Ostracization

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

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

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

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

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

Micropayments please

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

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

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

Bradley Manning is Still Screwed

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

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

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

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

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

Spanish Quick Reference updated

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

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

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

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

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

The Prosecution of Thomas Drake

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

China criticizes USA internet freedom?

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

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

Avaaz supports Bradley Manning

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

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

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

Software Patents Suck

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

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

Maxed Out

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

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

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

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

My life sucks.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spanish Quick Reference v2

The four-page Spanish course

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

The new reference (update 2.20: Sept 2014) requires two double-sided sheets of paper, but the first sheet is most important (the second sheet contains supplemental information, so you can generally go without it). My reference goes well beyond the usual pleasantries like "buenos dias" and "¿Donde está el baño?", and will hopefully allow you to express almost any thought in "pidgeon Spanish". It is designed primarily to help you learn and speak Spanish rather than understand it; for the purpose of understanding Spanish, perhaps later I should make a mini-dictionary so you can look up the most common words.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

In the examples section,

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Here are some more tips:

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

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

Learning Spanish

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

The Election Process

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

Lawrence Lessig on 'The Social Network'

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Spanish quick reference

Update: please use the new version!

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

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

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

• Spanish is phonetic, but you must learn and practice the Spanish pronunciation rules. No one will understand you if you use English spelling rules to pronounce Spanish. There is a pronunciation section in the quick reference, but you need a few hours of careful practice to get the hang of it.
  
  
• The basic word order of Spanish is SVO (subject-verb-object), like English. However, occasionally the pronoun will come before the verb and other word orders often occur in Spanish that are invalid in English.
  
  
• All Spanish nouns are masculine or feminine, including inanimate objects and concepts. "The" and "a" translate as "el" and "un" when used with masculine nouns, but "la" and "una" when used with feminine nouns. Nouns ending in "o" (but not "ó") are usually masculine; nouns ending in "a" are usually feminine. Nouns not ending in "a" or "o" do not reveal their gender, but such words are more likely to be masculine than feminine.
  
  
• Usually, Spanish adjectives come after the noun, and must match the gender and number of the noun that they are attached to: mesa roja = red table, ojo rojo = red eye, mesas rojas = red tables, ojos rojos = red eyes.
  
  
• As for any foreign language, Spanish does not translate word-for-word from/to English. To say something in pidgeon Spanish, try to boil your idea down to simple, independent components. Don't try to translate "I have just eaten the whole thing" word-for-word, instead identify the concepts and translate them: I, eat (recent past), all-of-this => yo, comer, hace poco, todo de esto. Conjugate if you can: yo, comí, todo de esto. Your Spanish grammar will probably be wrong, but there is a greater chance that it will be understood than a word-for-word translation like "Yo tener comido el todo cosa" (I can probably think of a better example).
  
  
• If you can't find a translation with my quick reference sheet, look for a different way to say the same thing. If you use Google Translate, give it a whole sentence at once to get its best translation.
  
  
• The system of Spanish verbs is terrifyingly complex, no doubt one of the most complex in the world. There are three types of verbs, each with their own set of conjugations: verbs that end in -ir, verbs that end in -ar and verbs that end in -er. Some, but not all, conjugations are the same between the three types.
  
  There is a different conjugation for each combination of tense, person and number; for example, there are separate words for "I eat", "we eat", "you eat", "you will eat", "you ate", "he/she ate", "they ate", "they would eat" and so forth. There are also special conjugations for imperative (eat this!), negative imperative (don't eat this), gerund (eating), and past participle (eaten). Finally, some verbs are irregular, meaning they have their own special conjugations.
  
  There are 17 verb tenses (give or take depending on how you count them), and 6 combinations of person and number; basically, a table of conjugations for one verb fills a page. A verb contains so much information that the pronoun is often dropped from the sentence.
  
  
• Learning the pronouns is a smaller crushing burden. English has two categories of pronouns (I/she/he/they and me/her/him/them), but Spanish has about five. My reference sheet shows three of those categories. "Subject" means before the verb, "Object" means after the verb, and "Prepositional" means after a preposition (in a prepositional phrase, e.g. para mi = for me, fuera de ti = outside of you). Tip: all pronouns that start with "t" mean "you".
  
  
• There are a ton of words that mean "is", plus the "va" family of words that mean "is going". "is" is the most complex verb in English, too, but in English it has only seven forms.
  
  
• As in English, words can have many synonyms; usually I did not list them on the quick reference unless there was unused space. I can only hope that a Spanish person doesn't have to continue learning new words into adulthood like an English person (as the English language contains around a million words).

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

• When you want to use a verb pair like "I can say", "I want to eat", "He learns to swim", etc., the first verb gets the tense information and the second verb is simply the infinitive, e.g. "Puedo decir hola"(I can say hello), "Quiero comer" (I want to eat), "He learns to swim" (Él aprende a nadar). Roughly like English, some verbs require the "to" (Spanish "a") after the first verb while others do not.
  
  On the plus side, Spanish doesn't seem to have the helping verbs that make English grammar more complex (except for the many forms of "have"--haya, hubiere, etc.--which I counted as part of the 17 verb tenses, but which my quick reference does not cover at all).
  
  
• "er" and "ir" verbs conjugate similarly, so on my quick reference I only show conjugations for an "er" verb, not an "ir" verb.
  
  
• For most verbs, a simple "-o" ending means "I" + present tense, e.g. como = I eat
  
  
• Verbs that end in "s" usually mean "you" or "we", e.g. comes = You eat, comemos = We eat, comías = you used to eat, comimos = we ate. Some "you/we" conjugations do not end in "s", but if it does end in "s" then you know that the verb includes the concept of "you" or "we". The "we" verbs usually end in "mos" so you can tell them apart from the "you" verbs.
  
  
• "you" plural familiar (vosotros) and its many conjugations are only required in Spain. Latin America uses "ustedes", which conjugates the same way as third-person plurals like ellas/ellos.
  
  
• "-a" and "-e"verb endings (habla = speak, come = eat, vive = live) are the closest thing Spanish has to "generic" present-tense verbs. If you want present tense but do not know what conjugation to use, I hypothesize that you will be understood if you just drop the "r" from -ar and -er verbs, or replace -ir with -e. You could also try the Spanish equivalent of "ing", which is "iendo" or "ando": está comiendo = is eating, está hablando = is speaking.
  
  
• If you need past, future or some other tense, I hypothesize that you will be understood if you just use the infinitive form (hablar, comer, vivir) plus a time phrase (en el pasado, en el futuro, hace poco, pronto). When possible, use "va a" (El va a comer = He is-going to eat) or "voy" (I am going) so that you do not need to conjugate the verb.
  
  By the way, "va" or "voy" themselves can be used like a verb that means "going" (Voy ahora = I am going now).
  
  
• There are two different verb groups for be (is/am/are): estar (estoy, está, ...) and ser (soy, es, ...). I haven't figured out all the details, but as a rule of thumb, I you should use estar with "ing" verbs and prepositional phrases (él está comiendo = he is eating, él está en el tren = he is in the train), and use ser with adjectives (él es alto = he is tall, ella es bonita = she is pretty).

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

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

OKCupid's fascinating blog

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

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

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

Click the title for something fascinating.

Rethinking copyright

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

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

Others pointed out how flawed this is:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Copyright is not a right

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

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

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

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

Dreams as simulations

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

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

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

Peter Watts

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[....] -AK Marc

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

[....]

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

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

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

[....]

The fault with the statements above is that they equate police officers with DHS guards. Despite having been on the wrong side of the law many times, I do believe that the vast majority of police officers are honest folks who foster good relations with their citizens and have honest intent(the only bad publicity seems to come from Los Angeles, with its officers up against crotch-grabbers [cnn.com] and coked-up madmen using babies for human shields [policeone.com]). I also agree that they're not out to cause trouble because they want to go home to their families without any bullshit.

However - DHS guards are not police officers. They are glorified security guards gone mad with the power they attained in the wake of 9/11. The vast majority of them face no danger, and the last one to be shot to death(since the '80's) passed under mysterious circumstances with his gun stolen, an obvious cover-up. [....]

- Ethanol-fueled

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

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

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

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

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

• DVD Extras and Director Commentary