In his most recent book, "A Necessary Evil, The History of American Distrust in Government," Garry Wills argues that your history teacher's idea that the Constitution was designed to produce a government which was not efficient is not, in fact, true. He suggests the authors of the Constitution had just finished in an experiment with that kind of a goal (The Articles of Confederation) and were, in fact, trying to fashion a more efficient democracy.
Wills says the ideas we associate with the Constitution (checks-and-balances, co-equal branches, etc) actually come from the thoughts of those who argued against the Constitution. He argues the Congress was intended to be most powerful branch with the judicial and executive branches simply making things run more smoothly.
I don't know if he's right, but this would certainly put the Bill of Rights ahead of the Constitution in the all-time hack list.
In the early '70s, state attorneys general started suing large corporations using class-action claims based on small amounts of harm to large classes of constituents. Does this produce less bottom-feeding? Is it still practiced today?
It would be particularly ironic when you consider the idealistic young attorney general from Washington state who established the precedent by suing oil companies for overcharging consumers.
That idealistic, young Ripon Society member today has become Microsoft's pimp-in-chief in the U.S. Senate: the cadaverously macabre (and decidedly unidealistic) Senator Slade Gorton.
Another interesting question: If you had a time machine, went back and told the young Gorton what he would become, would you be guilty of murder? Because he certainly would commit suicide rather than become the epitome of what he fought against in the '70s.
You can just about automatically discount any book with "dragon" in the title as yellow-peril style scaremongering. The Chinese leadership's biggest concern right now is making sure that when capitalism wins there that they own the best-run companies.
There's a lot of money to be made right now selling books to schizotypic paranoids who are casting about after the fall of Communism for something to be afraid of. This article probably falls into that category. At least in intent.
But they may have actually stumbled onto something important. The Chinese government has actually attacked a Falun Gong website in Pennsylvania. Think about it. A foreign government has attacked a legitimate U.S.-based web site! How does that differ from an act of war?
Since we haven't really responded, what else might they think they could get away with? Wouldn't it be funny if this turned out to be the opening salvo in a new kind of war and nobody noticed?
An interesting possibility was suggested by David Boies in his 57-minute televised interview with Charlie Rose.
Rose asked him why MS hadn't called Gates to the stand to undo the damage of his video testimony. Boies said he was surprised they didn't (suggesting he couldn't have done worse than the first time).
Then Boies offered the following explanation (not saying it was the real one, just suggesting it might explain things): "One of the advantages of having $100 billion is you get to say 'no'."
Suppose you were representing Microsoft and it became clear to you that Bill Gates did not understand how badly his strategy was going to do and was unwilling to listen to alternatives. Would you tell him? Or would you take the money and accept the loss?
Indeed, one could argue that this might be the problem in a more general sense at Microsoft. Who is going to tell Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Allchin they are wrong?
An interesting possibility: Paul Maritz is the only MS exec who didn't seem to be locked into their phony story when confronted with evidence. And his testimony was far less damaging than Gates' and Allchin's.
One relevant consideration: If no one can speak truth to the power of Gates and Ballmer, at what point do their delusions become inimical to the interests of MS stockholders? I suspect we passed that point some time back.
All of this needs to be understood in the context of Gates' continuing popularity. It may turn out that Bill will have to lose a lot of money before someone like Maritz can take the role of Jeremiah to his Ahab.
Actually this is a fairly common tactic for companies which believe they have a better chance of winning on appeal than at the original trial: Adopt an offensive style in court to provoke the judge to do outrageous things. (Bobby Seals was able to get Judge Hoffman to inspire the line "So your brother's bound and gagged and they've chained him to a chair.")
A similar thing happened in the Westway case in New York where the city and state provoked a judge to shut down a $4-billion boondoggle by flaunting his authority in court.
Judge Jackson has proved much harder to provoke. He has put together a FoF which will probably stand judicial scrutiny. My prediction: He will lean as far toward MS in the findings of law as he did toward DoJ in the findings of fact. This will produce the kind of result many analysts have been predicting all along. The difference: It will be unassailable at appeal.
The philosopher, Aristotles, (on whose ideas much of Western thought is based) never wrote those ideas down (at least in any form that survives today). The books we attribute to Aristotle are all based on the notes his students at the Lyceum took while he lectured.
One could even call Plato's Dialogues "lecture notes of Socrates' dialogues" (although they are really more of a fictionalized memoir of Socrates with a lot of Plato's ideas probably put into Socrates mouth to give them more weight).
It seems to me the legal issues here are clear: If the notes are in the student's own words, it is clearly legal to publish them. If they are the direct words of the professor (and he meets the other requirements of statutory copyrighting), then publishing them would be a violation of whatever copyright might legally exist.
Interestingly, copylefting may actually prove more easily enforced in this case (as it deals directly with derivative works). Does anybody know of any professors who are making open-source-style announcements in their classes?
I did paraphrase what Boies said. What he said did include the statement that he was not part of the the discussions. But it did also include other statements which clearly contradict the "Drudge Report" and its invention.
And he said that even those who are involved in the discussions have not reached a conclusion, as was clearly stated by Drudge.
Here is what was said:
CHARLIE ROSE: So, what should be done, if that's true, in remedy?
DAVID BOIES: Now, that's the hard question. OK? And that's something I just don't have a view on.
CHARLIE ROSE: You don't have a view.
DAVID BOIES: I just don't--
CHARLIE ROSE: You have a view, but don't want to tell me? Or you don't have a view?
DAVID BOIES: No, I don't have a view. I don't have a view. Part of that is that I've not been involved directly in the remedy discussions. Part of it is that I think, even for the people who are involved in those discussions, those are still ongoing.
And, although I've not talked to them in detail, I don't think people have a concrete, finite view as to exactly what the right remedy is. If they do, I don't know 'em.
That really wasn't what my function was.
Sometimes what we remember is not exactly what we heard. Perhaps this would explain Gates' problems with evidence clearly contradicting what he testified.
Drudge has no idea what he's talking about. David Boies said very clearly and very credibly on the Charlie Rose show last night that the remedy team is still in the very early stages of discussion.
And Pournelle's credibility is little better. His pseudo-Libertarian prejudices have caused him to embarrass the entire clan of nerds by making even more mistakes than the judge. The judge at least has an excuse (he never used a computer before the trial and was supposed to limit his findings to the evidence presented him). Pournelle has none, but this is not the first time he has betrayed the cause of freedom in serving his own little brand of Libertarianism.
There is much I disagree with in the judge's decision, but we need an geek evaluation which is more accurate than what Pournelle offers.
Pournelle claims the history of OS/2 is misrepresented by the judge. But Jerry's rant is much further from the mark than the judge's. Pournelle claims that OS/2 was done in when developers wouldn't pay the fee for the kit. This is a gross misreading of history. Maybe developers should have refused to pay, but they didn't. They all assumed IBM would lead the way and paid for their developer's kits.
Just look at the major vendors of DOS/Windows apps from the year before OS/2 was released. Name me one who didn't release their next upgrade for OS/2 before they came out with a Windows release.
Indeed, Microsoft told all the members of its MSDN that they should go for OS/2. They even suggested that that was the direction MS itself was pursuing. Of course, we know today that this was a lie. But, whether it was illegal monopolistic practice or not, it was crucial to their current dominance in the word processing space at the very least -- and probably much more.
The original OS/2 failed not because developers failed to adopt it, but because it was limited to the PS/2, which corporate America refused to buy, especially when Intel, Compaq and others resisted the march toward a proprietary hardware standard. For Pournelle to claim otherwise is to ignore all those developers who were left standing there with unsold OS/2 program disks in their hands as Microsoft claimed their former markets.
Of course, the judge was never talking about the original release of OS/2 at all. And he was absolutely clear that he was discussing the release of OS/2 for the open Intel standard which came later -- Warp. Throughout the decision he repeated makes it clear exactly what platform he was talking. And it was the one which OS/2 didn't run on until Warp.
The judge is very careful about his findings of harm to consumers -- the one area in which I agree with him almost completely. For Pournelle to deride the judge, suggesting the only damage found was the $30 overcharge for each copy of Windows, can only be characterized as the kind of dishonesty that got Bill Gates in trouble. The judge was very specific and found a number of damages which went beyond the loss of consumer choice.
And another one just popped up today in the form of BubbleBoy.
Remember that Microsoft built its empire by charging $15 for each copy of DOS on a $3,000 IBM machine. Now, they get $65-$95 for each copy on an $800 machine. Monopolistic pricing is always considered crucial in an antitrust case.
The neo-classical economics Jerry uses to justify his pseudo-Libertarian arguments against government "price-setting" all predict that the price of operating systems would have dropped to $2 by now. But, like many Libertarians, Pournelle is so afraid of government chains that he willingly puts his hands to the chains of outrageously more despotic corporations.
All threats to freedom are dangerous -- public or private.
Jim Allchin admitted 19 times in his testimony that his previous claims about IE being bundled into Win98 were lies. The judge correctly found the "integration" was done for MS's benefit, not the consumers. And he documented numerous disadvantages to the bundling.
It is truly embarrassing when a neophyte like Judge Jackson puts a pundit like Jerry Pournelle to shame.
All of this is not to say that I don't believe some of what Jackson says is wrong. But, remember, he is constrained by the evidence put before him. And that evidence showed -- over and over again -- that Microsoft was lying through its teeth (and often being very arrogant about it when caught).
My prediction is that he will lean as far toward Microsoft in his findings of law as he did towards the government in his findings of fact. The result will be a balanced decision which will be unassailable at appeal.
Incidentally, this will provide a strong Libertarian precedent, which will set a very high factual standard for the remedies he eventually prescribes. The handwringing of Pournelle and others over the precedent being set here ignores the fact that findings of fact set no precedent. Precedents are set by findings of law. Oops, another big error for Pournelle, but at least this one's not on his home turf.
This judge's Libertarian credentials far outweigh Pournelle's. He was the first appointment at this level by Ronald Reagan. In the end we will see that he serves freedom to the same degree that pseudo-Libertarians like Pournelle betray it.
The judge in the Microsoft case ruled that the benefits of bundling IE into Win98 could have been achieved by having them as separate programs. He also ruled that there were disadvantages to consumers for bundling (he cited slower performance for users who wanted to use Netscape).
But this is a big-time disadvantage. Since IE5.0 is automatically installed on my Win98 machines (and is not listed in the Remove Programs list), I cannot turn my IE security settings to "high" without disabling some web sites in Netscape Communicator.
I agree with Libertarian values, but their application to situations like this often leave much to be desired. I'm glad somebody is pointing out the lack of real-world predictions which can be made by neo-classical economics.
MillMan is wrong when he suggests real-world economics NEVER tend toward stability. The assumption the neo-classical school makes is that all markets reach a point of diminishing returns. That actually happens in some areas -- gold mining, farming, or any area where making more and more becomes less efficient (usually because poorer land or mines have to be used as you expand).
But he is absolutely right in suggesting such examples are very rare. And they are becoming more rare in the information economy. Metcalfe's Law ("The value of any network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes") also applies to networked economies, which are becoming more plentiful.
Networked economies occur in any industry where the value of the product increases with the number sold. Consider the salesman who had to sell the first telephone, "Gee, you can call... Well, you can't call anyone now. But as soon as somebody else buys one, you can call them."
More and more things are turning into networked economies: faxes (at first they were sold in pairs, so businesses could put them in two of their offices); package delivery (if you can't guarantee delivery to many places, you aren't worth much); the Internet; operating systems; videotape formats (the more people who buy your format, the more stores will want to stock your format, which means the more people will want to buy your format).
In such environments, the neo-classical prediction that markets will tend to stabilize in support of the best, least-expensive product almost never come true. Still, neo-classical theorists still cling to this belief. In order to satisfy this will to believe, they have to believe that Windows must be the best product.
Look at the predictions which this economic theory has made: Bangladesh will stop producing too many children and become a developed country in a few years after they adopted a free market economy. The Russian people will be better off economically when Communism falls. The percentage of the price of a new computer which goes to pay for the operating system will decline over time ($15 of $4,000 IBM PC in 1982; $65-$95 of an $800 computer today). Beta will beat out VHS. The list goes on and on.
Why do these economists cling to such a useless theory? When the system is forced to equilibrium by decreasing returns, you get linear equations. When you admit we often have increasing returns, you get non-linear equations. Economists have long wanted to make their discipline more scientific. They can't do this when they can't solve the equations. We know how to solve the linear equations; we don't know how to solve the equations generated by increasing returns.
Economists have long made the assumptions they needed to be able to solve their equations. Who cares if they're inaccurate assumptions? Well, the banks care -- the banks who loaned trillions to the Third World because their economists' predictions said the Third World nations would be able to pay them back.
There's nothing wrong with Libertarian values, but Libertarians who assume that government is always an enemy of freedom and the corporations are always friends of freedom are betraying those values. They are also abdicating the responsibility of liberty-seekers: to evaluate all potential coercers fairly and accurately.
Interestingly, neural nets and other recent developments are looking very promising in solving the equations we need to accurately model the real world and its economics.
Not surprisingly the banks who have a lot of Third World loans are the ones who are paying for much of this research.
Findings of fact are seldom overturned on appeal because higher courts assume the judge with the more direct experience of the evidence has the advantage in determining facts. In this particular case, some of the issues are particularly technical (in the computer-science sense, not the legal sense). This means any attempt to send the decision back to Jackson to rethink these findings would likely allow the judge to reaffirm his findings (while explaining in a way that would not make the appeals court look good).
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this decision is the extent to which Judge Jackson demonstrated that he understood both the coding issues and the business-case issues. This doesn't bode well for Microsoft's lawyers.
One of the consequences of the way Jackson has structured this trial is the fact that the MS counsel will now have to argue the facts of law accepting these findings of fact. It should be great fun to watch.
One thing that very few people on both sides of this debate seem to have realized is that Gates is a terrible liar. This should have be obvious from his videotaped testimony.
An even better example of this was the interview which Bill gave just after he testified before a congressional committee. It was an hour-long interview conducted by Charlie Rose in front of a live audience (the audience got to ask questions, too, and some were quite well informed) at the New York City Public Library.
It became very clear that the entire audience knew exactly when he was telling the truth, partly because the audience was sitting out of his line of sight when he faced Rose (he then had to glance out of the corner of his eye to see the audience reaction). At one point the audience was so sure he was lying the entire crowd broke out into raucous laughter.
This has consequences which will be uncomfortable for Bill's detractors as well as to his supporters. It means we not only have to accept he's not telling the truth sometimes. We must also realize there are times he is telling the truth when our prejudices might lead us to prefer to believe he's lying.
At some point we should recognize that he really does believe that the world is a better place for the changes he has brought about.
As console games try to cross over into the world of the Internet, they just might want to consider the opinions of one of the first to cross over from board games to computer games (and the first to see on-line gaming as an interesting place).
Perhaps more to the point would be to consider Costikyan's role in the Great Schism of roleplaying. At the time of pen-and-paper roleplaying's third generation (GURPS, The Fantasy Trip, Paranoia, etc), there were two schools of thought on how the future of the genre should go: generic-universal and narrow-focus.
Both groups saw that TSR was making most of its Dungeons and Dragons money off supplements. But they advocated different ways of taking advantage of this fact.
Generic-universalists sought to produce a single system which would cover a wide variety of genres (from sci-fi to high fantasy, for instance). They then expected to make their money selling a large number of supplements enabling that wide range of genres.
The narrow-focus group (of which Costikyan was a leading proponent) sought to produce highly-focused products which implemented a single idea very well. That idea might be original (as in Paranoia, Vampire, Werewolf and Toon) or based on a movie (Star Wars or Ghostbusters) or a series of books (ICE's Tolkein-based system). Their plan was to make money selling supplements which very explicitly outlined the exact details of the game world.
I suspect some of the reason the narrow-focus group has had so much success is the quality of the games which Costikyan contributed.
As a participant in this pseudo-religious debate, Costikyan probably has some valid insights into this kind of conflict. He may be planning to take a side himself, given that he has done so in the past.
And let us not forget his novel, "Once a Hero," one of the great high-fantasy works of recent years.
And what about his father's connections with shady election-law politics in New York City? Certainly the "last lawyer in Tamany Hall" never hesitated to plunge into an ideological schism.
I appreciated the fair tone of both this analysis and the comments it brought out. There are many things I don't like about Bill Gates, but his detractors sometimes fail to recognize at least one point:
Bill gives it away whenever he tries to lie. This is readily apparent in his court testimony, his Congressional appearance, and the Charlie Rose interview he did the next day. So, those of us who reject much of what he says have to recognize that he believes it.
And here I thought everybody who reads slashdot is a geek.
My assumption has always been that the name gives an obvious clue. Anyone who has ever used the UML has noted the possible value in creating an object-oriented system that implements metaobjects to a greater or lesser degree.
Any number of people are working on this, hoping it will be the next big breakthrough in computing. (I admit I am.) Damian Conway suggested at the Perl Conference that he sees it as a way to win the Larry Wall Award again next year.
"Transmeta" suggests to me they are trying to do metaobjects, probably at greater-degree level mentioned above.
I think this not an important issue. I think it is a bunch of fairly unrelated important issues.
First, there are the issues revolving around programmers directly: Should I rewrite a base class for my new company just because I wrote the original for another employer? Should I release it as open-source? Should I store my customers' data in a proprietary format (even encrypted) which prevents them from using another vendor or consultant?
Then there are the Evil-Empire-type issues: Is the same behavior which was acceptable from a struggling startup still fair when executed by a global monopoly? Should I ever have to pay for an upgrade for basic software like an operating system or a word processor? Shouldn't a purchaser get to own the software in some sense (not just a license)?
Then there are the script-kiddie-, Buffy-fan-type issues: Is deep-linking ethical? Can I justify copyright violations as a response to censorship? Is it ever ethical to watch any Fox show besides "The Simpsons"? Is it ever unethical to steal something from Rupert Murdoch? Does the information really want to be free?
I think Jon does these debates a bit of a disservice, muddying the waters by mixing them all together. But then, when he starts talking 'Netiquette and flaming, I think he gets into an area which is not the private domain of programmers, but a set of issues for our whole society. Once everybody can get on the Web (now) without any technical expertise, the decisions about how to behave there become everybody's responsibility.
It was nice of the ethics-schmethics crowd to flame Jon and demonstrate the need to bring these issues up.
Sure this is a hoax. It's never been discussed by anyone with the real power to do anything like it.
But how you react to it says something deep and profound about your mental health (something which "they" couldn't test without asking strange-sounding questions you probably wouldn't answer). So, the fact that such an obvious fraud appears on slashdot must mean that someone is reading the responses, collating them, and preparing a report on how many nerds are schizophrenics.
This reminds me of a newspaper column a few years ago in which the columnist argued that the fact that he had fallen for a hoax about the government because he believed they wanted to overregulate showed that government was bad. Of course, I learned much more about him than I did about government regulation.
How can anyone claim to be surprised by any of this? Bob Metcalfe wrote a column which was a puerile, ad-hominem flame of the the Linux community (known for its emotional flamers). He received a bunch of puerile, ad-hominem flames back. Of course. Go back and look at the original column. He starts with a terrible analogy in which compares the open source movement to various Communists. Then, halfway through the column, he admits it's a bad analogy and proposes one that's even more inappropriate. That back-to-the-earth metaphor lasts about a paragraph before he changes strategies again: He starts calling Open Source "Open Sores." Now, most of us stopped making jokes about people's names sometime back in grade school. Those that didn't write puerile, ad-hominem flames. Or bad columns. Is Bob Metcalfe surprised he got flamed? No. He set out to be flamed so he could talk about how irresponsible the Linux community flamers were. I'm only surprised anyone was foolish enough to rise to his bait.
This video is sold by PBS Home Video at 800-828-4PBS (800-828-4727). I think it's about $50, but there may be shipping and handling added to that. If they ask you if you are an educational institution, say "no" because they charge teachers more. (How's that for the logic of educational TV?)
Open Source and resurrection in Cryptonomicon
on
Review:Cryptonomicon
·
· Score: 1
I'm surprised no one else has commented on the Cryptonomicon as an Open Source manifesto.
IMHO one of the fundamental theses of this novel is that before crypto became an open-source project in the late '40s it was heavily unbalanced in favor of the cryptoanalysts. To put it in the terminology of the book, cryptographers before that point were usually dilettantes who came up with good ideas they thought were unbreakable and cryptoanalysts were non-dilettantes who (by working really hard) could almost always break the codes.
When cryptographers started publishing their ideas in the late '40s, those ideas started getting critical review. The result has been the longest period in history when crypto has surpassed analysis.
All of this has pretty obvious implications for the security of Open Source OSes and other programming projects. And those implications probably go far beyond security to stability and speed.
SPOILER ALERT!
I do have one question about the plot of this book: Didn't Enoch Root die in Sweden in 1945 and get buried there only to reappear in a jail in the Philippines in the late '90s?
Was there some explanation of this resurrection that I missed?
Of course, all the discussion about the real purpose of this book misses the point which should be obvious: The whole 900 pages was just an excuse to tell a really bad pun. (The title of the final chapter)
As someone who has led youth groups (some of which included students from Columbine), I believe there is a two-stage process involved in these killings. The first is the alienation phase with which so many commentors are identifying. The second is the blame process, in which they (and many others, especially on TV news) are participating.
As part of the youth programs in which I have participated, we always included a module on cliques. When we discussed this, the kids from Columbine always said, "Our school is the clique-iest."
But guess what? So did all the kids from other schools.
The truth is: Cliques start forming around 5th grade, reach their peak in junior high, and start to taper off in high school. Young people in these years define themselves by these cliques (either by the cliques to which they belong or by their outsider status).
It may come as a surprise to those of us who always defined ourselves as outsiders, but even many who are in the most popular cliques harbor doubts about whether they really "belong." The number who have this feeling that they are just pretending to belong increases in high school and usually leads to an ability to define one's identity independently of in-ness or out-ness with the "in" crowd.
The Second Stage The other phase which contributes to the kind of events we experienced in Colorado is the blame phase.
We can see this on TV every night this week. We can see it in the comments to Jon's commentary. What we don't always see is that blame is part of what these two boys used to justify their actions.
It is the same whether it is a Christian blaming the shootings on the end of school prayer in 1962 or an atheist counselor saying these kids should have been detected and helped. It is the same whether it is gun nuts who are sure that if more people had been allowed to carry concealed weapons in the school the killings would have been stopped or whether it is gun-control lobbyists saying we should ban them.
What all these people don't seem to realize is that these two boys were able to divide the world into those who they could blame for their problems and themselves. And they believed that their ability to blame entitled them to force the world to take note of their grievances.
And where did they learn to seek redress for this blame?
From the movies? Yes.
From videogames? Yes.
From the media? Yes.
From violent music lyrics? Yes.
But most of all, more than any other source of learning the blame-redress game, they learned it from those very people who are now on TV, promoting their little agendas at the expense of those who were killed at Columbine.
And, until we learn that lesson, there will be more. Because what we fail to realize is that we are teaching kids all over the country that their natural feelings of outsider-hood are the reasons they should become killers like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
And remember: not only the geeks can feel alienated from the "in" crowd. It's really just a natural part of growing up.
Slashdot Mirror
In his most recent book, "A Necessary Evil, The History of American Distrust in Government," Garry Wills argues that your history teacher's idea that the Constitution was designed to produce a government which was not efficient is not, in fact, true. He suggests the authors of the Constitution had just finished in an experiment with that kind of a goal (The Articles of Confederation) and were, in fact, trying to fashion a more efficient democracy.
Wills says the ideas we associate with the Constitution (checks-and-balances, co-equal branches, etc) actually come from the thoughts of those who argued against the Constitution. He argues the Congress was intended to be most powerful branch with the judicial and executive branches simply making things run more smoothly.
I don't know if he's right, but this would certainly put the Bill of Rights ahead of the Constitution in the all-time hack list.
In the early '70s, state attorneys general started suing large corporations using class-action claims based on small amounts of harm to large classes of constituents. Does this produce less bottom-feeding? Is it still practiced today?
It would be particularly ironic when you consider the idealistic young attorney general from Washington state who established the precedent by suing oil companies for overcharging consumers.
That idealistic, young Ripon Society member today has become Microsoft's pimp-in-chief in the U.S. Senate: the cadaverously macabre (and decidedly unidealistic) Senator Slade Gorton.
Another interesting question: If you had a time machine, went back and told the young Gorton what he would become, would you be guilty of murder? Because he certainly would commit suicide rather than become the epitome of what he fought against in the '70s.
You can just about automatically discount any book with "dragon" in the title as yellow-peril style scaremongering. The Chinese leadership's biggest concern right now is making sure that when capitalism wins there that they own the best-run companies.
There's a lot of money to be made right now selling books to schizotypic paranoids who are casting about after the fall of Communism for something to be afraid of. This article probably falls into that category. At least in intent.
But they may have actually stumbled onto something important. The Chinese government has actually attacked a Falun Gong website in Pennsylvania. Think about it. A foreign government has attacked a legitimate U.S.-based web site! How does that differ from an act of war?
Since we haven't really responded, what else might they think they could get away with? Wouldn't it be funny if this turned out to be the opening salvo in a new kind of war and nobody noticed?
An interesting possibility was suggested by David Boies in his 57-minute televised interview with Charlie Rose.
Rose asked him why MS hadn't called Gates to the stand to undo the damage of his video testimony. Boies said he was surprised they didn't (suggesting he couldn't have done worse than the first time).
Then Boies offered the following explanation (not saying it was the real one, just suggesting it might explain things): "One of the advantages of having $100 billion is you get to say 'no'."
Suppose you were representing Microsoft and it became clear to you that Bill Gates did not understand how badly his strategy was going to do and was unwilling to listen to alternatives. Would you tell him? Or would you take the money and accept the loss?
Indeed, one could argue that this might be the problem in a more general sense at Microsoft. Who is going to tell Bill Gates, Steve Ballmer, and Allchin they are wrong?
An interesting possibility: Paul Maritz is the only MS exec who didn't seem to be locked into their phony story when confronted with evidence. And his testimony was far less damaging than Gates' and Allchin's.
One relevant consideration: If no one can speak truth to the power of Gates and Ballmer, at what point do their delusions become inimical to the interests of MS stockholders? I suspect we passed that point some time back.
All of this needs to be understood in the context of Gates' continuing popularity. It may turn out that Bill will have to lose a lot of money before someone like Maritz can take the role of Jeremiah to his Ahab.
Actually this is a fairly common tactic for companies which believe they have a better chance of winning on appeal than at the original trial: Adopt an offensive style in court to provoke the judge to do outrageous things. (Bobby Seals was able to get Judge Hoffman to inspire the line "So your brother's bound and gagged and they've chained him to a chair.")
A similar thing happened in the Westway case in New York where the city and state provoked a judge to shut down a $4-billion boondoggle by flaunting his authority in court.
Judge Jackson has proved much harder to provoke. He has put together a FoF which will probably stand judicial scrutiny. My prediction: He will lean as far toward MS in the findings of law as he did toward DoJ in the findings of fact. This will produce the kind of result many analysts have been predicting all along. The difference: It will be unassailable at appeal.
The philosopher, Aristotles, (on whose ideas much of Western thought is based) never wrote those ideas down (at least in any form that survives today). The books we attribute to Aristotle are all based on the notes his students at the Lyceum took while he lectured.
One could even call Plato's Dialogues "lecture notes of Socrates' dialogues" (although they are really more of a fictionalized memoir of Socrates with a lot of Plato's ideas probably put into Socrates mouth to give them more weight).
It seems to me the legal issues here are clear: If the notes are in the student's own words, it is clearly legal to publish them. If they are the direct words of the professor (and he meets the other requirements of statutory copyrighting), then publishing them would be a violation of whatever copyright might legally exist.
Interestingly, copylefting may actually prove more easily enforced in this case (as it deals directly with derivative works). Does anybody know of any professors who are making open-source-style announcements in their classes?
I did paraphrase what Boies said. What he said did include the statement that he was not part of the the discussions. But it did also include other statements which clearly contradict the "Drudge Report" and its invention.
And he said that even those who are involved in the discussions have not reached a conclusion, as was clearly stated by Drudge.
Here is what was said:
CHARLIE ROSE: So, what should be done, if that's true, in remedy?
DAVID BOIES: Now, that's the hard question. OK? And that's something I just don't have a view on.
CHARLIE ROSE: You don't have a view.
DAVID BOIES: I just don't--
CHARLIE ROSE: You have a view, but don't want to tell me? Or you don't have a view?
DAVID BOIES: No, I don't have a view. I don't have a view. Part of that is that I've not been involved directly in the remedy discussions. Part of it is that I think, even for the people who are involved in those discussions, those are still ongoing.
And, although I've not talked to them in detail, I don't think people have a concrete, finite view as to exactly what the right remedy is. If they do, I don't know 'em.
That really wasn't what my function was.
Sometimes what we remember is not exactly what we heard. Perhaps this would explain Gates' problems with evidence clearly contradicting what he testified.
Drudge has no idea what he's talking about. David Boies said very clearly and very credibly on the Charlie Rose show last night that the remedy team is still in the very early stages of discussion.
And Pournelle's credibility is little better. His pseudo-Libertarian prejudices have caused him to embarrass the entire clan of nerds by making even more mistakes than the judge. The judge at least has an excuse (he never used a computer before the trial and was supposed to limit his findings to the evidence presented him). Pournelle has none, but this is not the first time he has betrayed the cause of freedom in serving his own little brand of Libertarianism.
There is much I disagree with in the judge's decision, but we need an geek evaluation which is more accurate than what Pournelle offers.
Pournelle claims the history of OS/2 is misrepresented by the judge. But Jerry's rant is much further from the mark than the judge's. Pournelle claims that OS/2 was done in when developers wouldn't pay the fee for the kit. This is a gross misreading of history. Maybe developers should have refused to pay, but they didn't. They all assumed IBM would lead the way and paid for their developer's kits.
Just look at the major vendors of DOS/Windows apps from the year before OS/2 was released. Name me one who didn't release their next upgrade for OS/2 before they came out with a Windows release.
Indeed, Microsoft told all the members of its MSDN that they should go for OS/2. They even suggested that that was the direction MS itself was pursuing. Of course, we know today that this was a lie. But, whether it was illegal monopolistic practice or not, it was crucial to their current dominance in the word processing space at the very least -- and probably much more.
The original OS/2 failed not because developers failed to adopt it, but because it was limited to the PS/2, which corporate America refused to buy, especially when Intel, Compaq and others resisted the march toward a proprietary hardware standard. For Pournelle to claim otherwise is to ignore all those developers who were left standing there with unsold OS/2 program disks in their hands as Microsoft claimed their former markets.
Of course, the judge was never talking about the original release of OS/2 at all. And he was absolutely clear that he was discussing the release of OS/2 for the open Intel standard which came later -- Warp. Throughout the decision he repeated makes it clear exactly what platform he was talking. And it was the one which OS/2 didn't run on until Warp.
The judge is very careful about his findings of harm to consumers -- the one area in which I agree with him almost completely. For Pournelle to deride the judge, suggesting the only damage found was the $30 overcharge for each copy of Windows, can only be characterized as the kind of dishonesty that got Bill Gates in trouble. The judge was very specific and found a number of damages which went beyond the loss of consumer choice.
And another one just popped up today in the form of BubbleBoy.
Remember that Microsoft built its empire by charging $15 for each copy of DOS on a $3,000 IBM machine. Now, they get $65-$95 for each copy on an $800 machine. Monopolistic pricing is always considered crucial in an antitrust case.
The neo-classical economics Jerry uses to justify his pseudo-Libertarian arguments against government "price-setting" all predict that the price of operating systems would have dropped to $2 by now. But, like many Libertarians, Pournelle is so afraid of government chains that he willingly puts his hands to the chains of outrageously more despotic corporations.
All threats to freedom are dangerous -- public or private.
Jim Allchin admitted 19 times in his testimony that his previous claims about IE being bundled into Win98 were lies. The judge correctly found the "integration" was done for MS's benefit, not the consumers. And he documented numerous disadvantages to the bundling.
It is truly embarrassing when a neophyte like Judge Jackson puts a pundit like Jerry Pournelle to shame.
All of this is not to say that I don't believe some of what Jackson says is wrong. But, remember, he is constrained by the evidence put before him. And that evidence showed -- over and over again -- that Microsoft was lying through its teeth (and often being very arrogant about it when caught).
My prediction is that he will lean as far toward Microsoft in his findings of law as he did towards the government in his findings of fact. The result will be a balanced decision which will be unassailable at appeal.
Incidentally, this will provide a strong Libertarian precedent, which will set a very high factual standard for the remedies he eventually prescribes. The handwringing of Pournelle and others over the precedent being set here ignores the fact that findings of fact set no precedent. Precedents are set by findings of law. Oops, another big error for Pournelle, but at least this one's not on his home turf.
This judge's Libertarian credentials far outweigh Pournelle's. He was the first appointment at this level by Ronald Reagan. In the end we will see that he serves freedom to the same degree that pseudo-Libertarians like Pournelle betray it.
The judge in the Microsoft case ruled that the benefits of bundling IE into Win98 could have been achieved by having them as separate programs. He also ruled that there were disadvantages to consumers for bundling (he cited slower performance for users who wanted to use Netscape).
But this is a big-time disadvantage. Since IE5.0 is automatically installed on my Win98 machines (and is not listed in the Remove Programs list), I cannot turn my IE security settings to "high" without disabling some web sites in Netscape Communicator.
I agree with Libertarian values, but their application to situations like this often leave much to be desired. I'm glad somebody is pointing out the lack of real-world predictions which can be made by neo-classical economics.
MillMan is wrong when he suggests real-world economics NEVER tend toward stability. The assumption the neo-classical school makes is that all markets reach a point of diminishing returns. That actually happens in some areas -- gold mining, farming, or any area where making more and more becomes less efficient (usually because poorer land or mines have to be used as you expand).
But he is absolutely right in suggesting such examples are very rare. And they are becoming more rare in the information economy. Metcalfe's Law ("The value of any network is proportional to the square of the number of nodes") also applies to networked economies, which are becoming more plentiful.
Networked economies occur in any industry where the value of the product increases with the number sold. Consider the salesman who had to sell the first telephone, "Gee, you can call... Well, you can't call anyone now. But as soon as somebody else buys one, you can call them."
More and more things are turning into networked economies: faxes (at first they were sold in pairs, so businesses could put them in two of their offices); package delivery (if you can't guarantee delivery to many places, you aren't worth much); the Internet; operating systems; videotape formats (the more people who buy your format, the more stores will want to stock your format, which means the more people will want to buy your format).
In such environments, the neo-classical prediction that markets will tend to stabilize in support of the best, least-expensive product almost never come true. Still, neo-classical theorists still cling to this belief. In order to satisfy this will to believe, they have to believe that Windows must be the best product.
Look at the predictions which this economic theory has made: Bangladesh will stop producing too many children and become a developed country in a few years after they adopted a free market economy. The Russian people will be better off economically when Communism falls. The percentage of the price of a new computer which goes to pay for the operating system will decline over time ($15 of $4,000 IBM PC in 1982; $65-$95 of an $800 computer today). Beta will beat out VHS. The list goes on and on.
Why do these economists cling to such a useless theory? When the system is forced to equilibrium by decreasing returns, you get linear equations. When you admit we often have increasing returns, you get non-linear equations. Economists have long wanted to make their discipline more scientific. They can't do this when they can't solve the equations. We know how to solve the linear equations; we don't know how to solve the equations generated by increasing returns.
Economists have long made the assumptions they needed to be able to solve their equations. Who cares if they're inaccurate assumptions? Well, the banks care -- the banks who loaned trillions to the Third World because their economists' predictions said the Third World nations would be able to pay them back.
There's nothing wrong with Libertarian values, but Libertarians who assume that government is always an enemy of freedom and the corporations are always friends of freedom are betraying those values. They are also abdicating the responsibility of liberty-seekers: to evaluate all potential coercers fairly and accurately.
Interestingly, neural nets and other recent developments are looking very promising in solving the equations we need to accurately model the real world and its economics.
Not surprisingly the banks who have a lot of Third World loans are the ones who are paying for much of this research.
...Judge Jackson respectfully disagreed with you.
Findings of fact are seldom overturned on appeal because higher courts assume the judge with the more direct experience of the evidence has the advantage in determining facts. In this particular case, some of the issues are particularly technical (in the computer-science sense, not the legal sense). This means any attempt to send the decision back to Jackson to rethink these findings would likely allow the judge to reaffirm his findings (while explaining in a way that would not make the appeals court look good).
Perhaps the most interesting thing about this decision is the extent to which Judge Jackson demonstrated that he understood both the coding issues and the business-case issues. This doesn't bode well for Microsoft's lawyers.
One of the consequences of the way Jackson has structured this trial is the fact that the MS counsel will now have to argue the facts of law accepting these findings of fact. It should be great fun to watch.
One thing that very few people on both sides of this debate seem to have realized is that Gates is a terrible liar. This should have be obvious from his videotaped testimony.
An even better example of this was the interview which Bill gave just after he testified before a congressional committee. It was an hour-long interview conducted by Charlie Rose in front of a live audience (the audience got to ask questions, too, and some were quite well informed) at the New York City Public Library.
It became very clear that the entire audience knew exactly when he was telling the truth, partly because the audience was sitting out of his line of sight when he faced Rose (he then had to glance out of the corner of his eye to see the audience reaction). At one point the audience was so sure he was lying the entire crowd broke out into raucous laughter.
This has consequences which will be uncomfortable for Bill's detractors as well as to his supporters. It means we not only have to accept he's not telling the truth sometimes. We must also realize there are times he is telling the truth when our prejudices might lead us to prefer to believe he's lying.
At some point we should recognize that he really does believe that the world is a better place for the changes he has brought about.
As console games try to cross over into the world of the Internet, they just might want to consider the opinions of one of the first to cross over from board games to computer games (and the first to see on-line gaming as an interesting place).
Perhaps more to the point would be to consider Costikyan's role in the Great Schism of roleplaying. At the time of pen-and-paper roleplaying's third generation (GURPS, The Fantasy Trip, Paranoia, etc), there were two schools of thought on how the future of the genre should go: generic-universal and narrow-focus.
Both groups saw that TSR was making most of its Dungeons and Dragons money off supplements. But they advocated different ways of taking advantage of this fact.
Generic-universalists sought to produce a single system which would cover a wide variety of genres (from sci-fi to high fantasy, for instance). They then expected to make their money selling a large number of supplements enabling that wide range of genres.
The narrow-focus group (of which Costikyan was a leading proponent) sought to produce highly-focused products which implemented a single idea very well. That idea might be original (as in Paranoia, Vampire, Werewolf and Toon) or based on a movie (Star Wars or Ghostbusters) or a series of books (ICE's Tolkein-based system). Their plan was to make money selling supplements which very explicitly outlined the exact details of the game world.
I suspect some of the reason the narrow-focus group has had so much success is the quality of the games which Costikyan contributed.
As a participant in this pseudo-religious debate, Costikyan probably has some valid insights into this kind of conflict. He may be planning to take a side himself, given that he has done so in the past.
And let us not forget his novel, "Once a Hero," one of the great high-fantasy works of recent years.
And what about his father's connections with shady election-law politics in New York City? Certainly the "last lawyer in Tamany Hall" never hesitated to plunge into an ideological schism.
I appreciated the fair tone of both this analysis and the comments it brought out. There are many things I don't like about Bill Gates, but his detractors sometimes fail to recognize at least one point:
Bill gives it away whenever he tries to lie. This is readily apparent in his court testimony, his Congressional appearance, and the Charlie Rose interview he did the next day. So, those of us who reject much of what he says have to recognize that he believes it.
And here I thought everybody who reads slashdot is a geek.
My assumption has always been that the name gives an obvious clue. Anyone who has ever used the UML has noted the possible value in creating an object-oriented system that implements metaobjects to a greater or lesser degree.
Any number of people are working on this, hoping it will be the next big breakthrough in computing. (I admit I am.) Damian Conway suggested at the Perl Conference that he sees it as a way to win the Larry Wall Award again next year.
"Transmeta" suggests to me they are trying to do metaobjects, probably at greater-degree level mentioned above.
QED
I think this not an important issue. I think it is a bunch of fairly unrelated important issues.
First, there are the issues revolving around programmers directly: Should I rewrite a base class for my new company just because I wrote the original for another employer? Should I release it as open-source? Should I store my customers' data in a proprietary format (even encrypted) which prevents them from using another vendor or consultant?
Then there are the Evil-Empire-type issues: Is the same behavior which was acceptable from a struggling startup still fair when executed by a global monopoly? Should I ever have to pay for an upgrade for basic software like an operating system or a word processor? Shouldn't a purchaser get to own the software in some sense (not just a license)?
Then there are the script-kiddie-, Buffy-fan-type issues: Is deep-linking ethical? Can I justify copyright violations as a response to censorship? Is it ever ethical to watch any Fox show besides "The Simpsons"? Is it ever unethical to steal something from Rupert Murdoch? Does the information really want to be free?
I think Jon does these debates a bit of a disservice, muddying the waters by mixing them all together. But then, when he starts talking 'Netiquette and flaming, I think he gets into an area which is not the private domain of programmers, but a set of issues for our whole society. Once everybody can get on the Web (now) without any technical expertise, the decisions about how to behave there become everybody's responsibility.
It was nice of the ethics-schmethics crowd to flame Jon and demonstrate the need to bring these issues up.
Sure this is a hoax. It's never been discussed by anyone with the real power to do anything like it.
But how you react to it says something deep and profound about your mental health (something which "they" couldn't test without asking strange-sounding questions you probably wouldn't answer). So, the fact that such an obvious fraud appears on slashdot must mean that someone is reading the responses, collating them, and preparing a report on how many nerds are schizophrenics.
This reminds me of a newspaper column a few years ago in which the columnist argued that the fact that he had fallen for a hoax about the government because he believed they wanted to overregulate showed that government was bad. Of course, I learned much more about him than I did about government regulation.
How can anyone claim to be surprised by any of this? Bob Metcalfe wrote a column which was a puerile, ad-hominem flame of the the Linux community (known for its emotional flamers). He received a bunch of puerile, ad-hominem flames back.
Of course.
Go back and look at the original column. He starts with a terrible analogy in which compares the open source movement to various Communists. Then, halfway through the column, he admits it's a bad analogy and proposes one that's even more inappropriate. That back-to-the-earth metaphor lasts about a paragraph before he changes strategies again: He starts calling Open Source "Open Sores."
Now, most of us stopped making jokes about people's names sometime back in grade school. Those that didn't write puerile, ad-hominem flames. Or bad columns.
Is Bob Metcalfe surprised he got flamed? No. He set out to be flamed so he could talk about how irresponsible the Linux community flamers were.
I'm only surprised anyone was foolish enough to rise to his bait.
This video is sold by PBS Home Video at 800-828-4PBS (800-828-4727). I think it's about $50, but there may be shipping and handling added to that. If they ask you if you are an educational institution, say "no" because they charge teachers more. (How's that for the logic of educational TV?)
I'm surprised no one else has commented on the Cryptonomicon as an Open Source manifesto.
IMHO one of the fundamental theses of this novel is that before crypto became an open-source project in the late '40s it was heavily unbalanced in favor of the cryptoanalysts. To put it in the terminology of the book, cryptographers before that point were usually dilettantes who came up with good ideas they thought were unbreakable and cryptoanalysts were non-dilettantes who (by working really hard) could almost always break the codes.
When cryptographers started publishing their ideas in the late '40s, those ideas started getting critical review. The result has been the longest period in history when crypto has surpassed analysis.
All of this has pretty obvious implications for the security of Open Source OSes and other programming projects. And those implications probably go far beyond security to stability and speed.
SPOILER ALERT!
I do have one question about the plot of this book: Didn't Enoch Root die in Sweden in 1945 and get buried there only to reappear in a jail in the Philippines in the late '90s?
Was there some explanation of this resurrection that I missed?
Of course, all the discussion about the real purpose of this book misses the point which should be obvious: The whole 900 pages was just an excuse to tell a really bad pun. (The title of the final chapter)
Neal Stephenson was on for the whole half hour on ZDTV's Big Thinkers, which will be running for the rest of the day (Wednesday).
As someone who has led youth groups (some of which included students from Columbine), I believe there is a two-stage process involved in these killings. The first is the alienation phase with which so many commentors are identifying. The second is the blame process, in which they (and many others, especially on TV news) are participating.
As part of the youth programs in which I have participated, we always included a module on cliques. When we discussed this, the kids from Columbine always said, "Our school is the clique-iest."
But guess what? So did all the kids from other schools.
The truth is: Cliques start forming around 5th grade, reach their peak in junior high, and start to taper off in high school. Young people in these years define themselves by these cliques (either by the cliques to which they belong or by their outsider status).
It may come as a surprise to those of us who always defined ourselves as outsiders, but even many who are in the most popular cliques harbor doubts about whether they really "belong." The number who have this feeling that they are just pretending to belong increases in high school and usually leads to an ability to define one's identity independently of in-ness or out-ness with the "in" crowd.
The Second Stage
The other phase which contributes to the kind of events we experienced in Colorado is the blame phase.
We can see this on TV every night this week. We can see it in the comments to Jon's commentary. What we don't always see is that blame is part of what these two boys used to justify their actions.
It is the same whether it is a Christian blaming the shootings on the end of school prayer in 1962 or an atheist counselor saying these kids should have been detected and helped. It is the same whether it is gun nuts who are sure that if more people had been allowed to carry concealed weapons in the school the killings would have been stopped or whether it is gun-control lobbyists saying we should ban them.
What all these people don't seem to realize is that these two boys were able to divide the world into those who they could blame for their problems and themselves. And they believed that their ability to blame entitled them to force the world to take note of their grievances.
And where did they learn to seek redress for this blame?
From the movies? Yes.
From videogames? Yes.
From the media? Yes.
From violent music lyrics? Yes.
But most of all, more than any other source of learning the blame-redress game, they learned it from those very people who are now on TV, promoting their little agendas at the expense of those who were killed at Columbine.
And, until we learn that lesson, there will be more. Because what we fail to realize is that we are teaching kids all over the country that their natural feelings of outsider-hood are the reasons they should become killers like Eric Harris and Dylan Klebold.
And remember: not only the geeks can feel alienated from the "in" crowd. It's really just a natural part of growing up.