+1 for Algebra Education

Often there are arguments about whether Algebra should be taught in school. After all, so many people don't use it in real life. But I think a well-rounded education is important, including Algebra, History, Physical Education, English Literature, and other subjects that people might not use in real life. But why do I believe that? Is there a good reason?

Well, humbug, I can't prove it. But people that lack breadth of education are not really able to understand the world, and so they may be deceived more easily by their government, their news media, their companies or their churches, and they may make large numbers of poor decisions, all the while being unaware of it. At best, this annoys those of us who are more competent; at worst, when such people are placed in positions of power, they can do a lot of damage. I'm reminded of Hugo Chavez here, about whom I saw an interesting documentary: he is apparently well-meaning but arrogant, believing himself to be a far better leader than he really is and certainly better than his appointed ministers; though I guess in a place like Venezuela, where average education levels are low, Chavez is relatively smart.

A comment on Slashdot gives another example of such a person. This person probably knew algebra, but he didn't know all those other subjects whose merits we seldom argue about:

"You shouldn't have to study Shakespeare to get a physics degree."

I disagree.

I spent a fair amount of time once with a man who was educated in the fashion you seem to think is appropriate. In his case, he'd started out working on the factory floor at an IBM manufacturing facility in Texas (30 years ago when they still made stuff in the US), and had qualified for and taken a technical math and computer science education culminating in a master's degree. IBM's "school" was accredited and his degree was a real one, but it included only technical subjects; no liberal ed at all. Prior to his IBM education he had barely graduated from high school -- and I'm not sure how he did, frankly.

He was a highly intelligent man, very articulate and perceptive. However, as soon as the discussion left technology his utter lack of education became instantly apparent. He was even ignorant of basic principles of physics -- he knew a fair amount about electronics, but in mechanics he understood less than most high school dropouts I've known. His ability to understand politics was nonexistent because he didn't know any history, or even understand basic civics. And don't even attempt to talk about literature, philosophy, etc.

Now, obviously, a big part of his ignorance was due to his own utter lack of interest in anything outside of computer science. You can't obtain a MSCS without being able to read, and anyone who can read can educate themselves. But the point was that the difference between him and the typical college graduate -- even though he was almost certainly smarter than said typical graduate -- was stark and obvious, and it wasn't in his favor. His lack of general knowledge wasn't just a problem when socializing, either, it often caused him to make dumb decisions that affected the business, and you simply could not put him in front of customers, because unless the discussion was laser-focused, he'd eventually say something that made him look like an idiot.

After my experience working with him, I decided I wholeheartedly agree with the liberal education philosophy. The worst part about it was that his deep, narrow knowledge and utter lack of knowledge outside of a single field made him believe, quite firmly, that there really wasn't much to know outside of his field. It's often said that that the primary purpose of a BA/BS is to teach the student the breadth of his own ignorance. Well, this guy never learned that.

We don't all need deep knowledge in every area, but an introductory course in each of the major areas of human knowledge really does add significant value. It makes us more rounded, teaches us some much-needed humility and, well, educates us. That education is what differentiates a university degree from a vocational certificate, and the former is more valuable than the latter.

I can see how most people might not use algebra. The thing is, basic algebra isn't really hard to learn, so learning it shouldn't really be a big deal. I do suspect, therefore, that there is something wrong with the way it is taught. Certainly I remembered that I didn't really understand it at first, back in grade 8 or 9, but now that I understand it seems fairly simple.

And I actually do use algebra at work, occasionally, and even basic calculus, in my programming job. Yet I have heard multiple programmers who are not very good at algebra say that they never use it, and never saw a use for it. Well, that makes sense. In life there are often several roads to a destination. Sometimes there is a short road that uses algebra and a long, winding road that does not. I will use the short road and those that can't do algebra will take the long road, probably never even realizing that the short road existed.

I have to admit though, there are some things that people really must know that were not taught in my school: how bank accounts and mutual funds work and the terminology involved; what a mortgage is and how it works; how the university/college education systems work; the basics of the legal system; principles of ethics; and so forth. Maybe there is an argument to be made that all these things should be given higher priority than Algebra. But if we do education right, we could teach all of this stuff. How to do it right, though, I can't say.

A response to the above comment offers a plausible counterargument, though:

I agree with both of you and the GP. I agree with the GP that such classes are annoying and largely useless to the specific discipline that the person chooses. I agree with the parent that you need to look beyond your discipline. A little background: I'm currently a college student (becoming a sophomore) at a big-name university, studying robotics. At this university, we have general education requirements of the following: Humanities, Social Science, Language, Natural Science. We also have a mandatory writing class and "Intro to the humanities". The goal, obviously, of these requirements is to make students well-rounded. This sounds good in principle, but in reality it fails.

Before I explain why, I must note that there are different types of students who respond differently to attempts to make them well-rounded. The first type, I call "robots." Robots essentially drag themselves through a fixed course in life - birth, elementary school, middle school, high school, college, career, marriage, kids, retirement, death. What kind of robot you get depends on the school you attend, but essentially they are all the same person. You get people who are insanely good at some subject (chemistry, biology, etc.) but not so good at everything else. Or so you'd think. What you actually get are people who have no intrinsic motivation, but are good at anything they have to do. That means they'll learn what they need for their career and they'll do well in these sort of general education classes if they have to get a degree. But, there's a problem: they'll never apply that knowledge to anything else. For example, if you have a robot who studies neuroscience and takes a required philosophy class, they won't consider the impact of neuroscience upon moral philosophy. Basically, requiring these students to take these sorts of classes is like programming an industrial welding robot to play a violin. While it might seem like you've done something, all you've really done is make a weird demonstration that doesn't really do much after it quits.

The second type of student here is the party animal. These students just party through college - they're not here for academics really, they're here for the connections. They are here for a variety of reasons - legacy, decent test scores, athletics, etc. As you might expect, they take a "C's get degrees" attitude to required courses. They don't gain anything from such courses but at least they push down to curve for the rest of us. Or you might assume. Actually, they take up valuable resources including TA and professor time, ask basic and banal questions and worst of all annoy the course staff and make them angry at the student body as a whole.

Lastly, there are some students who are truly intellectual. They actually integrate the ideas from the various disciplines together and create better ideas as a result. These students don't actually need much help being well-rounded. They'll read articles and get ideas from other fields on their own because that's part of there personality. They may take non-major related classes out of interest (I'm doing this with physics, chemistry, and maybe biology) for entertainment. The only benefit they may receive from these classes is a little push on the envelope (which they may hit anyway). The disadvantage is that they take required classes, which are bad because forced education is an inherently bad process. Students who don't want to learn are a pain to teach. This annoys professors that take that anger out on the student body. They also force professors to dumb down the course, in turn causing students who are actually engaged to be bored out of their minds. This bordem in turn causes them to become disinterested. Essentially, the entire thing fails for everyone at the same time.

So, to recap, required courses fail for each group of students for different reasons. Robots learn the material and then fail to apply it. Party animals flunk the classes. Intellectual students become disinterested in the basic classes and disconnected teachers. Solving the problem of making "robots" intellectual is not going to be done by dragging them through a few GE's. I don't know what the answer is, but I know we need to find it before the flesh-and-blood robots are replaced with silicon-and-steel ones.

Of course, I fall into the last category, and I can't entirely agree: I learned some interesting things in university, including things outside my core interests in computers, that I probably would not have learned otherwise. Sure I study stuff in my free time, but when it's a requirement for the degree, I study it harder and longer. That said, the quality of education at the U of C was (mostly) so bad that I would have been able to learn a lot of the same stuff in less time, with less stress and spending less money, if I studied without the university's "help". As for the other two categories of people--the robots and the jocks--I can't accurately comment on them because I have a lack of experience with them, because of my lack of social skills. I must say, I would be grateful if Social Skills was a required subject. Maybe then I would be any good at it.

[Is it just me or did I just write a boring, rambling blog post? Oh well.]

One final thought, maybe the trouble with Algebra is that it is treated as an end goal--our goal is to teach you algebra!--when in fact it is just a tool. We must then use algebra to see its value. You can't truly learn physics, for example, without algebra. But maybe the same people who argue we don't need algebra might say we don't need physics, either. Perhaps in the modern world, a more useful thing than physics is probability and statistics:

I would actually say statistics is probably the *most* broadly-applicable branch of mathematics. *Everyone* - scientist, politician, gambler, civic-minded citizen, and commercial watching bumpkin would benefit from a firm grasp of at least the basics of statistics, and of those scientists are typically the only ones who have any clue at all, and even their grasp on it is often shaky, especially in the softer science. And you don't actually need much more than basic algebra to learn it either.

No other field I can think of is as broadly used with as little understanding (how many times have you seen a % today?), which makes it ripe for exploitation. There's a reason for the phrase "there's lies, damned lies, and statistics" - statistics is (mostly) actually pretty simple from a "solve this equation" perspective, the difficulty is that there's a whole lot of counter-intuitive aspects to probability so it can be tricky to answer the question you think you're answering - which makes it ridiculously simple for someone to make a rock-solid sounding statistical argument that's completely spurious.

To me this ties back into the ability to understand the world and not be deceived. Statistics are easy to misuse, both accidentally (incompetence) and deliberately to deceive. More competence in statistics gives people a better chance to detect the liars and the idiots and to refute or ignore them.

Rich dude: poor people are entitled brats

I read an interesting comment today by GameboyRMH:

I was just thinking this morning about an incident many years ago when a rich old dude who owned MS stock lost his sh** at me when I talked about the practical necessity of pirating a copy of Windows as a broke 3rd-world teenager, calling me an entitled brat who didn't deserve to have it because I couldn't pay for it (keep in mind that in those days there was really no other practical desktop OS). I should simply have refrained from using any computers to stay within the rules, he argued in effect.

I thought to myself, that is one of the most ridiculous and silly things that I have ever experienced. This rich old man blasting a poor kid for subverting the rules of the silly game that made him rich, in a way that harmed exactly no one. But it shouldn't be funny, his worldview was monstrous, horrible, a level of hyper-selfishness that transcends physical wealth and extends to symbolism.

To think that I had enough respect for that guy that I didn't respond...I should have told that disgusting man to go f*** himself immediately.

Comment copied without notice or permission.

The rich dude's worldview is also very common, and we must contest it vigorously. This comment was part of a discussion about a new anti-piracy law in New Zealand. Another interesting comment:

It stretches honesty when one is hungry and sees his neighbor's apple tree, knowing the trunk of the apple tree is his neighbor's property, yet the fruit is hanging in his yard, even dropping on his lawn, and only some law, passed by some senators lobbied by the tree owner, says he can't pick the apple off his lawn and eat it, or even take a picture of it.

There are some things which are are very difficult to enforce... and tend to function not as a deterrent, but as a starting place for learning to disrespect obedience of law. I see this kind of law as a prime example of this.

Like prohibition, trying to enforce law like this does more harm than good, as it gets people started at a very early age to have no inner respect for law, obeying it not for the common good, but only for fear of punishment if caught. It does not foster respect for law, instead it fosters a sense of accomplishment for finding creative ways of disrespecting the law.

tftp says "respect for the law" is already completely dead in the U.S.; and here I thought it was just on Wall Street:

...in the USA respect for the law is not even a theoretical concept anymore. Widespread violations cannot be detected and the law enforced; this leads to loss of fear of punishment. You do not need to go too far to see proof of that. Everyone drives faster than the speed limit allows and the police does not even bother stopping anyone unless they are way over the limit. People jaywalk with no care in the world; robbers rob 24/7 stores as if it is their personal ATM; people park under signs "no parking", have sex in public parks, set up camps in public places, use drugs, and take dumps on police cars. What rule of law are you talking about? It's pure anarchy, with occasional firefighting done by few LEOs [Law Enforcement Officers].

There is no law to respect either. Over the years new laws accumulated up to a whole library of books - some with laws and other with their interpretations. Most people quite reasonably think that the law is not protecting them. And how it can be, with laws against "disorderly conduct" and with people arrested for "resisting arrest" or for filming police or for taking photos of cities? On the other hand, real criminals (petty or not) are in and out of jail faster than you can keep track of them. The police is most certainly not your friend; LEOs are not interested in helping you and they have no duty to help you. They might kill you, though, if you give them half of an excuse, because safety of one officer is more important than ten dead bodies of the rabble.

With this whole train wreck continuing downhill with ever accelerating speed we will see more anarchy and fewer places where an nonest person can safely walk around. Downloads of music are just a minor blip on the radar of widespread lawlessness.

But do megacorporations really need laws, when they can get their way by making deals with each other?

Earlier this month ISPs came to an agreement with the recording/movie industry to enact a "6 strikes" policy to punish copyright infringement. (see ArsTechnica article, as previously discussed on /.)

The very next day after the article was published, I noticed something interesting when I was using BitTorrent--aside from request overhead, I was uploading zero data. I'm currently watching a 3.1GB torrent--1.79 GB downloaded and 0.0 uploaded. And no, it isn't my client settings. I have checked them several times, nor did I change them any from when I was uploading normally. Seeding a completed torrent does nothing--it just sits there with no activity.

To put it in simple terms, Comcast (my ISP) is throttling uploads by 100% but not touching download rates (at least mine). Are they, in essence, protecting their customers from the "6 strikes" policy they agreed to enforce? If so, I assume they are doing this to prevent losing customers that continue using P2P software.

I can't imagine the MPAA/RIAA will be very happy about this.

Legal copying now illegal in Canada

In case you missed it, Canada's conservatives recently passed the new copyright reform bill. Micheal Geist, Canada's foremost copyright blogger, says it has one of the most restrictive approaches to digital locks in the world, since you aren't allowed to break digital locks without authorization even if it's for a reasonable or legitimate purpose, and even if copyright is not involved. For example, copying a small video clip from any commercial DVD is now illegal in Canada (just as it is in the U.S., by the way), even though it would otherwise be legal under "fair dealing". Likewise, using an unauthorized DVD player that can skip start-of-disc commercials or ignore region coding (the number on the disc that only authorizes playback in "Mexico/South America", for example) is illegal. An example that is not copyright-related would be hacking a digital device to give it more abilities than it comes with; this could become illegal if the manufacturer makes any attempt, however feeble, to prevent such usage with a digital lock.

The digital lock parts of the bill were widely condemned by almost everyone outside music and film industry circles, but on the plus side, Micheal says that the government didn't completely ignore citizen voices, except perhaps on the digital lock issue (which, however, has always been the most important issue). Also on the plus side, citizen's groups delayed the DRM (digital lock) law by as much as 10 years. That's good, because it means Canadians became accustomed to having freedom, which will make it a little harder for the government to successfully take it away.

Beware the TPP

The Trans-Pacific Partnership agreement appears to be the latest means by which big business conglomerates hope to bypass local democracies to have their desired laws passed. While various citizen's groups are concerned about many different aspects of the TPP, the issue most dear to my heart is what effect it will have on the internet. I recommend everyone reading this, all three of you, to sign OpenMedia's TPP petition:

I oppose any provisions in the Trans-Pacific Partnership (TPP) agreement that would expand the power of conglomerates, including by criminalizing or otherwise restricting the use of the Internet. I oppose an online environment that lets big media conglomerates invade my privacy, remove online content on demand, saddle me with heavy fines, or terminate my access to the Internet.

I call on the governments involved in the TPP to make the process transparent, accountable, and open to public participation and to all interested stakeholders.

There is no singularity

To all those of you who are waiting for "the singularity", whether it be a Skynet-like hellscape or a Star Trek utopia. I'm sorry to burst your bubble. There ain't gonna be one.

I've been hearing about this for awhile now. "The technological singularity is the hypothetical future emergence of greater-than-human intelligence through technological means." - leading to ever greater intelligences, based on the idea that if humans can create an intelligence greater than ourselves, then that intelligence will create an intelligence greater than itself, and so forth, with the level of intelligence increasing exponentially in an unpredictable "intelligence explosion."

Not only will there be no singularity in the 21st century, I'm confident we will not even be able to create AIs that are as smart as us, in any time frame we can imagine. While it seems premature to talk about the 22nd century, I doubt we'll create machines that exceed our intelligence within the next thousand years--if such a thing is even possible.

I've been programming since I was 11, and I have never seen anything remotely comparable to human intelligence in a computer, or even animal intelligence. Virtually all the clever things our computers do are merely things that their creators designed them to do. And everything I've heard about the human brain leads me to believe that we cannot replicate it in the forseeable future.

A lot of people are misinformed about the brain. Some people still seem to believe in the 19th-century notion that the brain starts at birth as a blank slate into which, through the magic of "intelligence", it is filled with stuff. In reality the brain has a particular and intricate structure, much like a modern computer chip. There are dozens of parts, each with numerous subsystems designed to do particular tasks. All of these parts are in place at birth and are required for us to do what we do. We really have no clue how to replicate what the brain does; in fact for the most part we have very little idea what each of the parts do.

And yet they keep making movies and video games with all these AIs in them. Usually these AIs are developed by some kind of super-genius or by means unknown from a shady government agency. TV AIs usually exhibit emotions, curiosity, music appreciation, and other things that are really human traits, and the traits inserted by the writers to make the AI seem more machine-like are either highly implausible, or mere human traits in disguise. The most implausible Hollywood AI trait is the desire to kill everyone, a popular cliché that I need not dignify by discussing further.

For instance, Data on Star Trek appeared not to have any emotions, but for instance he clearly demonstrated loyalty, curiosity, desire (for how can one make choices without some desired outcome?), and other je ne sais quoi traits that may be hard to name but seem distinctly human. One of his more implausible traits was that he would listen to several musical scores at once. Since there is no easy way to distinguish which notes belong to which piece, it's not really possible to enjoy several pieces at once even if your positronic brain contains five "music appreciation units" for some reason (or one fancy multiplexed unit.)

Well, in case you didn't know this already, Hollywood is full of totally clueless writers. In novel writing, I always hear authors say "write about what you know," because this makes your stories as plausible and genuine as possible. Hollywood, however, is full to the brim with people writing, acting and directing about topics they know nothing about*. So in the land of Hollywood and sci-fi we have these clichés and about AIs, computers, hacking, science (and so on) that are nonsensical fantasy, with virtually no connection to reality.

* I recognize the irony that I am writing an opinion piece about AI when I am not an expert in AI nor in the human brain. But hey, it's not like anyone reads my blog.

Even if we could make a computer do all the useful things a human does--walking, talking, object recognition, navigation, reliable context-sensitive voice recognition, language manipulation and problem-solving in general--we'd still be only halfway there. The computer would still just be a tool. It wouldn't really be "an intelligence", or rather it wouldn't be what we think of as an intelligence, that is, an intelligent free agent. To be an AI like we see in the movies, it would also need a suite of emotions (from joy to embarrassment to boredom), curiosity, a sense of purpose, self-awareness (note that no one seems to know what, exactly, self-awareness is anyway), and of course a generalized ability to learn (and there are many different ways that we learn). The key point is, there is no magic formula for any of this. Each of hundreds or thousands of human traits, if they can be replicated at all, must be individually analyzed and studied before they can be replicated by us, and we'll probably only do a sucky cheap knock-off of each trait at first. And once we have figured out how to replicate each of the parts, we'll still have to spend a century or two figuring out how to put the parts together.

If it's even possible.

I mean, why should it be possible? It really shouldn't be possible. Because I have a soul. Or more to the point, I am a soul. I don't know what a soul is, I just know that I am one. And surely there is no way to duplicate one. I know that the brain is a machine, and after much soul-searching I have to admit that I might be 99% machine. But isn't the 1% important? Without the soul, a machine can never really be alive.

I find the difference between humans and computers fascinating. The supposed similarity between brains and computers gets a lot of attention, but the differences deserve more attention.

Consider some of the things humans can do. We can casually recognize objects, animals and people from any angle almost instantly. We can learn language merely by hearing it (as children), we can effortlessly navigate our bodies around obstacles, and we can solve arbitrary riddles (some better than others). The smartest people in the world have toiled for decades trying to figure out how to make computers and robots do the same things, with only limited success, and some of these tasks still require supercomputers. Possibly the most impressive "human" thing a computer has ever done is to play Jeopardy, which IBM's Watson supercomputer played quite well, albeit using 2880 processors and 16 TB (that's 16,000 GB) of RAM in  90 server machines to do it. And note that Watson does not go out and study encyclopedias of its own volition; everything action it takes is chosen within a framework carefully programmed by a team of humans.

Even the human ability to do mathematics is not really something computers are any good at. Computers are good at computation. Pure mathematics, on the other hand, is a field in which computers have limited abilities. You can program them to manipulate symbols, but the things researchers do in mathematics are creative, exploratory, and essentially fascinating activities that computers don't do at all.

And yet we humans can never, ever learn to instantly add 10-digit numbers, let alone multiply them or take their square roots or do other numeric tasks that even the simplest computer chips can do instantaneously,  with perfect reliability, using almost no energy. How's that? Manipulating numbers is trivially simple, compared to the kinds of things humans are good at; indeed, it is the only thing that the earliest mechanical computers were good for. Even analog computers, used (for example) in World Wars I and II to help aim big guns, are better at arithmetic than we are.

1-bit Full Adder circuit. Chain a few together and you can add binary numbers.

It may not look simple, but there are probably protein molecules more complicated than this.

Why is this? The immediate answer is that our brains simply don't have a circuit for adding numbers. Such a circuit would be small and simple and God could have easily put it in there, but it just ain't there. Nor do we have anything well-equipped to do the task. An addition circuit can be simulated with our memories, but our memories are notoriously unreliable and very slow. Our ability to form mental habits can be exploited to perform arithmetic, but no matter how much you practice, you will always be ridiculously slow and unreliable compared to the world's simplest calculators. You may have seen the mathemagician. He can do some operations faster than the audience can type them into a calculator, but he's still far slower than the calculator itself since 98% of the calculator's time is spent doing nothing, waiting for the user to press "equals".

There are three basic things computers can do easily: computations, memorization, and running programs. Curiously, humans are bad at all three of those things.

Computers can do the same things over and over and over, perfectly and extremely fast, which enables them to run programs, and almost everything computers can do is accomplished with programs--including simulations of human traits! And yet a human cannot run any kind of program. In real life there are no "Manchurian Candidates". In our brains, the closest thing we have to programs are habits, but these are quite different from computer programs. Habits are created through training (repetitive action), and a computer has no habits except to the extent we figure how to write programs to deliberately develop them. But while we could certainly teach a computer to learn certain types of habits, humans fundamentally can't run programs, because we seem to be positively allergic to repetitive action. Have you ever tried doing a complex action repetitively? We can't do it! Every time we try to do something, it comes out a little different. In fact, the more times we try to do something in a row, the worse our performance gets!* Bowling strikes me as a sport that would seem utterly ridiculous to a robot. The whole goal is to do a simple task reliably, and it takes years of practice to even come close. A purpose-built robot would have little difficulty, I think, bowling 300. But a human cannot even walk in a straight line without a frame of reference.

* in the long run we may improve, but our performance always gets worse as we repeat many times without pausing.

Thus, most likely any impressive intelligence we do produce will not resemble us very much, owing first to our lack of understanding of ourselves, and second to the fact that computers and brains are not well suited for the same tasks. One way or another, Hollywood's ideas about AIs will be proven faulty.

So, don't titillate yourself too much about the prospect of the singularity. There isn't one.

Also, there is no spoon

Anonymous insider talks

A member of the hacker collective Anonymous did a media interview while hiding in Canada. They mention that Fox News has branded them terrorists, which of course is quite different from my impression of them because I don't watch Fox News. While sometimes I feel that their actions go too far, their most common action is temporarily taking a web site offline in protest, or hacking groups they don't like and making some of their internal emails public. Terrorism? I doubt that those who have lost a loved one to actual terrorism would appreciate that kind of rhetoric. Here's the part I found most insightful:

I think the general public is beginning to learn the value of information. To give an example, for a very long time nobody in the U.S. or the world was allowed to know the number of civilian casualties in Afghanistan or Iraq. There were wild guesses and they were all over the ballpark figures, until a young army private named Bradley Manning had the courage to steal that information from the U.S. government and release it. Now we know that despite their smart munitions and all their high-technology they have somehow managed to accidentally kill 150,000 civilians in two countries. ... As these kinds of startling facts come out, the public will begin to realize the value of the information and they will realize that the activists are risking everything for that information to be public.

Q: What do you say to people who believe Anons are just cyber-terrorists?
A: Basically I decline the semantic argument. If you want to call me a terrorist, I have no problem with that. But I would ask you, "Who is it that’s terrified?" If it’s the bad guys who are terrified, I’m really super OK with that. If it’s the average person, the people out in the world we are trying to help who are scared of us, I’d ask them to educate themselves, to do some research on what it is we do and lose that fear. We’re fighting for the people, we are fighting, as Occupy likes to say, for the 99%. It’s the 1% people who are wrecking our planet who should be quite terrified. If to them we are terrorists, then they probably got that right.

"Information terrorist" – what a funny concept. That you could terrorize someone with information. But who’s terrorized? Is it the common people reading the newspaper and learning what their government is doing in their name? They’re not terrorized – they’re perfectly satisfied with that situation. It’s the people trying to hide these secrets, who are trying to hide these crimes. The funny thing is every email database that I’ve ever been a part of stealing, from Pres. Assad to Stratfor security, every email database, every single one has had crimes in it. Not one time that I’ve broken into a corporation or a government, and found their emails and thought, "Oh my God, these people are perfectly innocent people, I made a mistake."

Mass Effect 3 Is Awesome

I'm really enjoying Mass Effect 3 in Stereoscopic 3D with enhanced FOV. If you play it, be sure to crank up the field-of-view for maximum enjoyment. (Oh, what's that, you didn't buy the PC version? Er, I think you're out of luck.)

Nothing Changed

Is the US a One-Party State?

In U.S. politics, I get an impression that most people--at least the kinds of people that leave comments all over the internet--actually believe there is a large difference between Democrats and Republicans, between Obama and Bush and whoever will run against Obama this year.

And certainly when it comes to speeches, Obama created a persona for himself that sounded a lot different from any Republican, and even different from the ordinary borderline-corrupt Democrats. That's why so many people voted for him. I gave $100 to his campaign based on his inspiring speeches and his inspiring book, but then I saw his actual bahavior, and it was quite worrying, so I pledged not to donate anything more. Of course, I hoped that it was somehow a blip, that he'd somehow just made a mistake or two. I could not have been more wrong!

Democrats and Republicans make a lot of noise about their differences, and their opposition to each other is indeed fierce, but that's a game they play. It's almost like two sports teams. They are opposed to each other, they have different players, but they use similar strategies and have the same goals, because they play within the same system. When you look at policy, the differences are only skin deep. I recently came across a website of somebody who agrees with me: NothingChanged.org.

Actually, I think this guy believes what I'm saying even more strongly than I do. I mean, yes the two parties behave very similarly, but there are still differences that matter. For example, the repeal of "don't ask, don't tell" was a small, but significant, policy change that the Republicans probably would not have made. And there is a fair chance that the Republicans would have done nothing about health care.

However, because the health care problem is so serious, there is also a fair chance that they would have done something in order to improve their chances for re-election. Moreover, I expect a Republican health "care" bill would probably amount to a wholesale handout to insurance companies, just like Obamacare is. You know why I'm saying it's a wholesale handout to insurance companies? Partly it's just rumors I've heard. I haven't studied it scientifically, so I could be wrong. But one simple fact made me extremely suspicious of Obamacare: the insurance companies made no serious effort to oppose it. Health care in the U.S. costs roughly double the average for developed nations, and those who profit from this fact surely want to make sure it remains true. The fact that endless millions of corporate advertising dollars were not mobilized against Obamacare tells me all I need to know. Obamacare must be good for business. And I don't mean good for business in general, but specifically good for businesses that profit the most from the expensive mess we already had. And if Republicans made a health care bill, you can bet it would protect those fat profits equally well. I still suspect Obamacare is better than nothing (for the people). But like the 15% tax rate enjoyed by the mega-rich, the country probably can't afford it.

As for Wall Street "reform", the people would demand that either party "do something" about those crooks on Wall Street. Obama's "reform" bill is literally the least he could do. Everything I've read says that the bill had no teeth and made no major improvements to anything. That's exactly what I would expect from a Republican version of the bill. The unwavering backroom support of white-collar corruption is one of the most disturbing things that the two parties have in common. It's one thing to bail out a corporation because it's "too big to fail". It's quite another thing to bail out the crooks who caused the meltdown by letting them keep their jobs and their inflated bonuses with only one criminal indictment in a sea of fraud.

"But wait," you say, "Republicans completely opposed every major policy change by Obama! They voiced their opposition at every opportunity! Surely they would not have made similar changes themselves!"

Right, they always opposed everything Obama proposed, but that doesn't mean they wouldn't support exactly the same legislation if it had been their party's president proposing it. True, Republicans bills would probably be slightly different, and the rhetoric about the bills would be very different. And maybe they would have done nothing on the health care issue. But it would be no great surprise to me, in a parallel universe where John McCain is president, if a health insurance bill were passed there too.

Besides, there are plenty of things that the two parties (and the last two presidents) have in common that they don't much talk about.

• The Democrats renewed Bush's tax cut for the super-rich.
• Neither party is proposing to raise the 15% tax rate on personal income from capital gains. Many of the ultra-wealthy make most of their income not directly from working, but from investment income, which is taxed at this rate.
• For the above two reasons and others, neither party is willing or able to eliminate the deficit. The size of the national debt is truly a crisis, not only because it's enormous, and not only because the economy is too weak to even stop borrowing more, but because the two parties are two corrupt to make the changes needed to make it possible to pay down the debt.
• Both parties are very friendly to, and submit bills written by, big business.
• Obama did not reduce troop deployments (not for a very long while, anyway), he just moved some troops around.
• Neither party is willing to consider citizen-friendly changes to copyright law.
• Both parties want to guarantee that no other parties can compete with them. Not only does neither party discuss electoral reform (which would allow more than two parties and a wider range of policy ideas), but they actually pass laws that make it harder for independents and third party candidates to run for office. (Sorry, I can't find any of the articles I've read on this subject. By the way, once in awhile someone will talk about tweaking or eliminating the electoral college, but this will not solve the problem and is not actually necessary. Want to hear a better idea? Read about Direct Representation or at least Proportional Representation.)
• The secret domestic warrantless wiretapping program that started under Bush was vigorously supported by Obama's DOJ.
• Obama did not close Bush's Guantanamo. Instead he chose to sign the National Defense Authorization Act, which (I hear) allows the president to jail Americans without trial, evidence, due process or habeas corpus. (Yeah, he said he'd never use those powers, which is irrelevant for whoever replaces him.)
• Both parties support the war on drugs in its current form.
• It's hard to be sure that there is any significant difference in foreign policy between the two parties, although at least Obama would consider talking to opposing governments.
• Both parties believe in big government and big spending, but the Republicans prefer to cut taxes regardless of how much they spend (thus, the debt nearly doubled from $5.7 trillion in January 2001 to $10.7 trillion by December 2008, even though the economy was prosperous for most of that time.)
• Obama continues Bush's policy of expanding executive power through the ever-increasing use of executive orders and by simply ignoring the law and the constitution (see below).

I expected that Obama, being a former constitutional law professor and having opposed bills in the past on constitutional grounds, would respect the constitution and the law. But the man has no respect for the constitution.

A clear-cut example of this is the military assault on Libya. I actually tentatively supported the military intervention itself; I don't have a problem with toppling dictators per se, and I don't have any specific reasons to object other than the general fact that "war is bad". But it looked like a civil war was going to happen with or without international intervention, and the U.S. intervention offered the possibility to end the war more quickly, with fewer lives lost.

But candidate Obama said: "The President does not have power under the Constitution to unilaterally authorize a military attack in a situation that does not involve stopping an actual or imminent threat to the nation". Yet that's exactly what Obama did in this case. Legally he had to seek the support of congress, but he never did. And while some congresspeople complained, nothing was done and Obama ultimately suffered no consequences for his unprincipled behavior.

But I digress. On the whole, my point is this:

I think people need to seriously consider whether the U.S. has, effectively, become a one-party system. Some U.S. politicians have different opinions than each other, and they may claim to be in different parties, yet for the vast majority of issues, most U.S. politicians either agree, or else they disagree with their mouths but, when it comes to the kinds of bills and amendments they support (and just as important, the kinds of bills they wouldn't propose in the first place), they are very similar. Out of 535 people in congress, I am personally aware of only two (Dennis Kucinich and Ron Paul) who hold themselves to high standards and consistently maintain views quite different from most of their party. And Dennis Kucinich is about to lose his seat due to redistricting.

I wouldn't be surprised if the differences between Chinese politicians in their one-party state are as great as the differences between American politicians in their two-party state. Of course, the differences between Chinese and American politicians are vast. All I'm saying is, Americans really do not have meaningful choices in politics.

Still, we do have our free speech. If everyone complained as much as I do, things would change in a hurry.

The math of rear car cameras

It seems as if all media outlets, not to mention most lawmakers and laypeople, lack a grasp of basic arithmetic. Perhaps that's why so many people make absurd statements like "you can't put a price on a human life". Oh really? Then why don't we prevent every preventable death? 8.8 million children die before their fifth birthday and I'm sure most of the deaths are preventable, so why don't we stop those deaths? Obviously, it's because saving their lives costs more than we are willing to pay. It's considered just too costly to save them. The same goes for every homeless person who dies in the snow, and everyone that dies because their medical treatments cost far more than they can afford.

In most preventable deaths worldwide, I'm guessing lifesaving measures would probably cost under $100,000 per person, and probably much less for children. But instead of going after the low-hanging fruit, we prefer to find the most expensive ways to save lives. The worst example of this phenomenon is no doubt the War on Terror, which, if you count Iraq*, must have cost at least a trillion dollars by now and has caused far more deaths from terrorism than it has saved (mostly in Iraq).

* (I realize Iraq was not part of the war on terror if we are to be honest, but without the War on Terror the Bush Administration would not have been able to convince the media and the public that we needed a war, so it deserves at least some of the blame... but if my reasoning is in error, simply think about the cost of the TSA instead of Iraq.)

So it's irritating every time the media reports a story about a program that would cost a lot of money to save a few lives, without giving any hint as to how much value we would be getting for our money, and it's irritating everytime lawmakers pass a law without any real cost/benefit analysis. I heard that airbags cost $1000 per car (or was that per bag?), that the number of lives they save is apparently minimal among those like me that already use seatbelts, and that airbags can actually cause injuries and deaths of young children. But that didn't stop the Canadian government from mandating them on all new cars, which of course cost me money personally when I bought a car.

So now U.S. government regulators want to mandate rear-facing cameras in all new cars to reduce injuries and deaths from cars going backwards. The article I saw about this, like virtually every article from the mainstream media, didn't translate the numbers into a form I could immediately understand.

So here are the numbers. The estimated cost of the rule change is $2.7 billion per year or $160-$200 per vehicle, a cost that will surely be passed onto the buyers. And "regulators say that 95 to 112 deaths and as many as 8,374 injuries could be avoided each year by eliminating the wide blind spot behind a vehicle".

First of all, when I read that I am immediately curious whether the text actually means what it says: is 8,374 (A) the number of injuries that would be prevented per year, or is it actually (B) the total number of injuries? Although "as many as 8,374 injuries could be avoided" sure sounds like (A), I have seen so many news articles carelessly misrepresent statistics that I'm sure the true meaning could easy be (B), because when it comes to numbers, I have developed a sense that reporters are very, very lazy people. Yes, perhaps this particular reporter is good with numbers, but I have no way to know that.

If the meaning is actually (B), the actual number of injuries prevented might just be half of 8,374, or so, since not all drivers will become much safer just because they have a camera in addition to the three mirrors and rear window they already have. Likewise I am automatically led to wonder where number $160-$200 came from: is that cost distributed among all vehicles that don't already have a rear camera? Or is it distributed among all vehicles, even ones that are already sold with a rear camera?

So what's the cost here? Well, admittedly it's hard to decide how to explain the value proposition. What is the relative worth of saving a life compared to preventing an injury? If we assume that saving a life is worth ten (10) times as much as preventing an injury, then what we are buying for $2.7 billion dollars is as follows:

• $286,800 to prevent each injury (times 8374 injuries)
• $2,868,000 to prevent each death (times about 104 deaths)

Or if we assume that saving a life is worth 50 times as much as preventing an injury, the results become as follows:

• $198,900 to prevent each injury (times 8374 injuries)
• $9,945,000 to prevent each death (times about 104 deaths)

Anybody with basic math skills and a calculator can work this out. Admittedly it's a bit more complicated when you have to decide how much of the $2.7 billion to count toward injuries and how much to count toward deaths, but even in the simplest cases the media doesn't make any effort to communicate the costs in ways that are easy to understand. Now that you can see the cost, you might think twice about supporting this proposal.

Another way to look at this is comparing the number of lives saved to the number of cars with cameras, in order to determine the individual chance that you'll kill someone while backing up. There are 254.4 million registered cars in the U.S.. Comparing this to the expected number of injuries prevented, it seems that the chance you will, during your lifetime, not personally injure or kill someone while backing up because you have a government-mandated camera that you would not have chosen to buy yourself is close to zero. I can't actually calculate the chance, however, without knowing how many additional cars must be fitted with cameras in order to prevent the 8374 injuries (it must be less than the full 254.4 million.)

Now, maybe you think $2.9 million to $10 million dollars is a reasonable price to pay to save a single life of a middle-class person, and that $200,000 to $287,000 is reasonable to prevent a single injury. Personally, I disagree, I think the price is too high in this case, although at least there's the side benefit that we'll all have these cool display screens in our cars, and a little most peace of mind. It seems to me that in cases like this where the cost/benefit ratio is poor, the government should not be forcing everyone to spend more (or buy used).

And what about alternatives? A rear camera plus a LCD screen is not the only way to reduce injuries and deaths. It might be cheaper to use infared or radar sensors plus a warning sound (or even automated braking) to tell drivers when they are about to hit something. If an automaker wants to use this approach instead, will it be allowed to? But the humble New York Times did not consider the issue.

In any case, I wish our media would put a little more effort into their coverage and take a little time to break down the numbers for us. But you know what? They won't. So we would be wise to learn how to use a calculator ourselves.

SOPA? We don't need no stinking SOPA

ArsTechnica reports:

Popular site JotForm doesn't host music or movies or child pornography, all of which have led US Immigration and Customs Enforcement (ICE) to seize other Internet domain names without advance warning (sometimes making serious mistakes). JotForm also doesn't create content itself. Instead, it helps customers create online forms that can then be embedded in their websites for easy data collection.

But that didn't spare the site from having its entire business shuttered without warning yesterday as the site's domain name was shut down at the request of the US Secret Service. JotForm's domain name registrar, GoDaddy, redirected the site's nameservers to NS1.SUSPENDED-FOR.SPAM-AND-ABUSE.COM—and with that, JotForm.com became unreachable and the site's two million user-created forms all broke.

And it all may have been done without a court order.

It's pretty remarkable what the U.S. government gets away with these days. I mean, when it comes to foreign policy, I guess they've been willing and able to do any old insane act you can think of for decades now. But usually they've left their own citizens alone. The recently defeated SOPA bill would have allowed big companies to take down web sites with user-generated content, without first having to go through the hassle of a court case. But did you know that the government can already shut down your web site on a whim? At least, they can if your domain registrar is GoDaddy. JotForm is a case in point. I had never heard of JotForm before, but I have half a mind to subscribe to their service to help make up for the business they've lost over this wrongful shutdown.

Update: Now the U.S. government has taken down a foreign website, run by foreigners living outside the U.S., using a foreign registrar, for running a gambling business that violates the laws of Maryland. Read all about it! Whatever you think about gambling (I don't like it or do it myself), there is something very wrong with this picture.

An education in occupation

Until the 1990s, Iraq had perhaps the best university system in the Middle East. Saddam Hussein's regime used oil revenues to underwrite free tuition for Iraqi university students -- churning out doctors, scientists, and engineers who joined the country's burgeoning middle class and anchored development. Although political dissent was strictly off-limits, Iraqi universities were professional, secular institutions that were open to the West, and spaces where male and female, Sunni and Shia mingled. Also the schools pushed hard to educate women, who constituted 30 percent of Iraqi university faculties by 1991. [...]

[...] As the international sanctions regime cut off journal subscriptions and equipment purchases, academic salaries fell precipitously, and 10,000 Iraqi professors left the country. [...]

In 2003, after the invasion, many Iraqi professors hoped that their university system would be revitalized under US occupation. They expected funding to buy new books, to replace equipment, and to repair the damage inflicted by the sanctions. And they hoped for new tolerance for open debate and inquiry.

In fact, the opposite happened.

Out of $90 billion appropriated for reconstruction and counterinsurgency in Iraq for 2004, less than one one-hundredth of one percent was earmarked for reconstruction of the universities.

Still don't get the fuss about SOPA?

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

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

• 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.

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.)

Note: there are a couple of gotchas with Steam. First, you can't return a game if it won't run on your computer. There are two games in my library I've never played for this reason, and if you're thinking this must be against consumer-protection laws, well, you're probably right. Second, you can't re-sell or transfer a game to anyone else. So think carefully before you pay full price for a game on Steam. On the plus side, you can install a game on multiple computers, but ordinarily you can't run it on two computers at the same time (this sounds like it imposes an unreasonable internet-access requirement on single-player games, but that's only partly true.)

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

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

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.

• Still not convinced? Read the opinion of John Carmack, famous game developer behind the Doom and Quake games.
• 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