Category Archives: Rants and Raves

Blogging statistics?

Dave Slusher was musing about a peculiar statistic of his audio blogging experiments: all the commentors appear to be male. That set me to wondering what the statistics of your average blogger was. Luckily, Livejournal maintains statistics that I found rather interesting.

Despite Dave’s experience, on LiveJournal only one in three bloggers who chose to identify their sex claimed to be males: women outnumber men 2 to 1. 98% of them use free accounts. The age distribution is heavily skewed towards teenagers. Only 1.1% of them are over age 40 (like myself). The most popular age for bloggers is eighteen.

This explains a great deal about the popularity of my blog.

Another milestone.

My email server has been up for just four days, and is mentioned only in a single post on my weblog. Today I received the first of what I suspect will be many spam emails. Their product?

Advancement of your business by direct e-mail marketing. 
We offer e-mail mass mailing to any country.

In other words, spam. What a surprise.

Limits to Growth in Energy Consumption?

Sometimes a single sentence is enough to kick your brain into thinking about things in a different way than you have before. This rant was keyed off the sentence “There is no limit to the amount of energy an industrialized society will use per capita”. I’d never really thought of it in precisely this way before, nor did it seem to me to be obviously true or false.

It is certainly true that I consume more energy than my father did, and his father, and so on back to the formation of industrialized society. The availability of inexpensive electricity and fossil fuels, and the general usefulness of them make their use almost obligatory. The food I eat isn’t grown locally: much of it is shipped from hundreds of miles away.

As I thought about this, I tried to consider myself as a single energy exchanger. A human might expend about 2000 kilocalories of energy in a day. If we sum up the total energy consumed as we go about our day, and we look at the ratio of energy burned by our bodies to those expended on our behalf, is there any real lower bound on this ratio? If so, then what factors affect this ratio?

The limits are mostly economic. If energy is expensive, we realize that we can make due with less. We tend to conserve resources which are precious. We begin to make tradeoffs:
we buy smaller cars, more efficient appliances, and turn off lights. We also try to improve the efficiency of energy generation, storage and transmission to lower the overall cost.

What this means for the future is the interesting question. If one believes that breakthroughs in energy technology will mean the continued growth of cheaper energy sources, then it seems likely that society will continue to develop new means to use that energy to do work, even if the work is only marginally useful. On the other hand, if you believe that the increasing population will cause us to exhaust our non-renewable energy resources and breakthroughs in renewable sources aren’t able to keep up, we will begin to reach our limits of energy growth.

When I first read The Limits To Growth in the eighties, it didn’t really click with me that there was this indisputable growth in the desire of industrialized societies to use energy. If populations are climbing and simultaneously energy use per capita is climbing, but most of our energy resources are non-renewable, then something has got to give. The interesting question becomes: how can an industrialized society place an upper bound on the amount of energy it is willing to expend on behalf of individuals, and what quality of life will be represented at that level?

I don’t have any answers, just questions. It was therefore not surprising that some googling
turned up some interesting ideas.

The Wikipedia turned up the work of Donella Meadows on leverage points to intervene in systems. The work of Joseph Tainter on Complexity, Problem Solving and Sustainable Societies seems to be most directly applicable.

Weekend of Fun

Well, I’ve been busy this weekend helping my son repaint his room. It’s now a lovely sky blue, with faux-finished images of clouds painted all around. It’s really quite restful, but it took the better part of both days to finish. I’ve had precious little time for anything else, and I’m too tired to write up what little I have thought about.

Still I managed to go out and catch the new Alien vs. Predator movie, and experimented a bit with writing scripts for capturing video with my Brooktree card. I’ll write these up tomorrow: consider this a tease.

DRM is doubleplus good for business, Congress advised | The Register

Your rightsThe Register reports that the CBO is advising Congressmen that Digital Rights Management is good for America. Well, for American business anyway.

It is surprising (well, maybe not surprising, perhaps just disappointing) that the CBO completely ignores the central questions at the core of current discussions about copyright and instead lodges their heads firmly in the… pockets of current large media consumers. Nothing in this report does anything to discuss what I think are the core issues behind current copyright discussions:

  1. First, copyright terms have been extended retroactively for all works. While some works have continuing value, the vast majority are not being exploited in the marketplace. These works were simply kidnapped to provide companies like Disney an additional extension, and the public foots the bills for this governmental largesss.
  2. Even for works which retained some commercial value, the intention of the Framers was clearly that such works would eventually be put into the public domain. This is part of the balance between trying to encourage creativity and yet keeping our collective culture free.
  3. Regulations surrounding copyrights have increased dramatically, as have the protections offered to copyrighted material. This makes the potential inclusion of any material which you did not author yourself incredibly perilous: you simply can’t be sure that you have really aquired all the rights to the work you are deriving from. To secure these rights is expensive and fraught with peril, and pushes many creative works out of any realm of possibility.

The CBO report addresses none of these issues. It doesn’t address the possible economic boom that could occur if large numbers of creative works entered the public domain. Given the frequency that studios like Disney derive stories from works in the public domain, there is some reason to believe that the effect could be large. The CBO report does not address (as is admitted by the source listed in the Register article) that their report does not consider the costs of enforcement in their estimates.

What the CBO echos is precisely what the content industry really wants: new market opportunities to sell their works under the umbrella of a government sponsored and continuously extended monopoly. They hypothesize that there exists some markets which are currently not exploitable (perhaps in the form of single use DVDs or CDs) which will provide consumers with new products. The problem is, of course, that nobody wants single use CDs.

Like it or not, if you are a member of the traditional content industry, change is coming, and you better be ready for it. The more you work to outlaw the actions of your consumers, the more quickly you will hasten your own demise. You can continue to expand the already Draconian penalties for “piracy”, you can introduce new technologies which interfere with fair and unregulated uses of your copyrighted works, and you can continue to loot the public domain by paying off Congress to expand copyright terms indefinitely. The result isn’t good for America, and ultimately, it won’t be good for your companies. Ultimately people with a bit more vision than yourselves will start listening to consumers, and will be able to exploit the new market efficiencies that you only shake your heads at.

You can read the CBO’s report Copyright Issues in the Digital Media and decide for yourselves.

Things CPU Architects (and others) Need To Think About

Bob Colwell gave an interesting talk at Stanford about his experiences as Chief Architect of Intel’s IA32 processors from 1992-2000. I spent an hour and a half watching the video download, and thought it was an interesting look into where CPU design is going, not going, and what that means for products.

I’m not a huge hardware guy, but the level is pretty straightforward, I had no problem following his presentation.

The points that really struck home were really about complexity. At Pixar, I spent well over a decade working on RenderMan, Pixar’s core renderer that we have used for all our films. Many of the criticisms that Colwell had for later architectures (increasing fragility, difficulty in extension, maintaining backward compatibility, shrinking ability to keep track of all aspects of the design) are common in large software projects as well. When I finally left the RenderMan group, I suspect that I understood about 85% of the renderer really well, which was probably just about as high as anyone, but it was clear that there were many subtle interactions amongst features which led to confusing performance variations. Often trying to tune these variations was like moving piles of sand: you move some sand, but you always leave a little behind and pick up some dirt too.

Colwell ultimately is concerned that that if CPU manufacturers continue to try to play the “more transistors, more die, more speed, more heat” game they’ve been playing, then they will have only a dead end architecture that they can’t sell because nobody wants a processor that dissapates 2KW.

Good stuff.

Snitch, the Copyright Ferret

BSA's new copyright mascotNews.com is running a story about the BSA’s new mascot, a ferret who lectures children about the perils of the copyright infringement. Children will play games where they destroy pirated software and collect licensing agreements.

Oh good lord.

How about teaching them the real facts of our absurd copyright system? That if they go into a record store and steal a cd, they may be arrested and subject to a fine of up to $1000, but if they are hit by a lawsuit from the RIAA, they could be fined for millions in damages? Try to explain to them that taking an intangible object is worth thousands of times more than taking the same object in tangible form.

Why not teach them about the public domain, and all the resources available to them which are in the public domain?

Why not teach them about the Creative Commons and the culture which promotes sharing and collaboration rather than ownership?

It’s simple: because the BSA is simply about promoting fear, not education.

No thanks to Snitch the Weasel.

How to ameliorate the outcome of Eldred v. Ashcroft

Your Government at WorkI’m nearing the end of Lessig’s Free Culture, and am at the point in the book where Lessig describes his loss in Eldred v. Ashcroft which challenged the consitutionality of the Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It is very interesting on many levels: to see how Lessig strategized, to see what arguments were made and how the justices responded. It’s even somewhat moving to hear his description of his disappointment with the Supreme Court in their ruling, which was contrary to their finding in Lopez, and failed utterly to discuss the merits of Lessig’s argument.

Many of Lessig’s supporters wrote him to tell him that he never had a chance: the Supreme Court simply wasn’t ready to reverse Congress on this matter. So the burden shifts between trying to convince the Supreme Court to trying to convince Congress.

We’ve got a tough row to hoe. The entertainment industry is a powerful lobby and contributes a great deal of money to preserve the monopoly power that long (or practically infinite) terms grant them. It’s hard to see how your average yutz can go toe-to-toe with their interests and come out ahead.

What can we do then? Well, we could try taking a cue from the Open Source world. Open source exists solely because people choose to donate their works to greater the common good. People give up their rights to maintain exclusive rights so that people can build on their work and expand its scope and utility. The Creative Commons provides a useful framework for giving up some of your rights (or all of your rights) and making them available to all. By granting people specific rights under a Creative Commons license agreement, you are saying “I don’t need all the rights granted to me, I’m happy with less” and you encourage others to build upon your creative work.

Another thing you can do is help educate others on the power of public domain resources. For instance, consider the following list of 100 great books in the public domain. You’ll see many familiar books there. How many have you read? (I’ve read 29 of them, 30 if you could the Bible). All of these books are available on Project Gutenberg. Moreover, most of these books are still in print because publishers don’t have to pay royalties for their use. Publishers like Penguin Classics or Dover are free to republish these, often in inexpensive editions which are terrific. If they still had to pay royalties, many of these works would be out of print.

Don’t believe me? Let’s examine a book which is in the public domain, like Alice in Wonderland. Searching on amazon.com, we find that the Signet Classic edition of this book runs for $3.95. Actually, that’s a pretty good buy, because it includes the book Through the Looking Glass as well. Compare this to The Great Gatsby, which was published in 1925 and is therefore still under copyright. We see that the cheapest edition of this book is $9.06, with a list price of $12.95. The Puffin Classic edition of The Three Musketeers costs a whopping $4.99. Hemingway’s The Sun Also Rises (still under copyright) lists for $10.40, with a list price of $13.00. You could work out the cost of the CTEA by multiplying the number of years by the average increase in cost for a book like The Sun Also Rises and the number of copies, and see what that total is. This particular book ranks 2,333 on amazon.com, so you’d imagine that it’s still selling pretty well. Let’s assume it sells ten thousand copies a year, the terms were expanded by twenty years, and the average cost is $2.00 more per copy. The cost (not assuming any kind of inflation) is then $400,000. The CTEA robbed the public out of $400,000 worth of value to perpetuate a monopoly for the copyright holders. Try multiplying that out by all the books which had their terms extended, and you see that Congress handed millions and millions of dollars to copyright owners. The Sun Also Rises would have entered the public domain twice in the last few years except for the laws enacted by Congress to extend terms for which the public at large derived absolutely no tangible benefit. The CTEA was nothing more than the extension of a monopoly for which we all pay.

This message can be brought home by reiteration (perhaps even better and more clearly expressed than I can), but also by making good use of available public domain resources. For instance, if I want to know which Shakespeare play contained the words “If the cause be not good”, I can access a Shakespeare search engine, and find the speech by Williams in King Henry V. This search engine exists because someone saw a need, and there was no need to license the underlying work to achieve it. Try to find a Hemingway search engine. Go ahead.

Well, I’ve run out of steam for today, so I’ll just sum up. What can we do? We can carry on, using the resources that are available to us, and we can choose not to pursue the culture of exclusivity and ownership that current copyright practice promotes. In other words, we change society not by legislating the change, but by changing ourselves.

Addendum: the image illustrating this entry came from Project Gutenberg.

On Politics

Except for my occasional bleats about intellectual property rights, I try not to write very much about politics in my blog. It’s not that I don’t have political opinions: I do, and many of them quite strongly held. It’s simply that I write this blog mostly for my own amusement, and talking about politics and politicians simple isn’t all that amusing to me.

Still, it’s an election year, and I’m so consistently exposed to the craziness of our poltiical system that I find myself beginning political rants and raves, and have only been able to resist the temptation with some supreme act of will.

At the same time, it seems that blogging is becoming a real player in the discussion of political events. In Lessig’s Free Culture, he notes that blog stories have advantages that conventional media do not: they can unfold in a time frame which simply isn’t available to conventional media. Television and newspapers are ultimately money-driven enterprises, and it doesn’t pay for them to release half finished stories, nor in most cases to dedicate reporters to digging deeply into the background of stories. Blogs are driven by the forces of gossip and enthusiasm, and present a different view of the political landscape than we see published in newspapers.

So, I’m considering the revocation of my self-imposed ban in talking about politics. It’s not that I have a great deal to say which others have not said, and said better. You probably won’t learn much that you couldn’t learn elsewhere. But the blogosphere grants individuals the power to add to the political landscape in a way that no other technology has, and like most powers, they are useful only if you exercise them.

If you feel this will be a mistake, and that I should keep with my normal, more light hearted content, feel free to comment below.

Video of INDUCE hearings via P2P

Lawrence Lessig has a link to a Bittorrent feed for the INDUCE hearings, starring the venerable Orin Hatch. I’ve ranted about INDUCE before a bit, and how it substantially modifies the Supreme Court ruling in the 1984 Betamax case. It’s not good law folks, and is yet another attempt by the content industry to further criminalize many previously unregulated or fair uses of content.

Torrent away!

Creeping Featurism

The Python Daily URL! feed has had quite a few articles lately on the so-called “decorator” syntax. I must admit, I’m not really up on the controversy, but I was amazed that even after reading three or four posts, I still couldn’t figure out what the intended utility of the new feature was supposed to be. I suppose it’s because I’m hopelessly out lunch with respect to certain OOP practices, but still: I’m not a programming language newbie.

Whether I’m right or not, it does not bode well for the trend that Python is taking. I’m not the only one who is noticing. Python is sprouting new features which increase the spartan simplicity and expressive nature of the underlying language, complicate it’s implementation and give very marginal utility in return.

Personal (if second hand) anecdote: While attending the University of Oregon in the late 1980’s, I had the pleasure of having Will Clinger as one of my professors. Will was the author of the Revised Report on Scheme: the master work which describes what Scheme was, what it required and gave the semantics for the language. It was a remarkably terse document. In contrast, the specification for Common Lisp was being worked on by Guy Steele. The Common Lisp specification was large, cumbersome and while Common Lisp was more feature-rich, it seemed like a lot of work to implement all facets of the language, and there were many things included in the specification which were of marginal utility. Sound familiar?

Clinger described the situation to me thusly: when presented with a potential new feature for the Scheme specification, he asked himself two questions:

  • Can this feature be implemented using machinery allready in the Scheme specification? If yes, then it is better to implement it that way, and not pollute the base language. This criterion eliminated unnecessary language changes that were largely semantic.
  • If this feature couldn’t be implemented using the existing language, then is this feature the best idea which implements the desired effect? At the time, they were working on the Scheme macro facility, and they were working very hard to make sure that they implemented the best macro facility they could.

By contrast, Clinger characterized Steele’s approach as roughly “If each additional feature is of some use to somebody, and only marginally complicates the language, then who am I to oppose?” This is no doubt at least partly due to the business forces which already were heavily invested in various versions of Lisp, and therefore had a vested interest in seeing their own pet extensions merged with the language specification. Still, this “default is to accept” notion is very damaging to the tidiness of language specifications.

I fear that in the future, some of Python’s expressiveness will be clouded by dozens of features which are of marginal utility. We shall see.

Great Hackers

Paul Graham posted Great Hackers, an adaptation of his keynote OSCON 2004 speech. He’s also the author of Hackers and Painters, which I haven’t read yet, but probably will pick up shortly.

His comments to me seem rather thought provoking, but should be tempered a bit by a sense of humility. For instance, in talking about individual productivity, it seems rather obvious to me that in a social environment you can’t play it fast and loose with productivity as if it were a property of the individual. It really doesn’t help you to have someone who can code Lisp if you don’t have anyone who can grow wheat. How then, should we compensate the two individuals. Does the Lisp programmer naturally deserve more than the wheat farmer? Graham seems to be arguing for some kind of “ladder of progress”, which is often little more than an attempt at justification of the inequities of the world by the “haves”.

I also found his discussion of “how to detect a hacker” to be interesting. As an example, he listed Trevor Blackwell who coincidently, I’ve met as well. I got a chance to ride Trevor’s Segway Clone at Hackers, and had a long discussion with him. Something was obvious to me that apparently wasn’t obvious to Graham: Blackwell was a good hacker. Graham says that at first he thought he was crazy and an idiot. The hubris is believing that a legitimate dichotomy exists, with idiots and nuts on one side and hackers on the others. Hackers are by and large the nuttiest people I know. After all, what normal person spends $1000 of their money to homebrew their own Segway? Or build a Farnsworth Fusor fusion reactor? Or write their own Unix operating system? Insanity is part and parcel of what most hackers do.

Lots of people have their buttons pushed by Graham. If he poo-poos Java, the Java fanatics come out of the woodwork to call him idiot. If he says he deserves more money because he’s a hacker, people with socialist leanings come out of the woodwork to do the same. I don’t bother getting worked up about it: some of it is obviously true, some of it is insightful, and some of it is probably entirely wrong. But it beats listening to politics…

Yahoo! News – Senator Induces Support for Piracy Bill

The Internet has been abuzz with comments about Senator Orrin Hatch’s INDUCE Act, which would criminalize any activity that “induces” copyright infringement as if it were actually copyright infringement. I doubt I could say anything about it which has not been said elsewhere, but it’s a law that would eviscerate the 1984 Supreme Court decision in the Betamax case, which established the criteria that devices are legal if there is a substantial, non-infringing use for the technology in question. During this time, electronics manufacturers as well as movie and music producers have reaped the rich rewards of providing media to an entire new audience of listeners. While they may have squawked in the beginning, revenues from DVD sales exceed the money from box office receipts. Far from bankrupting media companies, this finding actually created an entire market with rich opportunities.

But if Hatch, Leahy, Frist, Daschle and the like have their way, that’s about to end. Do you enjoy your iPod? I rather like mine. I digitize my CDs, my own music, audio books, and even some boodler audio. I am loading it currently with lots of five dollar CD’s from the bargain rack (currently my favorite is naxos.com’s Best of Puccini). What can I say? I’m a cheapskate. As the EFF points out, the INDUCE act would enable copyright holders to bring lawsuits against electronics manufacturers like Apple. After all, my iPod can hold 10,000 songs, an amount which vastly exceeds the capacity needed by the average consumer. Clearly, since they’ve sold hundreds of thousands of these, they are trying to encourage people to illegally acquire music.

None of this is new, but I was reading the Yahoo! news story linked above, and extracted this gem:

Hatch urged supporters and opponents of the bill to help him develop a compromise that protects legitimate manufacturers while allowing copyright owners to protect their rights.

“If you help us, we just might get it right, but if you don’t we’re going to do it [anyway],” Hatch said.

Allow me to translate: “Bend over folks. We know this isn’t a good law, but it’s coming anyway. Our corporate masters think they need it, and we are just the slack jawed bunch of ignoramuses to give it to them.”

Idiots.