Mr. Masnick's techdirt post is a welcome call for calm and even optimism. It is a reminder of the importance of perspective, the sort of wisdom encapsulated in the expression "This, too, shall pass" -- that is, just as most joy and glory is transient, so will the troubles and woes of today eventually vanish.
That said, his post is revealingly presumptuous. He writes about people trying to "hold back progress" and describes his frustration at not being able to convince them "of just what opportunities moving forward provides." But perhaps the reason he is so frustrated is that he misses a basic truth: that the people he describes aren't actually seeking to "hold back progress" -- they just have a different understanding of what is progress and what isn't, of what counts as "moving forward" and what doesn't. People do not agree on what is in the public interest; they do not agree about what is best for society, for the state, for the family.
Persuading those who disagree with you is not always a matter of marshalling facts or, as Mr. Masnick puts it, "clearly paint[ing] a picture." Often the people who disagree with you already understand the facts full well and already see the picture clearly -- they just disagree about whether what you call progress is indeed progress. This disagreement might well be rooted in a vision of the future that is fundamentally in conflict with your own. (See, for example, Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions and Yuval Levin's Imagining the Future.)
This, incidentally, is why the book that Mr. Masnick approvingly cites, Robert Friedel's excellent A Culture of Improvement, deliberately eschews the term "progress". You might think human cloning or nuclear weapons or Windows Vista are all examples of unambiguous progress; your neighbor might well disagree.
"[W]hy are programs so buggy? A general answer has already been given:
because it is human nature to push until we get into trouble -- and then blame
our tools. We load the elephant with feathers until the elephant collapses,
whereupon we conclude that feathers are too heavy for elephants. No matter how
amenable software is to our efforts, it can overwhelm us if we pile the code
high enough -- and we often do, because it's so fatally easy. But the special
reason for software's bugginess is that we almost never demand that it be
bug-free (I use "demand" here in the economist's sense: not just desire, but
desire backed up by ability and readiness to pay).
"Software manufacturers are rational economic actors; if they can sell us
software without going to the expense of thoroughly debugging it, they will. The
copy of Microsoft Word that occasionally drives me crazy cost around $200; if
Microsoft had been forced to debug it thoroughly before releasing it, its price
would be closer to $2,000. Would I pay that much for a version that I could be
sure would never crash at a critical moment, losing hours or days of my work?
Probably not; apparently, I don't value my sanity that highly. I am neither
blaming anyone nor apologizing for anything; I am simply reporting Microsoft's
behavior and mine, in the belief that they are typical of just about all
software developers and computer users. In a word, we have buggy software
because we consumers won't pay what effectively bug-free software would cost.
"The reasons why software is almost always buggy are not inherent in the
technology and thus inevitable, but spring from human choices and practices that
we can understand and could change if there were a compelling reason to do so.
Those habits include piling the code on until it overwhelms us, and taking our
chances with buggy software in order to get it more cheaply. Both problems could
be overcome if we wanted to overcome them badly enough."
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
on
Geek Charities?
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The think tank I started in 1999, the Center for the Study of Technology and Society, is a nonprofit organization that accepts charitable donations. We're a nonpartisan group that studies the social implications of advancing technology.
We are still getting on our feet, so you can be sure that any donation you send our way, no matter how small, will mean a great deal to us.
There is a new special focus page dedicated to Internet Voting on my organization's Web site, with some background, the pros and cons, and an extensive archive of linked articles:
Also, I have created a sort of "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" game on my personal Web site that lets users explore the possibilities for what will happen next to resolve this year's election -- including a decision in the House of Representatives, and "faithless" electors in the Electoral College.
As I already mentioned over on Cluebot, I think many people are reading too much into Bush's statement. I do not think he was criticizing the Internet, and certainly not all that severely.
In fact, when you actually look at the record of the debates so far, it's interesting to notice the other times the word "Internet" has been uttered.
In the first debate (3 Oct 00), the word "Internet" was used three times, all by Governor Bush:
"Look. [Al Gore] is a man who's got great numbers. He talks about numbers. I'm beginning to think not only did he invent the Internet but he invented the calculator."
"Testing is the cornerstone of [educational] reform... and we ask them to post the results on the Internet." (Does he mean "we will" ask them? I'm unsure.)
"I believe there needs to be instant disclosure [of campaign contributions] on the Internet as to who is giving to whom."
And that's it! Neither of the vice presidential candidates mentioned the word "Internet" in their debate, and in Wednesday night's debate, the word "Internet" was only used in the instance which inspired (if that is the right word for Katz's repetitious drumming) this discussion.
So in all, four mentions of the Internet, all by Gov. Bush: once in a joke, once in a cultural criticism, and twice in useful applications of information technology.
By the way, please notice that the New Scientist article this whole discussion is about is more than a year old - it is dated 10 April 1999 - and a great deal more research has been done on this topic in the intervening months.
Judge Kaplan argued that computer code is "a matter of First Amendment concern. But computer code is not purely expressive." He goes further: "society must be able to regulate the use and dissemination of code in appropriate circumstances."
In other words, computer code is more than just speech, and as the courts have ruled since 1968, when laws "are limited to the noncommunicative aspect" of some form of conduct, they do not violate First Amendment protections.
This is a theme explored somewhat in a recent article in Salon (for which Mr. Garbus was interviewed, incidentally):
"...
there is still no formalized legal definition for software. Is it a product subject to the same Uniform Commercial Code that would hold Maytag responsible if a washing machine electrocuted its user? Or because it can be repeatedly upgraded and changed, is it more like an ISP -- a service that's governed by the terms of a contract between its operator and user? Or is it speech, worthy of protection for its contribution to "an open exchange of ideas?" No single statute or decision spells this out."
While code certainly has an aspect that could be deemed speech worthy of protection (as Professor Touretsky movingly testified), it has nonexpressive aspects as well. That seems to be at the heart of Judge Kaplan's decision, and you will have to work hard to get around that on appeal.
Hence my questions to you:
1. What level of Constitutional protection does software or computer code deserve? Will you continue, in appeal, to take the hard line that computer code is purely speech?
2. I know this may be somewhat out of your purview as lawyers, but do you hold out any hope for legislative remedy? If so, how would you want Congress would alter the DMCA?
3. And, finally, what possible implications does Judge Kaplan's ruling have for other cases relating to the legal status of software, such as the storm brewing over business method patents on software?
You're right - the question of the completeness of this 'draft' is somewhat unclear, but the press conferences on Monday should probably make things plainer. By "complete," we can safely presume they mean Celera's technique (which involves just a single person's genome) and the HGP's technique (several people's genes) can, combined, give us a certain arbitrary amount of the genome with a certain arbitrary amount of confidence.
A the head of Celera himself said in recent Congressional testimony, "There is no example of the results of any genome sequence project being published in the scientific literature prior to meeting the established quality, order and completeness standards. It would be poor science policy and a terrible precedent for the young genomics field." (My emphasis.)
Of course, there aren't all that many published genomes altogether, are there? Those established standards for quality, order and compelteness are arbitrary, and peer review is sort of an odd process in a case that has seen so much public political ballyhooing. With the fruit fly genome, several minor errors were discovered and corrected - but remember that even very high accuracy (say, 99.5% accuracy) can mean many thousands of errors in a database this vast.
So the next few years will be spent tidying up and cleaning up the data. But the key areas will be ascertained first, and those will get the most attention. And then - even as we speak - people will be busy annotating, and trying to find correspondences between gene sequences and phenotype - that's the huge task of figuring out just what this vast porridge of G, C, A and T means.
Perhaps the company you're thinking of is "DoubleTwist," which issued inflated press releases about having "analyzed" the genome. That caught the fancy of the press; here are two articles about it:
We have a number of stories related to this topic on our Government and Politics page, including links to several other organizations studying and writing about how the Internet is changing politics: http://www.tecsoc.org/govpol/govpol.htm
Science fiction writers are so much more than mere futurologists - they are the heirs of the great ancient philosophers. In an era, like ours, when academic "philosophy" is bogged down in esoterica and arcana (and general post-modernist, post-structuralist, post-interesting cant and crapola), science fiction writers have been wrangling over the greatest eternal philosophical questions to puzzle and provoke the human mind: What would a good society be like? What about a bad society? The "perfect" society? How do we get there from here?
I'm kind of spooked that governments are paying attention to sf. Not that I think Asimovian psychohistorical prediction and control is possible - I am quite certain it is wholly impossible - but I think there are many ideas and tools in science fiction that governments might use inappropriately.
But, then, that's just an anti-government reflex, I suppose. I'm glad that people making decisions are recogizing science fiction as the hotbed of innovation and insight its fans have long recognized it as.
That's an interesting point. I still disagree, because I believe most of the things you mentioned (such as computer science and distributed computing) actually belong in the technology category, not the science category. I personally use the term science to mean pure science. I suppose that's where our difference lies.
I quite agree with the AC who also responded to your fascinating tirade; you really believe that you can squeeze a legitimate philosophical argument out of a dry sponge merely twisting words around.
Take this, for instance: "... people living within the borders of These United States live not in a democracy, but in a republic, where the rights of the minority are supposed to be protected."
That is, of course, an overly simplistic understanding of political philosophy. A republican form of government does not protect the rights of a minority any differently than a democracy - both can preserve or harm rights. However, a republican form of government better permits the political expression of the interests of a minority than a pure democracy, which could suffer from a "tyranny of the majority."
And yet your dabbling in political philosophy seems to have given you no understanding of basic social contract theory. And let me assure you, the "dead white men" who founded the United States used the word "society" far more often than the goofy terminology you think they intended: "a dynamic, evolving conversation." Puuuh-lease! That's what happens around a dinner table.
You're right, there are clashes between minorities and majorities. And the interests of individuals and societies are sometimes at odds (as in the case of paying taxes). But to say things like "technocrats" somehow "define" what you call "collectives" (including the term "society") runs counter to historical evidence and all common sense.
I think you're waaaaaay overly-optimistic on a number of your suggestions, particularly with your imagined timeline ("Just a couple of hundred years or so at this rate"). Still it was extremely interesting, thanks.
The best part of your commentary was this:
"The internet will evolve from being a global suppository of all human knowledge into actually being humanity."
Heavens, I hope you meant "repository " instead of "suppository "!
Yes, but all of those sciences existed before the Internet's invention, and long before its popularization. The Net certainly provides interesting examples and helps further research along by smoothing over the obstacles to communicating scientific ideas - but it is fallacious to argue that technologies necessarily inspire scientific progress.
A. Keiper
Slashdot Mirror
Exactly right.
Mr. Masnick's techdirt post is a welcome call for calm and even optimism. It is a reminder of the importance of perspective, the sort of wisdom encapsulated in the expression "This, too, shall pass" -- that is, just as most joy and glory is transient, so will the troubles and woes of today eventually vanish.
That said, his post is revealingly presumptuous. He writes about people trying to "hold back progress" and describes his frustration at not being able to convince them "of just what opportunities moving forward provides." But perhaps the reason he is so frustrated is that he misses a basic truth: that the people he describes aren't actually seeking to "hold back progress" -- they just have a different understanding of what is progress and what isn't, of what counts as "moving forward" and what doesn't. People do not agree on what is in the public interest; they do not agree about what is best for society, for the state, for the family.
Persuading those who disagree with you is not always a matter of marshalling facts or, as Mr. Masnick puts it, "clearly paint[ing] a picture." Often the people who disagree with you already understand the facts full well and already see the picture clearly -- they just disagree about whether what you call progress is indeed progress. This disagreement might well be rooted in a vision of the future that is fundamentally in conflict with your own. (See, for example, Thomas Sowell's A Conflict of Visions and Yuval Levin's Imagining the Future .)
This, incidentally, is why the book that Mr. Masnick approvingly cites, Robert Friedel's excellent A Culture of Improvement, deliberately eschews the term "progress". You might think human cloning or nuclear weapons or Windows Vista are all examples of unambiguous progress; your neighbor might well disagree.
"[W]hy are programs so buggy? A general answer has already been given: because it is human nature to push until we get into trouble -- and then blame our tools. We load the elephant with feathers until the elephant collapses, whereupon we conclude that feathers are too heavy for elephants. No matter how amenable software is to our efforts, it can overwhelm us if we pile the code high enough -- and we often do, because it's so fatally easy. But the special reason for software's bugginess is that we almost never demand that it be bug-free (I use "demand" here in the economist's sense: not just desire, but desire backed up by ability and readiness to pay).
"Software manufacturers are rational economic actors; if they can sell us software without going to the expense of thoroughly debugging it, they will. The copy of Microsoft Word that occasionally drives me crazy cost around $200; if Microsoft had been forced to debug it thoroughly before releasing it, its price would be closer to $2,000. Would I pay that much for a version that I could be sure would never crash at a critical moment, losing hours or days of my work? Probably not; apparently, I don't value my sanity that highly. I am neither blaming anyone nor apologizing for anything; I am simply reporting Microsoft's behavior and mine, in the belief that they are typical of just about all software developers and computer users. In a word, we have buggy software because we consumers won't pay what effectively bug-free software would cost.
"The reasons why software is almost always buggy are not inherent in the technology and thus inevitable, but spring from human choices and practices that we can understand and could change if there were a compelling reason to do so. Those habits include piling the code on until it overwhelms us, and taking our chances with buggy software in order to get it more cheaply. Both problems could be overcome if we wanted to overcome them badly enough."
[Mark Halpern, "Buggy Software and Missile Defense," The New Atlantis, Number 10, Fall 2005, pp. 47-57.]
A. Keiper
We are still getting on our feet, so you can be sure that any donation you send our way, no matter how small, will mean a great deal to us.
You can check out our Web page here: http://www.tecsoc.org .
If you are interested in helping our organization, or if you just want more information, please feel free to drop me a line at adam@tecsoc.org.
Thanks for your time, and for the many kind messages we've received from Slashdot visitors in the past year.
Yours,
Adam Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
http://www.tecsoc.org/govpol/focus net vote.htm
Also, I have created a sort of "Choose-Your-Own-Adventure" game on my personal Web site that lets users explore the possibilities for what will happen next to resolve this year's election -- including a decision in the House of Representatives, and "faithless" electors in the Electoral College.
http://ortelius.cartographe r.c om/elect2000/elect.htm
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
http://www.tecsoc.org/persec/webwatch/echelon.htm
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
A. Keiper
In fact, when you actually look at the record of the debates so far, it's interesting to notice the other times the word "Internet" has been uttered.
In the first debate (3 Oct 00), the word "Internet" was used three times, all by Governor Bush:
And that's it! Neither of the vice presidential candidates mentioned the word "Internet" in their debate, and in Wednesday night's debate, the word "Internet" was only used in the instance which inspired (if that is the right word for Katz's repetitious drumming) this discussion.
So in all, four mentions of the Internet, all by Gov. Bush: once in a joke, once in a cultural criticism, and twice in useful applications of information technology.
Yours,
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
Yours,
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
http://www.tecsoc.org/persec/persec.htm#cell
http://www.tecsoc.org/persec/archivepersec.htm#9
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
- A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
Judge Kaplan argued that computer code is "a matter of First Amendment concern. But computer code is not purely expressive." He goes further: "society must be able to regulate the use and dissemination of code in appropriate circumstances."
In other words, computer code is more than just speech, and as the courts have ruled since 1968, when laws "are limited to the noncommunicative aspect" of some form of conduct, they do not violate First Amendment protections.
This is a theme explored somewhat in a recent article in Salon (for which Mr. Garbus was interviewed, incidentally):
While code certainly has an aspect that could be deemed speech worthy of protection (as Professor Touretsky movingly testified), it has nonexpressive aspects as well. That seems to be at the heart of Judge Kaplan's decision, and you will have to work hard to get around that on appeal.
Hence my questions to you:
1. What level of Constitutional protection does software or computer code deserve? Will you continue, in appeal, to take the hard line that computer code is purely speech?
2. I know this may be somewhat out of your purview as lawyers, but do you hold out any hope for legislative remedy? If so, how would you want Congress would alter the DMCA?
3. And, finally, what possible implications does Judge Kaplan's ruling have for other cases relating to the legal status of software, such as the storm brewing over business method patents on software?
Thanks for your time.
Yours,
Adam Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
A the head of Celera himself said in recent Congressional testimony, "There is no example of the results of any genome sequence project being published in the scientific literature prior to meeting the established quality, order and completeness standards. It would be poor science policy and a terrible precedent for the young genomics field." (My emphasis.)
Of course, there aren't all that many published genomes altogether, are there? Those established standards for quality, order and compelteness are arbitrary, and peer review is sort of an odd process in a case that has seen so much public political ballyhooing. With the fruit fly genome, several minor errors were discovered and corrected - but remember that even very high accuracy (say, 99.5% accuracy) can mean many thousands of errors in a database this vast.
So the next few years will be spent tidying up and cleaning up the data. But the key areas will be ascertained first, and those will get the most attention. And then - even as we speak - people will be busy annotating, and trying to find correspondences between gene sequences and phenotype - that's the huge task of figuring out just what this vast porridge of G, C, A and T means.
For more, see our Biotech page.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
Genome 'Dark Horse' Comes to the Fore (BBC, 8 May 00)
Dot-Comming the Genome Race Wired, 8 May 00
For more, you can see our Biotech page.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
http://www.tecsoc.org/govpol/govpol.htm
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
I'm kind of spooked that governments are paying attention to sf. Not that I think Asimovian psychohistorical prediction and control is possible - I am quite certain it is wholly impossible - but I think there are many ideas and tools in science fiction that governments might use inappropriately.
But, then, that's just an anti-government reflex, I suppose. I'm glad that people making decisions are recogizing science fiction as the hotbed of innovation and insight its fans have long recognized it as.
A. Keiper
The Center for the Study of Technology and Society
Washington, D.C.
A. Keiper
A. Keiper
Take this, for instance: "... people living within the borders of These United States live not in a democracy, but in a republic, where the rights of the minority are supposed to be protected."
That is, of course, an overly simplistic understanding of political philosophy. A republican form of government does not protect the rights of a minority any differently than a democracy - both can preserve or harm rights. However, a republican form of government better permits the political expression of the interests of a minority than a pure democracy, which could suffer from a "tyranny of the majority."
And yet your dabbling in political philosophy seems to have given you no understanding of basic social contract theory. And let me assure you, the "dead white men" who founded the United States used the word "society" far more often than the goofy terminology you think they intended: "a dynamic, evolving conversation." Puuuh-lease! That's what happens around a dinner table.
You're right, there are clashes between minorities and majorities. And the interests of individuals and societies are sometimes at odds (as in the case of paying taxes). But to say things like "technocrats" somehow "define" what you call "collectives" (including the term "society") runs counter to historical evidence and all common sense.
A. Keiper
The best part of your commentary was this:
"The internet will evolve from being a global suppository of all human knowledge into actually being humanity."
Heavens, I hope you meant " repository " instead of " suppository "!
A. Keiper
Yes, but all of those sciences existed before the Internet's invention, and long before its popularization. The Net certainly provides interesting examples and helps further research along by smoothing over the obstacles to communicating scientific ideas - but it is fallacious to argue that technologies necessarily inspire scientific progress. A. Keiper
A. Keiper