Those rarefied few of you who might read these all-to-sporadic missives of mine (even if only on the way to see if I'm really bashing the Catholic Church in my other blog), which if I'm lucky, might include my wife, and maybe a co-worker or two who are polite enough to humor me, were witness to an intentionally vague posting of mine a couple weeks ago in which I mentioned the onerous Digital Millennium Copyright Act. Setting aside the trite and faddish nature of the name of this notorious piece of legislation, caused by an affliction that affected nearly everyone in marketing, politics, or any other public communication capacity around the year 1999 of utilizing, in nearly every kind of nomenclature, a reference to the fact that it would soon be a large, round number of years since the date that Dionysus Exiguus (know as "Dennis the Short"), a sixth-century Scythian monk, mistakenly identified as the year of the Birth of Christ, a fad that had nearly died out by time the new millennium actually began, thanks to the fact that Dennis, like everyone else outside of India at the time, and perhaps not even there, would have reacted with incredulity at the mere mention of such an absurd notion of a Year Zero, on 1 January 2001, by which time the novelty of the whole thing had faded and the country, beleaguered by a long, tedious and ultimately absurd election drama, became distracted by the ripe opportunity of a new chief executive to hate, this legislative monstrosity represents a perfect example of the absurd extremes to which Congress, beholden and responsive to only the most monied of its members' supporters, could stray, unreigned by common sense, simple consideration of the logical consequences, or just about anything else but the bidding of its corporate masters, or in an occasional fit of quadrennial panic, the perception, but not the well-being, of the public.
Consider gun control laws. It is already illegal in every jurisdiction to murder someone, with or without a firearm, but thanks to ineffective law enforcement, the breakdown of any sense in the public of civility, or civil responsibility, the short-sightedness of an increasingly intellectually benumbed population and the general moral decay that been the primary precipitate of post-Enlightenment Modernism, murders had increased to an epidemic proportion. Having completely failed in efforts to prevent or deter these awful crimes, the legislators, in their infinite pragmatism, and not insignificant otiosity concluded that since the laws were being broken with impunity, domestic order would most certainly be restored with the simple application of additional bureaucracy. So gun control laws were passed, and an activity which is inherently harmless, the owning of a firearm, was made illegal, in the apparent hopes that the failure of a potentially capital punishment to deter murderous behaviour would be rectified by the additional paperwork and the threat of much less serious punishment. Of course, to be fair, gun control laws did have a significant impact of reducing the potential for gun violence in all but the people who would actually commit such crimes in the first place. In other words, only people who want to obey the law, will.
Emboldened by the easy, but false logic of these feckless accomplishments, and completely undeterred by the truth of the almost complete failure of these laws to accomplish their goals, the U.S. Congress set about to address the complete lack of enforcement against digital piracy of music, books, and increasingly, movies. Media companies, having realized that their monopoly of 19th century distribution methods for their products was rendered completely null and void by the radical transformation wrought by the advent of the Internet, turned to various encryption technologies in order to prevent the violation of their copyrights, not to mention in order to maintain an artificially and grotesquely inflated price on the distribution of content, which has now become essentially free compared to the days when physical media was required to move around sounds and images. Under the auspices of the name "Digital Rights Management", companies have shackled their products with technological means to prevent digital redistribution by customers. Of course, the irony is that no matter how securely, no matter how byzantine and baroque the means used to protect your rights, if the end product is viewable by human eyes or hearable by human ears, then it can be copied. The end result of these increasingly misguided undertakings was to penalize paying customers, who were often saddled with products that did not work as they should because they were designed, under every conceivable circumstance except one, not to work at all.
On a personal note, my first DVD device was the DVD drive that came with the IBM Thinkpad laptop I purchased in 2000. Realizing that I now had the ability to play DVD's I went out and picked up DVD copy of "The Matrix", a movie that had been recently released on DVD. I found however, that the movie would not play on my computer, and that I had in fact paid some 24 dollars for a round piece of aluminized plastic that could serve me no purpose other than as, perhaps, a coaster. I later found out that that particular DVD had known problems with particular players, including those used in IBM laptops, and of course, this is due, in part to the inclusion of encryption technology in the DVD-specification. It wasn't until I purchased another DVD player (actually it was my wife who surprised me with it for Christmas) that I was able to actually use a product that I had months before bought and paid for fully. This is, of course, only one example of the numerous ways in which I was deprived of the rights and value which were most assuredly legally and morally mine to be had because of Digital Rights Management.
The ironic thing is that DRM has always been quickly and relatively easily "cracked" by those people with the means to do so. As the certain circles of the general public gained more and more skill in circumventing these methods of protection, the media companies engaged in more and more destructive behavior, rendering their products less useful and less valuable, infringing on the Fair Use rights of paying customers while having little or no effect on piracy, particularly the well-organized and highly lucrative piracy operations based largely in the Far East. Having failed completely in the totally contradictory goal of creating a product that can be distributed, but cannot be distributed, they turned their efforts to the resource always available to those corporations of significant financial wherewithal, the purchase of appropriate legislation from those most costly courtesans of the legal system, the U.S. Congress. Since the means to copy a protected CD, DVD, or software amounts to what is essentially a trade secret, which cannot by definition be protected by copyright or patent law, since you cannot copyright a process, and a patent requires those details of the process to be made public, the media conglomerates tried the gun control method. It is a common and well-known tactic that if a business cannot compete fairly, legislation can always be procured to protect what the market would take away. By carefully crafting legislation that would, in effect, enforce by law what they could not enforce by well-intentioned but woefully flawed technological schemes, and counting on the Congressional sponsors, too distracted by their burgeoning re-election warchests, to actually read and consider the ramifications of what they were about to pass, the media companies simply made it illegal to attempt to circumvent copy-protection. Now just like owning a gun. circumventing copy protection is a completely harmless activity. It isn't until you commit a crime: murder, in the case of a gun, or distributing a copyrighted movie or music to someone who is not legally entitled to receive it, does the activity lead to harm.
As always, in the rush to address a legitimate problem with an illegitimate solution, unintended consequences are often the main, if not the only, result. In this case, our esteemed representatives have carved away a huge piece of the rights of consumers under copyright law, that of Fair Use. It is no longer legal for someone to attempt to backup copy-protected media, despite the fact that there are many legally and morally justifiable reasons for doing so. Physical media are not impervious to damage, new technologies are constantly being developed which require the perfectly legal copying and conversion of a digital product in order to use it, and mere matters of convenience make it necessary for the rights already established by over two hundred years of copyright law precedence to be protected, and not whittled away by companies too lazy or stupid to effectively react to changes in the market for their products.
It is as if horse-and-buggy manufacturers in the early 20th century bribed lawmakers to require everyone purchasing a one of the new horseless carriages to still maintain a stable, and periodically purchase riding crops. In fact, one is reminded and actual instance of this behavior: that of the dairy corporations in the early 20th century which, in a move that would feel right at home in a list of the business practices of Microsoft, convinced lawmakers to require margarine manufacturers to dye their product pink because, in the economic climate surrounding two World Wars and a Depression and given margarine's superior price-to-quality ratio with butter, there was no way they could compete without an unfair advantage.
Now we come to 2007, and the media companies having foisted upon us yet another format war for the next generation of content distribution have once again placed all their eggs in the basket of DRM, which having failed in its every single application in the past 30-some years to prevent illicit distribution, was quickly defeated once again, surprising no one, but, it would seem, the people who created it. It turns that there is an encryption key needed to decode the contents of an HD-DVD, and having figured out this key, people began to publish this information on-line. In fact, the HD-DVD specification allows for this key to changed as needed, so while the key that was made public could be used to decrypt HD-DVD that had already been released, new releases would utilize a different key. Of course, the new key is already public before the HD-DVDs that will use it have been released, but I'm sure all the time and energy being invested into this hopeless attempt to stuff the genie back into the bottle makes someone feel good.
Now, to be honest, there are lots of people who will use this information to commit piracy, but the information itself is as harmless as a gun locked up in a firebox in the back of your closet. There is no harm, only the potential for harm if additional, illegal and immoral positive actions are committed. What we have in effect is Congress once again making a perfectly harmless and legitimate activity illegal, in the hopes of preventing some truly illegal activity (illegal in that actual harm occurs) from occurring. Of course, it has never worked in the past, and will never work in the future. The only effect of this kind of legislation is that it is now possible, in a country that prides itself as a bastion of free speech and free association to be harassed and possibly subject to criminal or civil punitive measures for publishing a list of numbers, for instance these:
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Since of course consistency is as much practiced by our lawmakers as is common sense, logic and reason in general (i.e., almost not at all), legislators seem perfectly content to engage in such ludicrous activity despite the gaping inconsistencies this introduces. But if we were for a moment to consider what it really being legislated here, and extend it to all other analogous situations using the same reasoning, it should therefore be made illegal to publish books about lock-picking, surveillance, shady accounting practices, how to purchase, or even how to make firearms... perhaps even how best to get elected to Congress. After all, if owning a gun is now considered tantamount to committing a violent crime with it, shouldn't knowing how to acquire one, legally or illegally be also? Shouldn't it in fact be illegal in those jurisdictions that practice gun control to even communicate how the forge your own firearm, or mix gunpowder? Once again, we are faced with a rule, which in its face might, without any consideration, appear to be of no negative consequence and even beneficial to society, which is in fact, if one follows its specious reasoning to its perfectly reasonable conclusion, to be of such outrageous absurdity that it should summarily be thrown out of consideration.
That conclusion is this: The logic behind gun control and the Digital Millennium Copyright Act is that if we prevent people from acquiring the means to commit crime, then we can more easily and effectively prevent them from committing that crime. To follow this logic no large distance to its ultimate conclusion means that Congress, if it is going to attempt to instill any amount of consistency in the body of Law whatsoever, must immediately and unconditionally require that all citizens surrender the whole of their intellect and will to the benevolent custody of Mother State, for it is only mindless animals who are completely incapable of committing crimes.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Tuesday, May 01, 2007
Baiting the Corporate Tyranny
I would ask all my readers, by which I mean me and maybe my wife and a coworker or two, to humor me in a little experiment. If you are technically inclined and haven't been living in a cave for the past couple weeks, you will be aware of the discovery and publication of a piece of data, the dissemination of which has been viewed very dimly by a particular corporate entity. This data consists of a number. It is a fairly large number, but it is only a number. As we speak, Cease and Desist letters are being issued to sites that are publishing this number, what it means, and how to use it. I won't explain it here, since it is trivial to find, but I will publish the number. I just want to see what happens.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Regardless of whether I am approached or not, the fact of the matter is that corporations are issuing Cease and Desist letters for the publication of a 32-digit hex number, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, one of the many abominations wreaked upon this republic by a Congress able, and more importantly, willing to make every citizen at every time a federal criminal. In other words, merely publishing this information, which has spread across the 'net like wildfire in past week, is causing people to be subjected to legal action, and under the dysfunctional legal system that has metastasized from the elegant and just one established by our Founding Fathers, the mere threat of legal action can guarantee the threatened party financial and legal hardships beyond the wherewithal of the average citizen to withstand, if immediate compliance is not rendered forthwith.
So, tell me, Americans. Do you even recognize this country any more? I am not sure I do. Is there any politician, any governmental entity, any political candidate is not wholly bought and paid for by the powerful and the rich? Are corporations (already legally "people"), in fact, the only "citizens" with any voice in this great nation? 2008 will prove to be a watershed year, and the way things are going, it doesn't look like it's going to be a good one.
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
Regardless of whether I am approached or not, the fact of the matter is that corporations are issuing Cease and Desist letters for the publication of a 32-digit hex number, citing the Digital Millennium Copyright Act, one of the many abominations wreaked upon this republic by a Congress able, and more importantly, willing to make every citizen at every time a federal criminal. In other words, merely publishing this information, which has spread across the 'net like wildfire in past week, is causing people to be subjected to legal action, and under the dysfunctional legal system that has metastasized from the elegant and just one established by our Founding Fathers, the mere threat of legal action can guarantee the threatened party financial and legal hardships beyond the wherewithal of the average citizen to withstand, if immediate compliance is not rendered forthwith.
So, tell me, Americans. Do you even recognize this country any more? I am not sure I do. Is there any politician, any governmental entity, any political candidate is not wholly bought and paid for by the powerful and the rich? Are corporations (already legally "people"), in fact, the only "citizens" with any voice in this great nation? 2008 will prove to be a watershed year, and the way things are going, it doesn't look like it's going to be a good one.
Wednesday, December 20, 2006
Principles of Conservatism
I read this column this morning and it reminded me of something I have been wanting to post on here for a few weeks now. While Mr. Jeffrey's principles are universal and cohesive in scope, and very well thought out, I too came up with a list of conservative principles and I've been wanting to publish them somewhere where there's ever-so-small a chance that someone other than a few computer nerds would see them. The following is a based on something I wrote on Slashdot shortly after the midterm elections to counter the assertion that the election results were a repudiation of conservative politics and/or some kind of liberal mandate. In fact, it was neither.
Since I have often been one of those people who, as Mark Twain so cleverly put it, wants to have read classics much more that I want to actually read them, I decided it was time to take a break from my normal fare and read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". The topic of corruption in post-Industrial Revolution American capitalism has always been one that has interested me, particularly since I believe we are entering an entirely new phase of it, exacerbated by the hand-in-hand exponential growth of technology and bureaucracy, as well as the general complexity of life.
I'm only part way through the book, and while it clear to me that Sinclair's style of writing is absolutely tremendous, his story is gripping, and in places horrifying, I am trying to reconcile his documentation of the excesses and evils of early 20th century capitalism with his strong support for socialism. You see, to me, totalitarianism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin. The overarching principle of the world is "Power Corrupts", so any concentration of power, whether by a dictator of a nation or a Chief Executive Officer of a corporation, is bound to lead to evil. Basically we are talking about two extremes of a socio-economic spectrum with capitalism on one end and communism on the other.
The problem with pure communism, which is also the problem with pure capitalism, is that immoral people will inevitably wreck the system and enslave the less powerful in order to engage in tyranny. In fact, any system of government or economics that does not have a very meticulous system of checks and balances, as well as limited and decentralized power will suffer the same consequences. If the powers of regulation and commerce are not pitted against each other, or are at least not controlled by the same people, individuals will suffer. This is why I have a problem with the reaction to "The Jungle" being a call for socialism. If you take a corrupt system, in this book's case the unchecked "Meat Trust", and give control over it to the government, you are handing massive power to an organization that is already powerful. How can you expect the result to be less corrupt? The good will of men? How does that square with my "overarching principle of the world"?
I believe the correct response was the one that was actually taken: Unions, which were limited collectivism to acquire bargaining power, and government regulation, which was limited socialism, not to exert power, but to protect the weak. Of course, in the intervening decades, unions have become too powerful and are often as corrupt as the companies they were created to defend against, and government regulation has become so overly complex and burdensome that it has a direct, deleterious affect on our national economy and quality of life.
If you read the Acts of the Apostles, you will see the early Christian communities lived in what is pretty much a text-book communal (or communist) society among themselves, as did medieval monasteries and other religious communities through the ages. With a small group of people who are like-minded and zealous about their beliefs (as any new adherent to a religion, particularly if he is being persecuted for it, would be), this can work. But of course it didn't last too long, and once the Church became large and successful its wealth and power were often subverted for less-than-Christian ideals, which is one reason today why it specifically eschews political power and uses the vast majority of the wealth it collects and maintains for good works.
Similarly, it's relatively easy to have a startup company with, say 8 people, where everyone is top-notch, hard-working and delivers good results. It's practically impossible to have a company with 1000 people where everyone is of that same caliber. Similarly, communism doesn't scale. It can't scale. You can have a large company that is successful, but communism can't work at all unless everyone is equally invested and committed to it. Socialism bypasses the corruption stage and goes straight to tyranny. Capitalism can be subverted for evil, and will be if there is nothing to stop it. No system is perfect as long as we flawed humans are a part of it.
That said however, I still find the conservative principles to be qualitatively more sound than the alternatives.
Here's my take on "conservative" principles. Some of these are no doubt compatible with "liberal" principles or are at odds with "conservative" principles as espoused by some "conservative" politicians. Many of these are probably more accurately called "libertarian" principles, because at this point in the game, the entire body politic of the United States is hopelessly mired in big government, grotesque complexity, and obsession with tweaking details on issues when the overall strategy is hopelessly flawed, and any concrete steps towards solving problems is a step away from government interference.
I think that is a good thing that my ideas don't fit into the rigid molds our public discourse has created. Political philosophies in the U.S. have become too issue-dependent, and are often, even usually, not philosophies at all but merely a laundry list of grievances against specific practices or perceived and real problems, regardless of their causes and effects, and irrespective of the best way to address them.
My principles are:
#3 was the hardest to word succinctly. Here's what else I wanted to say:
Any social safety-net or entitlement will be gamed as much as possible and is guaranteed to be inefficient. Compassion is the most easily subverted intention, the easiest to take advantage of. People should not be allowed to starve or live without shelter, but without a real chance to fail, many people will simply let the system take care of them. Even more are trapped in a cycle of dependency because there are no concrete options that allow them to escape it. (See #1 and #6).
#10 is particularly important and is particularly misunderstood in this day and age. Liberty can only exist in a people whose individuals are willing and able to be self-governing. And yes, that implies moral absolutes. Liberty without morality is another name for anarchy. Since we rapidly losing (and disposing of) our morality, we will have to lose our liberty to maintain order. I think very few people understand this, and as a result, our government is having to become more and more controlling as we, as a society, are ceding more and more responsibility to control ourselves or our children. And as I said in princple #5, the best government is the most local. Nothing is more local than governing yourself, and anything else is by definition, less efficient.
In terms of the United States, #11 means individual states should have the right to secede. We are united because in unity there is strength, but if it is forced, there is no true unity. As much as I am opposed to the idea of slavery, I think it was wrong to go to war to preserve the Union. And slavery wasn't the real reason the southern states seceded. In fact, they seceded for many of the same reasons the 13 colonies revolted from England in the first place. Ironically, the American Revolution was caused by an order of magnitude less government interference than we now deal with on a daily basis. The way things are going now, I believe it is likely this country will face this same issue in the 21st century.
#12 and #13 are specifically addressed to so-called liberals.
Since I have often been one of those people who, as Mark Twain so cleverly put it, wants to have read classics much more that I want to actually read them, I decided it was time to take a break from my normal fare and read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle". The topic of corruption in post-Industrial Revolution American capitalism has always been one that has interested me, particularly since I believe we are entering an entirely new phase of it, exacerbated by the hand-in-hand exponential growth of technology and bureaucracy, as well as the general complexity of life.
I'm only part way through the book, and while it clear to me that Sinclair's style of writing is absolutely tremendous, his story is gripping, and in places horrifying, I am trying to reconcile his documentation of the excesses and evils of early 20th century capitalism with his strong support for socialism. You see, to me, totalitarianism and capitalism are two sides of the same coin. The overarching principle of the world is "Power Corrupts", so any concentration of power, whether by a dictator of a nation or a Chief Executive Officer of a corporation, is bound to lead to evil. Basically we are talking about two extremes of a socio-economic spectrum with capitalism on one end and communism on the other.
The problem with pure communism, which is also the problem with pure capitalism, is that immoral people will inevitably wreck the system and enslave the less powerful in order to engage in tyranny. In fact, any system of government or economics that does not have a very meticulous system of checks and balances, as well as limited and decentralized power will suffer the same consequences. If the powers of regulation and commerce are not pitted against each other, or are at least not controlled by the same people, individuals will suffer. This is why I have a problem with the reaction to "The Jungle" being a call for socialism. If you take a corrupt system, in this book's case the unchecked "Meat Trust", and give control over it to the government, you are handing massive power to an organization that is already powerful. How can you expect the result to be less corrupt? The good will of men? How does that square with my "overarching principle of the world"?
I believe the correct response was the one that was actually taken: Unions, which were limited collectivism to acquire bargaining power, and government regulation, which was limited socialism, not to exert power, but to protect the weak. Of course, in the intervening decades, unions have become too powerful and are often as corrupt as the companies they were created to defend against, and government regulation has become so overly complex and burdensome that it has a direct, deleterious affect on our national economy and quality of life.
If you read the Acts of the Apostles, you will see the early Christian communities lived in what is pretty much a text-book communal (or communist) society among themselves, as did medieval monasteries and other religious communities through the ages. With a small group of people who are like-minded and zealous about their beliefs (as any new adherent to a religion, particularly if he is being persecuted for it, would be), this can work. But of course it didn't last too long, and once the Church became large and successful its wealth and power were often subverted for less-than-Christian ideals, which is one reason today why it specifically eschews political power and uses the vast majority of the wealth it collects and maintains for good works.
Similarly, it's relatively easy to have a startup company with, say 8 people, where everyone is top-notch, hard-working and delivers good results. It's practically impossible to have a company with 1000 people where everyone is of that same caliber. Similarly, communism doesn't scale. It can't scale. You can have a large company that is successful, but communism can't work at all unless everyone is equally invested and committed to it. Socialism bypasses the corruption stage and goes straight to tyranny. Capitalism can be subverted for evil, and will be if there is nothing to stop it. No system is perfect as long as we flawed humans are a part of it.
That said however, I still find the conservative principles to be qualitatively more sound than the alternatives.
Here's my take on "conservative" principles. Some of these are no doubt compatible with "liberal" principles or are at odds with "conservative" principles as espoused by some "conservative" politicians. Many of these are probably more accurately called "libertarian" principles, because at this point in the game, the entire body politic of the United States is hopelessly mired in big government, grotesque complexity, and obsession with tweaking details on issues when the overall strategy is hopelessly flawed, and any concrete steps towards solving problems is a step away from government interference.
I think that is a good thing that my ideas don't fit into the rigid molds our public discourse has created. Political philosophies in the U.S. have become too issue-dependent, and are often, even usually, not philosophies at all but merely a laundry list of grievances against specific practices or perceived and real problems, regardless of their causes and effects, and irrespective of the best way to address them.
My principles are:
- Equalize opportunities, because you cannot equalize results.
- People can generally take care of themselves, and they should be expected to, until they prove otherwise.
- Help people when they truly need it, but if aid to someone doesn't also come with a cost, it will be abused and ineffectual.
- The rights of the individual take precedence by default. Anything that compromises individual rights and opportunities will compromise their chances for success.
- Any aspect of government should be as local as possible. There are very few things that truly require implementation at the national level, or can be effective at a national level. This is especially true in a country as large and diverse as the United States.
- Real education is the best tool for any person, and the best way to prevent any problem. Investments in education will always pay off (but remember #3). Moral education is the most important kind.
- Humans are the best and most important natural resource on the planet. Human life, therefore, should be held in the highest regard, and its protection should be the highest priority.
- We are stewards of the Earth, we neither own it or are owned by it. We have a right to use it and to change it to suit our needs, but we have a duty to protect and preserve its value.
- There will always be evil. Be prepared to neutralize it, or you will be defeated by it.
- Liberty is not license. Freedom necessitates responsibility and duty.
- Sovereignty is a right for both individuals and groups. People have a right to associate with whom they please.
- You have no right not to be offended by others.
- Life isn't fair. You can't make it fair. Get over it.
#3 was the hardest to word succinctly. Here's what else I wanted to say:
Any social safety-net or entitlement will be gamed as much as possible and is guaranteed to be inefficient. Compassion is the most easily subverted intention, the easiest to take advantage of. People should not be allowed to starve or live without shelter, but without a real chance to fail, many people will simply let the system take care of them. Even more are trapped in a cycle of dependency because there are no concrete options that allow them to escape it. (See #1 and #6).
#10 is particularly important and is particularly misunderstood in this day and age. Liberty can only exist in a people whose individuals are willing and able to be self-governing. And yes, that implies moral absolutes. Liberty without morality is another name for anarchy. Since we rapidly losing (and disposing of) our morality, we will have to lose our liberty to maintain order. I think very few people understand this, and as a result, our government is having to become more and more controlling as we, as a society, are ceding more and more responsibility to control ourselves or our children. And as I said in princple #5, the best government is the most local. Nothing is more local than governing yourself, and anything else is by definition, less efficient.
In terms of the United States, #11 means individual states should have the right to secede. We are united because in unity there is strength, but if it is forced, there is no true unity. As much as I am opposed to the idea of slavery, I think it was wrong to go to war to preserve the Union. And slavery wasn't the real reason the southern states seceded. In fact, they seceded for many of the same reasons the 13 colonies revolted from England in the first place. Ironically, the American Revolution was caused by an order of magnitude less government interference than we now deal with on a daily basis. The way things are going now, I believe it is likely this country will face this same issue in the 21st century.
#12 and #13 are specifically addressed to so-called liberals.
Monday, December 18, 2006
Why is my new 200GB harddisk only 186GB in size?
Or, Marketing Lies 2006.
Actually, this one is easy to explain.
Technically, a kilobyte is 1024 bytes (i.e., 2 to the tenth power), which of course is close to 1000 and of course "kilo-" means 1000. But we computer types always like to count by 2's and powers of 2. 1024 makes much more sense to a computer. It's really a coincidence that the
numbers work out like this.
Similarly megabytes really means 220 bytes or 1,048,576 bytes, but of course it's much easier to say it's a million bytes.
A gigabyte is really 1,073,741,824 bytes, although we humans (and especially lower life forms like marketing types) like to think it's a billion bytes.
So when your harddrive claims to be 200GB but your computer only reports it as 186GB, they are both correct. The marketing people just take the version of "gigabyte" that is most convenient for their purposes, whereas your computer uses the "correct" definition from a computer science point of view. The computer science gigabyte is 7% bigger, which explains the discrepancy. Of course, if your hard drive claims to provide 200GB of storage, you can rest assured that you are getting 200,000,000,000 bytes (give or take, formatting the disk takes up some of the space). Of course, since the price per byte for harddrives has dropped by a factor of about 20,000 since I bought my first harddrive in 1989, I'm not too worried either way.
There have been two proposals to fix this confusion:
1. The first proposal is that we use a different prefix when referring to the "computer science" versions of kilobyte, megabyte, etc, since "kilo-" is universally accepted to mean "one thousand", "mega-" universally means "one million". The idea proposed is to contract the word "binary byte" with the Systeme Internationale numerical prefix, so that 1024 bytes is "KIlo BInary BYTES" or "kibibytes". This also gives us "mebibytes", "gibibytes", etc. This has not caught on for two reasons: First, it is hopelessly pedantic, and second, it makes the speaker sound like he has some kind of speech impediment.
2. The second proposal is something I am making at this moment. A very dangerous plague that affects many parts of the world, especially third world countries, is that of land mines. There are millions of land mines around the world just waiting for some innocent person, years or even decades after the war in which the mines were used, to walk across it and lose a limb or even his life. I propose that we create an international task force for defusing all land mines and that they can be very effective by employing a very long stick with a marketing person tied to the end. If you are one of those people who claim (as I actually do) to hold human life precious, you can at least take the less satisfying alternative of mocking marketing types whenever possible, or at least buying a Dilbert book where it is already done for your convenience.
If you feel ripped off by the marketing legalese that gives you 7% less disk space than you think you are getting, be glad you weren't buying backup tapes in the early 90's. I didn't discover until too late when they described the capacity of a backup tape, they would assume a compression ratio of 2:1, meaning when they claimed the tape stored 120MB, that meant it really stored 60MB, and they "assumed" that you would use compression. Needless to say, this was much more dishonest that the "gigabyte" controversy described above, especially given the fact that the stuff I was backing up was usually compressed to begin with. I don't know if they do that any more since I haven't bought a backup tape in over a decade, but I wouldn't be surprised if there had been a class action lawsuit.
There actually was a successful class action lawsuit over the size of computer monitors. When describing the size of a monitor, the monitor manufacturers would describe the diagonal size of the cathode ray tube, a good inch to inch and a half of which was not usable because it was inside the frame of the monitor. The class action suit resulted, like all such suits, in some lawyers getting millions of dollars, while those of us actually affected by the wrong-doing got an insultingly small amount of money, and only if we went through some laborious process that would cost 5 or 10 or 20 times as much, given the value of our time, to actually receive. But at the least the monitor makers stopped this particular instance of lying.
Actually, this one is easy to explain.
Technically, a kilobyte is 1024 bytes (i.e., 2 to the tenth power), which of course is close to 1000 and of course "kilo-" means 1000. But we computer types always like to count by 2's and powers of 2. 1024 makes much more sense to a computer. It's really a coincidence that the
numbers work out like this.
Similarly megabytes really means 220 bytes or 1,048,576 bytes, but of course it's much easier to say it's a million bytes.
A gigabyte is really 1,073,741,824 bytes, although we humans (and especially lower life forms like marketing types) like to think it's a billion bytes.
So when your harddrive claims to be 200GB but your computer only reports it as 186GB, they are both correct. The marketing people just take the version of "gigabyte" that is most convenient for their purposes, whereas your computer uses the "correct" definition from a computer science point of view. The computer science gigabyte is 7% bigger, which explains the discrepancy. Of course, if your hard drive claims to provide 200GB of storage, you can rest assured that you are getting 200,000,000,000 bytes (give or take, formatting the disk takes up some of the space). Of course, since the price per byte for harddrives has dropped by a factor of about 20,000 since I bought my first harddrive in 1989, I'm not too worried either way.
There have been two proposals to fix this confusion:
1. The first proposal is that we use a different prefix when referring to the "computer science" versions of kilobyte, megabyte, etc, since "kilo-" is universally accepted to mean "one thousand", "mega-" universally means "one million". The idea proposed is to contract the word "binary byte" with the Systeme Internationale numerical prefix, so that 1024 bytes is "KIlo BInary BYTES" or "kibibytes". This also gives us "mebibytes", "gibibytes", etc. This has not caught on for two reasons: First, it is hopelessly pedantic, and second, it makes the speaker sound like he has some kind of speech impediment.
2. The second proposal is something I am making at this moment. A very dangerous plague that affects many parts of the world, especially third world countries, is that of land mines. There are millions of land mines around the world just waiting for some innocent person, years or even decades after the war in which the mines were used, to walk across it and lose a limb or even his life. I propose that we create an international task force for defusing all land mines and that they can be very effective by employing a very long stick with a marketing person tied to the end. If you are one of those people who claim (as I actually do) to hold human life precious, you can at least take the less satisfying alternative of mocking marketing types whenever possible, or at least buying a Dilbert book where it is already done for your convenience.
If you feel ripped off by the marketing legalese that gives you 7% less disk space than you think you are getting, be glad you weren't buying backup tapes in the early 90's. I didn't discover until too late when they described the capacity of a backup tape, they would assume a compression ratio of 2:1, meaning when they claimed the tape stored 120MB, that meant it really stored 60MB, and they "assumed" that you would use compression. Needless to say, this was much more dishonest that the "gigabyte" controversy described above, especially given the fact that the stuff I was backing up was usually compressed to begin with. I don't know if they do that any more since I haven't bought a backup tape in over a decade, but I wouldn't be surprised if there had been a class action lawsuit.
There actually was a successful class action lawsuit over the size of computer monitors. When describing the size of a monitor, the monitor manufacturers would describe the diagonal size of the cathode ray tube, a good inch to inch and a half of which was not usable because it was inside the frame of the monitor. The class action suit resulted, like all such suits, in some lawyers getting millions of dollars, while those of us actually affected by the wrong-doing got an insultingly small amount of money, and only if we went through some laborious process that would cost 5 or 10 or 20 times as much, given the value of our time, to actually receive. But at the least the monitor makers stopped this particular instance of lying.
Thursday, October 19, 2006
Thoughts Before and After the Election
This was written on October 19, but I never got around to finishing it.
----
I read a while back that in 1960, President Nixon was well aware that alleged vote fraud by the Democrats in Chicago helped Kennedy win the election. Nixon supposedly chose not to challenge the election because he didn't want to call into question the U.S. system of elections. Now this story may or may not be true, but I do believe that this kind of thing would have happened 40 or 50 years ago.
Nowadays, I wouldn't believe it for a minute. While the controversy in the 2000 Presidential Election took well over a month to resolve, with an army of lawyers and endless discussions of the absurdities of punch-card technology, the election was finally settled, and I believe the Rule of Law was upheld, even if in this case, the law was a poorly-thought-out law made by lazy state legislatures who obviously had never considered what would happen in the case of a close election. Of course, it's a given that the Democrats would bring race into the issue, but the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that while there was widespread incompetence, there was no deliberate voter disenfranchisement, yet another affirmation of the old adage, "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence."
In 2004, the Democrats again called into question the integrity of the election system when Ohio, whose electoral votes put President Bush over the top, ended up being a close vote. Of course, there were other states where the vote was significantly closer, but of course they wouldn't have changed the election, so, I suppose, it didn't matter whether there were voting irregularities or not.
----
So now it's past the election and while I can't say I'm happy the Democrats won, I also can't say I'm sad the Republicans lost. Really, the choice it between the party that has 4 bullets in gun pointed at my head vs. the party that has 5 bullets in their gun pointed at my head.
Time to spin the cylinder...
The original piece was supposed to be about Electronic Voting and how flawed and unaccountable it is, something which has been covered in painful detail by people more devoted to the issue than I. My real fear this time around was that some party was going to once again question the legitimacy of the election, which is always damaging, except that this time they would have a good reason. However, I suppose the Democrats aren't going to complain because they won and Republicans aren't going to complain because even they have to admit they deserved to lose. Of course, the issue isn't going away, and if the 2008 Presidential election is again close, we will once again be forced to look at a system that probably isn't more accurate than the typical margin for error for any poll, which is plus or minus 3 points.
In Virginia we use optically-scanned ballots in which you fill in your choices with a black marker. The ballots are roughtly the size of a letter-sized piece of paper, which gives plenty of room to lay out the candidates in a non-cluttered way (none of that "butterfly" nonsense), and to include the entire wording of constitutional amendments, bond referenda or anything else we voters might be called upon to decide. After filling in the little dots, the voter feeds the ballot into a small machine which stores them. Afterwards they can be counted with optical-scanning technology that has been used and relied upon for many decades.
I think this is the most obvious solution as it allows for all the advantages of electronic voting, but there's always a hard copy of the vote to fall back on. Once you've got something in place to help the blind or otherwise disabled who cannot fill out the paper ballot, you have, what I think is a good solution, and I cannot imagine that this technology costs anywhere near as much as those hare-brained Diebold machines that can be hacked 7 ways to Sunday.
The biggest irony of this is that Diebold already manufactures machines that handle electronic transactions and record-keeping in a way that no one seems to have a problem with. They are called Automatic Teller Machines, and you can bet that if there were some question of ATMs being hackable or insecure, it would be big news, because unlike votes, which apparently have little value to most people, we're talking money here, and we all know that's what really runs the show.
Nevertheless, I am happy and relieved that our Great American System survived the election without any serious problems so our legislators can get back to squandering our money, security and future. After all, selling out the U.S. is going to remain a full-time job for quite a few years.
----
I read a while back that in 1960, President Nixon was well aware that alleged vote fraud by the Democrats in Chicago helped Kennedy win the election. Nixon supposedly chose not to challenge the election because he didn't want to call into question the U.S. system of elections. Now this story may or may not be true, but I do believe that this kind of thing would have happened 40 or 50 years ago.
Nowadays, I wouldn't believe it for a minute. While the controversy in the 2000 Presidential Election took well over a month to resolve, with an army of lawyers and endless discussions of the absurdities of punch-card technology, the election was finally settled, and I believe the Rule of Law was upheld, even if in this case, the law was a poorly-thought-out law made by lazy state legislatures who obviously had never considered what would happen in the case of a close election. Of course, it's a given that the Democrats would bring race into the issue, but the U.S. Commission on Civil Rights concluded that while there was widespread incompetence, there was no deliberate voter disenfranchisement, yet another affirmation of the old adage, "Never attribute to malice what can adequately be explained by incompetence."
In 2004, the Democrats again called into question the integrity of the election system when Ohio, whose electoral votes put President Bush over the top, ended up being a close vote. Of course, there were other states where the vote was significantly closer, but of course they wouldn't have changed the election, so, I suppose, it didn't matter whether there were voting irregularities or not.
----
So now it's past the election and while I can't say I'm happy the Democrats won, I also can't say I'm sad the Republicans lost. Really, the choice it between the party that has 4 bullets in gun pointed at my head vs. the party that has 5 bullets in their gun pointed at my head.
Time to spin the cylinder...
The original piece was supposed to be about Electronic Voting and how flawed and unaccountable it is, something which has been covered in painful detail by people more devoted to the issue than I. My real fear this time around was that some party was going to once again question the legitimacy of the election, which is always damaging, except that this time they would have a good reason. However, I suppose the Democrats aren't going to complain because they won and Republicans aren't going to complain because even they have to admit they deserved to lose. Of course, the issue isn't going away, and if the 2008 Presidential election is again close, we will once again be forced to look at a system that probably isn't more accurate than the typical margin for error for any poll, which is plus or minus 3 points.
In Virginia we use optically-scanned ballots in which you fill in your choices with a black marker. The ballots are roughtly the size of a letter-sized piece of paper, which gives plenty of room to lay out the candidates in a non-cluttered way (none of that "butterfly" nonsense), and to include the entire wording of constitutional amendments, bond referenda or anything else we voters might be called upon to decide. After filling in the little dots, the voter feeds the ballot into a small machine which stores them. Afterwards they can be counted with optical-scanning technology that has been used and relied upon for many decades.
I think this is the most obvious solution as it allows for all the advantages of electronic voting, but there's always a hard copy of the vote to fall back on. Once you've got something in place to help the blind or otherwise disabled who cannot fill out the paper ballot, you have, what I think is a good solution, and I cannot imagine that this technology costs anywhere near as much as those hare-brained Diebold machines that can be hacked 7 ways to Sunday.
The biggest irony of this is that Diebold already manufactures machines that handle electronic transactions and record-keeping in a way that no one seems to have a problem with. They are called Automatic Teller Machines, and you can bet that if there were some question of ATMs being hackable or insecure, it would be big news, because unlike votes, which apparently have little value to most people, we're talking money here, and we all know that's what really runs the show.
Nevertheless, I am happy and relieved that our Great American System survived the election without any serious problems so our legislators can get back to squandering our money, security and future. After all, selling out the U.S. is going to remain a full-time job for quite a few years.
The Secretary of Commerce on Immigration
This is something I wrote on July 10, 2006.
----
So, I'm riding into work, and when Imus isn't interviewing someone interesting, I usually listen to C-Span. This morning they had
Secretary of Commerce Gutierrez talking about immigration reform and after listening to him I am totally disgusted.
Mostly, he spoke in vague generalities, dodged practically every question and all but said that they weren't going to do anything about the immigration problem. I never heard so many straw-man arguments in a row in my life.
Among his points:
1. The government needs to make it easier for businesses to "enforce the law". He repeated that phrase in the context of "businesses" more than once. How blatant can you be? Here's a Bush representative openly abdicating on law enforcement with respect to immigration. I thought that was his job. Thanks a lot.
2. He claimed that the new biometric cards that are supposed to replace the many different legal forms of identification would be "unforgeable". I give them 10 years to get this in place, if ever, and counterfeit cards will be out in a month. There's too much money involved for it not to be.
3. He admitted that most immigrants are poorly educated, low-wage earners that wouldn't contribute to the government as much as they would consume, but if we let millions more of these folks in, through the "magic" (his word) of the American Melting Pot, they and their kids would become contributing members of society. No doubt this is true for many people, but when you are invoking "magic" to sell your point, you are looking pretty weak, regardless of what you are arguing.
4. He had no specific proposals and only insisted that Congress has to come up with something good. He kept insisting that everyone who thinks the administration is not addressing this correctly is wrong, but didn't really explain why. He insisted multiple times that while the Administration hasn't enforced existing laws, they would enforce the new ones, if they were "workable".
5. He invoked "Jobs Americans won't do", which is the worst straw man argument of all. First off, the vast majority of "jobs Americans won't do" are being done by legal Americans. Second, of course the illegals are going to have an upper hand. Employers don't have to pay taxes, they can skirt OSHA and other regulations, they don't have to worry about Labor laws (how many times do you hear about garment sweatshops being busted up in California)... of course Americans aren't going to want to do the job and employers can undercut them by 50% and lost very little because everything's off the books.
While I generally support the President's foreign policies (even though the "war" isn't being run very well), I can't think of one thing that Republicans have done domestically besides the tax cut (which made their grotesque overspending 10 times worse) that is positive. To make things worse, the Supreme Court, including the guys I support, have basically said it's OK to ignore the "exclusionary rule" for evidence if the crime is serious enough (i.e., "terror"-related), once again throwing Rule of Law in the toilet, which is about the only thing definitive the U.S. Government has achieved in the past 15 years.
----
So, I'm riding into work, and when Imus isn't interviewing someone interesting, I usually listen to C-Span. This morning they had
Secretary of Commerce Gutierrez talking about immigration reform and after listening to him I am totally disgusted.
Mostly, he spoke in vague generalities, dodged practically every question and all but said that they weren't going to do anything about the immigration problem. I never heard so many straw-man arguments in a row in my life.
Among his points:
1. The government needs to make it easier for businesses to "enforce the law". He repeated that phrase in the context of "businesses" more than once. How blatant can you be? Here's a Bush representative openly abdicating on law enforcement with respect to immigration. I thought that was his job. Thanks a lot.
2. He claimed that the new biometric cards that are supposed to replace the many different legal forms of identification would be "unforgeable". I give them 10 years to get this in place, if ever, and counterfeit cards will be out in a month. There's too much money involved for it not to be.
3. He admitted that most immigrants are poorly educated, low-wage earners that wouldn't contribute to the government as much as they would consume, but if we let millions more of these folks in, through the "magic" (his word) of the American Melting Pot, they and their kids would become contributing members of society. No doubt this is true for many people, but when you are invoking "magic" to sell your point, you are looking pretty weak, regardless of what you are arguing.
4. He had no specific proposals and only insisted that Congress has to come up with something good. He kept insisting that everyone who thinks the administration is not addressing this correctly is wrong, but didn't really explain why. He insisted multiple times that while the Administration hasn't enforced existing laws, they would enforce the new ones, if they were "workable".
5. He invoked "Jobs Americans won't do", which is the worst straw man argument of all. First off, the vast majority of "jobs Americans won't do" are being done by legal Americans. Second, of course the illegals are going to have an upper hand. Employers don't have to pay taxes, they can skirt OSHA and other regulations, they don't have to worry about Labor laws (how many times do you hear about garment sweatshops being busted up in California)... of course Americans aren't going to want to do the job and employers can undercut them by 50% and lost very little because everything's off the books.
While I generally support the President's foreign policies (even though the "war" isn't being run very well), I can't think of one thing that Republicans have done domestically besides the tax cut (which made their grotesque overspending 10 times worse) that is positive. To make things worse, the Supreme Court, including the guys I support, have basically said it's OK to ignore the "exclusionary rule" for evidence if the crime is serious enough (i.e., "terror"-related), once again throwing Rule of Law in the toilet, which is about the only thing definitive the U.S. Government has achieved in the past 15 years.
Monday, October 09, 2006
A place to vent...
I decided to segregate my rantings, and that this area would be for issues of a technological (and perhaps eventually a political) nature. So, I would like to mention another location I have set up. It's called Disgruntled Catholic, and if you have any interest, I invite you to check it out. But be warned, unless you know me personally, it's almost certainly not what you are expecting.
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