It's much easier now. Browsers have trained users to a standard set of basic interactions (this used to be a massive obstacle for new programs). Databases, combined with modern storage capacities and CPU speed, have eliminated massive amounts of work. The languages are both safer and more powerful, and less tied to specific hardware. Deployment is trivial via the web. I can do more now by myself than the good team of developers I led were able to produce 30 years ago.
There are certainly plenty of projects that require substantial teams, but these are ones whose scope (e.g., AI) or polish (e.g., games) would have been totally unfeasible in the past. More to the point of the post, there are probably many more places now than in the past where a single programmer can quickly make and deploy a useful database-driven website.
In my second main programming job, in a physics lab starting in 1968, I had two hours twice a week (during changes in experiment) plus one weekly maintenance day to work with the computer itself. The only medium was punched paper tape, so I would load the editor tape, read in the source tape, use the no-monitor teletype to make the hundred or so changes I had handwritten (in pencil on legal pads or previous printouts), print out new source tapes (typically 5 pieces each about 50 feet long), read in the compiler tape, have the compiler read in the new source tapes and print out a binary tape, then finally read in the binary tape to see if things worked. Each cycle would be about an hour, so I was ahead of the once-a-day people, but I got very good at foreseeing the consequences of changes.
Our emerging knowledge of genetics implies that our self-engineered descendants a few centuries from now will be very much more capable (if our lineage makes it that far). This will be especially true of the subset who leave high-gravity planetary surfaces and the dangerous neighborhoods of stars for better real estate in deep space. Their descendants, perhaps based on superconducting neurological systems (cold is a feature not a bug for quantum effects) and with the size that microgravity enables, are unlikely to have much to say to entities on our current level.
What I don't understand is that since any competent system designers who take both computer and social issues into account will promptly arrive at this same conclusion, why do none of the systems use it? The lack of transparency of the computer-based systems is a fatal flaw for a process whose most important task is to promote confidence that everyone's vote was counted.
From conversations with my local election officials and other governmental types (I've held elective office myself and can speak politico as well as geek), I think that the main problem is that the officials are so impressed by the speed of the systems, and by their immunity to certain traditional kinds of fraud, that they ignore their lack of robustness and their potential to sabotage public confidence.
Making a GPLed demonstration system that used this idea (and perhaps extended it with judicious use of public-key encryption) would be a great project. Anyone interested? Or is it already patented?
Most of the "tipping point" theory (which goes back at least to Erdos' 1960 random-networks paper) looks at how gradual accumulation can lead to sudden shifts in system properties. Good stuff, and relevant to situations from Darwinian evolution to traffic-jam analysis, but not really new.
However, the work of Sante Fe researcher Stuart Kaufmann (The Origins of Order, etc.) gives a whole new direction, showing how complex, interlocked systems can arise in some circumstances by winnowing a more complex chaotic system that arises naturally. It sounds circular until you look at it carefully, but Kaufmann backs up his analysis with extensive computer simulation as well as a deep analysis of genetic control processes (Kaufmann's original specialty).
These ideas can be used far beyond the biological settings for which they were first developed. Examples range from the crystallization of activity patterns in a new organization or cultural area to the process of learning itself, where the "aha" experience marks the emergence of a set of coherent concepts from the overflowing cloud of ideas that sets the stage for it.
Adding Kaufmann's ideas to your set of explanatory tools will permit you to resolve many complex-systems questions that are otherwise intractable. And computer types are particularly well-situated to understand and use his arguments.
To really mess things up (these roughly match the topics of the corresponding ones from the article):
[1] Demonize the teachers who are now doing the work not only of the schools of 50 years ago, but also of most of the parents (both parents have less time for their kids than they used to) as well as of many employers (who can't afford to invest in training a highly-mobile workforce). Make the teaching job as hard and unpleasant as possible, too.
[2] Provide immunity to all large organizations from any harm they cause to common folks, using the sleaziness and irrational pay structure for lawyers for cover. Reinforce this by institutionalizing bribery under the name of campaign contributions and ensuring that elections are so expensive that people who are unbribed and unrich can't get public notice.
[3] Blame any complaints by people trying to raise a family on low-wage jobs or live on Social Security as being class warfare. Give enormous publicity to rare weirdo legal judgments (and supress some of the facts about those).
[4] Sneer at attempts to help other people, especially via dignity-preserving mechanisms like the minimum wage. Encourage people to ignore the needs of their relatives and neighbors, and punish those (like many Hispanics) who share rather than concentrate their resources.
[5] Don't hold the rich accountable for productive social use of their wealth. Drop taxes on wealth and property, tax stock gains much less than earned income (and exempt it from social-security taxes), and expand rather than plug tax loopholes. Don't even think about interfering with the overseas tax havens that prevent any national government from dealing with this problem.
[6] Ensure that laws lack public support by using them to proscribe drugs (except for a couple of favored ones). This also provides alternate funding for law enforcement both through bribery and no-legal-recourse confiscations. Make prison sentences long enough to be a world leader in the fraction of population in prisons.
[7] Force schools to concentrate on dull standardized tests and sanitized materials, and don't listen to what teachers have to say about the effects. In particular, don't tell kids the interesting truths about science (evolution), history (genocide, slavery, fanaticism) or their own future (learn to be useful if you want to have a happy life), and don't encourage the creativity that will make them troublesome, strong people (like, heaven forbid, good programmers) rather than "good workers".
[8] Pay lip service to families, but forbid any deviation from the standard man-plus-wife-plus-offspring definition. Mock people who choose to build their lives around non-kin friends and children (like those evil teachers in [1]). Also ensure that families bear all the costs of medical care for their children, and avoid any programs that transfer money from singles or kids-already-raised folk (I am both) into the hands of the parents who are actually doing the work of raising tomorrow's kids (in addition to having the highest paid-employment workload in the industrialized world).
[9] Sabotage the economic and social development of the rest of the world by siphoning off as much of their talent as possible, by blackballing for loans any countries that try to protect their own industries or workers, and by using patents to force tribute from poor countries before they are permitted to use new ideas.
[10] Keep tax rates on the wealthy at the lowest level in the world, and enroll all the gonna-be-rich fools in protecting privileges they will never get to use (except for a handful lottery winners).
[11] Figure out a way to cover up the fact that the US medical insurance system has managed to develop all the faults of both badly-run government systems and of heartless private ones.
[12] Having correctly identified anti-scientific attitudes (fundamentalist, new-age, or just mindless) as a central danger to the US's greatest contribution to the world -- secular freedom guaranteed by constitutional law -- throw this insight away by attacking all attempts at unifying our society (or worse, the world) along those lines by providing a common core of free public services (schools, social security pensions, medical care, daycare and family allowances) whose sharing would force people to broaden their horizons.
Wow! Rants are fun! I never would have gotten that far in one sitting if I had been talking to someone, since each of these points would take a a book to properly present and defend just my point of view (and there is more than one "other side" in most cases). But maybe this outline from an old lefty will give the libertarian/. crowd something to think about.
These novels have a great premise: an organization of weapon shops selling, in defiance of the imperial government, weapons that work wonderfully, but only when used in self defense (the guns are smart enough not to be fooled).
This is an example of one of my favorite kinds of science fiction, where the implications of a significant-but-limited technical change are followed out. (Of course I can get that from reality, but not in one evening's reading.)
One way to investigate the politics of a question is to change its technological parameters -- some pacifists and some militia members might change sides on the gun-ownership question under weapon-shop conditions
I agree that the problems you are describing are painfully common in the US K-12 system right now. The colleges are somewhat better (although still very mixed), because the teachers have more say about what is used and have the help of computer-savvy students. But the limited number of office applications needed will not drive school use in the long term -- it will be dominated by instruction, whose needs are at least an order of magnitude larger.
Look ahead a few years (not very many) to $100 computers that have cheap fast wireless connections and resemble Nintendo in both their hardware/software robustness and their familiarity to children. Further, the ease of programming for education will continue to increase dramatically (the web has already transformed it in the last decade), as will the supply of computer-skilled teachers. Even if the rich countries ignore this area (which they won't, since they have growing teacher shortages), countries like Brazil, China, and especially India will not.
In a no-distribution-cost networked world, OSS is uniquely well qualified to compete on tasks that can be programmed in small chunks and need broad collaborative feedback to be perfected. Education is just such a domain.
Education is universally underfunded, and is such a massive activity that it is hard to see how that will ever cease to be true. While there is some market to rich-country middle-class parents, schools in most of the world (including much of the USA) will seldom be able to either pay commercial-software prices or, due to their public nature, to use pirated software. And the difference between cheap and free is essential, since free software can be used at the initiative of a teacher without the paralysis of going through a management approval and purchasing process.
This has been rather slow to take off, although there are a lot of very good educational web sites, but it will build dramatically once the OSS installation process has been smoothed out by the government OSS adoptions that are beginning to appear. Educational software is particularly likely to be able to attract sponsored development. It will also need a lot of localization and customization to match textbooks, etc. Many of the educational websites will be able to move easily into applications.
We can already see that corporations will make a strong attempt to co-opt this sector by strings-attached "contributions" that channel students their way, and this may have some impact in the short term. But they can't afford to buy off the entire billion students.
Better learn how to combine freedom with openness
on
Don't Stymie Nanotech
·
· Score: 2, Interesting
The exisiting nanotech, biotechnology, will force the world to deal with the perils of cheap, superdangerous weapons (and well-intentioned but misguided tools) well before built-from-scratch nanotech is advanced enough to matter. The world will not be able to afford letting people (including companies and governments!) keep activities of this kind secret much longer.
This will take some adjustment, especially for the USA since it is accustomed to depending on individual, commercial, and governmental ability to act in secrecy as the basis of freedom. (We are about the only holdout on international-inspection treaties on germs and chemical weapons, and we highly value my-home-is-my-castle and no-one-can-see-my-messages privacy.)
Solving this problem will not necessarily require a totalitarian regime, but that is what will happen if people who value freedom refuse to deal with it. We should push for a combination of openness (so everyone can watch for dangers), vigilance (because serious failures will damage both people and freedom), tolerance (so that openness still leaves people free to act unless they are clearly out of line), and widely-distributedprosperity (so that the zealots little base for support). And we should be tolerant of each other as we try to sort out how to balance these sometimes-conflicting goals.
But biotechnology (and later other nanotechnology) are going to be as much part of the solution (especially for health and prosperity) as part of the problem. It's not like everyone is in such great shape to start with.
When I worked on a left-wing paper in the '70s, we used to say that we didn't mind the FBI spies and bugs, but we felt that they should at least be willing to provide us copies of the minutes of our staff meetings.
That Hideous Strength is one of the very best cautionary tales about how "progress" can be misused. It is also a gem of storycraft -- who would have thought a story could convincingly combine university and corporate politics, a science institute, Merlin (yes, that Merlin), the Greek gods, angels, and Satan?
However, it seems to me that the only utopia in this series is the first book (Out of the Silent Planet), which is set on Mars. It is a very enjoyable story, but its purpose is to set up a contrast with Earth (which is the "silent" planet), not as a real effort at a utopia in its own right.
Here are my favorites, with political viewpoints that range from conservative to libertarian to anarchist to socialist:
Red/Green/Blue Mars (Robertson) -- the recent trilogy that brilliantly captures the accelerating possibilities of technological contributions to changing things for the better, with all the heroic struggle anyone could want
The Moon is a Harsh Mistress (Heinlein) -- an intelligent blend of revolutionary politics, radical family structure, self-organizing libertarian economics, and the possibilities of intelligent computers
The Dispossessed (LeGuin) -- egalitarian anarchy examined critically but lovingly (a good antidote to Rand)
Islandia (Wright) -- an anti-"progress" utopia from about 1900 that is surprisingly attractive, although its vision of a society knit together by family and location loyalties and a shared literature is by this time something that we would have to re-create rather than just hold onto.
Utopias are becoming more important as people become more powerful (e.g., computers, genetics, potential global prosperity), since the future is going to be largely be something we create rather than just witness. This makes dystopias more important too, but as cautionary tales rather than defeatist predictions.
Another novel I like that contains all the elements -- a utopia, a dystopia, and our present time (that will determine which path is taken) -- is Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Pearcy
If you read the patent, you will see that it applies to a complex algorithm based on a certain kind of x-ray data, not to comparison in general. However, it is true that most patents seem obvious to their inventors, so in a way they are the last people to be in a position to judge.
Without having an opinion one way or the other on the impact of RMS's behavior at the meeting, I am one person who was active in the civil-rights movement in the early 60's who is not offended by the comparison of it to the fight to restrain IP claims. (I'm also author of several minor patents --
example.)
US-led intellectual-property laws (all mixed together, as Stallman points out) are a growing method of forcing the poorer parts of the world to send money to the richer parts. The biggest problem is not copyright, but patents such as the ones that make many needed medicines too expensive to use throughout most of the world. Taking money from impoverished sick people (or countries) just for the privilege of using an idea is as immoral as were the earlier colonial and feudal expropriations that were also justified by ownership ideas that are now discredited.
Laws that let you keep other people from using ideas need to be limited to what can be clearly shown to benefit people in general. When numerous trivial ideas are granted patents, and unjustified but ruinously-expensive infringement lawsuits are routinely used to stifle independent invention, it is clear that the correct balance has been lost. While the protests should not be limited to DRM (it won't help for people to see entertainment piracy as the only IP issue), I think that the fights on DRM are an important element in awakening people to the dangers posed by greed backed up by political power, even if the greatest such dangers are not DRM ones.
The civil-rights movement and the women's-rights movements were glad to make use of precedents from the ACLU's free-speech efforts to stop pornography prosecutions and from alliances first formed to repeal alcohol prohibition -- even if the issues were not directly related in theory, the enemies of more freedom were pretty much the same in all cases, so that all the freedom efforts reinforced each other in practice. Efforts for more IP freedom are in the same tradition.
Re:Hello? Fermi Paradox!
on
Rare Earth
·
· Score: 1
My favorite answer to the Fermi Paradox is:
Life that is intelligent by galactic standards is so far ahead of the protein-soup kludge we are evolving from that we wouldn't recognize it if we saw it.
Planets are the last place to look for intelligent life because they are unstable, crowded, and so space-warped by their gravitational field that most of planet-bound organisms' bodies are dedicated to shielding and lifting, or to supplying the energy to do so.
Even from where we sit now, it is obvious that the next few centuries of human evolution will be an explosion of intentional genetic modication and human-computer interconnection. Our descendants a few thousand years out will be unrecognizable, and pretty soon will no more able to talk to critters at our level than we are to honeybees.
This is not a new idea: A great Fermi-era science-fiction novel with a related theme is Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud. But my point is that wherever life starts, it is going quickly go upscale culturally and head for the prime real estate (at least between the stars, probably even away from the noisy, supernova-prone galaxies) soon after it develops intelligence, and won't look back.
Slashdot Mirror
It's much easier now. Browsers have trained users to a standard set of basic interactions (this used to be a massive obstacle for new programs). Databases, combined with modern storage capacities and CPU speed, have eliminated massive amounts of work. The languages are both safer and more powerful, and less tied to specific hardware. Deployment is trivial via the web. I can do more now by myself than the good team of developers I led were able to produce 30 years ago. There are certainly plenty of projects that require substantial teams, but these are ones whose scope (e.g., AI) or polish (e.g., games) would have been totally unfeasible in the past. More to the point of the post, there are probably many more places now than in the past where a single programmer can quickly make and deploy a useful database-driven website.
In my second main programming job, in a physics lab starting in 1968, I had two hours twice a week (during changes in experiment) plus one weekly maintenance day to work with the computer itself. The only medium was punched paper tape, so I would load the editor tape, read in the source tape, use the no-monitor teletype to make the hundred or so changes I had handwritten (in pencil on legal pads or previous printouts), print out new source tapes (typically 5 pieces each about 50 feet long), read in the compiler tape, have the compiler read in the new source tapes and print out a binary tape, then finally read in the binary tape to see if things worked. Each cycle would be about an hour, so I was ahead of the once-a-day people, but I got very good at foreseeing the consequences of changes.
Our emerging knowledge of genetics implies that our self-engineered descendants a few centuries from now will be very much more capable (if our lineage makes it that far). This will be especially true of the subset who leave high-gravity planetary surfaces and the dangerous neighborhoods of stars for better real estate in deep space. Their descendants, perhaps based on superconducting neurological systems (cold is a feature not a bug for quantum effects) and with the size that microgravity enables, are unlikely to have much to say to entities on our current level.
What I don't understand is that since any competent system designers who take both computer and social issues into account will promptly arrive at this same conclusion, why do none of the systems use it? The lack of transparency of the computer-based systems is a fatal flaw for a process whose most important task is to promote confidence that everyone's vote was counted.
From conversations with my local election officials and other governmental types (I've held elective office myself and can speak politico as well as geek), I think that the main problem is that the officials are so impressed by the speed of the systems, and by their immunity to certain traditional kinds of fraud, that they ignore their lack of robustness and their potential to sabotage public confidence.
Making a GPLed demonstration system that used this idea (and perhaps extended it with judicious use of public-key encryption) would be a great project. Anyone interested? Or is it already patented?
Most of the "tipping point" theory (which goes back at least to Erdos' 1960 random-networks paper) looks at how gradual accumulation can lead to sudden shifts in system properties. Good stuff, and relevant to situations from Darwinian evolution to traffic-jam analysis, but not really new.
However, the work of Sante Fe researcher Stuart Kaufmann (The Origins of Order, etc.) gives a whole new direction, showing how complex, interlocked systems can arise in some circumstances by winnowing a more complex chaotic system that arises naturally. It sounds circular until you look at it carefully, but Kaufmann backs up his analysis with extensive computer simulation as well as a deep analysis of genetic control processes (Kaufmann's original specialty).
These ideas can be used far beyond the biological settings for which they were first developed. Examples range from the crystallization of activity patterns in a new organization or cultural area to the process of learning itself, where the "aha" experience marks the emergence of a set of coherent concepts from the overflowing cloud of ideas that sets the stage for it.
Adding Kaufmann's ideas to your set of explanatory tools will permit you to resolve many complex-systems questions that are otherwise intractable. And computer types are particularly well-situated to understand and use his arguments.
To really mess things up (these roughly match the topics of the corresponding ones from the article):
/. crowd something to think about.
[1] Demonize the teachers who are now doing the work not only of the schools of 50 years ago, but also of most of the parents (both parents have less time for their kids than they used to) as well as of many employers (who can't afford to invest in training a highly-mobile workforce). Make the teaching job as hard and unpleasant as possible, too.
[2] Provide immunity to all large organizations from any harm they cause to common folks, using the sleaziness and irrational pay structure for lawyers for cover. Reinforce this by institutionalizing bribery under the name of campaign contributions and ensuring that elections are so expensive that people who are unbribed and unrich can't get public notice.
[3] Blame any complaints by people trying to raise a family on low-wage jobs or live on Social Security as being class warfare. Give enormous publicity to rare weirdo legal judgments (and supress some of the facts about those).
[4] Sneer at attempts to help other people, especially via dignity-preserving mechanisms like the minimum wage. Encourage people to ignore the needs of their relatives and neighbors, and punish those (like many Hispanics) who share rather than concentrate their resources.
[5] Don't hold the rich accountable for productive social use of their wealth. Drop taxes on wealth and property, tax stock gains much less than earned income (and exempt it from social-security taxes), and expand rather than plug tax loopholes. Don't even think about interfering with the overseas tax havens that prevent any national government from dealing with this problem.
[6] Ensure that laws lack public support by using them to proscribe drugs (except for a couple of favored ones). This also provides alternate funding for law enforcement both through bribery and no-legal-recourse confiscations. Make prison sentences long enough to be a world leader in the fraction of population in prisons.
[7] Force schools to concentrate on dull standardized tests and sanitized materials, and don't listen to what teachers have to say about the effects. In particular, don't tell kids the interesting truths about science (evolution), history (genocide, slavery, fanaticism) or their own future (learn to be useful if you want to have a happy life), and don't encourage the creativity that will make them troublesome, strong people (like, heaven forbid, good programmers) rather than "good workers".
[8] Pay lip service to families, but forbid any deviation from the standard man-plus-wife-plus-offspring definition. Mock people who choose to build their lives around non-kin friends and children (like those evil teachers in [1]). Also ensure that families bear all the costs of medical care for their children, and avoid any programs that transfer money from singles or kids-already-raised folk (I am both) into the hands of the parents who are actually doing the work of raising tomorrow's kids (in addition to having the highest paid-employment workload in the industrialized world).
[9] Sabotage the economic and social development of the rest of the world by siphoning off as much of their talent as possible, by blackballing for loans any countries that try to protect their own industries or workers, and by using patents to force tribute from poor countries before they are permitted to use new ideas.
[10] Keep tax rates on the wealthy at the lowest level in the world, and enroll all the gonna-be-rich fools in protecting privileges they will never get to use (except for a handful lottery winners).
[11] Figure out a way to cover up the fact that the US medical insurance system has managed to develop all the faults of both badly-run government systems and of heartless private ones.
[12] Having correctly identified anti-scientific attitudes (fundamentalist, new-age, or just mindless) as a central danger to the US's greatest contribution to the world -- secular freedom guaranteed by constitutional law -- throw this insight away by attacking all attempts at unifying our society (or worse, the world) along those lines by providing a common core of free public services (schools, social security pensions, medical care, daycare and family allowances) whose sharing would force people to broaden their horizons.
Wow! Rants are fun! I never would have gotten that far in one sitting if I had been talking to someone, since each of these points would take a a book to properly present and defend just my point of view (and there is more than one "other side" in most cases). But maybe this outline from an old lefty will give the libertarian
These novels have a great premise: an organization of weapon shops selling, in defiance of the imperial government, weapons that work wonderfully, but only when used in self defense (the guns are smart enough not to be fooled).
This is an example of one of my favorite kinds of science fiction, where the implications of a significant-but-limited technical change are followed out. (Of course I can get that from reality, but not in one evening's reading.)
One way to investigate the politics of a question is to change its technological parameters -- some pacifists and some militia members might change sides on the gun-ownership question under weapon-shop conditions
I agree that the problems you are describing are painfully common in the US K-12 system right now. The colleges are somewhat better (although still very mixed), because the teachers have more say about what is used and have the help of computer-savvy students. But the limited number of office applications needed will not drive school use in the long term -- it will be dominated by instruction, whose needs are at least an order of magnitude larger.
Look ahead a few years (not very many) to $100 computers that have cheap fast wireless connections and resemble Nintendo in both their hardware/software robustness and their familiarity to children. Further, the ease of programming for education will continue to increase dramatically (the web has already transformed it in the last decade), as will the supply of computer-skilled teachers. Even if the rich countries ignore this area (which they won't, since they have growing teacher shortages), countries like Brazil, China, and especially India will not.
In a no-distribution-cost networked world, OSS is uniquely well qualified to compete on tasks that can be programmed in small chunks and need broad collaborative feedback to be perfected. Education is just such a domain.
Education is universally underfunded, and is such a massive activity that it is hard to see how that will ever cease to be true. While there is some market to rich-country middle-class parents, schools in most of the world (including much of the USA) will seldom be able to either pay commercial-software prices or, due to their public nature, to use pirated software. And the difference between cheap and free is essential, since free software can be used at the initiative of a teacher without the paralysis of going through a management approval and purchasing process.
This has been rather slow to take off, although there are a lot of very good educational web sites, but it will build dramatically once the OSS installation process has been smoothed out by the government OSS adoptions that are beginning to appear. Educational software is particularly likely to be able to attract sponsored development. It will also need a lot of localization and customization to match textbooks, etc. Many of the educational websites will be able to move easily into applications.
We can already see that corporations will make a strong attempt to co-opt this sector by strings-attached "contributions" that channel students their way, and this may have some impact in the short term. But they can't afford to buy off the entire billion students.
The exisiting nanotech, biotechnology, will force the world to deal with the perils of cheap, superdangerous weapons (and well-intentioned but misguided tools) well before built-from-scratch nanotech is advanced enough to matter. The world will not be able to afford letting people (including companies and governments!) keep activities of this kind secret much longer.
This will take some adjustment, especially for the USA since it is accustomed to depending on individual, commercial, and governmental ability to act in secrecy as the basis of freedom. (We are about the only holdout on international-inspection treaties on germs and chemical weapons, and we highly value my-home-is-my-castle and no-one-can-see-my-messages privacy.)
Solving this problem will not necessarily require a totalitarian regime, but that is what will happen if people who value freedom refuse to deal with it. We should push for a combination of openness (so everyone can watch for dangers), vigilance (because serious failures will damage both people and freedom), tolerance (so that openness still leaves people free to act unless they are clearly out of line), and widely-distributed prosperity (so that the zealots little base for support). And we should be tolerant of each other as we try to sort out how to balance these sometimes-conflicting goals.
But biotechnology (and later other nanotechnology) are going to be as much part of the solution (especially for health and prosperity) as part of the problem. It's not like everyone is in such great shape to start with.
When I worked on a left-wing paper in the '70s, we used to say that we didn't mind the FBI spies and bugs, but we felt that they should at least be willing to provide us copies of the minutes of our staff meetings.
That Hideous Strength is one of the very best cautionary tales about how "progress" can be misused. It is also a gem of storycraft -- who would have thought a story could convincingly combine university and corporate politics, a science institute, Merlin (yes, that Merlin), the Greek gods, angels, and Satan?
However, it seems to me that the only utopia in this series is the first book (Out of the Silent Planet), which is set on Mars. It is a very enjoyable story, but its purpose is to set up a contrast with Earth (which is the "silent" planet), not as a real effort at a utopia in its own right.
Here are my favorites, with political viewpoints that range from conservative to libertarian to anarchist to socialist:
Utopias are becoming more important as people become more powerful (e.g., computers, genetics, potential global prosperity), since the future is going to be largely be something we create rather than just witness. This makes dystopias more important too, but as cautionary tales rather than defeatist predictions.
Another novel I like that contains all the elements -- a utopia, a dystopia, and our present time (that will determine which path is taken) -- is Woman on the Edge of Time by Marge Pearcy
If you read the patent, you will see that it applies to a complex algorithm based on a certain kind of x-ray data, not to comparison in general. However, it is true that most patents seem obvious to their inventors, so in a way they are the last people to be in a position to judge.
Without having an opinion one way or the other on the impact of RMS's behavior at the meeting, I am one person who was active in the civil-rights movement in the early 60's who is not offended by the comparison of it to the fight to restrain IP claims. (I'm also author of several minor patents -- example.)
US-led intellectual-property laws (all mixed together, as Stallman points out) are a growing method of forcing the poorer parts of the world to send money to the richer parts. The biggest problem is not copyright, but patents such as the ones that make many needed medicines too expensive to use throughout most of the world. Taking money from impoverished sick people (or countries) just for the privilege of using an idea is as immoral as were the earlier colonial and feudal expropriations that were also justified by ownership ideas that are now discredited.
Laws that let you keep other people from using ideas need to be limited to what can be clearly shown to benefit people in general. When numerous trivial ideas are granted patents, and unjustified but ruinously-expensive infringement lawsuits are routinely used to stifle independent invention, it is clear that the correct balance has been lost. While the protests should not be limited to DRM (it won't help for people to see entertainment piracy as the only IP issue), I think that the fights on DRM are an important element in awakening people to the dangers posed by greed backed up by political power, even if the greatest such dangers are not DRM ones.
The civil-rights movement and the women's-rights movements were glad to make use of precedents from the ACLU's free-speech efforts to stop pornography prosecutions and from alliances first formed to repeal alcohol prohibition -- even if the issues were not directly related in theory, the enemies of more freedom were pretty much the same in all cases, so that all the freedom efforts reinforced each other in practice. Efforts for more IP freedom are in the same tradition.
Even from where we sit now, it is obvious that the next few centuries of human evolution will be an explosion of intentional genetic modication and human-computer interconnection. Our descendants a few thousand years out will be unrecognizable, and pretty soon will no more able to talk to critters at our level than we are to honeybees.
This is not a new idea: A great Fermi-era science-fiction novel with a related theme is Fred Hoyle's The Black Cloud. But my point is that wherever life starts, it is going quickly go upscale culturally and head for the prime real estate (at least between the stars, probably even away from the noisy, supernova-prone galaxies) soon after it develops intelligence, and won't look back.