The "gn" in most open source applications stands not for "GNOME", but for "GNU". GNU, in case you haven't heard, stands for "GNU's Not Unix!", one of the earliest and essential parts of the free (as in speech) software movement. This used to divide Gnome and KDE folk because KDE, early on, was not free. That is (to some degree, at least) no longer the case. HTH.
Now morally speaking, of course, MP3 thieves deserve the death penalty, but that seems a little inefficient when a lesser deterrent will work just as well. Why don't they pass a three strikes MP3 law? Or mandatory *minimums* instead of maximums. It's worked with the crack cocaine problem - crack has been pretty much disappeared from our inner-city streets since we declared our war on drugs.
This post and others have readers asking you what the heck is going on there. Please give us some kind of thoughtful response, even if it's a "we goofed" or "there is a five day backlog" or whatever. Your loyal readers and commentators, want to know why this is happening and I think they deserve a response. -Don
...closed up shop? If Apple started a new OS company, how long do you think it would be before the company realized that it could market their product to PC computer users as well? And then what would have happened? I don't think that the prejudice is stopping people like myself from praising OSX, it's that OSX won't run on my hardware.
Well, that's fine, Apple makes money of their hardware. But that's why OSX is a yawn for most people. Of course most people will benefit eventually as Windows & *nix distros copy the nice parts, but most of us won't really know about the nice parts until we get them running on our own machines.
If the government wants to pay for computers, they can (under current prevailing interpretations of our constitution) attach strings. Is it a good idea? I don't think so.
I think that federal legislation requiring filtering is simply not necessary, and one of those areas where non-legal remedies are far more efficient and effective. I imagine that any parent that entered a library and saw hustler in the children's section would organize a change in library managment. I think public libraries already are implementing restrictions on children's access to unfiltered internet-connected computers. To legislate what should and should not be available to children at a library seems overly micromanagerial.
That said, I can see an argument that what the Congress is doing is not actually meant to change the way that libraries operate, but rather that congress intends this legislation as an expression of public sentiment. Expressive legalislation of this sort *should* be widely discussed before being adopted because it often has unanticipated consequences (making more paperwork for librarians, forcing libraries with one computer to install filtering even if children are not allowed to use it, etc.).
Maybe/. could do another feature (I know they did something like this a year or two ago) on what people should use for "permanent" storage. I'm currently involved in a project putting U.S. Supreme Court documents on-line. When I told the Court's librarian that we would back everything up to CD-ROM, she asked "But how long will CDs be here? A decade? What about fifty years from now?" Good question. I had no answer. I think they'll keep the hard copies.
Yeah, I meant the "Slashdot takes kickbacks" as a parody of Cliff's comment on the main story. I have nothing to back it up with, but the point was really that he didn't have anything to back up his comment with either (sorry Cliff;-P). -d
This disturbs me. Slashdot is all about community-responsible news reporting, but not just profits, but honesty, be it via the NYTimes, or Security Focus. Now I'm worried that Slashdot will start bribing my friends to hype news in their emails to me.
I like the raw/cooked metaphor you use...it is (to an anthropologist anyway) useful in describing the approach that many people take to technology in general. Just as Levi-Strauss taught us that myths are best understood in the context of other myths, I think that the same is true of approaches to software development. Claude Levi-Strauss was, of course, famously concerned with how mythic building blocks relate to one another--the "structure" of culture, as opposed to the details of cultural experience or myth. He drew attention away from the details of each myth, and asked people to focus on how myths worked together. It's an interesting approach that is evident in your comment and many others.
What makes this discussion so animated is the focus on the structural relationships between open source building blocks *and* detailed experience together: Can Linux keep the kernal/distro/gui/wm/fm/apps independent from one another *and* develop and provide a compelling experience for users? The arguments often shift back and forth between topical areas: how should open source agreements be structured/how should actual software components be related/what should govern the end user experience?
It's all important: how the mythic universe of opens source software is structured, which types of business and code relationships and values are promoted, and how end users of all types experience the product in their daily life.
Which brings me to your comment and the article. Dependencies like those you descirbe are at the heart of our business/software/usability universe. Is "g" or "K" hot or cold/up or down/good or bad? Who knows? The (still open) question about eazel is whether it will solidify standards that prevent or inhibit people like yourself from doing valuable work. Let's hope not.
HTML? Is that a joke? If I could write articles with decent formatting & dynamic supra and infra references in the footnotes & the occassional graphic in anything except MSWord, I would never boot-crash-reboot Win95 (I actually crashed writing this comment!). I'm not arguing that MSWord is what I want to use, but I haven't found anything else that gets the job done, let alone with ease and speed. Please, make my day! I'm dowloading AbiWord in the background, but after reading the features list, I'm not too optimistic.
The idea of university support and choice, however, is fabulous! If Yale provided any linux support, I probably wouldn't have toasted my video card installing Linux the first time.
If I remember my NYTimes Science Times correctly, the Egyptians didn't actually use a roller-pully system (in the sense that most people think of it) to transport stones. They did someting more ingenious, something that was only recently understood. Rather than placing logs underneath and pulling the stones long distances, they placed four arc-shaped wood devices on four sides of each block, essentially creating a huge wheel out the block. They then rolled this to the pyramids. Once at the pyramids, they used rollers and pulleys to maneuver the blocks up. Funny, it took us much longer to figure out how they moved the stones, than it took them to build the pyramids!
I've got dozens of examples, and as soon as I can safely and easily install linux on my laptop and do the things I want to do (see below), I'll do it in a heartbeat. I want to...
1. Add new printers and scanners without thinking about technical details. 2. Use my dual-function modem/network card without thinking about technical details. 3. Make complex word processing documents with intra-footnote references, changing layout, etc. (just need software for that). 4. Perform mapping analyses of data and print out pretty maps (just need software for that). 5. Edit videos without thinking about technical details (almost have software for that).
...you get the idea. By technical details I mean things that mac and win machines allow me to do without much expertise. Plug in a new scanner, recognize and configure my modem/network card, recognize, configure, and not fry my video card.
Some of the stuff I do is "advanced" by the average computer users standard, but little of what I do is technical or requires much technical knowledge of the OS or machines I use.
I can't imagine the Court will reverse itself, so Libby and the GOP can try all they want. Put aside considerations of "self-control" and "pornography" for a moment, and think about ex-offenders trying to cope with the trauma of prison rape upon release. Most don't have computers but can get access to the supportive community and information they need to begin treatment and recovery through computers at public libraries. The prison-rape support sites that I know of all have graphic letters from inmates describing rapes (www.spr.org, for example). No non-human filter will be able to tell that the user is seeking therapy and not sexual titilation (again, putting that issue aside).
These sites also use the letters from raped inmates to spread awareness about what happens in our contries prisons and jails. It's how I first became informed about the issue. Informing the public about the issue is a major concern...but what if they are politely filtered from every public library? This was just one of many points that convinced the Supreme Court to strike previous net-censorship laws.
This is all just to say that while kids do need protecting, and the government *may* have some good ideas about how to help, this is not one of them.
I'm not sure why you would want to adopt a "jury duty" model for slashdot moderatorship. Why not just let long-term members decide if they want to moderate a story or not. Once they moderate a post, they can't participate and vice versa. All other restrictions apply as well. I guess this could be gotten around (people could set up two accounts), but that seems like more work than fun.
Maybe I don't understand the idea, but it does seem too limited to me. Or maybe I'm just annoyed that I waited so long to set up my account.
Microsoft is creating fake end-user divisions to prevent the government from dividing it up along it's software divisions. This way, there is no internal dividing line along the lines that I and many others would like to see them go to the block with. Now there is no OS division or Office division or Internet division. All these basic software areas are spread among several "home" "small office" "corporate" and "back office" type divisions. Just the way they said that IE was part of windows, they will now claim that windows, office, etc. are *all* integral to each division.
This is not Microsoft dividing itself up, but it is beating the DOJ to the punch. This is a very smart way to fight a hacking up of the company.
I still think slashdot should have an area where we can view what's in the article pipeline. That way we won't bother posting stuff that's already there, and y'all can spend your time eating b-day cake instead of reading the same article suggestion over and over.
What about an area where everyon can see what is being suggested as a story for slashdot. No comments, no votes, no nothing except a place to see what people are suggesting be storied. This would provide:
1. a way to avoid wasting one's time sending in stories that are already in the pipeline, and
2. it would ease the burden on slashdot staff of reading a million suggestions for the same thing
With this moderation debate, slashdoters have managed to hit upon and, I believe, contribute to one the most interesting areas of debate about representative democracies: how not to squash minority viewpoints. The reason is this: slashdot has effectively allowed people to elect comments they like in something similar (though *not* identical) to a political election. Part of what is fascinating to me is how the discussion has mirrored the themes and ideas developed in discussions of almost all representative democratic institutions. But, there are some differences, and some novel ideas that I think might teach the political theorists something. I'm not a super scholar or anything, but here goes my summary of the debates:
Standard Voting Theories
The base model in American politics is majority rule. Unfortunately, majority rule voting tends to obscure and overpower minority voices every time. See any black nationalists in the House of Reps? Even though they may represent 1% of the population, they will never gain 1% of the seats, and thus never be heard from.
Disagreement #1: Is this good or bad? It eliminates the doomsday cult members (okay, so some Senators may seem to fall into that category at times, but you get the idea), but it also theoretically knocks out an opposition party that wins 49% of the vote in every state, but gains none of the seats in the House. 49% of the vote = 0% representation. Many people see this as inherently unfair, but many others see this as the 'Merican Way. (I know this is not how slashdot does it, but bear with me...that's coming.) So, this is the first big question: what type of representation of the opinion out there do you want? Just majority or something more representative?
Disagreement #2: If you answered "b", the next question is what kind of representation? Well, this is where things become similar to the slashdot case. Remember the demise of Lani Guinier? She went down hard for discussing these issues in detail. Her argument was this: We learn as kids to take turns on the swing. That's fair, we all get a turn. It's not as if the kids get together and all the Linux kids and all the NT kids vote on whether or not each group gets to ride. Anyway, her suggestion was another way of voting. She says, let's have a truly representational debate in congress. If that means that the "plants are people too" party gets 1% of the seats, so be it. That's diversity at work, and they only get 1%. At least the 49%ers get their 49% instead of 0%.
Okay, so here's where the disagreement comes in. There are a million ways to figure this out. Here we go with the Condorcet Paradox, agenda manipulation, May's Theorem, single peakedness, Downsian equilibrium, Black's Theorem, and the like. They involve many of the issues discussed in slashdot: multiple votes, negative votes, vote pooling, etc. And the debates about whether each voting scheme still silences monority voices goes on.But this isn't exactly what is going on at slashdot...
The slashdot debate is similar and different
Slashdot isn't trying to get a representative selection of viewpoints. There are meta-moderator police (a sort of Supreme Court that yanks out the unconstitutional actors). There is also a cap on scores. And the goal isn't a truly representative vote, but rather a tool to allow people to filter out the junk, and give props to thoughtful ideas. There's no true loser because no one is really censored. The 1% of d00d2 out there can post all they want, but they just stay at zero or get dropped down. The similarity comes in the voting part. The idea that people get a certain number of votes and can distribute them among posts is classic voting theory.
The slashdot contribution
What I think is novel about the slashdot solution is this: people can see whether a post has already been elected or demoted, and thus not waste their vote on that post. This matters because, as elections go on-line (as I think they eventually will), seeing how a vote is going will be a big issue, especially elections where people can vote for more than one candidate and cast more than one vote for a candidate. The novel idea is actually letting people see how votes are distributed in real time and then letting them make a decision based on that configuration. If you realize that your favorite candidate is a clear winner, but your second favorite is a big loser, you can dump all your votes on the second guy. The difference is information sharing in real time and contingent decision making. I think it's a big contribution to the political voting debates of the future.
Anyway, I'll be waiting to see how things pan out.
Postscript: reading sources for voting fools. Akhil Reed Amar, Lottery Voting: A Thought Experiment, 1995 U Chi Legal F 193; Lani Guinier, The Tyranny Of The Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy (The Free Press, 1994); Richard H. Pildes, Gimme Five, New Republic 16 (Mar 1, 1993); Pamela S. Karlan, Maps and Misreadings: The Role of Geographic Compactness in Racial Vote Dilution Litigation, 24 Harv CR-CL L Rev 173 (1989).
Slashdot Mirror
The "gn" in most open source applications stands not for "GNOME", but for "GNU". GNU, in case you haven't heard, stands for "GNU's Not Unix!", one of the earliest and essential parts of the free (as in speech) software movement. This used to divide Gnome and KDE folk because KDE, early on, was not free. That is (to some degree, at least) no longer the case. HTH.
Now morally speaking, of course, MP3 thieves deserve the death penalty, but that seems a little inefficient when a lesser deterrent will work just as well. Why don't they pass a three strikes MP3 law? Or mandatory *minimums* instead of maximums. It's worked with the crack cocaine problem - crack has been pretty much disappeared from our inner-city streets since we declared our war on drugs.
Donald Braman
What I want is an 800 number I can call every time Katz kills me with his pedantic tone.
-don
This post and others have readers asking you what the heck is going on there. Please give us some kind of thoughtful response, even if it's a "we goofed" or "there is a five day backlog" or whatever. Your loyal readers and commentators, want to know why this is happening and I think they deserve a response. -Don
...closed up shop? If Apple started a new OS company, how long do you think it would be before the company realized that it could market their product to PC computer users as well? And then what would have happened? I don't think that the prejudice is stopping people like myself from praising OSX, it's that OSX won't run on my hardware.
Well, that's fine, Apple makes money of their hardware. But that's why OSX is a yawn for most people. Of course most people will benefit eventually as Windows & *nix distros copy the nice parts, but most of us won't really know about the nice parts until we get them running on our own machines.
It would be more accurate to say "At least Bush hasn't forsaken the oil interests the continue to drive his environmentally destructive policies."
cute. i just went to www.gnomefoundation.org to see who all were in on this. nice work. Nice little non-helpful whois on that.
If the government wants to pay for computers, they can (under current prevailing interpretations of our constitution) attach strings. Is it a good idea? I don't think so.
I think that federal legislation requiring filtering is simply not necessary, and one of those areas where non-legal remedies are far more efficient and effective. I imagine that any parent that entered a library and saw hustler in the children's section would organize a change in library managment. I think public libraries already are implementing restrictions on children's access to unfiltered internet-connected computers. To legislate what should and should not be available to children at a library seems overly micromanagerial.
That said, I can see an argument that what the Congress is doing is not actually meant to change the way that libraries operate, but rather that congress intends this legislation as an expression of public sentiment. Expressive legalislation of this sort *should* be widely discussed before being adopted because it often has unanticipated consequences (making more paperwork for librarians, forcing libraries with one computer to install filtering even if children are not allowed to use it, etc.).
Maybe /. could do another feature (I know they did something like this a year or two ago) on what people should use for "permanent" storage. I'm currently involved in a project putting U.S. Supreme Court documents on-line. When I told the Court's librarian that we would back everything up to CD-ROM, she asked "But how long will CDs be here? A decade? What about fifty years from now?" Good question. I had no answer. I think they'll keep the hard copies.
Yeah, I meant the "Slashdot takes kickbacks" as a parody of Cliff's comment on the main story. I have nothing to back it up with, but the point was really that he didn't have anything to back up his comment with either (sorry Cliff ;-P). -d
This disturbs me. Slashdot is all about community-responsible news reporting, but not just profits, but honesty, be it via the NYTimes, or Security Focus. Now I'm worried that Slashdot will start bribing my friends to hype news in their emails to me.
I like the raw/cooked metaphor you use...it is (to an anthropologist anyway) useful in describing the approach that many people take to technology in general. Just as Levi-Strauss taught us that myths are best understood in the context of other myths, I think that the same is true of approaches to software development. Claude Levi-Strauss was, of course, famously concerned with how mythic building blocks relate to one another--the "structure" of culture, as opposed to the details of cultural experience or myth. He drew attention away from the details of each myth, and asked people to focus on how myths worked together. It's an interesting approach that is evident in your comment and many others.
What makes this discussion so animated is the focus on the structural relationships between open source building blocks *and* detailed experience together: Can Linux keep the kernal/distro/gui/wm/fm/apps independent from one another *and* develop and provide a compelling experience for users? The arguments often shift back and forth between topical areas: how should open source agreements be structured/how should actual software components be related/what should govern the end user experience?
It's all important: how the mythic universe of opens source software is structured, which types of business and code relationships and values are promoted, and how end users of all types experience the product in their daily life.
Which brings me to your comment and the article. Dependencies like those you descirbe are at the heart of our business/software/usability universe. Is "g" or "K" hot or cold/up or down/good or bad? Who knows? The (still open) question about eazel is whether it will solidify standards that prevent or inhibit people like yourself from doing valuable work. Let's hope not.
HTML? Is that a joke? If I could write articles with decent formatting & dynamic supra and infra references in the footnotes & the occassional graphic in anything except MSWord, I would never boot-crash-reboot Win95 (I actually crashed writing this comment!). I'm not arguing that MSWord is what I want to use, but I haven't found anything else that gets the job done, let alone with ease and speed. Please, make my day! I'm dowloading AbiWord in the background, but after reading the features list, I'm not too optimistic.
The idea of university support and choice, however, is fabulous! If Yale provided any linux support, I probably wouldn't have toasted my video card installing Linux the first time.
Just a clarification...
If I remember my NYTimes Science Times correctly, the Egyptians didn't actually use a roller-pully system (in the sense that most people think of it) to transport stones. They did someting more ingenious, something that was only recently understood. Rather than placing logs underneath and pulling the stones long distances, they placed four arc-shaped wood devices on four sides of each block, essentially creating a huge wheel out the block. They then rolled this to the pyramids. Once at the pyramids, they used rollers and pulleys to maneuver the blocks up. Funny, it took us much longer to figure out how they moved the stones, than it took them to build the pyramids!
I've got dozens of examples, and as soon as I can safely and easily install linux on my laptop and do the things I want to do (see below), I'll do it in a heartbeat. I want to...
1. Add new printers and scanners without thinking about technical details.
2. Use my dual-function modem/network card without thinking about technical details.
3. Make complex word processing documents with intra-footnote references, changing layout, etc. (just need software for that).
4. Perform mapping analyses of data and print out pretty maps (just need software for that).
5. Edit videos without thinking about technical details (almost have software for that).
...you get the idea. By technical details I mean things that mac and win machines allow me to do without much expertise. Plug in a new scanner, recognize and configure my modem/network card, recognize, configure, and not fry my video card.
Some of the stuff I do is "advanced" by the average computer users standard, but little of what I do is technical or requires much technical knowledge of the OS or machines I use.
Making hay from straw men ("a ban"?...c'mon, Katz) still wins comments. Jeez, even I'm commenting...Doh!
I can't imagine the Court will reverse itself, so Libby and the GOP can try all they want.
Put aside considerations of "self-control" and "pornography" for a moment, and think about ex-offenders trying to cope with the trauma of prison rape upon release. Most don't have computers but can get access to the supportive community and information they need to begin treatment and recovery through computers at public libraries. The prison-rape support sites that I know of all have graphic letters from inmates describing rapes (www.spr.org, for example). No non-human filter will be able to tell that the user is seeking therapy and not sexual titilation (again, putting that issue aside).
These sites also use the letters from raped inmates to spread awareness about what happens in our contries prisons and jails. It's how I first became informed about the issue. Informing the public about the issue is a major concern...but what if they are politely filtered from every public library? This was just one of many points that convinced the Supreme Court to strike previous net-censorship laws.
This is all just to say that while kids do need protecting, and the government *may* have some good ideas about how to help, this is not one of them.
I'm not sure why you would want to adopt a "jury duty" model for slashdot moderatorship. Why not just let long-term members decide if they want to moderate a story or not. Once they moderate a post, they can't participate and vice versa. All other restrictions apply as well. I guess this could be gotten around (people could set up two accounts), but that seems like more work than fun.
Maybe I don't understand the idea, but it does seem too limited to me. Or maybe I'm just annoyed that I waited so long to set up my account.
Microsoft is creating fake end-user divisions to prevent the government from dividing it up along it's software divisions. This way, there is no internal dividing line along the lines that I and many others would like to see them go to the block with. Now there is no OS division or Office division or Internet division. All these basic software areas are spread among several "home" "small office" "corporate" and "back office" type divisions. Just the way they said that IE was part of windows, they will now claim that windows, office, etc. are *all* integral to each division.
This is not Microsoft dividing itself up, but it is beating the DOJ to the punch. This is a very smart way to fight a hacking up of the company.
I still think slashdot should have an area where we can view what's in the article pipeline. That way we won't bother posting stuff that's already there, and y'all can spend your time eating b-day cake instead of reading the same article suggestion over and over.
What about an area where everyon can see what is being suggested as a story for slashdot. No comments, no votes, no nothing except a place to see what people are suggesting be storied. This would provide:
1. a way to avoid wasting one's time sending in stories that are already in the pipeline, and
2. it would ease the burden on slashdot staff of reading a million suggestions for the same thing
just my 2 wooden nickles
With this moderation debate, slashdoters have managed to hit upon and, I believe, contribute to one the most interesting areas of debate about representative democracies: how not to squash minority viewpoints. The reason is this: slashdot has effectively allowed people to elect comments they like in something similar (though *not* identical) to a political election. Part of what is fascinating to me is how the discussion has mirrored the themes and ideas developed in discussions of almost all representative democratic institutions. But, there are some differences, and some novel ideas that I think might teach the political theorists something. I'm not a super scholar or anything, but here goes my summary of the debates:
Standard Voting Theories
The base model in American politics is majority rule. Unfortunately, majority rule voting tends to obscure and overpower minority voices every time. See any black nationalists in the House of Reps? Even though they may represent 1% of the population, they will never gain 1% of the seats, and thus never be heard from.
Disagreement #1: Is this good or bad? It eliminates the doomsday cult members (okay, so some Senators may seem to fall into that category at times, but you get the idea), but it also theoretically knocks out an opposition party that wins 49% of the vote in every state, but gains none of the seats in the House. 49% of the vote = 0% representation. Many people see this as inherently unfair, but many others see this as the 'Merican Way. (I know this is not how slashdot does it, but bear with me...that's coming.) So, this is the first big question: what type of representation of the opinion out there do you want? Just majority or something more representative?
Disagreement #2: If you answered "b", the next question is what kind of representation? Well, this is where things become similar to the slashdot case. Remember the demise of Lani Guinier? She went down hard for discussing these issues in detail. Her argument was this: We learn as kids to take turns on the swing. That's fair, we all get a turn. It's not as if the kids get together and all the Linux kids and all the NT kids vote on whether or not each group gets to ride. Anyway, her suggestion was another way of voting. She says, let's have a truly representational debate in congress. If that means that the "plants are people too" party gets 1% of the seats, so be it. That's diversity at work, and they only get 1%. At least the 49%ers get their 49% instead of 0%.
Okay, so here's where the disagreement comes in. There are a million ways to figure this out. Here we go with the Condorcet Paradox, agenda manipulation, May's Theorem, single peakedness, Downsian equilibrium, Black's Theorem, and the like. They involve many of the issues discussed in slashdot: multiple votes, negative votes, vote pooling, etc. And the debates about whether each voting scheme still silences monority voices goes on.But this isn't exactly what is going on at slashdot...
The slashdot debate is similar and different
Slashdot isn't trying to get a representative selection of viewpoints. There are meta-moderator police (a sort of Supreme Court that yanks out the unconstitutional actors). There is also a cap on scores. And the goal isn't a truly representative vote, but rather a tool to allow people to filter out the junk, and give props to thoughtful ideas. There's no true loser because no one is really censored. The 1% of d00d2 out there can post all they want, but they just stay at zero or get dropped down. The similarity comes in the voting part. The idea that people get a certain number of votes and can distribute them among posts is classic voting theory.
The slashdot contribution
What I think is novel about the slashdot solution is this: people can see whether a post has already been elected or demoted, and thus not waste their vote on that post. This matters because, as elections go on-line (as I think they eventually will), seeing how a vote is going will be a big issue, especially elections where people can vote for more than one candidate and cast more than one vote for a candidate. The novel idea is actually letting people see how votes are distributed in real time and then letting them make a decision based on that configuration. If you realize that your favorite candidate is a clear winner, but your second favorite is a big loser, you can dump all your votes on the second guy. The difference is information sharing in real time and contingent decision making. I think it's a big contribution to the political voting debates of the future.
Anyway, I'll be waiting to see how things pan out.
Postscript: reading sources for voting fools. Akhil Reed Amar, Lottery Voting: A Thought Experiment, 1995 U Chi Legal F 193; Lani Guinier, The Tyranny Of The Majority: Fundamental Fairness in Representative Democracy (The Free Press, 1994); Richard H. Pildes, Gimme Five, New Republic 16 (Mar 1, 1993); Pamela S. Karlan, Maps and Misreadings: The Role of Geographic Compactness in Racial Vote Dilution Litigation, 24 Harv CR-CL L Rev 173 (1989).