do something good in the world. Good people are holding the world together. Ethics, fairness and reason are keeping it together. Love for one another is binding us together. Oh, and get educated. Frontline's documentary on Hugo Chavez taught me how a people's general lack of skills and education can hinder a country's development. Do good and let others see it, so that those of us who want to do good know we are not alone, and can gain courage from you.

Oops, it's 4:17 AM. Good night.

Note: Reposting because I was originally not logged in as myself.

CNN reports the Iraq leak online: one, two, three (video interview)
MSNBC reports the Iraq leak online: one, two, three
The Fox News version
Apologists explain the soldiers' behavior
Iraq slaughter is not an aberration

My Copyright Submission

2009-09-12T11:33:00.000-07:00

For some reason the Canadian government sought opinions on the future of Canadian copyright law (web site), and asked five questions of submitters. The consultation period ends tomorrow. The following is my submission, plus some additional notes in [square brackets] that were not in the original submission.

1. How do Canada's copyright laws affect you? How should existing laws be modernized?
I think copyright affects our entire society more than we realize. For example, when copyright was retroactively extended by 38 years in the U.S. (18 years in 1976 + 20 more in 1998), two generations of people were denied any additional public domain works, yet few people even noticed. But those of us that did were largely angry about it.

The very premise of copyright — that the only way people should make money is by denying others the right to make copies, and then charging for each copy — frames every discussion about how the "creative economy" works and should work. This is unfortunate because I believe there should be other options.

There are many creative people such as myself that would like to be compensated for our work, but who would also like to share it with the world as widely as possible. I am a Software Engineer, and I make software on salary. What bothers me about my job is that I am making totally closed software, and the number of customers for it will probably be quite limited. I write many algorithms that could have a wide range of applications, but insofar as the software is closed, those algorithms will only ever by used for the one application for which I wrote them. What a waste! And the whole reason I wrote this software is that the third-party closed software we used before didn't meet our needs. If we had access to the source code we could have modified it for our needs (though the expensive license fees were also an issue), but since the software was closed, we had to write the whole thing from scratch. And the software in question—map software similar to what you get in a portable GPS unit—has been written many times over by different companies. Doesn't this amount to wasteful duplication of effort? And the government pays an SR&ED credit for it.

I don't think my company would be materially affected by any changes the government might make to copyright law. Whether you enlarge or shrink the copyright term, whether or not you pass DMCA-style legislation, whatever you do about orphan works, none of that is likely to affect the bottom line [my company relies more on contracts and secret source code than copyright, as we typically sell to business and government].

But for me personally, I would like to see a government program that actually pays some authors outright for their work, in exchange for making that work freely available for anyone in Canada to copy and remix (or, in the case of software, re-use and modify in source code form). Such a system would, of course, not replace copyright, but simply provide a way for authors to be paid without forcing authors to restrict copying.

2. Based on Canadian values and interests, how should copyright changes be made in order to withstand the test of time?
What does that even mean?

3. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster innovation and creativity in Canada?
As I mentioned, I think the government should provide more funding options for authors, artists and programmers. In addition to the standard "charge for each copy" model, the government should consider another public consultation about at least a pilot program to pay willing artists with tax funds to make free works, and to pay open-source software developers for their valuable contributions to society.

Long copyright terms are not necessary for innovation and creativity. Most commercial copyright works make money for under 20 years. If copyright was 20 years, do you think any film would not be green-lighted because "it may make millions at first, but people will stop buying copies in 2030?" However, perhaps non-commercial rights should last longer than 20 years, such as the "moral rights" of attribution and the right to prevent others from altering the work.

DMCA-style anti-circumvision laws are not necessary for innovation and creativity. Organizations like CRIA, RIAA and MPAA desire such provisions to help them keep using old business models and avoid joining the 21st century. It seems to me they would much rather squeeze more money out of the general public for existing IPs than create new IPs. Economically, if you give in to American lobbies, the main effect will be that Canadian citizens pay more to U.S. corporations.

Remember, these corporate lobbies mainly do not represent artists and authors. They do not represent the Canadian economy or the world economy. They only represent their bosses.

So please, stop considering such things. It would be better to do nothing at all.

4. What sorts of copyright changes do you believe would best foster competition and investment in Canada?
I don't think anything that strengthens copyright will have a tangible impact on competition or investment. But why aren't you asking what changes would be best for the people of Canada? It's not only artists and corporations the government should aim to please, but the citizens too! The citizens would benefit from having access to as many works as possible, with as few restrictions as possible. Ordinary citizens are the most important group to please, because there are vastly more of us ["the greatest good for the greatest number"]. This should be the focus of your lawmaking.

5. What kinds of changes would best position Canada as a leader in the global, digital economy?
What does "digital economy" mean, exactly? If you mean online trade, or the software industry, or electronic trade in music and movies, I don't think anything has to be done to copyright law to keep those things healthy [you know what would increase online trade and lead to new business models? a ubiquitous micropayment system for making instant purchases under $1]. Don't listen to the scare mongers in the CRIA and Hollywood. Their piracy figures are absurdly large, and anyway digital trade is kind of a zero-sum game: "piracy" just means that some low-income Canadians are enjoying more songs/films/software than they can afford to pay for, and middle-class Canadians are spending their money on some other part of the economy instead of giving it to the record or film or game industries. It does not harm the economy as a whole. Let the people speak with their money: if they want to pay these industries they will. I do buy my favorite movies and shows on DVD, and I have paid for many terrific video games, even though I have the means to pirate anything I want.

In any case, the supply of artists and authors will never dry up no matter what you do. It's human nature to create — I work on open source software, even without pay. It's just that if I could get paid, I would make more of it [and better quality, and I'd be more responsive to users' needs--aspects which often harm the uptake of open source].

Look, we already have a bind-bogglingly rich landscape of copyrighted works. No one could ever consume a significant fraction of all available English works or software. Even if you just consume the "best" works, you could never come close to running out. But our laws are wasteful — both economically and morally — because they restrict the audience size for, and re-use/re-mixing of, those works. People don't realize the laws are wasteful because powerful groups have successfully propagated the current intellectual property system and long copyright terms throughout the world. Thus, there are no examples to point to of countries that have successfully taken a different path.

[One more thing I would add--though it is unpopular to say--is that we should seriously consider what size of market for entertainment and software we need. If people had freer access to creative works, they might realize that there are more than enough of them. If we are making too much, we should be open to the possibility that the market should contract--that less works should be produced, and yes, as a consequence, some creative personnel would have to leave the field. Personally I can see virtually unlimited demand for software, when you consider the infinite possibilities for niche customization, and the many new software ideas that have not yet been exploited. But there is a limit to the amount of mass-market entertainment that society needs, and if (when you include the vast library of past works) there is too much, we should not think it a tragedy if Copyright law were weakened so much that the market contracts.]

In conclusion, the Canadian government has so far only considered copying U.S. law. Please don't. Doing nothing would be better. Weakening copyright would be better. Almost anything would be better.

What's wrong with me?

2009-05-24T11:50:00.000-07:00

It's been over four months since I wrote a blog post, and it's not for want of material. So much is going on in the world, and so much is weighing me down in my own life, that I could write a heck of a lot about a heck of a lot if I were so inclined. But for some reason I have not desired to write. I suppose a big part of it is that I feel I have no audience for my blog, though this is probably due in large part to the lack of posts. It's a vicious circle!

I could talk about how corrupt/incompetent I suspect Alberta's premier is, or how disappointed I have been by the Obama administration, its DOJ, Joe Biden's pro-Hollywood-MegaCorp opinions and by the disgustingly superficial e-mails I get from "Organizing for America" (which I had hoped would really turn out to be a positive "movement", as they call it, rather than a way to herd sheeple). I could point you to a dozen news items that have caught my eye over the past few months, if I could remember them. But I don't feel like talking about that crap right now. Luckily, for the first time in over four months, there is some crap I am sufficiently motivated to write about.

I saw a movie called The Reader last night, and it left me feeling sad and empty inside. This movie comes in two halves, one a tale of a young man drawn to fornication (with his sexual experience presented in detail), and the other of a tale of a woman whose life was ruined by an awful past--a past the audience is told virtually nothing about. All we know for sure is that she lies to a court and as a result spends over twenty years in prison. It is a tragedy that is unrelentingly realistic--as often happens in life, the protagonist, out of fear, doesn't do the right thing and ultimately the audience is left without any answers, explanations, or closure for what has transpired. It's also a very slow movie, but somehow not boring enough to put me to sleep.

The movie gave me insomnia or contributed thereto; I couldn't sleep, and as is often the case when I can't sleep, I played a video game, which doesn't help me sleep at all. I was slaughtering zombies all night, yet the only real zombie was me.

It seems like I have been tired almost continuously for a month. It got so bad I asked my employer for permission to sleep in, and I saw a doctor, who made me go for a blood test, of which I don't yet have the results. One surely important factor is that for over six months I have had an medical condition (which I don't care to describe publicly) that often deprives me of sleep. My doctor, whose is overly concerned with getting his patients out the door as quickly as possible, decided it should be left basically untreated even though it had been going on for over three months when I first saw him.

Meanwhile, I have stopped going to church, even though I still believe that of all the world's religions, mine is the one most likely to be the truth. I have read and seen media recently that leaves me greatly disliking Atheism, for it is a religion that deceives people into thinking it is not a religion. Yet my mind has been dwelling on the more unsavory aspects of God as we know Him. In particular, the law of Moses and the events of the old testament stand out as something awful. Admittedly, I have not actually read the Old Testament (it's so damn big, and not exactly a page-turner), but I know some of its stories and laws.

I'll give two examples that distress me to no end. In Old Testament times, if you had an affair and it was discovered, your own community would murder you by stoning. Well, let me be bold and just state what's on my mind, because I've been fuming inside: I find this barbaric and evil, yet it seems to be God's own idea--even His commandment. My second example: when the Jews came to the promised land, the land was already inhabited. Therefore, God ordered the extermination of all its people--men, women and children. To me, something like this is even worse than when God killed everyone in the great flood, because this time he had His children do the dirty work rather than bearing it himself. In this instance he actively encouraged His children to develop blood-lust and a belief that violence is God's Way.

People often talk of how wonderful Jesus was and indeed, it seemed in the New Testament as though there were no end to his kindness and tolerance, though perhaps I just haven't noticed the bad parts. Yet in Mormonism, the God of the Old Testament is supposed to have been the very same spirit that inhabited the body of Jesus. How can these be the same beings? And why would he cancel the law of Moses halfway through human history? It does not make any sense to me. Certainly, I would say, good riddance; but changing the law does not excuse the law's original content. I don't worry about those law-of-Moses rules like "don't eat shellfish" or "watch out for the cloven hoof!"--those laws may have made sense at the time on for hygienic reasons. But I believe that a punishment should fit the crime, and death for adultery is overly harsh. Moreover, to have God's tacit approval to kill someone, based on the flawed judgments of man? It is disgusting.

In my view these laws demand explanation and justification. It is not enough to say "that was all in the past, we have new a law now and we can ignore the old law"--no, for it is the same God that made both laws, and God even claims that he never changes. What changed, then? Did man change? I do not think the typical person in 50 BC was so starkly different from the typical person in 50 AD that God should give them different laws or judge them by different standards. It seems to me that there is more variation among human beings in different cultures at any single moment in time, than there was between an average Jew at 50 BC and an average Christian Jew at 50 AD. Why then does God's law depend on the timing of his birth and not on the circumstances of his upbringing? My church has no answer to offer, and I find no comfort in ignorance.

There is also a principle, that God presents repeatedly in the Bible, that I have refused to accept. Basically the principle is the same one that you hear every day from mothers that are in public places with their children. "Don't do that, come here, stay beside me, don't say that, put that away!" The parent gives an order, and the child asks "why?" And usually the mother's response is "because I said so." Or, if the mother prefers to be condescending, "because I'm your mother".

To me anyway, it sounds a lot like God, when he says things like "thou shalt love thy neighbor as thyself: I am the LORD." But "I'm your mother" and "because I said so" are not reasons at all. These statements mean "I refuse to provide a reason at this time". And I know only a couple of reasons why a parent would refuse to give a reason for a commandment. One is that there simply isn't time (the parent needs obedience immediately); another is that the parent does not know how to explain in such a way that the child will understand. So, as our eternal parent, what are God's reasons for his commandments? Every week I spend an inordinate amount of time wondering "why?"

Why did God change his commandments? Why doesn't God help us reconcile his version of history with science? Why did God forsake every person on Earth in the dark ages? Why did God create sex and sex drive in 12-year-olds and then tell us never to have sex before marriage? And most of all, why won't He tell us why?

Unfortunately, God uses the rationale "because I said so" by default. I am not even certain that God ever provides reasons for his commandments. Reasons are often provided, though typically brief and superficial, but I wonder sometimes whether the reasons actually came from God or if it was merely the writers of scripture writing the reason they assumed would justify the commandment. Bah, never mind, I'm probably just getting cynical from all my heartache over this issue.

God told Adam to kill a lamb every so often and burn it at an altar. As I recall, Adam did this without question, until one day an angel appeared and asked him if he knew the purpose of this action. He replied that he did not, and so the angel explained that it was symbolic of the death of the messiah that would later come. Centuries later, God told Abraham to kill his only son, Isaac, and when Abraham told Isaac of this commandment, he agreed to allow himself to be killed. As Abraham was about to stab his son to death, an angel appeared to stop him: the commandment had been given only to test his obedience.

I feel as though God has made this the measure of a man: his willingness to obey without demanding a reason to. And I think many Christians would agree that this is a fine way for God to choose his leaders and to rule his people. But I am utterly unsatisfied by this approach to governance. It may make sense in a military relationship, where the superior gives orders and the subordinate obeys, but for God's sake, God, we are your children, not your soldiers and not your slaves!

Yet I seem to be the only person around that feels this way. We sing a song: "Onward Christian soldiers, marching as to war / with the cross of Jesus, going on before." I don't like this song. I mean, I like the music, but I don't like the attitude. I do not wish to see life or eternity as a war: I prefer peace. I do not wish to be a mere soldier in God's army: I want to be His son. Is the purpose of life to expose us to war? Is this why God will never attempt to justify himself in our eyes--because he is our commander, and we are here to obey, and if we do not wish to obey without reason or question, we can damn well report to the brig and tell it to the court marshall?

My problems in the church started in the groin. I was told that masturbation was wrong, and even as I did it, I believed it was wrong, too. But I couldn't stop; I was too weak. I used to feel so guilty, though now I feel less guilty and more unhappy that I am a weak person. But as time went on it slowly dawned on me that the commandment did not seem to make sense. Incidentally, should any non-Mormons be reading this, it should be noted that the Bible doesn't say anything whatsoever about masturbation; rather this commandment is given by the modern prophets (whose existence might come as a surprise, I know...)

It doesn't make sense because God created it. We are told He created not only the genitals themselves but the associated urges--hormones, and whatever it is in the brain that makes us feel the way we do. You may have heard a rumor that 98 percent of men masturbate--and the other 2 percent are lying. While I have no doubt some people don't do it, I think this little joke just reflects the reality of how difficult it is to remain 100% sex-free. How can God himself create something and then condemn its natural use as a sin? Consider the related doctrine in the Catholic church that one must only have sex with the intention to have a child. Mormons don't go that far, thankfully. But consider the church's justification: they say God only "intended" that the genitals only be used to procreate. It's like if God created the cat, then condemned it for licking itself, saying God only "intended" that the tongue be used to assist in food consumption; ergo, any other use is a fault in the cat's character (and God can disavow all responsibility for the behavior--it must come of the devil!)

I don't think you can blame this one on Satan, and it's a stretch even to blame it on man. How can we be held responsible for the design of our bodies? It isn't fair! It just is not fair!

Yet despite a probable prevalence of masturbation among Mormons, "good" Mormons (i.e. not me) do not need to know why they have been asked not to masturbate (or fornicate, for that matter). They just accept the claim that it's a sin, often feeling a sense of shame instilled at a young age, and somehow, they do not see any contradiction in the fact that God is both encouraging them to have sex (because of His design of body and mind) at the same time as he absolutely prohibits it (but only in word).

I often liken our bodies to the Garden of Eden. In the center of the Garden of Eden, like the center of our bodies, there was forbidden fruit, from the tree of knowledge of good and evil, that Adam and Eve were not allowed to eat. Eating of this tree was beneficial in the sense that it bestowed knowledge upon the partakers, yet forbidden because God said so. In the timeless land of Eden, according to Mormonism, nothing noteworthy would ever happen as long as Adam and Eve obeyed this commandment--they could not have children, for they did not know how (for some unspecified reason, their immortal junk didn't work); and they could do no good or evil, for they had no knowledge of either. And so, inevitably, a day came when Satan convinced Eve to partake of the fruit, and God's response was to cast them out and cut them off from his presence. Why? Because they did not obey. And yet this had been his design from the beginning. So far as we know, partaking of the fruit was a sin for only one reason: because God said so. And so it is with masturbation.

Because He said so.

I can't tell you how frustrating this has been for me. "Because I said so"? Why is this reasoning sufficient for everyone else? Am I the only Mormon on the planet who can't stand the fact that God is keeping the reason for such an important commandment secret? By the way, is this commandment even important, or am I "making a mountain out of a molehill"? I know that church leaders take it seriously. I have a Church-published pamphlet here called "Repentance Brings Forgiveness", which lists the unforgivable sins (murder and denial of the Holy Ghost) and says "Next to the unforgivable sins come sexual sins. Some such sins may be committed with oneself and some with another person".

So there you have it. Masturbation is "next to [...] unforgivable". Sounds pretty serious all right. No wonder the Holy Ghost doesn't want to hang around with me.

Why doesn't such an important commandment warrant an explanation from the Lord beyond simply "God intended for this organ to be used during marriage, ergo any other use is a sin?" Why is it wrong of me to demand from the Lord to know why masturbation could be considered worse than lying, stealing, vandalism or violence? Why is it a big secret?

Well, my best friend has arrived home. It's time to set this putrid matter aside and enjoy some light entertainment and a meal. But will this matter keep me awake at night? Will I become depressed with worry for my soul, again, and suffer reduced performance at work as a result, or will I be lucky enough to forget the whole thing until the next Sunday comes along? I am hoping for the latter, but admittedly, not praying.

$838 billion. Whoa.

2009-02-11T08:43:00.000-08:00

So how about this $800+ billion stimulus plan? Add the existing $700 billion bailout and I am very concerned we've got a recipe for disaster in the form of massive money mismanagement. My concern is fairly simple. There are only 535 congresspeople and they are vastly outnumbered by lobbyists. For each congressperson there is over 1.6 billion dollars in the $838 billion stumulus plan, but I expect most congresspeople don't directly decide how any of this money will be spent, while a few probably have tremendous power. Thus, there are probably a handful of congresspeople, each of whom are deciding--in the course of just two or three weeks--how to spend tens of billions of dollars. How is it even humanly possible to spend this money responsibly? How will it be micromanaged? How will it avoid giving enormous amounts of free money to undeserving recipients that have good lobbyists?

I like Jon Stewart's idea on the stimulus plan which he discussed with an economist on (IIRC) Feb. 2. They talked about lowering the payroll tax from 15% to 7%, an idea that (AFAIK) is not under consideration by either party, and about refinancing bad mortgages with lower interest rates. They also talked about the importance of giving not to large banks that caused the crisis, but to individuals with lesser faults--a "trickle up" stimulus plan instead of a "trickle-down-from-the-rich-bastards-who-caused-this-mess" plan. What I like about these ideas is that there isn't a lot of room for lobbyists, pork-barreling, or slipping in special-interest funding unnoticed. With fewer line items on the bill, less irresponsibility would get through. These ideas spread some of the government relief money just about equally to all citizens, and some of the money is targeted at people that need it--but at individuals who have no lobbyists, rather than banks and megabusinesses.

It also seems risky to increase the national debt by $1.5 trillion, which is about $5,000 for every man, woman and child in the U.S. The total debt after this stimulus plan will be about $11 trillion, I'm guestimating, or almost $37,000 per person. But in the U.S. money system, money is debt, and more debt means more money for everyone. Make sense? Well, to me it's a head scratcher. It seems like most countries around the world are borrowing--but who's lending? In the U.S. I assume most of the money will be "lent" by the Fed, which really means the Fed will punch some numbers in a computer to create the money out of nothing.

Now I don't really have a problem with printing money like this in a time of crisis--as long as they don't print so much that inflation gets out of control. In fact, printing money could be considered a perfectly even (if not perfectly fair) form of taxation: instead of taxing people, just print money. Then inflation decreases the value of everyone's money equally.

But instead of just printing money, the U.S. "borrows" it. But to me this seems ridiculous, when they are borrowing money that didn't exist before, from an organization (The Fed) that doesn't actually have any money in reserve. Presumably they will pay it back someday, and if so they will pay it back with interest. So my question is--and I have never seen anyone try to answer this question--who pockets the interest when payments to the Fed are made against the debt?

Update: This appears to be Obama's answer to my concerns about accountability - "a new website where citizens can track every dollar spent and every job created".

RIAA and BSA's Favorite Lawyers Taking Top Department of Justice Posts

2009-02-11T08:05:00.000-08:00

Hmm, Obama certainly isn't bringing change in the intellectual property arena. Quite the contrary. Presumably at the behest of Joe Biden, the lawyers who participated in suing tens of thousands of ordinary citizens, and lawyers of the BSA (the anti-piracy organization for much of the software industry), now get top DOJ positions.

Update: I recommend the following article, which is more balanced: Influx of Big Content lawyers at DoJ: cause for concern?

Israel

2009-01-01T12:11:00.000-08:00

Israel sure is a depressing subject. A comment in another post recently reminded me of the curious consensus among both major U.S. parties and all major news outlets that Israel is America's greatest ally and must not be criticized. I was pointed to this document. Assuming this heavily-footnoted paper from March 2006 is accurate in its factual reporting (nearly half of it consists of "endnotes"), the facts are very disturbing. Did you know, for instance, that Israel has killed 3.4 Palestinians for every Israeli lost since 2000, including 5.7 Palestinian children killed for every Israeli child killed? The paper notes other interesting facts:

Since the October War in 1973, Washington has provided Israel with a level of support dwarfing the amounts provided to any other state. It has been the largest annual recipient of direct U.S. economic and military assistance since 1976 and the largest total recipient since World War II. Total direct U.S. aid to Israel amounts to well over $140 billion in 2003 dollars. Israel receives about $3 billion in direct foreign assistance each year, which is roughly one-fifth of America’s foreign aid budget. In per capita terms, the United States gives each Israeli a direct subsidy worth about $500 per year.
....
The United States has provided Israel with nearly $3 billion to develop weapons systems like the Lavi aircraft that the Pentagon did not want or need, while giving Israel access to top-drawer U.S. weaponry like Blackhawk helicopters and F-16 jets. Finally, the United States gives Israel access to intelligence that it denies its NATO allies and has turned a blind eye towards Israel’s acquisition of nuclear weapons.
....
In addition, Washington provides Israel with consistent diplomatic support. Since 1982, the United States has vetoed 32 United Nations Security Council resolutions that were critical of Israel, a number greater than the combined total of vetoes cast by all the other Security Council members. It also blocks Arab states’ efforts to put Israel’s nuclear arsenal on the International Atomic Energy Agency’s agenda.
....
Contrary to popular belief, the Zionists had larger, better-equipped, and better-led forces during the 1947-49 War of Independence and the Israel Defense Forces (IDF) won quick and easy victories against Egypt in 1956 and against Egypt, Jordan, and Syria in 1967--before large-scale U.S. aid began flowing to Israel. These victories offer eloquent evidence of Israeli patriotism, organizational ability, and military prowess, but they also reveal that Israel was far from helpless even in its earliest years.

Today, Israel is the strongest military power in the Middle East. Its conventional forces are far superior to its neighbors and it is the only state in the region with nuclear weapons.

Later on, the paper describes how it believes pro-Israel lobby groups manage to maintain a universal pro-Israel position in both major parties and in the mainstream media as well.

I have the sense, and not just from reading this paper, that those who criticize Israel's policies or government risk being called anti-semitic. This is defined on answers.com as "One who discriminates against or who is hostile toward or prejudiced against Jews"--in other words, a racist. Not that I think Jews count as a race at all--they're just white people--but racists tend to think they're a race.

How can criticizing Israel (which of course is shorthand for the govenment of Israel) make you a racist?

If one criticizes the American government, are they labeled anti-American? Actually, I do think that has happened, especially in times of turmoil such as the time following 9/11. But nowadays, luckily, that crap just doesn't stick and says more about the name-caller than the name-callee. America, after all, has always had a tradition of freedom to criticize govenment. Besides, the term "anti-American" doesn't have a strong racist connotation the way "anti-semitic" does, and considering that Americans come in all colors, how could it? But somehow, this tiny middle-eastern nation is almost immune to criticism in mainstream media, seemingly on threat of name calling.

Coincidentally as I write this, the latest news headline is that Isreael has killed a top Hamas official. Oh, and much of his family. Oh, and a bunch of other people that happened to be in the same 4-storey apartment building.

GAZA CITY, Gaza Strip – Israel dropped a one-ton bomb on the home of a Hamas strongman Thursday, killing him along with two wives and four children in the first attack on the top leadership of Gaza's rulers. As the aerial bombardment escalated, the army said it was also poised to launch a ground invasion. Israel also appeared to be sounding out a possible diplomatic exit from the 6-day-old military offensive against Hamas by demanding international monitors as a key term of any future truce.

The bombing targeted 49-year-old Nizar Rayan, ranked among Hamas' top five decision-makers in Gaza. His four-story apartment building crashed to the ground, sending a thick plume of smoke into the air and heavily damaging neighboring buildings. It killed Rayan and 11 others, including two of his four wives and four of his 12 children, Palestinian health officials said. The Muslim faith allows men to have up to four wives.

Since the official was in Hamas, we can safely assume he was a bad guy (right?), but wait, what about the eleven other deaths? What about the residents of that building, whose possessions were destroyed and who are left homeless?

When analyzing the objectivity with which an issue is reported, it helps to imagine how rhetoric and news coverage would change if an act committed by one side in a conflict were instead committed by the other side. For example, the excellent book Confessions of an Economic Hit Man says that, in Latin America, the CIA is widely suspected to have assassinated Panama's populist leader, a fundamentally good man named Omar Torrijos, as part of an effort to regain some control over the Panama canal. The next leader, Manuel Noriega, refused to give the U.S. its desired power over the canal, and eventually the U.S. launched a small invasion of Panama in order to depose Noriega. In the process, somewhere between 2000 and 5000 civilians were killed.

To detect a lack of objectivity in the media--as absurd as it may seem--I think it's worthwhile to imagine if a well-liked U.S. president such as Barack Obama were killed in a mysterious plane crash. A foreign intelligence agency is suspected in the "accident", and the same agency is suspected in a similar accident a few months ago that killed another popular leader. Would the American media pay little attention, as they did to the incident in Panama? And what if a foreign force invaded Washington, D.C., killing thousands of civilians and capturing the President? Would the American people be more aware of this than when their own country invades Panama? Would the American people tolerate having only "ballpark" civilian death estimates that range from 300 to 5000, as noted on Wikipedia? Would some Americans automatically assume that the invasion was justified, as they do when America invades another country?

I suppose it's to be expected that Americans care a lot more about the death of their own rather than the deaths of foreigners caused by their military. Still, is this not a lack of fairness and objectivity? And is there not something wrong?

Fun fact: death estimates in the Iraq conflict range from 100,000 (a bare minimum based on official reports only, see IraqBodyCount.org) to nearly a million (an extrapolation of the 2006 figure of 655,000 put out by the John Hopkins report.) I don't really understand why, but for each and every U.S. soldier killed there (and there are a lot of those, as most Americans are no doubt aware), something like 25 Iraqis are killed. Or maybe 200, I mean who's counting? Of course, I don't mean to imply that Americans killed them; rather, the chaos caused by the horribly mismanaged invasion somehow empowered all the most evil elements of Iraq and neighboring states, other than Saddam himself of course.

Sorry, my mind wanders. Anyway, when I was a child I was taught that we are all brothers and sisters. Not all of us Americans. Not all of us North Americans. Not all of us English-speakers, but all of us human beings. We are all valuable in the sight of God, and all men are created equal. I hold fast to that ideal. I believe that an Iraqi or Panamanian hurts as much when dismembered as an American. I believe that people around the world have as much right to a livelihood as we do. Do you disagree?

Are Americans far more valuable than others? First-worlders far more valuable than third-worlders? Jews far more valuable than Palestinians? If you don't think so, then sit up and take notice, for the facts on the ground suggest otherwise.

So getting back to Israel, let's try reversing the situation. What if you heard that Hamas dropped a one-ton bomb on the 4-storey apartment building lived in by a top Israeli official, which killed him and 6 immediate family members and 5 unlucky others? I would think: "a top Israeli official lives in an apartment building?" and then: "oh dear, a lot of Palestinians will die for this".

But I think a lot of Americans simply wouldn't know the difference. I studied the history of Israel in high school, but by the time I got to university I had forgotten just about everything I knew, and I came to realize this when I got into a conversation with an Arab pizza place employee, and embarrassed myself with ignorant statements. For example, I thought that both Palestinians and Israelis killed one another in suicide bomb attacks, more or less in equal numbers. I guess I was too busy in my job (writing software for said pizza place) that I lost track of the world outside--the world on which America has a tremendous effect while its citizens aren't looking. And isn't that the story of most Americans?

Even though Israel may be the keystone of America's relationship with the world, most Americans know little about the conflict there. And according to the paper I introduced at the beginning, this is just the way the powerful lobby group AIPAC wants it, because the facts are not flattering.

I don't know the solution to this conflict, but I think reconciliation, compromise, diplomacy, and forgiveness--not proud displays of military force by Israel (or desperate acts of terrorism by Palestinian militants)--will have major roles to play. I worry that Israel always takes the latter approach because its unique relationship with the U.S. makes it invincible. I have heard there is a military culture in Israel's government--is this culture, I wonder, more prominent than the military culture in the U.S. government? In any case, I don't think that culture will ever come to an end as long as the U.S. props it up, and the U.S. will not stop propping it up until somebody starts saying "hey, maybe Israel doesn't deserve to be our greatest foreign-aid recipient" or "hey, maybe there's something morally wrong over there" or "maybe Jewish lives aren't quite worth 3.4 times as much as Arab lives".

And nobody in mainstream media and mainstream politics will say that until Americans learn enough about the situation to respond "hey, maybe he's right!" So please, learn a little more about this issue, and be ready to wonder whether decades of U.S. foreign policy is bringing this 50-year conflict to a close--or preventing a peaceful conclusion.

P.S. I know that there is plenty of blame to go around: Palestinians kill Israelis too. It's just that only one side actually has the power to end this conflict, and with great power comes great responsibility. And hey, happy new year! I have no doubt that 2009 will be an odd year. Numerically speaking.

¡ǝɯosǝʍɐ

2008-10-23T07:14:00.002-07:00

¿ʇɐ ƃuıɹɐʇs noʎ ǝɹɐ ʇɐɥʍ

Start the latest silly fad: write text upside-down.

Not all characters available. Some restrictions apply. Void where prohibited.

For source code, use 'View source' and search for 'fad'

Next Year's Laws (Beta)

2008-10-02T08:39:00.001-07:00

Click the headline for an interesting theory of how the law ought to be designed, and anecdotes of how terribly inconsistent the legal system can be.

Bonus slashdot article explaining why the Virginia High Court came to the wrong conclusion by striking down an anti-spam law on first-amendment grounds.

How to steal an election

2008-09-29T11:43:00.000-07:00

Intuitively, you might think that e-voting machines should be good for technology industries; after all, if machines didn't replace paper, many of us in these industries would be out of a job. But have you noticed that technology professionals like those that hang around at Slashdot, the EFF and Ars Technica are the same people that loudly proclaim their distrust of electronic voting machines and want paper audit trails?

Click the headline to read all about the flaws in electronic voting systems that can allow votes to be stolen wholesale. As a Computer Engineer (in training) that started programming at age 11, I can vouch for the horrifying plausibility of this article.

By the way, the article talks about how it is possible for vote-counting software to be modified in such a way that the changes can't be detected. But if you take the time to read through the long account I linked to in my last blog entry, you'll note that many of the techniques used to shift the election results from Kerry to Bush in Ohio were actually very blatant and low-tech--such as voter caging, refusing to recognize voter registration cards that are not printed on very thick paper, not giving out provisional ballots, causing long lineups at polls, or declaring a fake terrorist emergency. While these techniques may have angered voters, they served their intended purpose just the same. Apparently, remaining undetected while rigging the ballot is merely a bonus.
The remedy to much of the above, by the way, would be not to put leaders of one party in charge of interpreting and enforcing election law -- duh. The electronic voting system, however, can be subverted even if those in charge of the election are fair and neutral.

Was the 2004 Election Stolen?

2008-09-29T11:09:00.000-07:00

Every once in awhile I read something about major irregularities in the 2004 U.S. presidential election. Having never heard a rebuttal to these stories, I wonder how it is that such a tremendous fraud can slip through the mainstream media unnoticed.

As the last polling stations closed on the West Coast, exit polls showed Kerry ahead in ten of eleven battleground states -- including commanding leads in Ohio and Florida -- and winning by a million and a half votes nationally. The exit polls even showed Kerry breathing down Bush's neck in supposed GOP strongholds Virginia and North Carolina. Against these numbers, the statistical likelihood of Bush winning was less than one in 450,000. ''Either the exit polls, by and large, are completely wrong,'' a Fox News analyst declared, ''or George Bush loses.''

But as the evening progressed, official tallies began to show implausible disparities -- as much as 9.5 percent -- with the exit polls. In ten of the eleven battleground states, the tallied margins departed from what the polls had predicted. In every case, the shift favored Bush. Based on exit polls, CNN had predicted Kerry defeating Bush in Ohio by a margin of 4.2 percentage points. Instead, election results showed Bush winning the state by 2.5 percent. Bush also tallied 6.5 percent more than the polls had predicted in Pennsylvania, and 4.9 percent more in Florida.

Click the heading for the whole story by Robert F. Kennedy, Jr.

What about the 2000 election?

I recently saw an HBO movie called Recount, about the 2000 battle for a recount in Florida. You would expect this film to be somewhat dry, but I promise it is quite gripping. While much of the dialogue may be fiction, the plot is basically accurate, yet has more twists than anyone would expect from a true story. I had no idea the election was so close, or that many recounts were halted while in progress. All thumbs up!

P.S. Isn't there something wrong with the fact that votes in swing states like Florida are much more valuable than those in non-swing states? Shouldn't all votes count equally? If you think they should, support an end to winner-take-all elections, or better yet, an end to the electoral college.

Another interesting thing.

Economics: war versus common sense

2008-09-29T10:59:00.001-07:00

A Slashdot post I saw by "jollyreaper", replying to another post.

FDR tried and failed to fix the 1930s recession..... it ultimately took a world war to bring-back full employment. Without the war, FDR would have been voted out of office in 1940, and the recession would have stretched through most of the 1940s.

Obama faces what FDR faced, and Obama's not going to be any more successful. (Unless a war saves him.)

Why is it we always praise wars for bringing full employment? I hate to use the cheesedick "war on x" phrases but seriously, what if we were literally do pull out all the stops and mobilize the population on the scale of total war but make the enemy be shoddy infrastructure or crappy housing or something. Instead of marshaling the entire industrial might of the nation towards turning out bombers and tanks, why not treat the whole war as a massive public works project? Make the government the employer of last resort. "If private industry cannot provide work for our good citizens, the government will employ them in something as close to their profession as possible, working towards the public good." It's unemployment benefits that don't keep you out of work and gives the government a tangible return for the money. When the economy picks up, the private sector can start hiring the workers back.

We've been cutting back on investing in infrastructure for decades, it'd be good to put some money back into our country again. Set a goal of getting us off fossil fuels over the next two decades, put government labs to work on seriously making a go of fusion power, green living, reshape our cities to be less energy intensive.

Iraq fact widget

2008-09-18T11:06:00.002-07:00

Iraq

McCain's tax plan versus Obama's

2008-09-18T11:06:00.001-07:00

Both candidates seem to have plans that seem impossible to pay for, according to CNN:

The Tax Policy Center estimates that over 10 years, McCain's tax proposals could increase the national debt by as much as $4.5 trillion with interest, while Obama's could add as much as $3.3 trillion.

I sure hope both platforms are lies, because I don't think the country can tolerate so much more debt. Let's hope they will raise taxes enough to pay for their plans, or better yet, cut wasteful spending on military and pork-barrel projects.

Obama/Paul for president

2008-09-18T11:06:00.000-07:00

It's kind of funny: I like both Ron Paul and Barack Obama, even though they would make wildly different policy decisions.

Obama would raise taxes on the rich and implement universal health care. He will not reduce the size of the military, just recall some troops and shift others to Afghanistan. Ron Paul, if he could, would reduce taxes, drastically reduce the size of government, and reduce the scope of our military spending. Interestingly, despite this last point, the biggest contributors to his campaign were from the military and he was more popular than McCain, Romney or Huckabee among members of the armed forces.

Obama is a mild liberal, now pandering ever more toward the "center" of the political spectrum as perceived by the media.

Arguably, a deficit-spending platform is necessary--even if it's a lie--because people don't like to hear about service cuts and the MSM rarely points out how crazy a candidate's plan is. Thus, if one candidate says they will cut taxes without cutting services even though deficit spending is already rampant, the other has little choice but to make a similar claim because the MSM won't talk about the absurdity of it all.

For them, it seems, the "center" means accepting the military-industrial complex with its extremely high military spending, a casual willingness to use military force, proposing a deficit-funded budget, avoiding discussion of abortion so as to avoid appearing on one side or the other, an unwavering support for Israel, emphasizing one's Christianity, and so forth. He originally proclaimed that he would run a positive campaign focused on the issues, but with Republicans slinging mud and lies his way, it's no surprise he fights back with negative ads of his own.

Ron Paul is a libertarian, who makes up for this somewhat unpopular ideology with sheer integrity, straight talk, and an unwavering commitment to the rules and ideals of the constitution. Almost everything he says is gold because it rings true. He says the kind of things I think, but which the media and ordinary politicians ignore. He also defends the right to bear arms, but I can live with that as long as he promotes the rest of the constitution with at least as much fervency.

Both of them want political debates to focus on the issues, and neither want the media to be distracted by stupid sideshows. Both of them value ethics and a respect for the constitution. Both of them are more tech-savvy than Bush or McCain. Both of them recognize and dislike the corruption in Washington, and want change, though the scale of change Ron Paul would bring is surely greater. Both of them have a talent for speaking--though Obama appeals more to the heart and Ron Paul more to the mind.

Ahh, how nice it would be if I could take the best of each. Paul's straight talk with Obama's electability. Paul's contempt for big government plus Obama's belief that everyone should have access to health care and education. Paul's anti-abortion and anti-war leanings with Obama's anti-gun leanings. Paul's uncompromising support of the constitution, combined--in some impossible way--with Obama's ability to compromise in order to get things done.

I've got it. Let's have Obama for four to eight years and get our universal health care while ending the Iraq war, chipping away slowly at Washington corruption, and altering the tone of politics. Then let's vote Ron Paul, to take a sledgehammer to corruption, shrink government, close some of our 761 military bases, return to fiscal responsibility, end the drug war, and abolish all unconstitutional practices. Of course, for Paul to achieve all this is practically unbelievable today--but after drinking Obama's kool-aid of hope long enough, maybe the nation will be ready.

Mind you, I haven't heard either of them talk about two issues dear to my heart, intellectual property reform and electoral reform. It'll be interesting to see whether Ron Paul could have even the slightest chance of winning without the latter.

For a quick primer on Ron Paul, click here. Then check out his Campaign for Liberty.

Oh dear, Mr. Obama

2008-07-09T23:44:00.000-07:00

I sent the following message to barackobama.com.

Dear Mr. Obama:

Your behavior is a terrible disappointment. I donated $100 to your campaign and I was going to give more, but not anymore. For voting for retroactive immunity for telecomms, I pledge not to donate any more funds. I expected you to have more respect for the rule of law and for the constitution. You should have been the leader of the opposition to this!

Also: after promising to make use of the public financing system, you spun your reversal as some kind of sacrifice and an indicator of your greatness. I am not impressed.

I came to like you when I read "Audacity of Hope", but when I see you behaving like any other politician, it's like a slap in the face. Good luck in the election, and may you stop to look back on your principles when you arrive in the White House.

Hmm

2008-06-30T10:47:00.000-07:00

I'm disappointed about the way Barack Obama handled his recent decision to reject the public financing system.

Barack wrote this to Midwest Democracy Network last November:

"I have been a long-time advocate for public financing of campaigns combined with free television and radio time as a way to reduce the influence of moneyed special interests.... My plan requires both major party candidates to agree on a fundraising truce, return excess money from donors, and stay within the public financing system for the general election.... Senator John McCain (r-AZ) has already pledged to accept this fundraising pledge. If I am the Democratic nominee, I will aggressively pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee to preserve a publicly financed general election."

Now, I'm no expert. All I know of the public financing system I learned today, here. But a key part of that system is an 85 million dollar spending limit--a limit already exceeded by the funds Obama has raised.

According to Obama's campaign, 94% of donators gave in amounts of $200 or less. I'm inclined to interpret this cynically to mean that even if a person gives $100 10 times, they are still counted in the 94%. Nevertheless, the Republicans certainly can't come close to this level of middle- and lower-class support. There's no doubt that Obama, more than any other serious candidate in recent memory, counts on the grassroots for his support, and this is much to his credit. I've heard this public financing system would force him to return much of the funds already donated (logistically difficult, I would think?) and prevent further grassroots donations.

So, I don't really blame him for changing his mind about public financing under these unexpectedly favorable circumstances. But make no mistake: he did break his promise. He flip-flopped. Therefore, it is disquieting to me that on this occasion he is not only unapologetic, but does not acknowledge that anything has changed or that anything is amiss. To the contrary, he aggressively portrays this flip-flop as a further reason that Americans should not only vote for him, but donate more to his campaign!

What happened to straight talk? To shunning spin in favor of honesty? As a donator, I get frequent emails from Obama's campaign. Here's an excerpt of David Plouffe's message about this decision:

Even though we stood to receive more than $80 million in taxpayer funding for our campaign, the system has been so gamed and exploited by our opponents that it is effectively broken.

John McCain, the Republican National Committee, and their allies in so-called 527 groups that raise and spend unlimited contributions are dedicated to manipulating this broken system to raise as much money as possible -- and they've proven that they're very good at it.

A top McCain adviser told MSNBC earlier this month, "now that we're in the general election, the RNC money counts, the DNC money counts. So the truth is today, John McCain has more cash on hand and more money than Barack Obama does."

In April alone, they raised nearly $45 million. That's more than our campaign and the Democratic National Committee combined. And that doesn't include the plans of 527 groups like the one called "Freedom's Watch," which has said it will spend as much as $250 million under Karl Rove's direction to attack and defeat Barack Obama.

This sets off my Spidey Sense of Spin. First, David makes it sound like they are sacrificing over $80 million by turning down public funding, when in fact it's better for them financially. Barack and David have both played up the "brokenness" of the system, but it feels disingenuous when they were so eager to "pursue an agreement with the Republican nominee" to use public financing last year. And how exactly is it broken? As far as I know, Obama hasn't given an explanation longer than a TV soundbite, although the site I linked to earlier has helpful information. David also quotes a McCain man to indicate McCain is raising money faster than Obama, yet I have heard elsewhere that Obama has more money. So what is the truth? I don't know, but I am disinclined to assume David Plouffe is honest after he tries to feed me a plate of spin.

Mind you, if Obama really did "aggressively pursue an agreement" but the McCain camp adamantly refused to cooperate, I guess we could just forget about this matter because Obama wouldn't be breaking his promise. This article reports that "Bob Bauer met with McCain campaign counsel Trevor Potter and, according to Obama spox (sic) Bill Burton, Potter 'immediately made it clear there was no basis for further discussion,' that they weren't interested in any sort of agreement." But: "the McCain campaign... argues that Obama did not discuss this or try to negotiate at all with the McCain campaign."

Hmm. He-said-she-said. Typical Washington banter. I'd like to believe that the Obama camp really tried to come to an agreement. But somehow, though I can't put my finger on it, I am more inclined to think the McCain camp is telling the truth this time.

Of course, I'd still support Obama over most other politicians any day. But I'm still disappointed. Not disappointed that he rejected public financing. But disappointed that he didn't really try to keep his promise, and disappointed to have spin flung at me instead of honesty. In my opinion, after 8 years of George W. Bush, the most important quality in a presidential candidate is not his foreign policy experience, his plan for the economy or for health care, or his views on abortion.

After 8 years of George W. Bush, I now think the most important quality in a presidential candidate is his personal system of ethics. I'm not talking about something as trivial as personal sexual mores--you know, that issue on which Republicans tried to impeach Clinton. No, I'm talking about the kind of ethics that actually affects how the country is run--that determines whether America continues on its path of corporatocracy; that determines whether the gap between rich and poor will widen or narrow; that determines whether political discourse will become more honest or dishonest.

Would Barack Obama rather help the poor and downtrodden or enrich himself? Will he pursue a foreign policy that attempts to keep the third world in submission to U.S. financial interests, and that keeps terrorists at bay only by intimidation and threats, or will he pursue a policy that will instead seek prosperity for the peoples of the world, that will reduce terrorism by reducing the hatred that causes it?

We cannot know the answers to questions like these unless we can answer this simple question: is Barack Obama honest? I am certain that he basically is, but his handling of this issue does not, in my eyes, seem honest.

I have other doubts, too. Though I am convinced he is a good man, his thinking is annoyingly conventional. He doesn't advocate electoral reform or even electoral college reform. He doesn't talk about reducing the power of monopolies and duopolies. Improving Copyright law is not in his agenda. He doesn't shun military force as a solution to problems, although at least it's not his first choice. He wants to increase military spending. His stance is not strong enough against immunity for lawbreaking telecomms who implemented Bush's warrantless wiretapping program--and since the lawsuits are necessary to bring to light the extent and details of the program, his stance is not strong enough against the Bush Administration either.

But my point is, anything out of the mainstream is off the table for him.

Of course, I should point out that on none of these issues is McCain any better. To the contrary. But I came to like Obama when I read his book Audacity of Hope, and now anything from him that smacks of status quo, or of behaviour befitting a typical politician, is like a slap in the face.

No point in voting

2008-04-10T08:55:00.000-07:00

I was hoping to vote absentee for Barak Obama in the general election in the state I last lived in, Utah. I was shocked and saddened to learn from WIkipedia that all but two states have a winner-take-all system for allocating their electoral college votes.

Therefore, as Utah is a firm red state, my vote would not count.

Sometimes I don't understand the world. While I'm sitting here in my little blog space dreaming about how nice it would be to have a fair voting system for leadership elections, something like cardinal/range voting or condorcet/ranked pairs, the rest of the American people don't care about their vote enough to demand an end to winner-take-all elections, let alone the electoral college. While I dream of a congress elected by direct representation, the American people consciously pigeonhole themselves into only two categories, "Democrat" and "Republican".

They seem content with a two-party system in which neither party cares very much about reducing poverty, defending the constitution, playing fair on the world stage, or acting ethically according to a wholistic worldview. While only the Republicans are especially known for their taste for war, their focus helping the rich and their disregard for the constitution, the Democrats on the whole seem to acquiesce to such things. Many say this is because the Democrats are spineless; I don't think so. I worry they don't fight these things because they don't care that much. And the majority of Americans ever continue not to demand better. The majority is not just silent, but apathetic.

And I don't know why. After 7.5 years under George Bush, 70% (only 70%?) of the people have finally figured out that his performance is not worthy of their approval. Many even disapprove. But who is taking notice that Bush's policies require, and have historically required, the assent of Congress and a lack of critical examination from the media? How is it that so many people follow after John McCain when he has been uncritical toward Mr. Bush and wants, for the most part, to continue his policies?

Barak Obama may yet win the election. But the strength of the Republicans in the race is disheartening.

I am most of all baffled by the strong degree to which Latter-day saints support everything Republican, even Neoconservative Republicanism. As a Mormon myself I am horrified by the Republican and Neoconservative ideologies. Detaining people without charge, without trial, without rights in Guantanamo Bay? Manipulating the media and lying to the American people about weapons of mass destruction, linking Al Qaeda to Iraq, causing a war that costs 720 million dollars a day, a war that has killed more Americans than 9/11, a war that resulted in the deaths of as many as 655,000 Iraqis, a war that has harmed America's economy? Running an illegal domestic spying program whose scope is still secret, and then demanding that huge telecom companies be granted retroactive immunity from the law for helping run it? Sowing confusion among the people by habitually using spin, misrepresentation, and ignorance of fact? Failing to do anything whatsoever about genocide in Darfur?

Admittedly, the Democrats did nothing about the Rwandan genocide, so Mormons can't be expected to vote for them on that account. And admittedly Republicans are not in favor of abortion or gay marriage, so in some ways it fits with our religion. But if you took anything home from the Book of Mormon, it should have been that war is bad. That God never goes with you when you go to war in order to pillage other lands. In the Book of Mormon I see a progressive Nephite nation that was ahead of its time in recognizing the value of freedom and liberty. A nation that had a lot of defense spending only because it had to defend itself frequently, not because Halliburton and Lockheed Martin needed to maintain a large workforce and steady profits. Regarding the Republicans' low regard for the constitution and civil liberties, haven't church leaders expressed their beliefs that the constitution was inspired of God? Regarding media manipulation and yes, lying, to cause the war--I think there is something in the ten commandments about that.

By the way, if you still aren't convinced that the case for war was not made merely by stretching the truth but was, in fact, a big lie promoted with a major media campaign, then watch this program, "Buying the War", by Bill Moyers on PBS (transcript). After seeing this program, you might ask yourself how men like Bill Kristol and Richard Pearle can still be treated as men of credibility and even integrity in the press.

You cannot separate the actions of the Bush Administration from the Republican party, because Republican congresspeople have supported his policies all along, continue to do so today, and never apologize for their past actions.

Isn't this war and this assault on the constitution a greater evil than abortion, or gay marriage? Is the Republicans opposition to these things even relevant, given that the Republican congress did not ban abortion or gay marriage? On what basis should Mormons be opposed to universal access to medical care? I cannot parse Utah's continuing support for these things. The nature of people in general, I suppose, is something I will just never understand. Why do people ignore the big issues to focus on the small ones?

Time magazine invents the facts

2008-04-03T12:36:00.000-07:00

No matter how corrupt and sloppy the establishment press becomes, they always find a way to go lower. Time Magazine has just published what it purports to be a news article by Massimo Calabresi claiming that "nobody cares" about the countless abuses of spying powers by the Bush administration; that "Americans are ready to trade diminished privacy, and protection from search and seizure, in exchange for the promise of increased protection of their physical security"; and that the case against unchecked government surveillance powers "hasn't convinced the people." Not a single fact -- not one -- is cited to support these sweeping, false opinions.

Click the title to read more.

Cut it out, David Plouffe

2008-03-27T06:04:00.000-07:00

I like Barack Obama and I plan to vote for him in the general election. And because I donated to his campaign, I get mass mails from Barack and his campaign manager, David Plouffe, designed to convince me to give more and do more for the campaign. The language of emails signed by Obama, for the most part, tend to sound similar to his public statements. But sometimes Plouffe's emails use questionable statements to rile up supporters. A March 20 email stated:

Senator Clinton and Senator McCain are reading from the same political playbook as they attack Barack on foreign policy. They have both criticized Barack's commitment to act against top al Qaeda terrorists if others can't or won't act. And they have both dismissed his call for renewed diplomacy as naïve while mistakenly standing behind George Bush's policy of non-engagement that just isn't working.

Actually, both of them have a tendency to rephrase the other candidates' statements in their own words, without proving enough information for me to look up what they actually said. But surely McCain and Clinton didn't really criticize "Barack's commitment to act against top al Qaeda terrorists"? And consider this email of March 25:

In February alone, more than 94% of our donors gave in amounts of $200 or less. Meanwhile, campaign finance reports show that donations of $200 or less make up just 13% of Senator McCain's total campaign funds, and only 26% of Senator Clinton's.

Wow, it looks like Obama has 7 times as much grassroots support as McCain! That's what Mr. Plouffe would have supporters believe. But if you read closely, he's comparing two very different statistics: the McCain statistic does not measure the percent of donations $200 or less. It measures the percent of total campain funds from such donations, which is a totally different story. Since I don't know where to find the complete statistics, let us assume for the sake of argument that the average over-$200 donation to Barack's campaign is $1000, and that the average under-$200 donation is $100. Let us assume the same thing for McCain's campaign. Now, with some algebra, we can figure out the missing statistics:

On average, although 94% of Barack's supporters gave $100, 6% gave $1000. So donations under $200 make up 61% of his total campaign funds.
On average, although only 13% of McCain's funds come from $100 donations, 60% of donators gave $100.

If these assumptions are anywhere near correct, then it seems safe to conclude Obama is ahead in grassroots support: 61% of Barack's funds versus 26% of Hillary's and 13% of McCain's come from relatively small donations. And getting well over a million separate donations during the primaries is unprecedented. But let's try reversing Plouffe's statistics trick. Maybe the McCain camp could say this:

In February, more than 60% of our donors gave in amounts of $200 or less. In comparison, campaign finance reports show that donations of $200 or less make up 61% of Senator Obama's total campaign funds, and only 26% of Senator Clinton's. Yet the democrats claim to be ahead in grassroots support! What the hell are they smoking?

Look, I have no doubt that the other candidates use similar techniques. This sort of thing is precisely what I expect from politics. But Barack promised to be different. Barack promised a positive campaign that focuses on the issues. In many ways he has delivered on these promises; for example, Barack's speech "A more perfect union" not only proved his excellence as a speechwriter, but it proved that he could respond to a guilt-by-association smear campaign without crucifying his former pastor Reverend Wright. Had other candidates been attacked in a similar manner, no one would expect them to respond as Barack did.

While we're on the topic of Reverend Wright, it should be noted that he makes a lot more sense when you hear him in context. See: video 1; video 2. He may be wrong, but if he sounds nutty, it's only because news outlets only show ten seconds of his sermon out-of-context. It's also interesting to hear (former Republican candidate) Mike Huckabee's take on this controversy.

It was fun to read the Obama campaign's analysis of a Clinton press release, an email containing nonsense like this:

But the Obama campaign has just announced that it is turning its attention away from Pennsylvania. This is not a strategy that can beat John McCain in November. ... Why are so many voters turning away from Barack Obama in state after state?

My point is this. Just because Barack's opponents talk smack and twist the truth into falsehood, doesn't make it okay for Obama's campaign to do the same. David Plouffe needs to speak the truth, be fair, and take the moral high ground. Every time he doesn't, I am disappointed. Every time he doesn't, I wonder whether this campaign is really so different from Washington's status quo.

See what else I'm digging

Daylight Saving Time: Stupid

2008-03-18T17:29:00.000-07:00

I had thought it was pretty stupid of Congress to move the boundaries of Daylight Savings Time based on projected (not proven, just estimated) energy savings that were measured in only millions of dollars. It was stupid because

the change would be an inconvenience for a lot of people whose computers were programmed for the old time
it would mess up peoples' habits
it would require an unknown amount of money to be spent reprogramming computers (estimated here at up to $1 billion) and updating documents
it may annoy the cows--but seriously, Congress should have known that unknown factors might negate any positive impacts
it annoys us Canadians, who are forced to change our time zones too (granted, you can't expect Congress to care)
the estimated savings were so small. I was not able to find a figure online, but I recall mere eight-figure sums were quoted by the media. Shouldn't Congress be thinking a little bigger?

Well, it turns out that a study of actual energy use (rather than an estimate based on some mathematical model) showed that DST uses more energy in Indiana.

Think daylight saving time saves energy? Think again. Or not.

Why not Hillary?

2008-03-18T14:59:00.000-07:00

I used to dislike Hillary, and temporarily joined a Facebook group labelled something like "Join this group if you are AGAINST Hillary for president", until somebody asked me why I was against Hillary.

Hmm. It's a funny thing. I actually began to like like Bill Clinton a lot more after so much time under George Bush, but for some reason I didn't like Hillary even though I had not followed her in the media and really didn't know much about her. So what wasn't to like? I think somehow that the feelings of others had rubbed off on me. I had heard her described several times as a "divisive" figure and I had never heard any particular reasons to like her, and apparently this was enough to give me the same negative feeling. But it really is not good enough.

I checked her Wikipedia entry and it was pretty benign. She doesn't seem concerned with things like Net Neutrality, copyright/patent law, or other things I consider important. And she voted for the Iraq war, which I cannot be happy about, but I guess it was the popular thing to do at the time. On the other hand she had a universal health care plan, maybe not a perfect plan, but at least we can agree in principle.

So I quit the anti-Hillary group. Over time I've become more and more sure that I'd really rather have Barak Obama as president (or Dennis Kucinich or Mike Gravel or Ralph Nader), but it is a little disconcerting to have made up my mind without really considering Hillary at all.

Anyway, I was reminded of my misstep by this slashdot post, directed at someone who was against Hillary:

Why do you dislike Hillary so strongly? I'm genuinely curious. I know there's a lot of folks who hate her, but I don't ever hear it logically explained. I imagine there has to be a pretty strong argument for why you'd support Obama over McCain but McCain over Clinton when Obama and Clinton's policies are so closely aligned and so dramatically different than McCain's.

Good question. I could not have answered it two months ago. The response from "JudgeFurious":

You know, I spent a lot of time pondering that as well. Why does this candidate rub me the wrong way so badly? I didn't mind her husband as President and so I naturally started wondering if it was because of her gender. Was I being sexist without recognizing it? Ultimately I concluded that my biggest problem with Hillary Clinton was her personality and the almost palpable ambition she seems to give off. It's like the woman is just starving for power and will step over just about anybody or anything to get it. I haven't had this kind of negative feeling about a candidate or President since Nixon. Despite his actions I don't much get it from GWB. I do get a sense of it from Cheney however.

She goes into a series of primaries with agreeing to certain terms (like Florida and Michigan not counting for instance) and then when it seems like she might not get her way she starts making noises about changing those terms. She enters a primary in Texas fully aware of how the primary works in Texas (and any protests otherwise she might make border on being insulting in my opinion) and then again you start to hear rumblings from her campaign about the possibility of filing suit to have this changed because it does not favor her. She goes into debates talking about being "co-President" and trying to leverage her husbands coat tails (which I do not fault her for doing mind you) but then denies any real involvment when failures or negatives from his administration are brought up. I see this and think "You were either the co-President or you weren't so what's it gonna be?"

This is the kind of behavior that makes me just cringe at the thought of her being President of the United States.

Another interesting response from "inca34":

The Republican playbook is a general turn-off for me. Character assassination and fear mongering instead of forging plans for the future tends to be the dead giveaway. When Obama had more free reign over his campaign with all the candidates involved, he spoke of plans for the future that he was passionate about and which made sense to me in terms of feasibility. Hillary, for what little she's actually done, has little personality except for what she thinks will get her ahead.

She wants to garnish my wages if I can't afford medical insurance, eh? She wants to fight the war (any war) in XXXX (wherever) because she has vested interested in defense spending? She wants me to feel comforted in her experience by the fact that she's been cherry picked by her husband to be in positions of power for a shorter period of time that Obama has been doing public service-oriented work?

I'm sorry, her story just does not check out. I want nothing to do with her platform or her reforms. Her rhetoric reeks of a lack of substance and a motive for her own personal advancement.

Check the exit polls. The more educated, the more likely the vote was for Obama. This statement is not elitist and does not assume a college degree could trump reality or a good common sense, but the averages should speak for themselves. With a college education one ought to be able to seek truth more effectively. I've researched my candidates come to my own conclusions, and I wish everyone could do that, but that's just not realistic for 300 million people to do. So we rely on the media and the game and hope it all works out in the end.

If politics were about qualifications, I'd suspect we'd have heard more about Chris Dodd and Dennis Kucinich and a few others. I personally would prefer their going to the Whitehouse based off of solid records, good experience, and most important character trait a politician could have: they can't be bought. Obama has yet to be seen, though his discipline with his investments give me a good feeling. Hillary has been bought before, I'm sure it can and will happen again (keywords: walmart board labor union).

I have to agree, Obama's tactics are much more tasteful, his speeches are better, and some elements of his campaign (anti-war, pro-net-neutrality) definitely make me like him more. I don't know if he's going to deal with the corruption of the military-industrial complex, but there's certainly no reason to believe Hillary will.

And Hillary's claims that she's so much more experienced? Well, Obama's senate record is pretty impressive for a first timer, as "Grassroots Mom" explains.

I bought Obama's book "Audacity of Hope". Hopefully it'll convince me that he's as good a candidate as my brother (who campaigns for him) believes. Of course, the real test will come after he's voted into office. But a man committed to change is more likely to clean house than a woman who is not.

As an aside, I am finding McCain to be a suprisingly likable guy. It's a suprise because lately I have expected nothing but evil behavior from Republicans. I say that as a Mormon, which may seem ironic given that Utah is as Red as a rose. But McCain is not against the Iraq war and he is not promising change in Washington. I'm sticking with Barak, but suppose I ought to give McCain a closer look anyway.

Why newspapers suck

2008-01-26T08:23:00.000-08:00

This quote-of-the-day sums it up:

Trying to determine what is going on in the world by reading newspapers is like trying to tell the time by watching the second hand of a clock. - Ben Hecht (1893 - 1964)

Dose is the best daily newspaper I've seen, and the only free daily I had ever encountered when it appeared in Calgary two or three years ago. Sadly, they quit publishing here after just more than a year. A few months ago, my eyes bugged out upon noticing not one but three new free daily newspapers had appeared on our sidewalks: "24 Hours", "Metro" and "Rush Hour". Guess what, they all suck. Besides having much less content than Dose (you can read all their "real" news in 10 minutes, leaving you only with entertainment/celebrity crap), they don't have the personality of Dose and, like the paid-for papers, they follow the Ben Hecht model above.

I think the best thing about Dose was that they didn't follow that mold. They didn't tell you just the latest tiny piece of data about an ongoing story, but summarized the whole thing. They would have one or two full pages on a single topic (with no ads, and not huge pages, but not small either). It wouldn't be one article, but several on related issues, typically with one article giving a concise, useful overview of the topic dating way, way back. Traditional newspapers will tell you, day after day after day, how many people of what race were killed in Israel that day, and even their mode of death (gunfire? rocket attack? suicide bomb!!), but only Dose would tell you that Israel invaded and occupied Sinai and Gaza in 1967. Traditional newspapers will tell you that the homicide yesterday was the 14th of the year; Dose would give you long-term crime trends.

Yeah, Dose had their celebrity gossip too. They had "sex advice from strangers". But they had enough interesting material to keep me reading for a good half hour.

It's remarkable how little I learn from the news I read, because the media doesn't tie things together. It's also remarkable how useless newspapers are for forming an opinion, not just because they give facts without context, but because, in their obsession with seeming impartial they make no judgements or evaluations. Regarding their chosen topic, the paper tells you what officials X and Y say, what witnesses and experts (selected by the newspaper) say, and if you're lucky you may get an report from an unidentified source. But in case of conflicting reports, they do not attempt to determine who is telling the truth--at least until you get to the opinion section, if the paper has one, in which highly partisan pundits try to tell you what to believe, backed up only by some speculation and emotion-soaked logic.

Dose couldn't fit all pertinent details into their one-page reports, but it's remarkable that I could learn more from one page of Dose than from years of traditional news reports. Come back, Dose. I'll even pay for you.

Tasers

2008-01-26T06:30:00.000-08:00

I've been hearing about a lot of taser-related deaths lately, as well as various stories of police officers using tasers when victims are already on the ground or when they simply have no need to. Which may not sound like a big deal compared to Iraq, but it's hard not to be horrified by some of these stories. Why do you need to give people a 50,000-volt shock when they are on the ground? Why would they even consider using it when four or five officers are trying to arrest a single individual? Why would they use it repeatedly?

Like the story of mentally handicapped woman in a wheelchair who, suffering from schizophrenia, called 911 claiming to be in danger. Soon after police arrived, she was tasered ten times for two minutes and forty seconds, and died as a result. Good heavens, doesn't the battery ever run out on these things?

Let's see, what else...

Police kill man by taser. His last words, "don't kill me". This is raw footage. You see the police yelling at him to "RELAX!!" and "STOP RESISTING!!"; perhaps it didn't occur to them that when one's life is threatened, one can't help but resist.
Cop(s) taser unarmed mentally handicapped woman three times when she is frightened by the arrest of her mother.
Woman Tasered Numerous Times by Police, even after she's handcuffed
Officer tasers man apparently because he took too many seconds looking for his license and registration
It starts out as a routine traffic stop for speeding, but it soon becomes clear that this cop is really eager for an excuse to use his taser. By the way, notice how the taser causes the man to fall onto the road. Think: what if he had fallen in the direction of traffic? Later he tries to convince the cop to tell him how fast he was going, but the cop refuses to say. It is reported that he thought the policeman pointed a real gun at him (maybe tasers should be colored differently so it doesn't seem that way?)
Cop beats man, tasers him, then shoots him twice in the back (mind you, this is not so much a taser story as a murder story)
Man tasered in the eye
Police taser man sleeping in his own home
Woman "handcuffed, leg shackled, hog-tied, blindfolded and tasered numerous times" by "a group of law enforcement officers"

Now comes the most disgusting taser death story yet, not so much because of the excessive taser use (it was used just twice, reportedly) but because of bad behavior from all officials involved.

I wanted to quote a helpful summary of what happened to Robert Dziekanski, but I couldn't find a news article that told the entire story. Most news stories start when the RCMP (Canadian federal police) arrived, but one should really start at least 11 hours earlier, when Mr. Dziekanski got off the plane at the Vancouver Airport. I let this post gather dust for over two months, thinking I would write it when I got a more detailed news article, but I never found one.

In short, when Mr. Dziekanski (how can you pronounce that?), who spoke only Polish, came to Canada, he had agreed with his mother to meet her in the baggage claim area. The problem: the baggage claim area is a secure area that his mother was not allowed to enter. His plane touched down at 3:12 P.M., and 11 hours later, at 2 A.M., he was dead. During that time his mother made numerous attempts to get help from airport staff, which fail.

There's this timeline but it doesn't explain all the things that I've heard. It says "he would not have been able to leave the secure zone", but not why (the Calgary baggage claim area is also secure, but of course passengers can leave--I've done so myself). It says that a customer service agent pages Mr. Dziekanski, without telling his mother that the announcements don't reach the secure area--but not whether his parents mentioned that she thought her son was there, which to me seems like an important point. It says that Ms. Cisowski and her husband leave the airport and return home to Kamloops (355 kilometres away), but not that they left because they were told that their son wasn't there. Finally, though observers thought he spoke Russian and the RCMP were told that he speaks only Russian, a translator who spoke Russian and Polish wonders why he wasn't notified (and may have been fired for talking to the press).

Meanwhile, the rest of us wonder why the airport's official translators weren't summoned and why these RCMP would use a taser on him for failing to obey their English instructions. I think it's for the same reason this Utah Highway Patrolman tasers a guy after he takes more than a few seconds to find his license and registration: they were just really eager to use their toys. Paul Pritchard, a passenger who took a video of the incident, say the RCMP mentioned taser use to one another before meeting him; I guess when they arrived, their groupthink stupor led them to carry out their unjustified idea.

You can see the whole damn thing on youtube if you like. By my stopwatch, it was just 25 seconds from the time that the first two (of four) RCMP officers reached Mr. Dziekanski, to when (judging by the convulsions) they zapped him with a taser. And why the hell is that RCMP officer ramming his baton into the ground? It is the ground, and not Mr. Dziekanski, right? No wonder the mounties took away the memory card with Pritchard's video on it, and refused to give it back until he went to court.

And all I can do is stand by and blog about it.

It's such a sad story because it seems like there were so many opportunities for officials and airport staff to help, and they didn't. A little compassion is that was needed! Although Mr. Dziekanski was acting badly near the end, throwing two large objects to the ground, I would keep in mind that this man had been cooped up in there for ten hours after a flight halfway around the world. He can't communicate a single word to anyone and he can't even get anything to eat. He must have been exhausted, otherwise two taser zaps wouldn't have been enough to kill him. Perhaps he thought by breaking something he would finally get some helpful attention.

Transcript with translation from Polish

In the aftermath of the incident, my home province of Alberta issued new taser use guidelines. Did they tighten them up to discourage unnecessary zappage? Hell no! Police in Alberta can taser people just for threatening to resist arrest! Hello? Tasers are clearly more dangerous than traditional methods of arrest. Why would it ever be the first choice? It seems like an emergency measure to me, something a policeman should use only if he or she is alone, and lacks any other means to arrest someone. And once the suspect is on the ground, you don't just continue to zap them until they lose consciousness. If the suspect is on the ground, the cop should be too! Put on those handcuffs, don't just stand there squeezing your trigger. If they continue to resist arrest after you zap them, well, duh! You just gave them a blast of searing pain... of course they want to get away from you. Gah.

655,000 Dead

2007-11-27T17:40:00.000-08:00

A new study, based on a survey of 1849 Iraqi households, estimates the death toll at 655,000. I knew it was over a hundred thousand but not how many hundreds. Impeaching Bush and Cheney is the least we can do.

Qwertie.net is down indefinitely

2007-10-27T07:22:00.000-07:00

It was running on my home computer and we switched to a new internet service provider (from Shaw to Telus). Telus blocks home web servers, hence qwertie.net is inaccessible. Oh well, there were only a few files on it and my blog's not very popular...

The main page was a user-editable interdictionary I made in 2006 that I hoped Esperanto speakers would use to improve an existing Esperanto-English dictionary. It was like Wiktionary, but much more useful for language learners because it was designed for inter-language definitions specifically, and you could click on any word to look it up in both directions (e.g. if a definition contains the word jam, the user could click on it, and the dictionary would spit out the definition for the English word "jam" and the Esperanto word "jam" (pronounced "yahm") at the same time. Anyway, I posted a link to it on lernu.net and tried to start a discussion, but evidently no one was interested. Only one other person ever added definitions, and now it's probably gone forever.

My best friend is learning Esperanto and recently got a Pocket PC, so I used the .NET Compact Framework (a Microsoft thing, don't worry if you don't know what it is) to quickly make a little user-editable Pocket PC Esperanto-English dictionary. It's got a convenient user interface but it's only in alpha state right now (main problem: it takes at least 30 seconds to start). I'm too ashamed of it to post it online, and I'm not improving it because I'm too worried that no one will use it...

Anyway, I placed a couple of files that were on qwertie.net somewhere else: my research paper about why we still use the Qwertie keyboard layout (and what's better?), and the ever-unread paper on electoral reform in Canada. Speaking of which, the coolest democratic system I know of is Direct Representation.

Note to self: learn more about Barak Omama.

New Amazon MP3 Store Sucks...

2007-09-28T22:16:00.000-07:00

If you live in Canada. Or anyplace alse that isn't America. Actually, I've heard great things about the new Amazon MP3 store. I hoped I could finally clear my conscience by buying all those songs I've downloaded over the years...

But I live in Canada so I can't. It feels ironic that I started by trying to buy a song from a Canadian band, Barenaked Ladies, only to get this message:

We could not process your order because of geographical restrictions on the product which you were attempting to purchase. Please refer to the terms of use for this product to determine the geographical restrictions.

Despite this, Amazon continues to taunt me about its MP3 store. I click on their central banner ad and get a popup window explaining how "Amazon MP3 offers music lovers these great benefits". It tells me, "Hello, David. We have MP3 Downloads Recommendations for you." But I click the link and it says "Sorry, we have no recommendations for you in this category today."

How dare they make me keep my money like this.

Money is Debt

2007-09-27T19:23:00.000-07:00

I've just seen the most fascinating video called "Money As Debt", in which it is explained that banks create money by lending it. I had no idea it worked this way; in fact the video's content is so amazing I have to wonder if it is actually true. I can usually tell when something is made by a conspiracy nut, extremist or somebody with a self-serving agenda, yet this video doesn't set off my bulls*** detector very strongly, except that its history of the monetary system is extremely vague, real-world details are minimal, and some things said in the video really need more explanation. Although the YouTube poster called the video "Corrupt Banking System", the video itself does not say the system is corrupt; it only points out that power is overly concentrated in the hands of bankers, and that the system need not work the way it does.

Perhaps the most fascinating thing about the video is the quotes by prominent men--U.S. presidents, bank heads, economists--quotes which not only suggest that the monetary system works just how the video says it does, but which openly admit a degree of corruption in the system.

I have never yet had anyone who could, through the use of logic and reason, justify the Federal Government borrowing the use of its own money....I believe the time will come when people will demand that this be changed. I believe the time will come in this country when they will actually blame you and me and everyone else connected with the Congress for sitting idly by and permitting such an idiotic system to continue. - late Congressman Wright Patman, Chairman of the House Committee on Banking and Currency

"The modern banking system manufactures money out of nothing. The process is perhaps the most astounding piece of sleight of hand that was ever invented. Banking was conceived in iniquity and born in sin. Bankers own the Earth. Take it away from them, but leave them the power to create money, and with the flick of the pen they will create enough money to buy it back again…Take this great power away from them and all great fortunes like mine will disappear, and they ought to disappear, for then this would be a better and happier world to live in. But if you want to continue to be slaves of the banks and pay the cost of your own slavery, then let bankers continue to create money and control credit." - Sir Josiah Stamp, director of the Bank of England 1928-1941

"The inability of the colonists to get power to issue their own money permanently out of the hands of George III and the International Bankers was the Prime reason for the Revolutionary War" - Benjamin Franklin

"We are grateful to the Washington Post, the New York Times, Time magazine and other great publications whose directors have attended our meetings and respected the promises of discretion for almost forty years. It would have been impossible for us to develop our plan for the world if we had been subject to the bright lights of publicity during those years. But, the world is now more sophisticated and prepared to march towards a world-government. The supranational sovereignty of an intellectual elite and world bankers is surely preferable to the National auto-determination practiced in past centuries." - David Rockefeller, In an address to a Trilateral Commission meeting in June of 1991

And the most fascinating thing about the issue is the silence about the subject in the media and in our education system. Speaking of the education system, they don't teach us (me, anyway) anything about managing money, let alone how the monetary system works.

I'm certainly left wondering about certain issues.

It says that if there is no debt in the economy, then there is no money. But of course governments can print money, so there will always be money. Right?
In an example in the video, a hypothetical person deposits $10,000, but with no explanation from the narrator, on the screen that number becomes $9,000 before it is divided by the reserve ratio 9:1 for a result of $1,000.
At the end it postulates an improved money systems in which loans are interest-free. But if loans are interest free, then what is the incentive for people to pay off their loans? Clearly people will not pay off debts without some incentive to do so, and since they get real resources by spending the loan money, it's obviously not sustainable if they don't give anything back to society by working to pay off the debt.
The video claims "P/(P+I) will fulfill their loan contract" and "I/(P+I)" will be foreclosed, formulas that seem impossibly simple. What do they mean exactly?

Nevertheless, it's so interesting that I'm tempted to buy it from moneyasdebt.net. If only it were cheaper. Anyway, I hear there's another good video out there called "The Money Masters". I shall have to see it.

Windows Is Free

2007-08-15T17:58:00.000-07:00

This guy's got a pretty good point about why people pick Windows over Linux, even if they've heard of Linux:

One time, a friend called me with an offer. He would pay me 50 bucks to get his laptop working again. Specifically, what he wanted was to back up all his data, reformat his disk, re-install Windows, and then restore his data. I asked if he still had the original install disks for Windows. He stammered a bit, and asked if I might not simply have some on hand I could use. He didn't mind if it was a different version of Windows - subtle code for hoping for a more recent version. The fifty dollars was for my labor. He didn't see getting a copy of Windows as a cost-associated item. It was no big deal, either he had a copy of Windows or I did, or he figured I knew a friend who did.
I felt kind of uncomfortable about the proposition, so I said no. If he had asked me this more recently, I would have offered to put Linux on his computer. But he probably would have said no, because it would seem like a more expensive offer to him. He would have compared free, unfamiliar Linux to free, comfortable Windows. The cost of getting used to the new environment, as easy as it might be, is probably more tangible to him than the money he technically should be spending but won't.

A few years back I tried to install Linux several times but was stopped cold by hardware compatibility issues. Such problems have been getting better now, but now I'm stuck on Windows because I like to use Visual Studio and SharpDevelop for my programming work, neither of which work on Linux.

The different interface of Linux and the potential hardware issues are definitely problems. I never know how to install software on Linux if it's not available in the standard repository; I wouldn't know how to set up file sharing (it's hard enough getting it working on Windows!); Last time I used Linux, Firefox's interface looked ugly and different from all the other windows; my old webcam almost certainly wouldn't work; and even if my 3-in-1 laser printer has a Linux driver, there's no way it has all the features of the Windows version.

I can't stand that rift between the two Linux desktops, Gnome and KDE. Call me a conformist, but I hate to have programs that look and act differently running on the same computer, and as a programmer I don't want to have to pick which GUI libraries to target: that should be the end-user's choice. It's about time they put aside their differences and merged. Or for a meteor to hit one of the camps, leaving victory to the other guys by default.

What's with the U.S. government lately?

2007-08-12T09:21:00.000-07:00

Obviously I haven't been blogging much lately, even though there's lots to blog about. Especially when it comes to U.S. government behavior. Those warrantless wiretapping programs, and the new spying powers given by bill S. 1927, which was somehow passed by a Democratic congress; the misplaced 190,000 guns in Iraq that were given to Iraq security forces without accounting or accountability (more guns than the record-high 162,000 soldier deployment there); the Mahar Arar case (background) which demonstrates not only a disregard for human rights, but the remarkable fact that the U.S. can, without laying charges, detain and deport a person who is only stopping in the U.S. to catch a connecting flight. Does it make sense to "deport" somebody who was just about to leave the country? Since all indications are that Arar is innocent, this could easily happen to others, and probably has: after all, the public didn't know about Arar until after he was released from Syria, and we might not know about the case if Arar hadn't fought to make it a public affair. And of course there's Guantanamo...

Meanwhile, lots of ordinary people like me are being affected by the dumb new U.S.-Canada border laws. Passports are required for travelling by air but not by car--because of course, terrorists don't bother to get passports, and they only come by air. Unfortunately I can't get my Canadian passport because I have to get a new copy of my citizenship card first, which they still haven't sent after over six months. I can't get my American passport without a full (non-learner's) driver's license, so I took driving lessons and passed my test, but I'm still waiting for the official license in the mail. I want to go to my brother's wedding in Milwaukee, but it looks very likely that I'll have to send 4 days driving there and back with some extended family, which means I'll lose almost $500 by taking three extra days off work. Thanks again, Bush and pals. You idiots.

Anyway, my blog may be empty, but I do digg stories occasionally. Click here to check out some of the stories I consider interesting or worthwhile.

Loyc: Language of your choice

2007-07-12T14:29:00.001-07:00

I am a programmer, but this is not a programming blog. Naturally I want to write about programming topics sometimes, but I prefer to keep the general public as my audience here. So I've been putting my technical posts in my scribblings blog, which I really intended for notes-to-self and other nonsense. So now I've created Loyc, etc., a blog for serious programming posts, and, of course, for Loyc.

I'll try to explain in layman's terms.

I've become increasingly frustrated with the primitive tools programmers use to write programs. Programmers write code in programming languages, and I want to increase the power of those languages. So in my free time I work on a "compiler architecture" called Loyc.

See, there are literally thousands of programming languages in the world. And each of them has an "interpreter" or "compiler". A compiler is a program that understands a programming language. It translates code written by a human into binary code which a computer understands. There are also "interpreters" which are the same but different (get it?).

It seems that most programmers who aren't happy with the programming languages they've got just make another one. Hence we end up with about a zillion of them. Each language has certain features and lacks others.

I'm doing something different. I'm not making a new programming language. Instead, my compiler will (...someday...) understand two languages that already exist, "C#" and "boo". Loyc, which stands for "Language of your choice", will be an "extensible" compiler. This means that other programmers can come along and add features to the C# language and the boo language. They can even add whole new languages!

The idea is that I myself will not be The Great Innovator. I'm not gonna be the one to make a new language with new features. Instead, I will provide a way for programmers to add new features to languages that already exist.

See, usually there's some committee or even a single person that gets to decide what features will be in a language. In contrast, my design is democratic. Any skilled programmer can add a feature, and then the other programmers in the world can choose whether they will use the feature or not. Loyc should thus evolve as some sort of utopian democratic meritocracy, or this is my hope :)

Anyway, if you are a programmer, don't get too excited. Loyc doesn't really exist yet. Mostly it's just ideas in my head, but I'm working on it.

Rush Hour

2007-06-20T17:35:00.000-07:00

Under democracy one party always devotes its chief energies to trying to prove that the other party is unfit to rule - and both commonly succeed, and are right. - H. L. Mencken (1880 - 1956)

It was true a hundred years ago and still true today: people think "democracy" is a choice between only two parties.

On an unrelated note: rules are not like Mount Everest. You need not follow a rule "just because it's there". And you certainly shouldn't enforce a rule "just because it's there". Rules should only be enforced when they serve a purpose. I'm talking about cops handing out tickets for jaywalking when there are no cars in sight, or for mild speeding on a wide flat straight highway when road conditions are perfect and there is almost no traffic. I'm talking about this crazy rule on the Calgary C-Train that "no bikes are allowed during rush hour". I read that Calgary Transit is "happy" to have people with bikes on the train, just not during rush hour. I can only surmise this is due to the overcrowding that happens on some routes during that time. Here's the thing though: rush hour means people going into downtown in the morning and out of downtown in the evening.

There is no rush into downtown in the evening and (with the possible exception of the northwest train taking students to the university or SAIT) no rush out of downtown in the morning. Everyone knows this. Certainly the train drivers know this. This rule is a problem for me because I take my bike to work every day: leaving downtown in the morning and coming back in the evening. Every single day the trains are almost empty; there is a seat for everyone willing to sit down. In fact, it's quite possible that the trains are more empty during so-called rush hour than any other time of day. Why? Because the trains come 2-3 times as often, greatly reducing the passenger load per train. But some drivers still enforce the rule.

You might say rush hour is a time of day, but I say it is a state of affairs. There is no such thing as rush hour on Sunday. There is no such thing as rush hour out in the country. And there is no such thing as rush hour during an evening trip into downtown. On the other hand, during the two-week Calgary Stampede rodeo, rush hour comes at midnight.

The two nudist streakers that fall in love over the internet

2007-05-20T08:07:00.000-07:00

As a nudist I was very pleased when I saw this video on a random website:

The end of the video gives a link to the site believeindestiny.com, and only then did I start to get the feeling it was fake. I mean, it doesn't say directly, but it says

We gave people the chance to vote about what they thought should happen with stories like these: Should companies make stories and websites like these, or should they stick to normal ads? We asked whether they thought they’d been lied to or whether they enjoyed the story? Where does entertaining advertising stop and invasive manipulation begin?

So I look at the vote results...

Are stories like scott and emma's okay? 54.3% yes, advertisers of the world, go nuts and entertain me 22% yes, but only if at the end I am told it was a story 16% no, you should tell me from the start that it's fiction 7.7% no, keep ads in ad breaks and entirely separate from entertainment

I find it hard to believe that, in general, the majority of people don't care whether a story that is presented as the truth is actually false. If that's so, my faith in humanity is all but lost. If viewers don't mind in this case, I think it's probably because either

They do not identify with nudists or streakers
(note: I think nudists and streakers are rarely the same people)
and don't care about the truth because it doesn't affect them on an emotional level, or
They suspected it was fake already

Oh, and it could also be the biased phrasing of the poll question.

But I was affected on an emotional level--I thought it was an awesome and sweet story--and I didn't suspect it was fake because it looked convincing. If it were fake, it probably would have required a significant budget to put together. So why would it start and end with defects that look like playing and pausing a VHS tape? Why the low video quality? It was an effective psychological trick. Which brings us to motive: why make up a story like this? The website considers it advertising, but advertising for what? They weren't selling anything, so it just didn't look like an advertisement.

I conclude their motive was the value of market research. It's an experiment in viral marketing and an experiment in how much BS consumers are willing to tolerate. Their poll seems to show that consumers don't mind being lied to, which reminds me of the Iraq war and Bush administration's success in obtaining a second term. But I think reality is more complex. I suspect the poll result can be explained by human selfishness, by apathy. I think their tolerance has more to do with the fact that the story didn't affect them. If they were nudists, less of them would mind the lie. Same goes if they were in the military, or in Iraq.

Wait, wait, I'm connecting viral marketing with the war in Iraq? Good heavens, what's wrong with me?

Net Neutrality

2007-04-27T08:44:00.000-07:00

Click the title for an entertaining primer on Net Neutrality in the U.S.

Large broadband providers have some cute little arguments about why they oppose net neutrality; they say that by prioritizing packets, they can offer a needed service to those who are willing to pay for it. But the real issue is not prioritizing traffic; it's degrading traffic--slowing down whoever doesn't pay extra, by letting "priority packets" suck up most of the bandwidth.

Now I don't understand the economics of the network neutrality debate in detail. But when I see that huge incumbent telecom corporations are opposed to neutrality while those in favor are web site operators, medium-size businesses, and grassroots activists, that's almost enough for me to make a ruling by itself.

And then there's the fact, as Harold Feld explains in the above article, that we actually had Net Neutrality during the whole time period in which the internet was growing to be the wonder we enjoy today, and we are only losing it now. Yes, you could always buy a bigger or smaller internet connection at your own "edge" of the internet, but traffic was treated equally in the "middle" of the internet, as it moved between endpoints.

So I'm generally in favor of Net Neutrality, but I wonder if there isn't some merit in packet prioritization to improve "low-latency" services. If you use the internet for voice calls, you'll notice that one of its longstanding problems is lag and dropped packets. Sometimes, seemingly at random, bits of voice will be cut out of voice calls, and other times, it will take a long time for sound to go from one person to the other. Similar problems can arise when playing online video games, in which there is a delay (commonly called lag) between when a person acts and when other players see that action. While often part of the problem is imperfect software, another part of the problem is the route your voice takes through the internet. If your voice travels through a region of the net that is heavily loaded, packets may get through after a delay, or be dropped completely. For that reason, players of many online games prefer to play on servers in their own city or region. Gamers call the delay "lag", but the technical term is "latency" (the lower, the better.)

What's interesting about voice and online games is that they probably take up very little of total online traffic--I would guess less than 10%. That's because the bulk of traffic involves downloading. When you're downloading something, such as a video, it's no big deal if each individual packet takes 3 seconds to go from a web site to your home computer--what matters is that you get as many packets as possible. You want them to come "as quickly as possible", not "as soon as possible". But when you're in a voice call, it doesn't matter if you have a slow ISDN line or the latest mega-speed cable modem. The higher speed line could improve the audio quality a little, but it can do nothing to make data arrive sooner because your voice must compete with downloads and such to get through.

If we don't have net neutrality, there is clearly a risk that large corporations will find a way to make most people pay more, by improving the service to some at the expense of others. But what if we came to a compromise on net neutrality, in which at least 90% of all traffic in any given pipe must be treated neutrally (no discrimination against specific traffic allowed), while up to 10% of traffic is allowed to move more quickly?

In this way, some users and service providers would be allowed to buy a piece of that 10% in order to transfer low-latency data more quickly. That way, "premium" voice packets can be moved to the head of the queue and protected from loss in a busy pipe. With a limit of 10%, there is not enough non-neutral traffic to really slow down the neutral traffic. What do you think?

Electoral Reform

2007-04-25T15:59:00.000-07:00

I wrote an undergraduate paper on electoral reform last year (Feb. 2006) and it's still a good introduction to voting systems. A country's electoral system could have a big impact on election results and the way in which campaigns are run; the most common First-Past-The-Post system is the least fair, so I encourage you to look at the the others. The paper was intended for Canadians. If you don't live in Canada, well, tough cookies. After reading my paper you can move here at your leisure.

Here's to free speech

2007-04-25T08:43:00.000-07:00

Let's take a moment to thank the EFF and other public interest groups for their support of free speech. It's worth thinking about the consequences of ever losing it:

In many countries a journalism student covering a demonstration of school children would be commended for his initiative. In Syria, student Mesud Hamid posted photos on the net of Kurdish pupils demanding equal rights. He was arrested while taking an exam at university. "I was tortured," he said. "For one year and three months I was held in a cell measuring one metre by two. I didn't see the sun or sky for all that time." - BBC article

In North America we take it for granted. We shouldn't.

"Our enemies are innovative and resourceful, and so are we. They never stop thinking about new ways to harm our country and our people, and neither do we."

My Chinese former roommates seemed incredulous at my claim that the Bush poster on my wall, which makes fun of his many mis-statements, would be legal in the U.S. Unfortunately, they do not seem to understand the importance of free speech. On the other hand, maybe it's only fair: I can't understand those who actually want their government to suppress speech that its leaders don't like. And you know, governments never stop at suppressing opinions; they suppress inconvenient facts too, and they often oppress the people who have disseminated "undesirable" messages.

Municipal WiFi

2007-04-19T09:47:00.000-07:00

(Edited April 21)

Competition in broadband and cell phone services is poor; prices are much higher than they could be, both in the U.S. and Canada. That's interesting given the fact that the monopolistic incumbent companies rely on resources, such as the radio spectrum and conduits over and under roads and homes, that on a fundamental level don't belong to them. These resources belong to the public, but the government has granted them permission to use these resources by various licensing schemes, typically at a fixed price set long ago, while letting them keep all the profits.

Now, of course, it is necessary to let somebody use them, or they would be wasted. And without some regulation of the wireless spectrum, the resulting free-for-all could lead to a tragedy of the commons. So the airwaves must be regulated, but it must be done carefully or monopolies arise, leading to high prices and artificial scarcity. The trouble is that has already happened. Prices are high and the wireless spectrum is not used efficiently. Consider Wi-Fi; using an 802.11 wireless network, users can get speeds as high as 54Mbps (= 6.44 megabytes per second) which is 27 times faster than a 2 Mbps DSL internet connection in my area. Even if an area is congested, with many users on the same network, your data still transmits through the air faster than it can across the internet. Yet, you can buy your own personal wireless router for under $100 (and sometimes under $50).

I find it interesting that while I have my own personal wireless network almost for free, but I have to pay $30/month to use the cell phone network for (at most) a few hours. And that's just voice. Internet access would cost an additional $100/mo for only 250 MB of traffic. For comparison, a 54Mbps Wi-Fi router can (sometimes) transmit 250 MB in under 40 seconds. Maybe one of the reasons they can charge so much for so little is that on the cell network, that amount of data could take hours to send.

Imagine, now, if there were a network of Wi-Fi routers that provided internet access from anywhere in a city. How much do you suppose that would cost? It's clear to me that the prices of incumbent cell phone providers could be undercut by a huge margin. It's not my idea; it's called municipal broadband or municipal wi-fi and it's been proposed by many city goverments, smaller companies and public interest goups. Google has even implemented it in its home town. In addition to internet, services such as Skype would make it possible to use the network for calls to ordinary phones at low rates. If municipal broadband took off, Skype and other companies would certainly produce Wi-Fi phones that work like ordinary cell phones, except at much lower prices.

Naturally, the powerful telcos have been lobbying state and federal govenments to ban these networks. The sad thing is that governments have a curious tendency to listen to them.

The reason you can have your own wireless network for so cheap is that the spectrum used by wi-fi is unlicensed. It is still regulated by the FCC in the U.S. and the CRTC in Canada--in particular, power output is limited, so these devices cannot have a long range--but no one has been granted an exclusive license, so anyone can use it. Decades ago there might have been a valid argument that this free-for-all would have a tragedy of the commons effect, because the signals of so many "free riding" users would step on each other, leading to a chaos of noise that would destroy the value of the band for most practical purposes.

This has not happened. Even in crowded places with many devices in use, access only becomes slower, not worthless. An important reason for this is that digital technology is used in this band, technology that can automatically and instantly negotiate with other devices to share the channel efficiently. Even if there are a few "bad" devices on the band that do not play by the digital rules (e.g. microwave ovens and cordless phones), the devices can switch to different channels and/or retransmit lost signals automatically in order to get the data through.

Now, today's wireless signals are usually point-to-point, meaning that transmissions only have one destination, yet current wireless gadgets transmit (roughly) equally in all directions. Thus, radio chatter is received by lots of devices that don't want to hear it. In a room with 100 laptops and several access points, only a few devices can transmit at the same time, which leads to the slowdown I was talking about. At some point in the future, space-division multiplexing, meaning that signals are sent in the general direction of their destination, should allow more devices to talk at once.

I'm really not sure why some govenments are easily persuaded to ban such an obvious public benefit, but perhaps certain cash cows are a factor. Although the main beneficiaries are obviously big businesses, govenments get a cut too. Harold Feld explains in his discussion of the selling of former TV spectrum in the 700MHz range:

"Now you would think that (a) if the incumbents—large and small—are accused of gaming the system, and (b) all the incumbents defend the rules, while all the non-incumbents argue for a rule change, that the FCC would believe its own Chief Economist rather than the very people accused of gaming the rules to their advantage. Ha ha. Instead, the FCC adopted an industry sponsored 'compromise' that they easily manipulated to achieve open bidding. With the predictable result that the incumbents blocked the DBS guys and any other real competitor (while rewarding the mid-sized carriers with needed licenses).

"Why? In part because this stuff is hard to understand and it's very difficult to buck the kind of political pressure the incumbents brought to bear. In part because a number of folks at the FCC stil think of mid-sized carriers and cable cos as 'competitors' rather than 'incumbents.' But, most importantly, because spectrum auctions are the crack cocaine of public policy. Faced with the threat that the major incumbents would refuse to play (as if they could let that spectrum fall into the hands of rivals) and that the AWS auction would not gross the promised billions, the FCC caved like a chocoholic at a Godiva's outlet."

I highly recommend his excellent discussion, even though the auction is not directly related to municipal Wi-Fi. It illustrates a way in which government, even in unelected bodies like the FCC, can be influenced by big, monopolistic business at the expense of the public.

Mind you, the former UHF TV spectrum would make an excellent basis for municipal Wi-Fi if the FCC and CRTC would only allow it. One article explains:

At lower frequencies -- like in the television band -- signals travel farther and can go through walls, trees and mountains. Opening up some of this spectrum would make Community Internet systems much faster and cheaper to deploy, allowing a new generation of broadband entrepreneurs to enter the market. The broadcasters are about to return a sizable chunk of spectrum as part of the digital television transition, a portion of which could be reserved for Community Internet if Congress [don't you mean the FCC?] doesn't auction it all off to the cell phone companies. Another option would be to reallocate vast, unused "white spaces" between TV channels for wireless broadband. Either way, more "unlicensed spectrum" is the key to making universal, super-fast broadband for $10 a month a reality.

When it comes to the opposition of elected bodies to municipal broadband, campaign contributions are an obvious thing to look at, as well as the general phenomenon that politicians tend to favor big businesses--the bigger, the better. The telcos are rightly terrified of municipal wi-fi, given how cheap it can be done compared to how much they charge, and so I'd expect them to be lobbying like mad. Indeed, a completely free service (paid for by taxes) is the cheapest kind of service to provide, since no billing system is required and no "tech police" need to be hired to defend the network against free-riding attempts. This would be efficient and cheap for consumers, and a boon for the economy. At the same time it may harm the telcos, which would only be able to make money on the internet backbone and on services that are better than whatever the municipal network offers.

On the bright side, while municipal wi-fi has reportedly been banned in 14 states, Harold Feld thinks that incumbent opposition is softening because they know they can't stop it. As evidence he notes that AT&T plans to build a "muni wifi" system in Springfield, Il--the strategy being that if you can't beat 'em, pretend to join 'em and see how much profit you can get under the circumstances.

One final thought (source):

Settles noted that, when put in perspective, building a WiFi network is not that expensive. City governments regularly shell out hundreds of millions of dollars to build sports arenas, ballparks, and stadiums, yet balk at the much smaller cost (usually measured in tens of millions of dollars) to build and maintain a WiFi network.

"When you come down to it, you’re not talking about a lot of money," Settles said of the cost to build a WiFi network.

Links:

Municipal WiFi Projects in the U.S. - Part 1, part 2, part 3
Let There Be Wi-Fi
From third class citizen to first among equals: rethinking the place of unlicensed spectrum in the FCC hierarchy
Going Wi-Fi in Canada: Municipal and community initiatives
Municipal broadband @ Wikipedia
Wetmachine: an interesting blog

Microsoft's flip-flop on patents

2007-03-15T13:26:00.000-07:00

For the past few years Microsoft has supported software patents, an annoying plague ... or at least a common cold ... in the software industry. The software industry gained no benefit in the 90s when software patents became popular; there are good reasons to think that the system is unfair and detrimental to the industry as a whole.

I had a faint hope that when Microsoft was hit with a $1.5 billion judgement for infringing on one of the MP3 patents (because Windows supports MP3 files), it might change its tune. No such luck. Ironically, as this article expains, Microsoft's original basis for using patents recognized the flaws in the system.

FAQ: Behind Microsoft's MP3 patent jam

FOV

2007-02-20T18:02:00.000-08:00

This blog isn't about games, but I'm allowed to go off-topic right?

I play a lot of first-person shooters and other 3D games and I'm surprised at how many games don't offer a field-of-view (FOV) control.

In real life we have peripheral vision but in games we generally don't. Games are designed for relatively small screens, and if they start to pack too much of the environment on one screen, it starts to look weird. So they don't. The in-game camera of a typical first-person shooter typically has a FOV between 70 and 90 degrees. FOV is usually mesured vertically, I think (it depends on the game), which means that the angle from the top of the screen to the bottom is 70 to 90 degrees.

Suppose you are standing in the corner of a large square room, and you look directly at the opposite corner of the room. Now, can you see all four walls? If the answer is yes, then your field-of-view is greater than 90 degrees horizontally. In real life you can. But in many games, you can't. Video games deprive you of your peripheral vision.

In our home we have a projector that puts a 8-foot image on our wall. It is truly sweet, and makes for an immersive game when you're sitting 5 feet away from the picture. But if the game doesn't give you peripheral vision, it's no fun. It feels like you're looking at the world through a telephoto lens. As Half-Life 2 players reported, an FOV that is too low for the screen can cause nausea. Meanwhile, an FOV that is too high looks odd (and might have the same effect). Typically, console games have an FOV closer to 70 (because the screen is expected to be far away) and PC games use an FOV closer to 90 (since you people put your eyeballs two feet away from the screen).

Luckily, many PC games (though few console games) allow you to tweak the FOV. In this entry I will record instructions for changing FOV in various games. I would prefer to focus on first-person shooters but feel free to add instructions for any game in the comments.

Call of Duty

In Call of Duty, I've heard you can change the FOV by using Notepad to add the following command to C:\Program Files\Call of Duty\Main\config.cfg before you start the game (replace X with the desired horizontal FOV):

seta cg_fov "X"

By the way, certain widescreen resolutions are only available by changing this file. Use a series of commands like the following to request the desired resolution (more information):

seta cg_fov "96.4183" seta r_mode "-1" seta r_customwidth "1280" seta r_customheight "768" seta com_introplayed "1"

Call of Duty 2

Under the Options menu, enable the console
During gameplay, press the ~ key
Type "seta cg_fov X" (without the quotes, of course) and press Enter, where X is the FOV you want (e.g. 100)

Doom 3

Open the console (Ctrl + Alt + ~)
Type g_fov 100 (substitute 100 with your preferred value)

The FOV setting will be forgotten when you exit. To make it permanent, edit autoexec.cfg (see here). By the way: Doom 3 doesn't work in Windows Vista, argh!

Far Cry

Far Cry isn't designed for a custom FOV and it will switch back to the default FOV every time you zoom in & out with your gun or binoculars. Still, you might want to increase your FOV temporarily. I find that Far Cry's normal FOV works fine outdoors, but indoors you're better off with an FOV between 110 and 120.

As explained in a tweak guide, the first thing you have to do is enable devmode.

[Y]ou must go to your Far Cry game icon, right click on it and select Properties. In the Target box, insert a space after the last " mark and type "-Devmode" (without quotes). It should look something like this:
"C:\Program Files\UBISOFT\Crytek\Far Cry\Bin32\FarCry.exe" -Devmode
Click Apply and OK to close the Icon Properties box. The next time you run Far Cry from this icon it will begin in Developer Mode, which is essentially a cheat mode.

Once that's done, the simplest way to change the FOV is to type fov 110 from the in-game console (press ~ to reach it.) But since the game always tries to change it back, you might want a key to help you switch.

So do this:

Pick a key that you will use to set your favorite FOV. I use "Q" because it is convenient (it replaces Lean Left, which isn't as useful as Lean Right), but if the key you pick is already used for something else, it [probably] won't work. So first, un-assign the key from within the game.
Open C:\Program Files\Ubisoft\Crytek\Far Cry\DevMode.lua in Notepad.
Add the following line to the top of the file:

Input:BindCommandToKey("\\fov 110", "q", 1);

Replace 110 with your desired fov and q with your desired key. If it worked, then you can press that key in-game to change your fov. With extra work you could maybe set up a key that cycles through two or more different settings, but I'm lazy to figure out how.

Half-Life 2

This game's default FOV is 75 which is a shame because this game can be very immersive with a higher setting. We like to use 115 or 120 on our big screen; normal people might like 95 or so.

You are not allowed to change FOV at the beginning; I think you can change it after you meet Barney, pile stuff up by the window, drop down and go through the loading screen.
From the menu, go Options > Keyboard > Advanced and enable the "developer console".
Press ~ in-game.
Type sv_cheats 1
Type fov 100 (substitute 100 with your preferred value)

Valve decided FOV is a "cheat" so it doesn't work in online deathmatch games or in Counter-Strike.

Unreal Tournament

Open the console (is it done with ~?)
Type fov 100 (substitute 100 with your preferred value). This won't work in some servers but it works in single-player.

Unreal II: The Awakening

Press ~ to reach the console
Type BeMyMonkey to enable cheat mode
Type fov 100 (substitute 100 with your preferred value)
Press Esc to exit the console

Games that have no FOV control:

Halo
Call of Juarez (apparently)
F.E.A.R. has no FOV control, but if you use a widescreen resolution, you will have a somewhat greater FOV.

Many games that don't have a FOV control will at least have a higher FOV horizontally when you use a widescreen resolution. There is a website dedicated to widescreen gaming where you can learn more. Their master games list says "Hor +" in the "Screen Change" column if you'll be able to see more in a widescreen resolution (more of the scene is added on the left and right sides), or it'll say "Vert -" if you will actually see less (because the top and bottom of the scene are cut off). It's all explained here.

More games?

If you know how to change fov in other games or if there are other web sites that talk about this issue, please make a comment.

Excess Copyright

2007-02-11T16:17:00.000-08:00

I've written no posts in so long, it's embarrasing. How am I supposed to inform people about stuff unless I write about stuff? Anyway, if you're Canadian you might want to take a look at Excess Copyright, which covers the state of intellectual property law from a Canadian lawyer's perspective. Does that sound boring? IP law has important effects on modern life, and if you realize how important it is, you won't find it boring.

Theoretically.

On the other hand, I know how important my eternal salvation is, but I still nod off in church.

Idiot instructors

2006-12-18T20:58:00.000-08:00

I've had some great instructors at the University of Calgary, but they're certainly in the minority.

When I wrote that The U of C Sucks, I really thought I was going to school at a particularly bad university. Yet on the internet I've been seeing a lot of discontent about the quality of post-secondary education throughout North America. Here's one example:

On the first day of class, she struggled for a full five minutes trying to turn on the computer...

...despite repeated help and instruction from others in the class, Gabrielle just couldn't get it right. She started ever page with a BODY tag instead of the proper HTML tag, and insisted that it made more sense that way because HTML was "the language" and not a part of "the code." Her "proof" of this was that, thanks to Internet Explorer's forgiving nature, the pages rendered just fine.

Gabrielle's grasp of "documents" versus "programs" was just as painfully embarrassing. After editing an HTML document, she'd always say, "OK, I'm now saving my HTML program and will run it in Internet Explorer." I won't even get into how much Gabrielle struggled with doing actual web development in PHP.

Now I suppose this story is one that can describe just about every struggling Computer Science student that will eventually change their major to Communications. There's only one difference: Gabrielle was not a student in the Web Development course. She taught it.

Now, perhaps the story itself is a fabrication. Or not. But what's interesting is the high degree to which those in the forum identified with the story. It's believable because it rings true. Some of the responses:

"Honestly, this sounds about par for the course for a Community College / Junior College instructor. I had a couple of real boneheads in the comp sci department -- and this was at a *silicon valley* JC -- supposedly one of the best in the country, at that."

"That's like every 4th CS teacher I've had."

"The year I was appointed to the faculty, I taught a 4th year, or maybe it was graduate level, independent study course on X programming because the prof (my boss) was over-extended. I was all of 18 or 19 at the time, had never programmed in X and wasn't the greatest C programmer in the world. He knew I'd figure it out (and I did), but it could have gone horribly wrong, too. And this was at a good school. I can easily imagine a lesser school having someone like Gabrielle teach a web class."

"I used to work as both a lecturer and as tech support at a pretty decent CS university, and honestly there were some staff there who made two short planks look like a computer (...). Typically they start our as students who cheat their way through an undergrad degree (...) and get hooked on the lazy academic lifestyle. [...] they come back for a postgrad degree, take a decade to get through a PhD and wind up with a vague understanding of one very narrow field of CS and absolutely no idea about any others. The universities themselves don't help because they are all about bringing in money from research, and that's the direction they push the staff. Teaching undergraduates is generally treated as an annoyance they have to do to satisfy government requirements to keep all the lurks and perks associated with being a university..."

"For my OS Theory class, they couldn't find anyone to teach it. So the first night, the CS Chair came in and explained that to us. The second night, we got our professor..."

Well, you can imagine where that last one is going. Yup, something's rotten in the state of our schools.

Why Qwerty, and What's Better?

2006-12-18T16:22:00.000-08:00

If you're curious about where our standard keyboard layout came from, have a look at my paper about its history and what's better. I wrote it for a class, but I promise it's better than typical classwork.

Here is a mirror at Geocities. I wonder if it's time to start paying for web space...

Stealing Fair Use, Selling It Back to you

2006-12-06T07:39:00.000-08:00

EFF sums up how Hollywood is using the U.S.'s crappy DMCA to prevent consumers from doing what would otherwise be legal:

"Apparently, Hollywood believes that you should have to re-purchase all your DVD movies a second time if you want to watch them on your iPod." That's what we said last week, commenting on the Paramount v. Load-N-Go lawsuit, in which Hollywood studios claimed that it is illegal to rip a DVD to put on a personal video player (PVP), even if you own the DVD.

Well, this week the other shoe dropped. According to an article in the New York Times:

"Customers who buy the physical DVD of Warner Brothers' 'Superman Returns' in a Wal-Mart store will have the option of downloading a digital copy of the film to their portable devices for $1.97, personal computer for $2.97, or both for $3.97."

So you buy the DVD, and if you want a copy on your PVP or computer, you have to pay a second time. Despite the fact that you bought the DVD, and you have a DVD drive in your computer that is perfectly capable of making a personal-use copy. Imagine if the record labels offered you this "deal" for every CD you bought -- pay us a few dollars extra, and you can have a copy for your iPod. And a few more dollars, if you want a copy on your computer, too! As LA Times reporter Jon Healey puts it in his blog: "So from the perspective of the studios and federal officials, consumers have to pay for the privilege of doing the sorts of things with DVDs that they're accustomed to doing with CDs (and LPs and cassettes)."

This latest bitter fruit from Hollywood is brought to you by the Digital Millennium Copyright Act (DMCA), which treats "protected" content (like the encrypted video on DVDs), differently from "unprotected" content (like every audio and video media format introduced before 1996). Thanks to the DMCA, Hollywood believes fair use personal-use copies simply do not exist when it comes to DVDs.

Let's hope Congressman Rick Boucher is listening and will reintroduce his DMCA reform bill first thing next year.

Asset vs. Colemak

2006-11-17T22:06:00.000-08:00

So the designer of the Colemak keyboard layout and I have been going back and forth, him criticising my Asset layout and me improving it. I think I'm nearly at the point where I can improve it no more, and it looks like this:

I could get a small improvement by moving L and Y in order to get Y in a more comfortable spot, and to remove the same-finger contention for the common digraphs LO, OL and MY. In order not to cause new problems, I'd have to shuffle Y, L, U, J, P, and K. However, this would make only 11 letters match Qwerty, which in turn means it is less different from Colemak, which keeps 10 letters. Actually, I'm kind-of considering switching P and U, which would make 13 letters match Qwerty, but my digraph data indicates that same-finger typing would increase by 0.52%. On second thought, the tradeoff is insufficiently compelling; I'll leave things how they are.

In the choice between Asset and Colemak, I guess what it comes down to is how much Qwerty similarity is desired. Asset keeps 12 letters while Colemak keeps 10; and in total, my Nov. 13 redesign also keeps 20/26 letters on the same finger, whereas Colemak only keeps 15/26. Unfortunately, how important it is to keep keys on the same finger is purely a matter of opinion, because it would probably take a quite expensive study to tell for sure.

Now, Colemak and Asset have many similarities, the only major differences I can see being that (1) Asset is more similar to Qwerty, (2) Asset's Y key could be better placed, and (3) Asset has higher same-finger typing.

Colemak's designer, Shai Colemak says that "Asset has 100% more same-finger ratio compared Colemak." That could be true (evidence?), but I tried a corpus of several books at http://colemak.com/Compare and found that Colemak usually has under 2% same-finger typing, which implies under 4% for Asset. Now, if we assume digraphs typed with the same finger take twice as long to type as digraphs on different fingers (actually I think it's less than twice), then we would conclude that a Colemak typist could potentially type about 2% faster than an Asset typist.

So that's the trade-off. More similarity to Qwerty or 2% more speed. I guess we'll let the community decide. Mind you, Colemak has more followers so the conclusion is probably foregone. Anyway, I guess I should resubmit the new Asset…

It would be kind of nice if Shai and I could come to a compromise. For example, on Colemak's home row you see ARST:

If he switched R and S then S would be back in its Qwerty position, and the Ctrl+S (Save) shortcut would be preserved. My digraph data indicates that if R and S were switched, the amount of same-finger typing would increase by 0.22% (e.g. 1.92% instead of 1.70%), so one might expect typists that are 0.2% slower—no big deal, IMO. I guess he wouldn't think it worthwhile, since he has declared the layout "stable", but as I said on the forum… if he switches them, I'll drop out of the competition and replace my Asset page with a page that praises Colemak :)

The Asset Keyboard

2006-11-11T14:27:00.000-08:00

A while ago I designed an improved keyboard layout called Asset, which attempted to maximize similarity to Qwerty. Now I'm studying the history of keyboards for a school project, and I decided to update my design based on some advice from a guy named Scott. Scott informed me some time ago that he'd been using his own personal layout since 1992, which had a nearly identical home row to Asset. I took his advice and made a couple more tweaks too.

After making the new Asset keyboard I found out about a layout called Colemak, which led me to the "Million Dollar Keyboard" competition. In fact, it's nothing of the sort--the prize is sitting at around $250. Anyway, if anybody's reading this and likes the keyboard, and if I understand the poorly-designed rules correctly, then if you join Wikidot, you can vote for my design on 2006/12/28.

Firstly, they decided to use 2-round first-past-the-post runoff voting, which probably means they know very little about voting systems. The system they chose will not accurately measure the opinions of the voters. I would've probably recommended Range Voting, although if I were designing a system myself I'd probably use something a little more elaborate than standard systems. Secondly, leaving the polls open for only one day will exclude voters who either had something else to do that day, or were forgetful. Finally, now that many submissions have been made, it is clear that the submissions come in very different flavors:

Designs that change the key layout from Qwerty to something else
Designs that keep Qwerty, but rearrange extended keys or add new features
Ergonomic keyboard designs

It doesn't really make sense to have only one winner out of all three categories, because for the most part, the designs in different categories could be combined (although categories 2 & 3 tend to conflict or overlap). For example, one could easily imagine an Asset Editor's Keyboard in the style of the Microsoft Natural Keyboard.

RIAA bullying: worse than I thought

2006-10-09T12:16:00.000-07:00

I already knew that the RIAA routinely sues individual file sharers, P2P network companies, and any company that could be construed as aiding copyright infringement. But to my horror, they have also used very mafia-style tactics to "teach a lesson" to the entire technology industry. Lawrence Lessig explains in Free Culture (p.188-192):

[...I]nnovators who want to innovate in this space can safely innovate only if they have the sign-off from last generation's dominant industries. That lesson has been taught through a series of cases that were designed and executed to teach venture capitalists a lesson. That lesson—what former Napster CEO Hank Barry calls a “nuclear pall” that has fallen over the Valley—has been learned.

Consider one example to make the point [....]
In 1997, Michael Roberts launched a company called MP3.com. MP3.com was keen to remake the music business. Their goal was not just to facilitate new ways to get access to content. Their goal was also to facilitate new ways to create content. Unlike the major labels, MP3.com offered creators a venue to distribute their creativity, without demanding an exclusive engagement from the creators.

To make this system work, however, MP3.com needed a reliable way to recommend music to its users. The idea behind this alternative was to leverage the revealed preferences of music listeners to recommend new artists. If you like Lyle Lovett, you're likely to enjoy Bonnie Raitt. And so on.

This idea required a simple way to gather data about user preferences. MP3.com came up with an extraordinarily clever way to gather this preference data. In January 2000, the company launched a service called my.mp3.com. Using software provided by MP3.com, a user would sign into an account and then insert into her computer a CD. The software would identify the CD, and then give the user access to that content. So, for example, if you inserted a CD by Jill Sobule, then wherever you were—at work or at home—you could get access to that music once you signed into your account. The system was therefore a kind of music-lockbox.

No doubt some could use this system to illegally copy content. But that opportunity existed with or without MP3.com. The aim of the my.mp3.com service was to give users access to their own content, and as a by-product, by seeing the content they already owned, to discover the kind of content the users liked.

To make this system function, however, MP3.com needed to copy 50,000 CDs to a server. (In principle, it could have been the user who uploaded the music, but that would have taken a great deal of time, and would have produced a product of questionable quality.) It therefore purchased 50,000 CDs from a store, and started the process of making copies of those CDs. Again, it would not serve the content from those copies to anyone except those who authenticated that they had a copy of the CD they wanted to access. So while this was 50,000 copies, it was 50,000 copies directed at giving customers something they had already bought.

Nine days after MP3.com launched its service, the five major labels, headed by the RIAA, brought a lawsuit against MP3.com. MP3.com settled with four of the five. Nine months later, a federal judge found MP3.com to have been guilty of willful infringement with respect to the fifth. Applying the law as it is, the judge imposed a fine against MP3.com of $118 million. MP3.com then settled with the remaining plaintiff, Vivendi Universal, paying over $54 million. Vivendi purchased MP3.com just about a year later.

That part of the story I have told before. Now consider its conclusion. After Vivendi purchased MP3.com, Vivendi turned around and filed a malpractice lawsuit against the lawyers who had advised [mp3.com] that they had a good faith claim that the service they wanted to offer would be considered legal under copyright law. This lawsuit alleged that it should have been obvious that the courts would find this behavior illegal; therefore, this lawsuit sought to punish any lawyer who had dared to suggest that the law was less restrictive than the labels demanded.

The clear purpose of this lawsuit (which was settled for an unspecified amount shortly after the story was no longer covered in the press) was to send an unequivocal message to lawyers advising clients in this space: It is not just your clients who might suffer if the content industry directs its guns against them. It is also you. So those of you who believe the law should be less restrictive should realize that such a view of the law will cost you and your firm dearly.

This strategy is not just limited to the lawyers. In April 2003, Universal and EMI brought a lawsuit against Hummer Winblad, the venture capital firm (VC) that had funded Napster at a certain stage of its development, its cofounder ( John Hummer), and general partner (Hank Barry). The claim here, as well, was that the VC should have recognized the right of the content industry to control how the industry should develop. They should be held personally liable for funding a company whose business turned out to be beyond the law. Here again, the aim of the lawsuit is transparent: Any VC now recognizes that if you fund a company whose business is not approved of by the dinosaurs, you are at risk not just in the marketplace, but in the courtroom as well. Your investment buys you not only a company, it also buys you a lawsuit. So extreme has the environment become that even car manufacturers are afraid of technologies that touch content. In an article in Business 2.0, Rafe Needleman describes a discussion with BMW:

"I asked why, with all the storage capacity and computer power in the car, there was no way to play MP3 files. I was told that BMW engineers in Germany had rigged a new vehicle to play MP3s via the car's built-in sound system, but that the company's marketing and legal departments weren't comfortable with pushing this forward for release stateside. Even today, no new cars are sold in the United States with bona fide MP3 players. . . ."

This is the world of the mafia—filled with “your money or your life" offers, governed in the end not by courts but by the threats that the law empowers copyright holders to exercise. It is a system that will obviously and necessarily stifle new innovation. It is hard enough to start a company. It is impossibly hard if that company is constantly threatened by litigation.

The point is not that businesses should have a right to start illegal enterprises. The point is the definition of “illegal.” The law is a mess of uncertainty. We have no good way to know how it should apply to new technologies. Yet by reversing our tradition of judicial deference, and by embracing the astonishingly high penalties that copyright law imposes, that uncertainty now yields a reality which is far more conservative than is right. If the law imposed the death penalty for parking tickets, we'd not only have fewer parking tickets, we'd also have much less driving. The same principle applies to innovation. If innovation is constantly checked by this uncertain and unlimited liability, we will have much less vibrant innovation and much less creativity.

Interestingly, Lessig doesn't directly point a finger of blame at the RIAA in his book. Of course, it is our dysfunctional copyright laws that enable the RIAA's behavior, and this is his focus. Whereas the maximum fine for a doctor that amputates the wrong leg in an operation is $250,000, the maximum fine for each and every song you download illegally is $150,000. And so he continues:

[...] This wildly punitive system of regulation will systematically stifle creativity and innovation. It will protect some industries and some creators, but it will harm industry and creativity generally. Free market and free culture depend upon vibrant competition. Yet the effect of the law today is to stifle just this kind of competition. The effect is to produce an overregulated culture, just as the effect of too much control in the market is to produce an overregulated- regulated market.

The building of a permission culture, rather than a free culture, is the first important way in which the changes I have described will burden innovation. A permission culture means a lawyer's culture—a culture in which the ability to create requires a call to your lawyer. Again, I am not antilawyer, at least when they're kept in their proper place. I am certainly not antilaw. But our profession has lost the sense of its limits. And leaders in our profession have lost an appreciation of the high costs that our profession imposes upon others. The inefficiency of the law is an embarrassment to our tradition. And while I believe our profession should therefore do everything it can to make the law more efficient, it should at least do everything it can to limit the reach of the law where the law is not doing any good. The transaction costs buried within a permission culture are enough to bury a wide range of creativity. Someone needs to do a lot of justifying to justify that result.

While of course I agree fully that the law is out of whack, I also think it is wrong for companies to do evil, even if the law allows it. Just as there's something wrong with Nike using sweatshop labor, and something wrong with companies dumping toxic waste into a river, it is wrong, even evil, for RIAA to use the law as a weapon to punish grandmothers, 13-year-olds, mp3.com, venture capitalists, lawyers who don't share its interpretation of the law, and Jesse Jordan. For it is apparent that legality and morality are sometimes at odds in the modern world--especially when the RIAA itself has a hand in writing many of today's bills.

Oh, about Jesse Jordan. Lessig tells his story in Chapter 3:

In the fall of 2002, Jesse Jordan of Oceanside, New York, enrolled as a freshman at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, in Troy, New York. His major at RPI was information technology. Though he is not a programmer, in October Jesse decided to begin to tinker with search engine technology that was available on the RPI network.
[...]
RPI's computer network links students, faculty, and administration to one another. It also links RPI to the Internet. Not everything available on the RPI network is available on the Internet. [...] The idea of “intranet” search engines, search engines that search within the network of a particular institution, is to provide users of that institution with better access to material from that institution. Businesses do this all the time, enabling employees to have access to material that people outside the business can't get. Universities do it as well.

These engines are enabled by the network technology itself. Microsoft, for example, has a network file system that makes it very easy for search engines tuned to that network to query the system for information about the publicly (within that network) available content.

Jesse's search engine was built to take advantage of this technology. It used Microsoft's network file system to build an index of all the files available within the RPI network.

Jesse's wasn't the first search engine built for the RPI network. Indeed, his engine was a simple modification of engines that others had built. His single most important improvement over those engines was to fix a bug within the Microsoft file-sharing system that could cause a user's computer to crash. With the engines that existed before, if you tried to access a file through a Windows browser that was on a computer that was off-line, your computer could crash. Jesse modified the system a bit to fix that problem, by adding a button that a user could click to see if the machine holding the file was still on-line.

Jesse's engine went on-line in late October. Over the following six months, he continued to tweak it to improve its functionality. By March, the system was functioning quite well. Jesse had more than one million files in his directory, including every type of content that might be on users' computers.

Thus the index his search engine produced included pictures, which students could use to put on their own Web sites; copies of notes or research; copies of information pamphlets; movie clips that students might have created; university brochures—basically anything that users of the RPI network made available in a public folder of their computer.

But the index also included music files. In fact, one quarter of the files that Jesse's search engine listed were music files. But that means, of course, that three quarters were not, and—so that this point is absolutely clear—Jesse did nothing to induce people to put music files in their public folders. He did nothing to target the search engine to these files. He was a kid tinkering with a Google-like technology at a university where he was studying information science, and hence, tinkering was the aim. Unlike Google, or Microsoft, for that matter, he made no money from this tinkering; he was not connected to any business that would make any money from this experiment. He was a kid tinkering with technology in an environment where tinkering with technology was precisely what he was supposed to do.

On April 3, 2003, Jesse was contacted by the dean of students at RPI. The dean informed Jesse that the Recording Industry Association of America, the RIAA, would be filing a lawsuit against him and three other students whom he didn't even know, two of them at other universities. A few hours later, Jesse was served with papers from the suit. As he read these papers and watched the news reports about them, he was increasingly astonished.

“It was absurd,” he told me. “I don't think I did anything wrong. . . .

I don't think there's anything wrong with the search engine that I ran or . . . what I had done to it. I mean, I hadn't modified it in any way that promoted or enhanced the work of pirates. I just modified the search engine in a way that would make it easier to use”—again, a search engine, which Jesse had not himself built, using the Windows file- sharing system, which Jesse had not himself built, to enable members of the RPI community to get access to content, which Jesse had not himself created or posted, and the vast majority of which had nothing to do with music.

But the RIAA branded Jesse a pirate. They claimed he operated a network and had therefore “willfully” violated copyright laws. They demanded that he pay them the damages for his wrong. For cases of “willful infringement,” the Copyright Act specifies something lawyers call “statutory damages.” These damages permit a copyright owner to claim $150,000 per infringement. As the RIAA alleged more than one hundred specific copyright infringements, they therefore demanded that Jesse pay them at least $15,000,000.

Similar lawsuits were brought against three other students: one other student at RPI, one at Michigan Technical University, and one at Princeton. Their situations were similar to Jesse's. Though each case was different in detail, the bottom line in each was exactly the same: huge demands for “damages” that the RIAA claimed it was entitled to. If you added up the claims, these four lawsuits were asking courts in the United States to award the plaintiffs close to $100 billion—six times the total profit of the film industry in 2001.

Jesse called his parents. They were supportive but a bit frightened. An uncle was a lawyer. He began negotiations with the RIAA. They demanded to know how much money Jesse had. Jesse had saved $12,000 from summer jobs and other employment. They demanded $12,000 to dismiss the case.

The RIAA wanted Jesse to admit to doing something wrong. He refused. They wanted him to agree to an injunction that would essentially make it impossible for him to work in many fields of technology for the rest of his life. He refused. They made him understand that this process of being sued was not going to be pleasant. (As Jesse's father recounted to me, the chief lawyer on the case, Matt Oppenheimer, told Jesse, “You don't want to pay another visit to a dentist like me.”) And throughout, the RIAA insisted it would not settle the case until it took every penny Jesse had saved.

Jesse's family was outraged at these claims. They wanted to fight. But Jesse's uncle worked to educate the family about the nature of the American legal system. Jesse could fight the RIAA. He might even win. But the cost of fighting a lawsuit like this, Jesse was told, would be at least $250,000. If he won, he would not recover that money. If he won, he would have a piece of paper saying he had won, and a piece of paper saying he and his family were bankrupt.

So Jesse faced a mafia-like choice: $250,000 and a chance at winning, or $12,000 and a settlement.

The recording industry insists this is a matter of law and morality.

Let's put the law aside for a moment and think about the morality. Where is the morality in a lawsuit like this? What is the virtue in scapegoatism? The RIAA is an extraordinarily powerful lobby. The president of the RIAA is reported to make more than $1 million a year. Artists, on the other hand, are not well paid. The average recording artist makes $45,900. There are plenty of ways for the RIAA to affect and direct policy. So where is the morality in taking money from a student for running a search engine?

On June 23, Jesse wired his savings to the lawyer working for the RIAA. The case against him was then dismissed. And with this, this kid who had tinkered a computer into a $15 million lawsuit became an activist:

"I was definitely not an activist [before]. I never really meant to be an activist. . . . [But] I've been pushed into this. In no way did I ever foresee anything like this, but I think it's just completely absurd what the RIAA has done."

Jesse's parents betray a certain pride in their reluctant activist. As his father told me, Jesse “considers himself very conservative, and so do I. . . . He's not a tree hugger. . . . I think it's bizarre that they would pick on him. But he wants to let people know that they're sending the wrong message. And he wants to correct the record.”

We're glad to help you out, Jesse.

Just so this story has a happy ending, it is worth mentioning that the RIAA doesn't win every lawsuit. In 1998 they sued Diamond Multimedia for selling a portable MP3 player. The RIAA lost, allowing us to enjoy the iPod and other music players. Can you imagine how the world would look if they got everything they wanted? Or perhaps there is a more interesting question: what sorts of new technologies and businesses would exist if the law didn't side so eagerly with them? Until the law is changed, I suppose we'll never know.

P.S. While you can read Free Culture for free online, I highly recommend a paper copy.

The Usual Bush

2006-10-04T08:50:00.000-07:00

Would it be too blunt to simply say that George Bush is a bad man? His political tactics are as disgusting as his contempt for freedom, fairness, privacy, the Geneva conventions and the constitution. I don't talk about Bush much on my blog, but maybe I should.

What amazes me is that so many Americans still don't mind. It seems like he can do anything at all and as long as he claims it will help "the war on terror", people will still support him. Now, I like to think that Bush's victory in 2004 was caused by the lousiness of the alternative, John Kerry. That's why I advocate electoral reform, so we can have more than two "real" choices. But when I see that 41% of voters "approve" of Bush's perfomance (or maybe 44%), my hope dwindles a little. Even though 55% disapprove (45% strongly), I wonder why the rest of the people don't see what he's up to.

And what is he up to know? Well, there's a bill (here's a data sheet) that has just passed that will kill Habeas Corpus for some detainees. Forget the flowery description on Bush's web site; as Human Rights Watch explained before the bill's passing:

In its immediate practical impact, the most damaging of the bill’s provisions is clearly its “court-stripping” provision, which would bar detainees in U.S. custody anywhere around the world from challenging the legality of their detention or their treatment via habeas corpus actions, even if they have been subjected to torture. Innocent people could be locked up forever, without ever having the facts of their case reviewed by an independent court.

If held to be constitutional, the court-stripping provision would result in more than 200 pending cases being ejected from the courts, including the case that resulted in the Supreme Court’s landmark detainee ruling in June.

...

The bill has other dangerous provisions as well. The latest version of the legislation includes an extremely dangerous expansion in the bill’s definition of “unlawful enemy combatant” – a phrase used by the administration to justify holding a combatant outside of the usual protections given to combatants by the Geneva Conventions. It now explicitly deems persons who have “purposefully and materially supported” hostilities against the United States to be combatants, an unprecedented redefinition of “combatant” that could potentially cover a range of innocent people. Financing and support for terrorist activities are already criminal offenses in the civilian justice system. This definition would pervert any reasonable concept of what a combatant is.

Indeed, there is no requirement that an "enemy combatant" actually be involved in combat, and since no proof is required to apply the label, there is no guarantee that he or she is an "enemy" at all. The bill also sounds subjective, allowing top officials to make up new policies:

Moreover, the provision also gives carte blanche to the Pentagon to call anyone an “unlawful enemy combatant.” All it requires is that the person be deemed an unlawful combatant by a Combatant Status Review Tribunal (the administrative bodies used at Guantánamo) or “another competent tribunal” established under presidential or military authority.

...

...the Secretary of Defense is to be delegated the power to create new rules and procedures if he or she considers the use of their courts-martial equivalents to be impracticable.

The only plus side in this bill is that Bush didn't get all he wanted:

The legislation rejects the Bush administration’s attempt to explicitly rewrite the humane treatment requirements of the Geneva Conventions and to decriminalize all interrogation practices short of torture. On “Face the Nation,” last Sunday, Senator John McCain made clear that practices such as waterboarding, extreme sleep deprivation and induced hypothermia will continue to be war crimes if the legislation is passed.

The bill does, however, narrow the scope of the War Crimes Act; it bars the Geneva Conventions from being invoked in any suit against the U.S. government, gives the president power to interpret “the meaning and application” of the Geneva Conventions, and prohibits the courts from relying on foreign or international law sources in deciding cases involving certain violations of Common Article 3 of the Geneva Conventions.

I wonder if the U.S. is so polarised that Bush supporters completely ignore what the opposition is saying, assuming that it's all lies intended to make Bush look bad. Indeed, some of the rhetoric against Bush goes too far, and maybe that turns people off. For example, maybe the first paragraph of this post goes too far. But after Bush has abused the world so much, it starts getting hard to restrain myself.

Related links:

About DRM

2006-10-02T08:01:00.000-07:00

If you are interested in buying music, movies or TV shows online, it's important to know about so-called "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) and how it can affect you.

My best friend ran into trouble with DRM for the first time a few days ago. He was preparing a home movie about our vacation to Los Angeles and Mexico, so he tried to find mexican music online and found some at PureTracks (puretracks.com). Apparently I had done a terrible job teaching him about DRM, because he spent a long time listening to different tracks and then bought three songs--or more accurately, he paid for them. (If you are hip to copyright law, you know the difference.)

Of course, if he knew anything about DRM, he would've known that you can't simply put purchased music in a home movie. Free music, yes, pirated music, certainly--but if you pay for it, no. That's why opponents of DRM call it "Digital Restrictions Management" instead.

PureTracks, for its part, did not warn him of the DRM, or explain what it was, except in fine print. (I bet it also didn't explain, as this review of PureTracks does, that you can only download and listen to the tracks on Windows using Windows Media Player).

What is DRM?

In a nutshell, DRM refers to any technology whose sole purpose is to limit what you can do with digital media; usually it involves encryption. Encryption, in turn, is a mathematics-based method of preventing data from being understood by any piece of software that does not have the decryption key and the decryption algorithm. Only with all three items--the music file, the key and the decryption software--is it possible to listen to the music or do anything else with it, such as put it in a home movie or burn it to an audio CD. Ostensibly, DRM is intended to prevent piracy, but in practice many law-abiding consumers are prevented from exercising their rights.

When you buy music online from services like iTunes or (in our case) PureTracks, they are almost always encrypted with DRM. The decryption keys are always stored separately, often in a secret location, and in a file that may or may not itself be encrypted by a secondary key. The decryption software is tied to the media player; for example, the decryption algorithm for iTunes is built into iTunes, and the decryption algorithm for Windows Media Player is built into Windows Media Player. There is no technical reason for this; it is a business matter: Microsoft and Apple don't want to allow anyone else to use their algorithm.

You see, Apple has a near-monopoly on the business of selling music online, and it maintains this monopoly by having the only service (iTunes) that can put DRM'd music on an iPod. The music labels of the RIAA generally refuse to sell music without DRM; thus, as long as iPod remains the dominant music player (with 88% market share, by one estimate), Apple's monopoly is assured to continue. Microsoft is in a weaker position, and perhaps (just a guess) feels that by licencing their DRM algorithm to Apple, it would weaken their position further. Perhaps neither Apple nor Microsoft can safely reverse-engineer each other's algorithms, since doing so would risk lawsuits thanks to the DMCA and any software patents under which these algorithms are protected. RealNetworks reverse-engineered Apple's DRM, but Apple made a lot of angry noises.

But even if Microsoft and Apple were to licence the DRM algorithm to each other, they wouldn't let just anybody use the algorithms. No doubt anyone that wants to play with Microsoft or Apple would have to pay those companies and agree to strict terms-of-use that might preclude putting DRM'd music in a home movie. So when my friend tries to add his Mexican track to his DVD timeline, the DVD editor will forever respond:

Unable to open file [...]

File is protected by digital rights management (DRM).

DRM prevents you from doing everything that isn't explicitly allowed, which includes a lot of things. DRM is often sold with video, movies and e-books as well, but on the subject of music, the otherwise legal things you cannot do include

Making a backup copy of your music, or keeping a copy of your music on two of your own computers--well, actually you can do these things, but only with a method approved by Apple or Microsoft (for example, this page explains the method for iTunes). The naive method of simply making a copy of the files will not work. The scary part for Joe Consumer is that a backup may seem to work: when he makes a copy and plays it on the same computer, the music player may still be able to find the file on the hard drive that contains the decryption key. But when Joe's hard drive fails and he goes to restore the backup on a new one, the key is gone, and the files are worthless.
Putting the music on a music player that was not specifically designed and licenced to work with the DRM. For example, you can't put iTunes music on a non-iPod or put Microsoft DRM'd WMA music on any music player that doesn't have the Microsoft label "PlaysForSure".
Playing the music in the program you want. For example, if you bought some music from Apple and some WMA files from PureTracks, you would not be able to play both sets of music in the same program. As for me, I prefer to play music in WinAmp.
Playing the music in the operating system you want. In particular, neither Apple nor Microsoft provide a player for Linux (e.g. Ubuntu), which is popular among computer professionals and geeks everywhere.
Putting the music in a home movie for personal use.
Extracting short snippets for fair use purposes.

Escaping DRM

Generally, the only way to accomplish these legal activities is to get around the DRM. There are at least five ways to escape music DRM; the first method is the best way to avoid a slight degradation of the sound quality:

Using a DRM cracking program. For example, for WMA files, there is a program called FairUse4WM that may be able to unlock purchased music. However, we tried it and for some reason it didn't work. By the way, there is reason to suspect that it is illegal to use this program in the U.S., thanks to the widely-hated DMCA.
Microsoft and Apple provide one loophole to get around DRM: the ability to burn audio CDs. Audio tracks on audio CDs cannot contain DRM, so once you have the music on a CD, you can rip the CD to make MP3 files, which also do not contain DRM.
The sound drivers on some Windows computers allow you to directly record what is being played on speakers. In Windows' Volume Control window, choose "Properties" from the "Options" menu and under "Adjust volume for", choose "Recording" and click OK. Now you can adjust the recording controls. I can't tell you what to do exactly because the controls differ from one sound system to another. Anyway, once it is set up, you can record what is playing from another program such as the Sound Recorder in the Start Menu under Programs | Accessories | Entertainment. If you use Sound Recorder, by the way, be aware that it records at an extremely low quality by default. To record at CD quality, select File | Properties, click Convert Now, and choose "CD quality" under "Name", then click OK and OK. You should use a better program for all but the shortest recording tasks; I just don't know what to recommend. By the way, I don't think this method will be possible in Windows Vista because of new "security" measures added to Vista by Microsoft (can someone confirm?)
Use analog recording. For example, connect an audio cable from the speaker output of your computer into the line in of another device.
Use a file-sharing program to get another copy of your music, this time in MP3 format. Remember, MP3 files do not suffer from DRM. This method may be illegal, but it may also be easier than tackling the DRM directly.

Technologies that use DRM (new section)

Entities that use DRM or other forms of content restriction include:

Online music stores, including iTunes
Online TV and movie stores, including iTunes
HD-DVD and Blu-ray, the upcoming high-definition video discs
DVDs, which are encrypted with a system called CSS. Although this system is relatively weak, the DMCA makes it illegal to break in the U.S. That's why, in the U.S., you can't buy a program from a store that can extracts parts of a DVD for fair use, or downsamples a DVD for backup on a CD or DVD-R; software that does such things is underground. Home movie DVDs, however, can be made without CSS, and software can legally handle such video.
TiVo: TiVo now restricts what you can do with some programming. By the way, TiVo has also used its software patent on a "multimedia time warping system" to reduce competition.
Satellite radio: as the result of negotiations with the RIAA, recording is severely restricted on satellite radio. Last time I checked, you cannot move the recordings off the device that did the recording.

Conclusion

DRM is a means of control--a means of taking freedom away from citizens. It can be circumvented, but only with analog methods, the CD-burning loophole, piracy, or tools that are banned under the 1998 United States Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA). Only the CD-burning loophole and the analog methods are still legal (in the U.S.), and the content industries would like to "plug the analog hole" as well. As for CD burning, Microsoft and Apple have the power to limit that ability as they choose.

A lot of people, myself included, boycott DRM. Maybe you should too. But more importantly, tell everyone you know about DRM. Tell them how it can affect them. As an executive at Disney said to the Economist:

"If consumers even know there's a DRM, what it is, and how it works, we've already failed."

In addition, join me in opposing the DMCA, especially its anticircumvention provision, and new anti-consumer proposals such as the broadcast flag, the broadcast treaty, and the U.S.-instigated DMCA lookalike in Australia. The entertainment industry officially spent $55 million on lobbyists in 2005, so the fight is not easy, but without grassroots opposition, it is clear that major content owners will have their way.

But who knows? Maybe this copyfight will be a downhill battle.

WIPO's rediculous broadcasting treaty

2006-09-22T09:08:00.000-07:00

For some time now WIPO, an organization whose sole intention seems to be expanding IP monopoly powers worldwide, has been trying to create a "broadcasting treaty" that would create an new set of intellectual property rights for "broadcasters", whether they operate on the airwaves, cable or the internet. These new rights, which are planned to last 50 years from the time of broadcast, appear to be separate from copyright and would operate in parallel to it. Personally, I can't even figure out what exactly WIPO wants to accomplish with these radical new broadcasting rights; it is not only public interest groups that oppose it, but also many large technology companies such as AT&T, Verizon, Sony, Intel, Dell, HP, and more. Of course, I suppose major broadcasters and Hollywood are in favor (if their silence is any clue).

WIPO is an unelected organization consisting of people whom the public knows nothing about, yet it is somehow empowered to write laws that the world has to follow. I find that pretty scary, and the history of their treatymaking is pretty scary too. Admittedly, part of my fear comes from the fact that I don't understand how it works and from whence its power comes. I would like to learn but I haven't found a very good source yet.

I don't see any way for individual citizens to influence WIPO, so all we can do is watch on the sidelines and hope they don't get their way. The EFF is doing what it can, of course, but NGOs don't have any real power and typically aren't allowed to speak at WIPO meetings. As EFF said about a meeting last week:

A large and diverse group of public interest organizations, artists, U.S telecommunications companies, consumer electronics companies, and related industry bodies turned up in force to oppose the current draft. Yet again, non-governmental organizations were not given an opportunity to present statements during the meeting. However, EFF distributed an open letter to WIPO signed by over 200 podcasters and podcasting organizations, together representing thousands of podcasters. The letter expressed podcasters' concerns that the treaty would increase complexity for rights clearance and harm the innovation environment for online communication technologies.

Anyway, I recommend reading EFF's page on the broadcasting treaty.

AOL's search gaffe: not so bad?

2006-09-16T13:37:00.000-07:00

If you haven't heard, somebody at AOL released three months of web search records for roughly 1.5% of U.S. users that use AOL's client software. In the aftermath, AOL officially apologized and followed that up with the firing of three staff members including the Chief Technology Officer. Despite this, criticism of AOL continues, with the EFF leading the complaints.

Now usually I agree completely with the EFF, but in this case I'm not so sure. In the first place, each searcher is associated with a random ID number, so most searchers are impossible to identify--so far as I have seen, only one person has been identified by a third party. In the second place, AOL has been so thoroughly flogged that I don't think they will ever try it again.

And that's my point. Much has been made of the danger of releasing search records--sometimes people search for their own name, or personal info such as their Social Security Number whose presence online they only want to detect, not create. And, of course, there's the chilling effect that could be caused by people's fear that they might be watched. I'm sure there are other reasons too.

But as AOL says, their intention--or the intention of those who were fired, presumably--was to give academic researchers real-world data to analyze, so that researchers could look for patterns in the data and see what sort of thing real users search for. This is interesting stuff, both to provide us with shock-and-awe stories of sickos online (for example, this and this), and to satisfy our curiosity about what other people search for.

The nice thing about the AOL scandal is that none of those whose searches were revealed knew that their queries would be recorded and broadcast. This obviously makes it a serious privacy incursion, but it also ensures that the searches were completely honest, not constrained or biased by privacy worries.

The fact is, this search information can tell us things that we simply cannot learn any other way. So I, for one, will be genuinely interested to see what sort of observations academics will make from this data (if they dare).

But now that this data is available, I guess we don't really need any more. This data is valuable because of its uniqueness, but a second data leak wouldn't have the same novelty. So if some other dumb search engine decides to take a data dump, that's when I'll consider unleashing my wrath.

Ticket cancelled!

2006-09-16T07:14:00.000-07:00

My best friend decided to send my blog post about my transit ticket to the Calgary Transit Authority. At first they responded basically by saying "well, you could have bought next month's pass up to ten days in advance" and suggested I should show up in court to plead my case before a judge. Well, personally I don't think I should have to do that--I think it should not be their policy to give fines on the first of the month. I have never been charged with anything before and would not feel comfortable in court... especially since the fact remains that I'm technically guilty of the charge, notwithstanding that it is probably a mistake made by many.

Anyway, to my surprise I got a phone call from a "Transit Constable" who said that the ticket was given in error, and that they were cancelling it. Wow! This is a wonderful surprise. By the way, since getting the ticket I've had my fare checked 3 times, which proves they aren't singling out people who have an expired pass on the 1st of the month.

Dictionary (should be) up

2006-09-15T06:17:00.000-07:00

Finally, internet access.

No internet for awhile

2006-09-06T15:12:00.000-07:00

My roommate ordered internet from Shaw Cable on their web site over two weeks ago but did not get any response. In total he's spent three hours on the phone with Shaw and Telus, mostly on hold, getting slowly passed around the beurocracy, and has now been told by Shaw that we can have internet next Wednesday, Sept. 13. It's as though the strategy of the two main broadband providers for getting new customers is simply to hope that the other company is even slower!

Disappointed about Lessig

2006-09-05T17:13:00.000-07:00

Lawrence Lessig is a great man. He fought against the 1998 retroactive copyright extension in the U.S. supreme court, and he has been central in the movement to make copyright law more reasonable.

But I must admit some disappointment that we disagree in some fundamental way, though I'm not sure in what way precisely. As I was reading his book, Free Culture, I noticed that he referred, over and over, to "intellectual property" (IP) as "property". As I've said, I strongly disagree with the conflation of "intellectual" and "physical" property: they are not the same at all. Their properties are hardly related; logic that applies to one rarely applies to the other. I was surprised that he made little distinction between the two. Personally, I use the term "intellectual property" only because English doesn't offer another term. If it were up to me, intellectual property would have its own unique word, "yatterdote" or "tokentine" or "wektution" or something, because it is a unique beast, distinct from any other concept. Our laws, seemingly more and more, conflate the two forms of property; I wasn't expecting Dr. Lessig to contribute to the phenomenon.

...although copyright is a property right of a very special sort, it is a property right. - Free Culture, p.64

Although the text makes it clear that the two kinds of property are different, I am left with the general sense that Dr. Lessig still tends to apply physical-property thinking to IP.

Something I find interesting in the book is his eagerness to condemn "piracy", while leaving the concept of piracy vague.

I believe that "piracy" is wrong,and that the law, properly tuned, should punish "piracy," whether on or off the Internet. (p. 10)

I think this is deliberate; the book explores the idea of piracy and shows through many historical examples that it is not as clear cut as many claim. To the contrary, an entire chapter of examples shows how positive technological and cultural change was facilitated by what some (including Lessig himself, if you read the book literally) called "piracy".

But I have a little problem with his moral solidarity on the matter of commercial piracy:

All across the world, but especially in Asia and Eastern Europe, there are businesses that do nothing but take others people’s copyrighted content,copy it,and sell it—all without the permission of a copyright owner. The recording industry estimates that it loses about $4.6 billion (that works out to one in three CDs sold every year to physical piracy worldwide). The MPAA estimates that it loses $3 billion annually worldwide to piracy.

This is piracy plain and simple. Nothing in the argument of this book, nor in the argument that most people make when talking about the subject of this book, should draw into doubt this simple point: This piracy is wrong. (p. 63)

On the face of it, that statement is hard to disagree with--except for the figures, of course. A great many bloggers have rebuked the MPAA and RIAA for their piracy loss figures, which generally appear to have come from thin air. But I'll give Lessig the benefit of the doubt and assume that these figures are reasonable, since it is their internet piracy figures that are generally considered suspect.

Setting that issue aside, I'm troubled by the way he justifies his statement:

Which is not to say that excuses and justifications couldn’t be made for it. We could, for example, remind ourselves that for the first one hundred years of the American Republic, America did not honor foreign copyrights. We were born, in this sense, a pirate nation. It might therefore seem hypocritical for us to insist so strongly that other developing nations treat as wrong what we, for the first hundred years of our existence, treated as right.

That excuse isn’t terribly strong. Technically, our law did not ban the taking of foreign works. It explicitly limited itself to American works. Thus the American publishers who published foreign works without the permission of foreign authors were not violating any rule. The copy shops in Asia, by contrast, are violating Asian law. Asian law does protect foreign copyrights, and the actions of the copy shops violate that law. So the wrong of piracy that they engage in is not just a moral wrong, but a legal wrong, and not just an internationally legal wrong, but a locally legal wrong as well. True, these local rules have, in effect, been imposed upon these countries. No country can be part of the world economy and choose not to protect copyright internationally. We may have been born a pirate nation, but we will not allow any other nation to have a similar childhood.

Now here's where I say "wait a minute". The professor seems to be saying that the "pirated" book market that existed in the U.S. over a hundred years ago was O.K., because there was no law against it. And whether this is his view or not, it should be noted that many who lived at the time welcomed the pirated book market because it promoted learning as well as giving people broader access to entertainment (remember, books were the tool of choice to entertain oneself at the time.)

Then he says pirates in Asia are doing something unquestionably wrong, morally and legally, because there are laws in Asia against piracy. I'm already starting to disagree, since I don't believe that the law per se dictates what is moral and immoral. That is backwards. Rather, it should be morality that guides the law. But as Lessig admits in the very same paragraph, the local laws in Asia were imposed on them. They were imposed by such treaties as the WTO's TRIPS Agreement. While the individuals who wrote it and backed it may be hard to determine, it was clearly created and imposed by western interests, interests that do not want the people of poorer countries to enjoy the lower prices that gave the United States such a boost more than a century ago. The way international organizations like the WTO impose their power over the laws of eastern and southern countries makes it ironic when Lessig says this:

If a country is to be treated as a sovereign, however, then its laws are its laws regardless of their source. The international law under which these nations live gives them some opportunities to escape the burden of intellectual property law. In my view, more developing nations should take advantage of that opportunity, but when they don’t, then their laws should be respected. And under the laws of these nations, this piracy is wrong. (p. 64)

The irony is that international law can sometimes be a tyrant, bypassing sovereignty. In the case of TRIPS, some people have made a convincing case that it has.

I'm not saying that commercial piracy is ever the right thing to do. I remain uncomfortable with the idea, and I myself would never commit commercial piracy, nor would I knowingly pay a pirate for a commercial work. But I live in Canada, a rich country, and now that I have money, I can generally afford to buy my software at full price. When it comes to poor countries, I am very reluctant to judge them. Lessig is not. Although he says...

Alternatively, we could try to excuse this piracy by noting that in any case, it does no harm to the industry. The Chinese who get access to American CDs at 50 cents a copy are not people who would have bought those American CDs at $15 a copy. So no one really has any less money than they otherwise would have had. (p. 64)

...he later dismisses the argument by saying:

But where the law does not give people the right to take content, it is wrong to take that content even if the wrong does no harm.

And it's here where I must protest most strongly, or where I would protest, if I wasn't confused. What exactly does he mean by "wrong"? I think the word "wrong", used without qualification, suggests a moral wrong. But his argument against poor-people piracy seems to hinge on the law. Is he saying it is morally wrong to do something that hurts no one, if the law prohibits it? Putting it in another context, is it morally wrong to roll a stop sign when there is no one else around? Should God have sharp words for you about it when you get to the pearly gates? Dr. Lessig should have seen that this argument is not strong enough to accept at face value, yet there it is in the text without any further justification. That's what puzzles me, as Dr. Lessig is a lawyer and tends to be more thorough.

Speaking of God, I am reminded that Dr. Lessig is an athiest:

I don’t believe in gods, digital or otherwise.

This in turn makes me wonder how he defines "morally wrong". If it isn't God that dictates what is right and what is wrong, then there must be some other principle guiding the judgement. I don't know what his guiding principle is, but I can tell you mine. If God is set aside, my personal idea of morality is that hurting others is wrong, and benefitting others is good. This principle, in my mind, overrides all others. While Dr. Lessig eagerly condemns the pirate, regardless of the circumstances, I take note that when someone is poor, buying copyrighted works at the price fixed by a rich western corporation may be very difficult. It is often impossible for a poor person to pay full price for every work he wants; indeed, even paying for a few works may require a large sacrifice on his part. As a result I see a moral conflict where Dr. Lessig sees none. While I don't question the idea that artists deserve to get paid, I do have a sense of morality that is apparently opposed to Dr. Lessig. When I see that third world children learn less because they cannot afford textbooks, I see a wrong. Not a wrong against copyright holders, but against the children. I see a wrong committed by copyright interests, whereas Dr. Lessig, in his book, does not.

Many would agree with me here.

The issue of entertainment materials is less clear, because the fact is that no one truly "needs" entertainment to survive. Nevertheless, I am reluctant to condemn CD/DVD pirates, even commercial ones, because I am sure that if they were eradicated, the copyright holders would charge far higher prices, even in very poor countries. This would greatly reduce the amount of materials that poor people could enjoy, even though it would not raise the bottom lines of U.S. corporations or artists or filmmakers very much. Although movies and music are unnecessary for anyone's survival, I think they can make life more fun. If you accept this, then you must wonder why poor people should not be allowed to enjoy what rich people can enjoy, even though it is practical for them to do so. Have they done something wrong? Are we better than them?

I do not think we are better than them, nor do I think that what they have (namely, cheap creative works) should be taken away from them, unless they themselves wish it. But their copyright laws were not designed by them. They were designed by westerners.

Thus, an enticing argument exists that whether pirates are wrong or not, U.S. copyright holders are actually in the wrong by charging excessive prices and attempting to deny poor people access to materials that they could otherwise enjoy. In the context of my central moral principle, they are doing wrong because they effectively hurt the poor, and hurting others is wrong. Now, this argument has cracks in it, but I do think there is some truth in it too.

You might suppose I'm a Robin Hood. But I don't advocate stealing from the rich to give to the poor; I only advocate giving to the poor. You see, where Dr. Lessig sees taking, I see only copying. In my mind, there is a world of difference, and I am disappointed that Dr. Lessig does not properly acknowledge it.

Nevertheless, his book is a great read. It brings to light the ways in which IP laws, corrupted by corporate influence, can harm our freedoms and our culture. It tells interesting stories. It shows us how the legal battles created by today's technology mirror the battles of the past. It shows how today's culture and technology wars are the same as those of the past, and it also shows how today's battles are different. It helps us see that creativity is not an isolated phenomenon--creative people always build on top of the work of others, though our laws don't account for this fact. It teaches the meaning and value of free culture.

Most importantly, I hope that this book will make you realize that more than ever before, it is we of the general public who are on the front lines in today's culture war. Our enemies are large corporations and corrupt politicians. It is we, of the internet generation, who must fight it. If we do not fight the culture war, we will lose it.

By the way, I'm less than 1/3 of the way through the book. I may have more to say later...

http://www.free-culture.cc/freecontent/

Dictionary is going down

2006-08-30T07:24:00.000-07:00

The dictionary server at qwertie.net, running on my home computer, is going down because my best friend and I are moving. We have to move out tomorrow (Aug. 31) in the morning, and move in Sept. 1, in the afternoon. That means there will be at least two days of downtime. Sorry for any inconvenience. Oh, and also, we don't have an ISP at our new place yet. That could spell trouble... Update (Sept. 5): it's still down. We don't have internet access yet.