Web 2.0 offers NOTHING but a high-latency compatibility minefield
I appreciate the sentiment. There's lots of poorly or foolishly applied Javascript out there. And I assume you are engaging in hyperbole when you say "NOTHING." But I am convinced of the potential of judiciously applied Javascript.
I created Marginalia, an annotation extension for Moodle. It allows users to highlight passages of text and write notes in the margin. It has won rave reviews from many instructors and students. This is simply not possible without Javascript: it's supplementing the display of structured text, maintaining the benefits of HTML (compared to the opacity of an embedded applet, Flash, or what have you).
Oops. I those equal signs lost their angle brackets. I didn't notice they needed to be escaped in t post title. I meant to say expression => identity, speech => truth.
Speech and expression are not the same thing. Speech is a kind of expression, but not all expression is speech. Though the definition of "speech" has been broadly interpreted by U.S. courts to include many forms of expression.
However, there is still a substantial difference in emphasis. Speech is primarily understood in terms of communicating ideas. The tradition of free speech is tied to the Enlightenment conception of rational political discourse, according to which reasoned argument between informed individuals can rise above their particular interests to arrive at universal truths and a consensus about the public good.
Expression encompasses ideas, but it is also closely associated with individual feelings and identity. It is not focused on truth, implying a more relative understanding of individual experience in the tradition of the romantics. Furthermore, it does not suggest a separation of form from content. The form, in many cases, is the expression.
I think this is a fundamental difference. Take the idea/content distinction in copyright, for example. This makes pretty good sense when dealing written political argument (and copyright was designed for written texts). It breaks down when applied more broadly to expression, in which the form becomes inseparable from content which is not really "ideas." How do we separate the idea of a song from the form of the music?
You talk about communicating a "message." In reality, decades of research have found that communication is not so straightforward: expression is always interpreted by the audience, often in ways that the originator did not intend. This ability to interpret and make one's own meanings is also an important freedom of communication.
I am not a lawyer. Courts define terms in their own ways that may or may not connect to common understandings or empirical evidence. However, as a scholar of communication I find that expression is closer to how people actually communicate, debate, and engage in public life than is rational ideal on which the concept of free speech is based.
Corporations have been considered to be people since the 14th ammendment passed
Not quite. And the Wikipedia article glosses over what really happened, implying that personhood was granted by a court ruling. It wasn't. The 14th amendment was not initially interpreted as granting personhood to corporations. The decisive precedent was set in 1886 - by a court reporter (!), not a judicial decision. See Douglas Rushkoff's Life Inc., pp. 13-14:
. . in 1886, in a legal maneuver that has yet to be conclusively explained, a Supreme Court clerk with documented affinity for corporate interests incorrectly summarized an opinion in the headnotes of the decision on Santa Clara County v. Southern Pacific Railroad Company. The clerk wrote, "The defendant corporations are persons within the intent of the clause in section 1 of the Fourtheenth Amendment to the Constitution . . . which forbids a State to deny any person within its jurisdiction the equal protection of the laws." There was no legal basis for this statement, nor any discussion about it from the justices. From then on, however, corporations were free to claim the rights of personhood. The more precedents that were established, the more embedded the law became. Over the next twenty-five years, 307 Fourteenth Amendment cases went before the Supreme Court. Two hundred eighty-eight of them were brought by corporations claiming their rights an natural persons.
Here are more details about the incident - along with optimism that the courts were chipping away at corporate personhood. That was 2003. Since then as we know the supreme court has confirmed the rights of corporations as persons. I can't think of a better example of the distinction between morality and the law (well, apart from the appalling travesty of Dred Scott, which has a certain malevolent symmetry to this).
In reality, the government has much better tools it could re-purpose to stifle dissent.
Your argument has nothing to do with mine. I said nothing about government stifling dissent. The possibility had not even crossed my mind. You say that as though the mere fact that government does not stifle dissent does not magically produce democracy. It just ain't so.
You are focusing on controversial speech and dissent. This is a grave error. If you look at the formation of consensus and uncontroversial speech it is very clear how copyright can concentrate communicative and political power.
Democracy is founded on speech and expression, as I outlined. It is the positive consequence of political speech and participation. People actually need to be informed, to engage each other in discourse, to form opinions, to gather information, and to express their interests. (Nor is this an exclusive list - they also need to form identities, work together in communities and so on.) There has been a lot of work in this area in fields ranging from political science to cultural studies. See for example the work of Jürgen Harbemas, for example, who revived the concept of the public sphere.
To the extent that citizens are restricted or hindered in their attempts to take part in democratic discourse, democracy is limited. Exclusion from cultural discourse has similar effects. When this is the outcome, it does not matter whether it is because of direct or indirect intervention from government or private actors. With copyright we have an institution that is can obviously limit the engagement of citizens in the activities that produce a democratic society. An argument can be made for a given copyright regime the benefits (including informing the populace and creating spaces for discourse and deliberation) exceed the harms. Regardless of the net effect, it does not erase the the conflict between promoting discourse on the one hand and limiting it on the other.
You may be right about the technical meaning of "free speech" in American law. But in the broader context of what does it mean to communicate and debate in a democratic society, your description appears insular and shockingly ignorant of theoretical and empirical work about democracy and culture. The fact that courts once ruled that women were not persons did not in fact mean that women were not persons. It had legal effects, but it could not take away their personhood. Similarly, court interpretations of statutes concerning "free speech" do not define the limits of that term.
Public discourse is understood as foundational for democracy. Through speech and expression individuals express their interests in public, gather information to form opinions, sway others with argument, and form groups able to take effective political action.
The political significance of speech does not depend on it being original, unpopular or offensive. The opposite is true: it is when speech is popular - when it is disseminated and copied - that it becomes politically powerful. The unpopular words of one man don't matter. The same words uttered by many do. Classic examples include slogans like "no taxation without representation," iconic symbols like the peace sign, pamphlets like "Common Sense." Recall the scene in Casablanca in which the French stand up and sing La Marseillaise. It is not the words themselves that matter, or the fact that someone sings them: the whole point is that a whole people rise up and sing the same thing.
The idea/expression dichotomy is held up as defense. But it is flawed. It assumes that an expression expresses single idea (or set of ideas), and that each idea can be expressed in multiple ways. Casablanca illustrates the problem with this. The meaning of that song in that bar with the Nazi officers is not the *words* of the song. The meaning is the act itself, of singing in the face of the Nazis. The meaning is very different from the anthem sung on Armistice Day (the French equivalent of Remembrance Day). The same expression can be used to express original meanings. Furthermore, this particular expression is not substitutable. A bar full of French saying "we reject the Nazis" would seem pathetic, not powerful. Finally, this is a political - and democratic! - expression founded not on reason, but on emotion.
To the extent that copyright limits the dissemination of expression that can be used or repurposed with democratic or political significance, it impedes the free ability of citizens to speak and participate in democracy. The law may say that's not "freedom of speech" if it likes. It does not make it so.
Here is the scene in Casablanca. I am using it to make a political point. And copyright most definitely can stop me.
Would you say to meteorologist that 9 out of 10 of hurricanes like this one were destructive, "That's meaningless unless it's 19 out of 20"?
The threshold for statistical significance is an arbitrary convention, not some ironclad law that lets you ignore evidence. As a guideline it is more appropriate in some circumstances than in others. Something does not stop being evidence simply because it does not reach that threshold. I read scholarly papers all the time that say "while X does not achieve the threshold of significance, it is suggestive and worthy of more research." When there is other evidence to support it, such a result can be valuable. And there is such evidence: this calculation was done precisely because the election looks fishy.
You have it exactly wrong when you say "that's a large percentage of false positives for such a serious accusation." The election process is not innocent until proven guilty. We apply the presumption of innocence to human beings. An election is treated in the opposite way. It is not enough for it to be fair: it must be seen to be fair. It must be must be demonstrably legitimate. We do not let suspicious elections slide simply because the accusation is "serious." On the contrary, that is why we investigate them. This needs to be investigated precisely because of its seriousness.
People's understanding of issues is heavily determined by how they are framed. The frame sets the questions, which in turn point to the answers. Answering "Which side of the issue are you on?" means choosing one of exactly two sides.
Once an issue is politicized like this it ceases to be a question of truth and becomes a matter of identity. You may ask, "Do you believe in evolution?" But that is not the question many people will answer. What they really hear is, "Do you believe in evolution, or are a God-fearing person like us?" Then their answer is not so much a negative rejection of evolution as a positive affirmation of who they are and their membership in a community.
How did evolution become incompatible with being part of a community? This happened not by explicit argument, but by subtle framing of politics. You say that there are two sides to an issue. But that division into two is exactly the moment of politicization. Which side are you on? Are you with us or against us? Do you believe in evolution or do you believe in God?
Would you sacrifice your friends and your community and your sense of who you are in order to believe in an abstract theory that has no bearing on your day-to-day life? I think it is perfectly rational to say no regardless of the evidence. We need community to give life meaning. It's in our blood as human beings. But community life is impoverished in our lonely society. We cling to it when we find it.
Nor does this apply only to religious folk. Say you had a revelatory experience of God that showed evolution to be false. Imagine the social and personal implications of denying evolution. Would you believe, or would you imagine it was a hallucination? As an atheist, I can imagine the former would require a wrenching reconstruction of my identity and relationships to other people.
What you say is true in general: people tend to choose the evidence that suits them (though this is not symmetrical: some people, groups and arguments are more honest than others). My point, however, is that the logic you are criticizing is embedded in the very language of your post. Your acceptance that there are two sides - not one, not three - is where the slippery slope begins.
Thank you for pointing that out. Though marked -1 Troll, sopssa's posts there appear to me to be his opinions (right or wrong), honestly held and reasonably expressed: not attempts to incite trouble.
Even though this is off topic, I think it is worth mentioning. If not here, where? Moderation affects all Slashdot discussions. If too many mods forget how and why the system works, it can break down. It works reasonably well (unlike most mainstream news sites I have seen) because it focuses on the quality of discussion, not whether one agrees or disagrees. Modding down is meant as a last resort to weed out posts that harm reasoned discourse. It is not supposed to be used merely to express disagreement. It's too late to do much good, but as I seldom spend all my mod points I used some there.
At least the phone company never tried to make it so that we all had to use just their phones on their lines and it was illegal to plug anything else in to their equipment.
Thank you for the illustration. They did, and it did, and that's why we changed it. Then wonderful things happened: like modems, which led ultimately to public access to the Internet. We can change this too.
If Apple was the telephone company and it blocked the ability of Mr Fiore to communicate his satire to me, I think we would agree that (regardless of Apple's ownership of the wires) this was censorship, that it was bad, and that it should not be allowed. Indeed there are regulations to this effect.
If Microsoft implemented something in Windows that blocked my ability to view Mr Fiore's cartoons on my PC, I think we would be likely to come to the same conclusion. In this case it I own the computer; there is a strong argument to be made that I should be able to choose how to use it.
Now say I own an iPad. Mr Fiore would like to distribute his cartoons to me. Apple owns the app store, and they say No. They have implemented technical measures to prevent me from finding another way to get Mr Fiore's work onto the device I own. Furthermore, there is a law in place - the DMCA - that makes it illegal for me to work around those restrictions - even though I own the device, even though Mr Fiore would like to communicate (or sell) his work to me.
In other words, the government has already intervened in this situation. It has done so on Apple's behalf. Citizens have every right to intervene in the public interest.
As a society we use companies in the market as means to ends. We value communication; we have found the market is an effective way of enabling it. We have therefore regulated in order to create markets (through property rights, enforcement of contracts, and so on). We regulation different modes of communication in different ways. The telephone system is one example. The PC is another. Sometimes that regulation is done through government statutes, sometimes through regulatory bodies, sometimes the market is the regulating mechanism.
Your technical question of whether Apple's actions constitute a dictionary or legal definition of "censorship" ignores any ethical considerations. I think Apple's actions here are bad. I am not interested in "hating" Apple because it is a company fulfilling obligations, not a human being capable of moral choice. What I am interested in is how we can encourage and enable human speech, expression and communication. This story demonstrates a failure in this regard.
The question, then, is how to improve matters. Replacing Apple's control of the iPad with outright government control, to pick an extreme example, would likely do more harm than good. But there are other choices. One obvious response is to publicize and educate the problem, as Slashdot is doing. The government could fix the DMCA so that Apple can't use it to restrict my legitimate use of the product I own. Copyright and patent law are often used to create monopolies of distribution, to the detriment of artists and consumers: if Hollywood and the recording industry back Apple's approach, for example, we could end up with a single dominant channel of distribution. Our legislators should be concerned with this. We might also consider some kind of common carrier- or net neutrality-type regulation to ensure that channels like this are open. For example, it seems to me incredibly unreasonable that Apple gets the DMCA on side and is then able to behave like this. The law grants rights: it should also require the fulfillment responsibilities.
You are exactly right. There is a reason corporations don't get to vote. However much they like to call themselves "corporate citizens", they are not citizens. They are not human beings. They are machines we create in order to create wealth for us. (At least that's the theory.)
this is part of democracy where groups negotiate with each other to get what they want. to negotiate you have to give something up
The idea of a level democratic playing-field between citizens and non-citizens is nonsense. If I own 10 corporations should I have greater representation? This is as ridiculous as the three-fifths compromise by which slave-holdings states got additional government representation based on the number of slaves they owned. Needless to say, this representation did not reflect the interests of the slaves: just as corporate representation may not represent the interests of the human beings who make up the corporation. In both cases, institutions created by human beings (slavery, corporations) are used as an excuse to allocate undemocratic power to a few people who control them.
(This should be obvious from what I have said, but I want to be sure no-one puts words in my mouth: I am not suggesting that abuses of copyright are comparable to the horrors of slavery are comparable, no matter how illegitimate the former may be.)
I also didn't mean for there to be an 'elites vs honest' grouping. I apologize if that is how my post came across as it was not meant to.
Thank you for the cogent reply. I didn't mean to criticize you personally so much as use your post to illustrate a point.
My main concern lies with the social impacts of the technology. Apple's market power allow it to potentially determine or shape who has access to their platform for disseminating content (ugly word) and communication. For me, the great potential of digital technology and the Internet is that it makes it possible for everyone to participate in the creation of culture. Established oligopolies would rather continue with the model of television. Future innovation is likely to be new forms of communication; I want those to permit easy access and multi-way discourse rather than one-way channels for established players.
If the iPad turns out to be only one platform in vigorous competition with open systems then its being closed is a minor matter. However, computer platforms tend towards monopoly, both theoretically and empirically. We have seen this with Microsoft, Google, and so on. The time to do something about that risk is now, not when the outcome is clear - and it is too late.
Incidentally, I think the game machine argument is wrong. I recently bought a PS3 (for games - I have no interest in running Linux on it). Its biggest failing, in my opinion, is a lack of innovative games. The innovation that does happen seems to be with downloadable games rather than AAA titles on disk, and even there the variety is quite limited. I suspect this is largely due to the complexity of getting approval from Sony. The vibrancy of the iPhone game market to me is an indication that the relative openness of that platform (compared to the PS3) leads to more innovation. The reason I'm not on a PC is that I jumped ship when Microsoft introduced activation, and wouldn't want game DRM messing with my system. Which is quite ironic: the PS3 is as locked down as could be. I chose it because of something completely unrelated: it has a quiet fan.
P.S.: I was concerned about the openness of phones before the iPhone came along.
If the iPad lockdown had been the norm 20 years ago, the Web might never have been invented.
To be fair, interpreted code was added later with Javascript and CSS. If Apple permitted Web browsers, their current lockdown would have resulted in an HTML-only Web. That would be a great loss. Today, Javascript is essential for many Web applications like GMail and Flickr that are easier to use than their desktop counterparts. This was not true in its early years when Javascript complicated Web sites unnecessarily. Initial complexity followed by refinement and easy of use is not an uncommon pattern for open systems.
Apple's ban on interpreters and other languages looks like a huge gamble to me. One of the time-honored techniques of solving a problem with software is to invent a language for the general case, then use that language to implement the specific solution you need. This has been standard advice for Unix developers for decades. XSLT and Prolog, for example, are orders of magnitude more effective within their problem domains than are general purpose languages. The organic fit between object-oriented languages and GUI interfaces is another example (one that often obscures the fact that there are many problems for which OO is not the best fit). Without the ability to use the right language for the job, many programs simply wouldn't be written.
It's not just a matter for geeks either. The possibility of anyone writing HTML web pages, even though only exercised by a few, fed the Web's explosive growth and ultimately led to easy-to-use publishing software like blogs and wikis. There is no nice clean line between geeks and ordinary users. It's in that fuzzy region where the two mix that much of the most innovative work happens.
Android is more about tinkering and spec sheets and more nerdy goods. . . . It is 100% obvious that the iPad was not created for Slashdotters. It was created for Slashdotters parents, grandparents and sisters or anyone else who has come to a Slashdotter wondering why "the internet doesn't work"
It is utterly ironic that the debate about openness has been twisted into one of elites vs honest folk. These anti-elistist sentiments are so powerful they drive much of American politics and scientific backlash (e.g. creationism). Moreover, Apple - long seen as the maker of elitist products for snobbish users - has been recast as the ally of the common man (or grandmother). If I were a PR manager for Apple I could not hope to do better.
There is definitely a strong strand of elitism among technical folk, from the the old idea that users are losers to the incredible resistance to ease-of-use I remember from the 1990s ("If they can't use a command line I don't want them using my software). A lot of technology really is obtusely designed; the people who get frustrated (which is to say all of us) are not stupid. Tying the open vs closed debate to this experience of disrespect and frustration, and the wider discourse of elite domination by entities from bankers to bureaucrats, is very effective for evoking (legitimate) emotional responses, passing over the need to make thorough arguments.
Because the linkage is wrong. There is no necessary connection between something being open and it being hard to use. The iPad is easy to use and it is relatively closed. That is correlation, not causation. Apple is simply very good at designing (and marketing) the user experience. This ability seems to be rare among its competitors.
There is a historical precedent for a more open system that turned out to be easier to use than what it (partly) replaced. You allude to it in your post. The Web was a huge step up in intuitive usability compared to the desktop software that had previously performed many of its functions. It was also a huge step up in terms of capability (compare searching Wikipedia to searching Britannica). And it is open. Too open, in fact, for the iPad and its prohibitions on running interpreted code. Fortunately for today, it is already established and was granted a special exemption. If the iPad lockdown had been the norm 20 years ago, the Web might never have been invented. If lockdown is the norm in the future, the next huge improvement in usability and functionality might not happen.
I am fully confident that Apple has the talents to develop an easy-to-use and open system. (After all, my computers are Macs.) But the temptation for control is hard to resist. Especially when you can remake yourself as the computer of the people with that wonderful anti-elistism PR.
Cross-platform software toolkits have never -- ever -- produced top-notch native apps for Apple platforms. . . . I don't think iPhone OS users are going to miss the sort of apps these cross-platform toolkits produce
I can think of several top-notch cross-platform apps I use on my Mac: Firefox, Thunderbird, jEdit, GMail, Flickr and Delicious - to name a few.
Yes, I realize that Web apps are permitted on the iPhone (so long as they work with whatever features Safari chooses to implement). The point is that under these rules (including the older rule against interpreted languages) the invention of most Web technology would not have happened. The next breakthrough platform, whatever it might be, likely won't be developed for iPhone. If the industry follows Apple's lead and lock down their platforms, it might not happen at all.
Maybe Jobs is fine with that. He doesn't want Platform Next threatening his control the way the Web threatened Microsoft. Maybe he's wrong: maybe the next platform will be for gaming or something else that doesn't threaten his core business. Regardless, I wouldn't pretend for a moment this attitude is good for users.
The long-term interests of users point in another direction also. I use Thunderbird, not Mail, because it does not tie me to Mac. My deliberate choice of cross platform apps and data formats (Thunderbird, OpenOffice, jEdit) was what allowed me to jump from Windows to Mac in the first place. While many Mac-specific apps are technically very good, my decision to remain as platform agnostic as possible is what will allow me to jump away again. It is true that many users do not realize that freedom is in their long-term best interests. You may accuse me of elitism for claiming to know better. But that is exactly what Jobs is doing. He says he knows best. At least my claim does not involve forcing anyone to make my choice, or making it difficult to change their minds later.
Well, it's a treaty. All the Canadians have to do is to not sign it.
In many cases this is a myth, a nice fiction we can tell ourselves to make us feel better. Treaties can be convenient way for governments to institute unpopular measures. Here's how it works:
The government negotiates and signs the treaty. This can be done without any democratic oversight, as in the case of ACTA, because no legislation is being passed. (In some countries treaties can act as law without implementing legislation, but I'm pretty sure this is not the case in Canada.)
The government signs the treaty. Again, no legislation is passed, so the this may be done unilaterally by the government or by a few individuals within it.
Legislation is drawn up to implement the treaty. At this point, any democratic opposition is met with claims this is a "done deal". We signed the treaty and are obliged to live up to our international obligations with our trade partners. Trust us, it was the best deal we could get! (See policy laundering).
Once implemented, the country is locked in: at that point we really do have obligations to other countries (conveniently, they also have obligations to us!). Treaties ratchet policy in one direction only.
Keep in mind that the real push for this comes from multinational media corporations. Governments are not negotiating as independent actors: these corporations intervene on all sides to coordinate and even draft proposals. What we really have is a group of likeminded businesses who operate in concert using individual countries as a front. The treaty then appears to be the result of self-interested negotiations between independent actors: in fact the aim is to stage-manage it to appear that way. Given a means to diffuse opposition (e.g. policy laundering), governments - or, more specifically, the relevant politicians and bureaucrats within governments - may find that lobbyists make sure it is in their personal interest to cooperate.
I have no personal knowledge of how this treaty is being negotiated. I am not accusing anyone of anything. I hope that the relevant individuals in government are representing the interests of Canadians. But I have no doubt this is the kind of thing the usual suspects are trying to pull. In which case the suggestion that "we can just say no" neatly conceals what's really happening.
One final point: Canada is in no way the equal of the EU. The EU has over 500 million people to Canada's 32 million. We tend to anthropomorphize negotiations as though countries were freely contracting equal citizens. They aren't. They are unequal powers.
Say I accept that we can reach agreement about a definition of normal sight. That does not change the argument I am making, which is that once we start using this technique we will almost immediately come up against a different question of normal for which the answer is not obvious, and it would be very easy to cross that line without realizing it until after the fact. There is a slippery slope here. Which is not to say we shouldn't do it at all. But we need to carefully weigh the consequences and determine where we wish to stop before we begin, because if we do it after it may be too late to slow the momentum for improvement and prevent the fracturing of society into physically distinct classes.
No, at some point "fixing things" turns into "not fixing things", and that's pretty easy to differentiate. "Fixing things" is, by default, "improving things", at least for those who suffer from being broken.
I don't agree that it is easy to differentiate. In some cases perhaps. But in most there is no objective standard for what is "normal." Our idea of normal is cultural, and some people draw the lines in very different places (there is extensive scholarship on this point). Genetics are not normative: evolution makes no value judgments about which characteristics are good and which are bad. Some turn out to be more successful in a given context, but that doesn't make them "good" in a human sense.
I recall a news report that claimed introversion was a disorder that afflicted 25% of the population. Well, maybe in America. In China, if anything it would be extroversion that was considered abnormal.
I don't hate wealthy people because they can afford nice cars, attain beautiful women (often more than one), and receive more specialized care. I see nothing wrong with their success and I hope to be one of those people someday. What I would hate is for someone like you to tell me that I can't strive to differentiate because it might upset a few people and make them envious.
You are completely misunderstanding the argument. What you seem to be describing is a form of meritocracy. The American dream you describe assumes that with hard work anyone can succeed. Anyone could be smart, anyone could be hard-working. The worst-case of the society I am describing is one without that possibility. It is utterly unmeritocratic: no matter how hard you work, you would be unable to succeed because you were genetically inferior. You fail because you simply aren't smart enough, or haven't enough stamina, or lack the inbuilt emotional intelligence or what have you. The elite would be like an entrenched aristocracy, except instead of being merely more wealthy, they would also be physically and mentally privileged - and they would pass those advantages on to their offspring. Those advantages could be insurmountable.
Also, I guarantee that the social barriers created on the basis of physical differences would be at least as much an impediment to success. If the rich look like supermen, there will be intense prejudice against anyone who obviously lacks those advantages. Prejudice would run rampant because it actually had a basis in fact.
Historically the aristocracy were in fact physically different. The rich ate a diet including meat and a variety of other foods. The poor had only a limited diet of nutritionally incomplete foods - with insufficient protein, for example. Imagining eating a gruel of millet and turnips every day. The difference between rich and poor was manifested physically. You could tell a poor person just by looking at him: his status was physically marked on his body. In a physical conflict the rich would be likely to win simply because they were physically superior.
You are also injecting an ideological implication when you talk about "hate." I never said anything about hating wealthy people. I spoke only of the kind of society such engineering would produce. If the poor could see that they had virtually no chance to succeed no matter how hard they worked, there would be constant unrest. As there was in the middle ages, when peasant revolts were a constant fact of life.
"Would you like ultra-wide spectrum super-HD eyes with 60x optical zoom, Internet-connected HUD and complimentary laser cannons, just like everyone else has?"
Actually, you have hit the nail on the head. The doctor goes to cure your son's colorblindness, and asks: "While we're in there, would you like to pay some more money to make him taller? Boost his IQ? Make him live longer?"
I'm taking this example from Dr William Leiss. The problem is not that this would be wrong for the child (just assuming for the moment that there wouldn't be nasty unintended side-effects). The problem is the impact on society as a whole. Rich people can afford to extend their lifespans, make themselves beautiful, smarter, and so on. The elite become physically different from birth: physically, mentally, perhaps even morally superior. Imagine a society in which the rich lived twice as long. Do you think this would be just? Do you think freedom and stability could exist under these circumstances?
If this happens, Leiss worries that there will be one more genetic tweak: some of these elites will make their offspring genetically incompatible with others. Differences between classes will be transformed into differences between species.
Of course curing colorblindness on its own will not do that. It may be extremely desirable. But at some point fixing things turns into improving things, and that can be a very dangerous road to go down. There is no clear line between fixing and improving. Before we start down this path, we should think very hard about where we draw that line. Once the line has been crossed, momentum and the power of wealth will be very hard to stop.
Someone I love very much is colorblind. But I think the dangers really do bear thinking about.
There's a small part of me that would like to see other companies follow in the footsteps of Google. Get out of China. Just leave.
I agree. I think what Google is doing is good. However, this is not true:
besides North Korea and Cuba are there any other communistic states left?
China isn't really communist. In many ways it is more capitalistic than western countries. The fact that it calls itself "communist" is irrelevant. The fact that it censors political speech, on the other hand, is specific, and it's a good reason to criticize them.
I'm pointing this out because it is far too easy to stereotype regimes as good or bad, communist or capitalist or democratic, rather than looking at their specific actions. Countries we call "democracies" often behave in very undemocratic ways. The fact that we call them "democracies" or that they have votes to choose between a handful of parties every four or five years does nothing to make an undemocratic activity less so.
P.S.: Vietnam is also officially communist. As is Laos. Though I suspect that doesn't mean what it did twenty years ago.
How is this a flaw in the Emergency Response System if the change initiated by a government committee is how the incidents were classified wrongly?
You're right: it isn't a flaw in the software per se, and I would not assign any blame to those who developed it (as opposed to those who implemented it).
However, it is a predictable of administration, and the use of information technology is often integrated into systems in just this way. The idea that risk can be rationalized and reduced to a number (class A, class B, and so on) is itself potentially dangerous. Though it is not necessarily dangerous in any particular situation, it is nevertheless predictable that administrative or technical rationality would make this kind of outcome more common.
You see, the problem was not simply that the response categories were incorrect. The problem was that the system (including its operators, operating procedures, and so on) was too rigid, too rationalized, and therefore unable to respond to unexpected events:
While some services spotted the risk, ordering operatives to override the computer's orders manually, five of England's 12 ambulance trusts did not allow call handlers to upgrade such calls.
This kind of event was clearly unexpected by the systems implementors. But even if they had assessed the danger of falls differently, there is likely some other event that would fall outside the systems parameters. (Most falls probably should be category B events, not category A.) That's why you want to have human judgement and human overrides.
Treating a system in terms of independent technical components has a number of benefits, including efficiency. That's what happened here. The process was rationally divided into tasks for the humans and tasks for the computer. Nice, neat, clean: and likely to produce outcomes like this.
I'm guessing you've never been on a jury before, and so have absolutely no idea what a jury is there for. Juries don't know the law. They aren't expected to. That's what the Judge is for. . . . if you think this should have ended in jury nullification, you are a buffoon.
The law cannot answer questions of morality. Only human beings can do that. Lawyers and judges do not have privileged access to morality. They are not more moral than other people. They do not necessarily have a better (or worse) understanding of what is right and what is wrong. What is legal is not the same is what is right, and what is illegal is not the same as what is wrong.
Given the choice of obeying the law or doing what is right, what should you do? Do you do what you believe is right, or do you follow orders? The closer you are to the law - lawyers, judges, etc. - the more likely you are to choose the law. That is your bias. In fact there is no perfect answer. Sometimes breaking the rules is the right thing to do. Sometimes putting personal moral judgments aside is the right thing to do. The thing is, there can be no system of rules that can tell you which is which. Acting morally often requires of us that we step outside the constraints of the system. The law is a human construction. It is a machine, like a computer. It has its uses - but it also has its limitations.
Sometimes there are cases in which two people must choose contrary courses: in which one person breaks the rules, for example, and the other punishes them for it - and yet both are doing the right thing. There never has been a guarantee that all problems will have clean solutions. There will always be flawed judgements. Perhaps the greatest horrors are inflicted by those who believe that there is a perfect rule or a perfect machine. I'm afraid that's what you seem to be suggesting. Whatever the right or wrong of the jurists' actions, your simple recourse to the letter of the law cannot resolve that question. You have replaced the book of God with the book of man - and I say that as someone who does not believe in God.
Slashdot Mirror
I appreciate the sentiment. There's lots of poorly or foolishly applied Javascript out there. And I assume you are engaging in hyperbole when you say "NOTHING." But I am convinced of the potential of judiciously applied Javascript.
I created Marginalia, an annotation extension for Moodle. It allows users to highlight passages of text and write notes in the margin. It has won rave reviews from many instructors and students. This is simply not possible without Javascript: it's supplementing the display of structured text, maintaining the benefits of HTML (compared to the opacity of an embedded applet, Flash, or what have you).
Oops. I those equal signs lost their angle brackets. I didn't notice they needed to be escaped in t post title. I meant to say expression => identity, speech => truth.
Speech and expression are not the same thing. Speech is a kind of expression, but not all expression is speech. Though the definition of "speech" has been broadly interpreted by U.S. courts to include many forms of expression.
However, there is still a substantial difference in emphasis. Speech is primarily understood in terms of communicating ideas. The tradition of free speech is tied to the Enlightenment conception of rational political discourse, according to which reasoned argument between informed individuals can rise above their particular interests to arrive at universal truths and a consensus about the public good.
Expression encompasses ideas, but it is also closely associated with individual feelings and identity. It is not focused on truth, implying a more relative understanding of individual experience in the tradition of the romantics. Furthermore, it does not suggest a separation of form from content. The form, in many cases, is the expression.
I think this is a fundamental difference. Take the idea/content distinction in copyright, for example. This makes pretty good sense when dealing written political argument (and copyright was designed for written texts). It breaks down when applied more broadly to expression, in which the form becomes inseparable from content which is not really "ideas." How do we separate the idea of a song from the form of the music?
You talk about communicating a "message." In reality, decades of research have found that communication is not so straightforward: expression is always interpreted by the audience, often in ways that the originator did not intend. This ability to interpret and make one's own meanings is also an important freedom of communication.
I am not a lawyer. Courts define terms in their own ways that may or may not connect to common understandings or empirical evidence. However, as a scholar of communication I find that expression is closer to how people actually communicate, debate, and engage in public life than is rational ideal on which the concept of free speech is based.
Not quite. And the Wikipedia article glosses over what really happened, implying that personhood was granted by a court ruling. It wasn't. The 14th amendment was not initially interpreted as granting personhood to corporations. The decisive precedent was set in 1886 - by a court reporter (!), not a judicial decision. See Douglas Rushkoff's Life Inc., pp. 13-14:
Here are more details about the incident - along with optimism that the courts were chipping away at corporate personhood. That was 2003. Since then as we know the supreme court has confirmed the rights of corporations as persons. I can't think of a better example of the distinction between morality and the law (well, apart from the appalling travesty of Dred Scott, which has a certain malevolent symmetry to this).
Your argument has nothing to do with mine. I said nothing about government stifling dissent. The possibility had not even crossed my mind. You say that as though the mere fact that government does not stifle dissent does not magically produce democracy. It just ain't so.
You are focusing on controversial speech and dissent. This is a grave error. If you look at the formation of consensus and uncontroversial speech it is very clear how copyright can concentrate communicative and political power.
Democracy is founded on speech and expression, as I outlined. It is the positive consequence of political speech and participation. People actually need to be informed, to engage each other in discourse, to form opinions, to gather information, and to express their interests. (Nor is this an exclusive list - they also need to form identities, work together in communities and so on.) There has been a lot of work in this area in fields ranging from political science to cultural studies. See for example the work of Jürgen Harbemas, for example, who revived the concept of the public sphere.
To the extent that citizens are restricted or hindered in their attempts to take part in democratic discourse, democracy is limited. Exclusion from cultural discourse has similar effects. When this is the outcome, it does not matter whether it is because of direct or indirect intervention from government or private actors. With copyright we have an institution that is can obviously limit the engagement of citizens in the activities that produce a democratic society. An argument can be made for a given copyright regime the benefits (including informing the populace and creating spaces for discourse and deliberation) exceed the harms. Regardless of the net effect, it does not erase the the conflict between promoting discourse on the one hand and limiting it on the other.
You may be right about the technical meaning of "free speech" in American law. But in the broader context of what does it mean to communicate and debate in a democratic society, your description appears insular and shockingly ignorant of theoretical and empirical work about democracy and culture. The fact that courts once ruled that women were not persons did not in fact mean that women were not persons. It had legal effects, but it could not take away their personhood. Similarly, court interpretations of statutes concerning "free speech" do not define the limits of that term.
Public discourse is understood as foundational for democracy. Through speech and expression individuals express their interests in public, gather information to form opinions, sway others with argument, and form groups able to take effective political action.
The political significance of speech does not depend on it being original, unpopular or offensive. The opposite is true: it is when speech is popular - when it is disseminated and copied - that it becomes politically powerful. The unpopular words of one man don't matter. The same words uttered by many do. Classic examples include slogans like "no taxation without representation," iconic symbols like the peace sign, pamphlets like "Common Sense." Recall the scene in Casablanca in which the French stand up and sing La Marseillaise. It is not the words themselves that matter, or the fact that someone sings them: the whole point is that a whole people rise up and sing the same thing.
The idea/expression dichotomy is held up as defense. But it is flawed. It assumes that an expression expresses single idea (or set of ideas), and that each idea can be expressed in multiple ways. Casablanca illustrates the problem with this. The meaning of that song in that bar with the Nazi officers is not the *words* of the song. The meaning is the act itself, of singing in the face of the Nazis. The meaning is very different from the anthem sung on Armistice Day (the French equivalent of Remembrance Day). The same expression can be used to express original meanings. Furthermore, this particular expression is not substitutable. A bar full of French saying "we reject the Nazis" would seem pathetic, not powerful. Finally, this is a political - and democratic! - expression founded not on reason, but on emotion.
To the extent that copyright limits the dissemination of expression that can be used or repurposed with democratic or political significance, it impedes the free ability of citizens to speak and participate in democracy. The law may say that's not "freedom of speech" if it likes. It does not make it so.
Here is the scene in Casablanca. I am using it to make a political point. And copyright most definitely can stop me.
Would you say to meteorologist that 9 out of 10 of hurricanes like this one were destructive, "That's meaningless unless it's 19 out of 20"?
The threshold for statistical significance is an arbitrary convention, not some ironclad law that lets you ignore evidence. As a guideline it is more appropriate in some circumstances than in others. Something does not stop being evidence simply because it does not reach that threshold. I read scholarly papers all the time that say "while X does not achieve the threshold of significance, it is suggestive and worthy of more research." When there is other evidence to support it, such a result can be valuable. And there is such evidence: this calculation was done precisely because the election looks fishy.
You have it exactly wrong when you say "that's a large percentage of false positives for such a serious accusation." The election process is not innocent until proven guilty. We apply the presumption of innocence to human beings. An election is treated in the opposite way. It is not enough for it to be fair: it must be seen to be fair. It must be must be demonstrably legitimate. We do not let suspicious elections slide simply because the accusation is "serious." On the contrary, that is why we investigate them. This needs to be investigated precisely because of its seriousness.
I second your recommendation of that article. It's excellent.
People's understanding of issues is heavily determined by how they are framed. The frame sets the questions, which in turn point to the answers. Answering "Which side of the issue are you on?" means choosing one of exactly two sides.
Once an issue is politicized like this it ceases to be a question of truth and becomes a matter of identity. You may ask, "Do you believe in evolution?" But that is not the question many people will answer. What they really hear is, "Do you believe in evolution, or are a God-fearing person like us?" Then their answer is not so much a negative rejection of evolution as a positive affirmation of who they are and their membership in a community.
How did evolution become incompatible with being part of a community? This happened not by explicit argument, but by subtle framing of politics. You say that there are two sides to an issue. But that division into two is exactly the moment of politicization. Which side are you on? Are you with us or against us? Do you believe in evolution or do you believe in God?
Would you sacrifice your friends and your community and your sense of who you are in order to believe in an abstract theory that has no bearing on your day-to-day life? I think it is perfectly rational to say no regardless of the evidence. We need community to give life meaning. It's in our blood as human beings. But community life is impoverished in our lonely society. We cling to it when we find it.
Nor does this apply only to religious folk. Say you had a revelatory experience of God that showed evolution to be false. Imagine the social and personal implications of denying evolution. Would you believe, or would you imagine it was a hallucination? As an atheist, I can imagine the former would require a wrenching reconstruction of my identity and relationships to other people.
What you say is true in general: people tend to choose the evidence that suits them (though this is not symmetrical: some people, groups and arguments are more honest than others). My point, however, is that the logic you are criticizing is embedded in the very language of your post. Your acceptance that there are two sides - not one, not three - is where the slippery slope begins.
Thank you for pointing that out. Though marked -1 Troll, sopssa's posts there appear to me to be his opinions (right or wrong), honestly held and reasonably expressed: not attempts to incite trouble.
Even though this is off topic, I think it is worth mentioning. If not here, where? Moderation affects all Slashdot discussions. If too many mods forget how and why the system works, it can break down. It works reasonably well (unlike most mainstream news sites I have seen) because it focuses on the quality of discussion, not whether one agrees or disagrees. Modding down is meant as a last resort to weed out posts that harm reasoned discourse. It is not supposed to be used merely to express disagreement. It's too late to do much good, but as I seldom spend all my mod points I used some there.
Thank you for the illustration. They did, and it did, and that's why we changed it. Then wonderful things happened: like modems, which led ultimately to public access to the Internet. We can change this too.
If Apple was the telephone company and it blocked the ability of Mr Fiore to communicate his satire to me, I think we would agree that (regardless of Apple's ownership of the wires) this was censorship, that it was bad, and that it should not be allowed. Indeed there are regulations to this effect.
If Microsoft implemented something in Windows that blocked my ability to view Mr Fiore's cartoons on my PC, I think we would be likely to come to the same conclusion. In this case it I own the computer; there is a strong argument to be made that I should be able to choose how to use it.
Now say I own an iPad. Mr Fiore would like to distribute his cartoons to me. Apple owns the app store, and they say No. They have implemented technical measures to prevent me from finding another way to get Mr Fiore's work onto the device I own. Furthermore, there is a law in place - the DMCA - that makes it illegal for me to work around those restrictions - even though I own the device, even though Mr Fiore would like to communicate (or sell) his work to me.
In other words, the government has already intervened in this situation. It has done so on Apple's behalf. Citizens have every right to intervene in the public interest.
As a society we use companies in the market as means to ends. We value communication; we have found the market is an effective way of enabling it. We have therefore regulated in order to create markets (through property rights, enforcement of contracts, and so on). We regulation different modes of communication in different ways. The telephone system is one example. The PC is another. Sometimes that regulation is done through government statutes, sometimes through regulatory bodies, sometimes the market is the regulating mechanism.
Your technical question of whether Apple's actions constitute a dictionary or legal definition of "censorship" ignores any ethical considerations. I think Apple's actions here are bad. I am not interested in "hating" Apple because it is a company fulfilling obligations, not a human being capable of moral choice. What I am interested in is how we can encourage and enable human speech, expression and communication. This story demonstrates a failure in this regard.
The question, then, is how to improve matters. Replacing Apple's control of the iPad with outright government control, to pick an extreme example, would likely do more harm than good. But there are other choices. One obvious response is to publicize and educate the problem, as Slashdot is doing. The government could fix the DMCA so that Apple can't use it to restrict my legitimate use of the product I own. Copyright and patent law are often used to create monopolies of distribution, to the detriment of artists and consumers: if Hollywood and the recording industry back Apple's approach, for example, we could end up with a single dominant channel of distribution. Our legislators should be concerned with this. We might also consider some kind of common carrier- or net neutrality-type regulation to ensure that channels like this are open. For example, it seems to me incredibly unreasonable that Apple gets the DMCA on side and is then able to behave like this. The law grants rights: it should also require the fulfillment responsibilities.
You are exactly right. There is a reason corporations don't get to vote. However much they like to call themselves "corporate citizens", they are not citizens. They are not human beings. They are machines we create in order to create wealth for us. (At least that's the theory.)
The idea of a level democratic playing-field between citizens and non-citizens is nonsense. If I own 10 corporations should I have greater representation? This is as ridiculous as the three-fifths compromise by which slave-holdings states got additional government representation based on the number of slaves they owned. Needless to say, this representation did not reflect the interests of the slaves: just as corporate representation may not represent the interests of the human beings who make up the corporation. In both cases, institutions created by human beings (slavery, corporations) are used as an excuse to allocate undemocratic power to a few people who control them.
(This should be obvious from what I have said, but I want to be sure no-one puts words in my mouth: I am not suggesting that abuses of copyright are comparable to the horrors of slavery are comparable, no matter how illegitimate the former may be.)
Thank you for the cogent reply. I didn't mean to criticize you personally so much as use your post to illustrate a point.
My main concern lies with the social impacts of the technology. Apple's market power allow it to potentially determine or shape who has access to their platform for disseminating content (ugly word) and communication. For me, the great potential of digital technology and the Internet is that it makes it possible for everyone to participate in the creation of culture. Established oligopolies would rather continue with the model of television. Future innovation is likely to be new forms of communication; I want those to permit easy access and multi-way discourse rather than one-way channels for established players.
If the iPad turns out to be only one platform in vigorous competition with open systems then its being closed is a minor matter. However, computer platforms tend towards monopoly, both theoretically and empirically. We have seen this with Microsoft, Google, and so on. The time to do something about that risk is now, not when the outcome is clear - and it is too late.
Incidentally, I think the game machine argument is wrong. I recently bought a PS3 (for games - I have no interest in running Linux on it). Its biggest failing, in my opinion, is a lack of innovative games. The innovation that does happen seems to be with downloadable games rather than AAA titles on disk, and even there the variety is quite limited. I suspect this is largely due to the complexity of getting approval from Sony. The vibrancy of the iPhone game market to me is an indication that the relative openness of that platform (compared to the PS3) leads to more innovation. The reason I'm not on a PC is that I jumped ship when Microsoft introduced activation, and wouldn't want game DRM messing with my system. Which is quite ironic: the PS3 is as locked down as could be. I chose it because of something completely unrelated: it has a quiet fan.
P.S.: I was concerned about the openness of phones before the iPhone came along.
To be fair, interpreted code was added later with Javascript and CSS. If Apple permitted Web browsers, their current lockdown would have resulted in an HTML-only Web. That would be a great loss. Today, Javascript is essential for many Web applications like GMail and Flickr that are easier to use than their desktop counterparts. This was not true in its early years when Javascript complicated Web sites unnecessarily. Initial complexity followed by refinement and easy of use is not an uncommon pattern for open systems.
Apple's ban on interpreters and other languages looks like a huge gamble to me. One of the time-honored techniques of solving a problem with software is to invent a language for the general case, then use that language to implement the specific solution you need. This has been standard advice for Unix developers for decades. XSLT and Prolog, for example, are orders of magnitude more effective within their problem domains than are general purpose languages. The organic fit between object-oriented languages and GUI interfaces is another example (one that often obscures the fact that there are many problems for which OO is not the best fit). Without the ability to use the right language for the job, many programs simply wouldn't be written.
It's not just a matter for geeks either. The possibility of anyone writing HTML web pages, even though only exercised by a few, fed the Web's explosive growth and ultimately led to easy-to-use publishing software like blogs and wikis. There is no nice clean line between geeks and ordinary users. It's in that fuzzy region where the two mix that much of the most innovative work happens.
It is utterly ironic that the debate about openness has been twisted into one of elites vs honest folk. These anti-elistist sentiments are so powerful they drive much of American politics and scientific backlash (e.g. creationism). Moreover, Apple - long seen as the maker of elitist products for snobbish users - has been recast as the ally of the common man (or grandmother). If I were a PR manager for Apple I could not hope to do better.
There is definitely a strong strand of elitism among technical folk, from the the old idea that users are losers to the incredible resistance to ease-of-use I remember from the 1990s ("If they can't use a command line I don't want them using my software). A lot of technology really is obtusely designed; the people who get frustrated (which is to say all of us) are not stupid. Tying the open vs closed debate to this experience of disrespect and frustration, and the wider discourse of elite domination by entities from bankers to bureaucrats, is very effective for evoking (legitimate) emotional responses, passing over the need to make thorough arguments.
Because the linkage is wrong. There is no necessary connection between something being open and it being hard to use. The iPad is easy to use and it is relatively closed. That is correlation, not causation. Apple is simply very good at designing (and marketing) the user experience. This ability seems to be rare among its competitors.
There is a historical precedent for a more open system that turned out to be easier to use than what it (partly) replaced. You allude to it in your post. The Web was a huge step up in intuitive usability compared to the desktop software that had previously performed many of its functions. It was also a huge step up in terms of capability (compare searching Wikipedia to searching Britannica). And it is open. Too open, in fact, for the iPad and its prohibitions on running interpreted code. Fortunately for today, it is already established and was granted a special exemption. If the iPad lockdown had been the norm 20 years ago, the Web might never have been invented. If lockdown is the norm in the future, the next huge improvement in usability and functionality might not happen.
I am fully confident that Apple has the talents to develop an easy-to-use and open system. (After all, my computers are Macs.) But the temptation for control is hard to resist. Especially when you can remake yourself as the computer of the people with that wonderful anti-elistism PR.
Gruber writes:
I can think of several top-notch cross-platform apps I use on my Mac: Firefox, Thunderbird, jEdit, GMail, Flickr and Delicious - to name a few.
Yes, I realize that Web apps are permitted on the iPhone (so long as they work with whatever features Safari chooses to implement). The point is that under these rules (including the older rule against interpreted languages) the invention of most Web technology would not have happened. The next breakthrough platform, whatever it might be, likely won't be developed for iPhone. If the industry follows Apple's lead and lock down their platforms, it might not happen at all.
Maybe Jobs is fine with that. He doesn't want Platform Next threatening his control the way the Web threatened Microsoft. Maybe he's wrong: maybe the next platform will be for gaming or something else that doesn't threaten his core business. Regardless, I wouldn't pretend for a moment this attitude is good for users.
The long-term interests of users point in another direction also. I use Thunderbird, not Mail, because it does not tie me to Mac. My deliberate choice of cross platform apps and data formats (Thunderbird, OpenOffice, jEdit) was what allowed me to jump from Windows to Mac in the first place. While many Mac-specific apps are technically very good, my decision to remain as platform agnostic as possible is what will allow me to jump away again. It is true that many users do not realize that freedom is in their long-term best interests. You may accuse me of elitism for claiming to know better. But that is exactly what Jobs is doing. He says he knows best. At least my claim does not involve forcing anyone to make my choice, or making it difficult to change their minds later.
In many cases this is a myth, a nice fiction we can tell ourselves to make us feel better. Treaties can be convenient way for governments to institute unpopular measures. Here's how it works:
Keep in mind that the real push for this comes from multinational media corporations. Governments are not negotiating as independent actors: these corporations intervene on all sides to coordinate and even draft proposals. What we really have is a group of likeminded businesses who operate in concert using individual countries as a front. The treaty then appears to be the result of self-interested negotiations between independent actors: in fact the aim is to stage-manage it to appear that way. Given a means to diffuse opposition (e.g. policy laundering), governments - or, more specifically, the relevant politicians and bureaucrats within governments - may find that lobbyists make sure it is in their personal interest to cooperate.
I have no personal knowledge of how this treaty is being negotiated. I am not accusing anyone of anything. I hope that the relevant individuals in government are representing the interests of Canadians. But I have no doubt this is the kind of thing the usual suspects are trying to pull. In which case the suggestion that "we can just say no" neatly conceals what's really happening.
One final point: Canada is in no way the equal of the EU. The EU has over 500 million people to Canada's 32 million. We tend to anthropomorphize negotiations as though countries were freely contracting equal citizens. They aren't. They are unequal powers.
Say I accept that we can reach agreement about a definition of normal sight. That does not change the argument I am making, which is that once we start using this technique we will almost immediately come up against a different question of normal for which the answer is not obvious, and it would be very easy to cross that line without realizing it until after the fact. There is a slippery slope here. Which is not to say we shouldn't do it at all. But we need to carefully weigh the consequences and determine where we wish to stop before we begin, because if we do it after it may be too late to slow the momentum for improvement and prevent the fracturing of society into physically distinct classes.
I don't agree that it is easy to differentiate. In some cases perhaps. But in most there is no objective standard for what is "normal." Our idea of normal is cultural, and some people draw the lines in very different places (there is extensive scholarship on this point). Genetics are not normative: evolution makes no value judgments about which characteristics are good and which are bad. Some turn out to be more successful in a given context, but that doesn't make them "good" in a human sense.
I recall a news report that claimed introversion was a disorder that afflicted 25% of the population. Well, maybe in America. In China, if anything it would be extroversion that was considered abnormal.
You are completely misunderstanding the argument. What you seem to be describing is a form of meritocracy. The American dream you describe assumes that with hard work anyone can succeed. Anyone could be smart, anyone could be hard-working. The worst-case of the society I am describing is one without that possibility. It is utterly unmeritocratic: no matter how hard you work, you would be unable to succeed because you were genetically inferior. You fail because you simply aren't smart enough, or haven't enough stamina, or lack the inbuilt emotional intelligence or what have you. The elite would be like an entrenched aristocracy, except instead of being merely more wealthy, they would also be physically and mentally privileged - and they would pass those advantages on to their offspring. Those advantages could be insurmountable.
Also, I guarantee that the social barriers created on the basis of physical differences would be at least as much an impediment to success. If the rich look like supermen, there will be intense prejudice against anyone who obviously lacks those advantages. Prejudice would run rampant because it actually had a basis in fact.
Historically the aristocracy were in fact physically different. The rich ate a diet including meat and a variety of other foods. The poor had only a limited diet of nutritionally incomplete foods - with insufficient protein, for example. Imagining eating a gruel of millet and turnips every day. The difference between rich and poor was manifested physically. You could tell a poor person just by looking at him: his status was physically marked on his body. In a physical conflict the rich would be likely to win simply because they were physically superior.
You are also injecting an ideological implication when you talk about "hate." I never said anything about hating wealthy people. I spoke only of the kind of society such engineering would produce. If the poor could see that they had virtually no chance to succeed no matter how hard they worked, there would be constant unrest. As there was in the middle ages, when peasant revolts were a constant fact of life.
Actually, you have hit the nail on the head. The doctor goes to cure your son's colorblindness, and asks: "While we're in there, would you like to pay some more money to make him taller? Boost his IQ? Make him live longer?"
I'm taking this example from Dr William Leiss. The problem is not that this would be wrong for the child (just assuming for the moment that there wouldn't be nasty unintended side-effects). The problem is the impact on society as a whole. Rich people can afford to extend their lifespans, make themselves beautiful, smarter, and so on. The elite become physically different from birth: physically, mentally, perhaps even morally superior. Imagine a society in which the rich lived twice as long. Do you think this would be just? Do you think freedom and stability could exist under these circumstances?
If this happens, Leiss worries that there will be one more genetic tweak: some of these elites will make their offspring genetically incompatible with others. Differences between classes will be transformed into differences between species.
Of course curing colorblindness on its own will not do that. It may be extremely desirable. But at some point fixing things turns into improving things, and that can be a very dangerous road to go down. There is no clear line between fixing and improving. Before we start down this path, we should think very hard about where we draw that line. Once the line has been crossed, momentum and the power of wealth will be very hard to stop.
Someone I love very much is colorblind. But I think the dangers really do bear thinking about.
There's a small part of me that would like to see other companies follow in the footsteps of Google. Get out of China. Just leave.
I agree. I think what Google is doing is good. However, this is not true:
besides North Korea and Cuba are there any other communistic states left?
China isn't really communist. In many ways it is more capitalistic than western countries. The fact that it calls itself "communist" is irrelevant. The fact that it censors political speech, on the other hand, is specific, and it's a good reason to criticize them.
I'm pointing this out because it is far too easy to stereotype regimes as good or bad, communist or capitalist or democratic, rather than looking at their specific actions. Countries we call "democracies" often behave in very undemocratic ways. The fact that we call them "democracies" or that they have votes to choose between a handful of parties every four or five years does nothing to make an undemocratic activity less so.
P.S.: Vietnam is also officially communist. As is Laos. Though I suspect that doesn't mean what it did twenty years ago.
You're right: it isn't a flaw in the software per se, and I would not assign any blame to those who developed it (as opposed to those who implemented it).
However, it is a predictable of administration, and the use of information technology is often integrated into systems in just this way. The idea that risk can be rationalized and reduced to a number (class A, class B, and so on) is itself potentially dangerous. Though it is not necessarily dangerous in any particular situation, it is nevertheless predictable that administrative or technical rationality would make this kind of outcome more common.
You see, the problem was not simply that the response categories were incorrect. The problem was that the system (including its operators, operating procedures, and so on) was too rigid, too rationalized, and therefore unable to respond to unexpected events:
This kind of event was clearly unexpected by the systems implementors. But even if they had assessed the danger of falls differently, there is likely some other event that would fall outside the systems parameters. (Most falls probably should be category B events, not category A.) That's why you want to have human judgement and human overrides.
Treating a system in terms of independent technical components has a number of benefits, including efficiency. That's what happened here. The process was rationally divided into tasks for the humans and tasks for the computer. Nice, neat, clean: and likely to produce outcomes like this.
The law cannot answer questions of morality. Only human beings can do that. Lawyers and judges do not have privileged access to morality. They are not more moral than other people. They do not necessarily have a better (or worse) understanding of what is right and what is wrong. What is legal is not the same is what is right, and what is illegal is not the same as what is wrong.
Given the choice of obeying the law or doing what is right, what should you do? Do you do what you believe is right, or do you follow orders? The closer you are to the law - lawyers, judges, etc. - the more likely you are to choose the law. That is your bias. In fact there is no perfect answer. Sometimes breaking the rules is the right thing to do. Sometimes putting personal moral judgments aside is the right thing to do. The thing is, there can be no system of rules that can tell you which is which. Acting morally often requires of us that we step outside the constraints of the system. The law is a human construction. It is a machine, like a computer. It has its uses - but it also has its limitations.
Sometimes there are cases in which two people must choose contrary courses: in which one person breaks the rules, for example, and the other punishes them for it - and yet both are doing the right thing. There never has been a guarantee that all problems will have clean solutions. There will always be flawed judgements. Perhaps the greatest horrors are inflicted by those who believe that there is a perfect rule or a perfect machine. I'm afraid that's what you seem to be suggesting. Whatever the right or wrong of the jurists' actions, your simple recourse to the letter of the law cannot resolve that question. You have replaced the book of God with the book of man - and I say that as someone who does not believe in God.