mycroftiv

"I was catching a 7am flight out of Newark to Tampa, Florida, for a lunch meeting in Clearwater, then heading back to Newark on a 5pm flight, getting me in around 8:10pm, and with any luck, to my apartment by 9 or so. We all have days like that, they happen from time to time."

I don't have days like that, and neither should anyone else. With modern communication systems, flying in airplanes to lunch meetings and flying back that night is such an absurd waste of resources it qualifies as obscene. The fact that an expensive steakhouse decided to pull a cheap PR stunt by delivering a free steak to the airport to some well-known Big Shot is less obviously wasteful, but still a repellent manifestation of gratuitous luxury.

People within the cocoon of the upper percentiles of wealth often have a sense of how they are perceived by others, and usually take some care to disguise their self-satisfaction. It is always educational to get a glimpse into the mental world of extreme privilege.

>If “the patent system is broken” is a lazy rhetorical cheat, then “software patents shouldn’t be allowed” is the most completely vacuous intellectual cop-out possible.

What an insulting and unfounded statement. The arguments against software patents are strong and coherent. Intelligent people can disagree in good faith about the issue, but labeling the anti-software patent position a "completely vacuous cop-out" is unjustified rhetoric. So far as I can see, he doesn't really provide anything other than "math is hard, companies spend money on it" to support a contrary position, and the philosophical point that physical inventions are based on mathematical physics is true but outside the scope of legal reasoning.

The whole piece irritates me, because it is really just repeating the standard arguments for the utility of the patent system in general which all serious participants in the debate already know. The implication is that opponents of software patents are just too ignorant to know the basic issues - which may be true enough of Random Internet Commentators, but is certainly not true of the many experts who are opposed to software patents.

So, Intel is clearly terrified of the growth of ARM based mobile devices and especially tablets cannibalizing notebook sales. Somewhat ironically, Apple's heavy-handed litigation strategy against ipad competitors is probably helpful to Intel, because it delays competition in the tablet market and gives Intel more time to make the "ultrabook" (terrible name) into a real product. I'm not sure Intel will really succeed, the tablet concept seems to have enough appeal and momentum that the decline of conventional laptops seems inevitable, regardless of attempts to rebrand the category and innovate.

I've been reading this blog intermittently for quite a long time, and despite a lot of good conceptual thinking, I believe the author fails to understand a lot of principles which are equally important to the ones that he espouses. Maybe the most important is independence of layers - the author seems convinced that, as he says in this post, "it is the bedrock abstractions of a system which create its overall flavor. They are the ultimate constraints on the range of thinkable thoughts for designer and user alike."

I think this is simply wrong. Certainly, abstractions tend to leak, but the loper-os guy thinks that you can't create a usable system unless you extend lisp-like concepts all the way down to the CPU designs. He never seems to acknowledge that technologies like virtualization actually work to create independent environments.

I see several good things on the list of new features. The rc-based boot process is definitely a good idea. I haven't had the issues with the fossil filesystem that some have, so I don't know about cwfs as the main on-disk fileserver, but I'm looking forward to trying it out. A lot of the contributors have been doing good things in the Plan 9 world for quite awhile now. A list of some of the new features is at http://code.google.com/p/plan9front/wiki/features

It's been a long-running story. Florian is a stopped clock who proclaims that the sky is falling for free software about every patent and copyright issue. One of the best examples is a recent controversy over Android's use of its Bionic replacement for glibc. Here's a post that tries to sum up the issue and includes Linus' own opinion:

http://www.h-online.com/open/news/item/Linus-on-Android-head...

This is just one example of a long-running pattern with Florian's claims.

>“They are very likely to be infringed by code that is at the core of Android,” says IP expert Florian Mueller.

Now that's what I call a credible, expert source with no history of distorting the issues. Always good to see the balance and perspective that the business media gives to intellectual property issues in software.

I can't say I think much of an article talking about Android as "The Linux Dream" that doesn't clearly articulate the difference between the Linux kernel and the rest of userland. Android has really demonstrated that Stallman's convention of referring to GNU/Linux and not labeling the whole OS with the name of the kernel should have been adopted for purely practical reasons.

If people are happy to call Android "Android", then we should have been calling the desktop os with Linux kernel "GNU" and not "Linux" all this time, shouldn't we? The full names should be Android/Linux and GNU/Linux to differentiate the phone and desktop operating systems.

It seems that the power of a corporation to create a brand and call it whatever they want is uncontroversial, and nobody seems bothered by the name Android which makes no mention of the Linux kernel whatsoever, but RMS' thoroughly rational and sensible idea that the right name for the desktop OS should correctly label its major components has been very controversial.

I think there are a lot of lessons to be learned here about naming and power relationships, and our implicit acceptance of the dominance of corporate entities such as Google over our discourse.

Exactly - nobody gets sued unless they have enough money or competitive position that the suit is seen as profitable. Nobody really has any sympathy with Google or any other large company, so there isn't much "outrage factor" involved. I think there is a pretty large human cost to the software patent system, but a lot of the cost is in discouragement of innovation and misallocation of resources.

Is there any meaningful way to engage in activism or civil disobedience related to software patents? I support the FSF and EFF with donations, but I want to do more. As I see it, code is speech, and software patents are a restriction on the content of speech. I wish there was some way of dramatizing the issue, some way an activist could use software for a clearly beneficial charitable project that would also trigger legal action and produce headlines like "Software company dedicated to helping parents of chronically ill children research treatment decisions sued for billions for patent infringement."

Zuckerberg broke into the emails of journalists he thought could damage him back in the college days, and he called his users "dumb fucks" for trusting him. The way Zuckerberg is idolized for his success and even held up as a role model(!) when it was achieved through unethical means is symptomatic of a lot of my least favorite things about society. The fact that the essential character of Facebook is trying to leverage people's social connections for the purpose of marketing is highly distasteful to me as well.

Anyone interested in this should definitely read the description of a lot related work of recovery in the excellent paper by Warren Toomey on the restoration of early UNIX artifacts. There was a lot more involved than just doing an OCR scan of old documents, it is really impressive. http://www.usenix.org/events/usenix09/tech/full_papers/toome...

I wonder how the photographer would feel if the company that manufactured the trumpet played by Miles Davis had claimed that his photograph violated the copyright of their "sculpture" and the tailor Miles got his suit from also protested. Of all art forms, photography has some of the least claim on being an entirely original creation of the artist.

I admit I know approximately nothing about how rapidly infrastructure deteriorates, detailed demographic trends in China, or the decision making process that allocates these resources. It still seems to me that there must be some rational justification for the excess construction, even if it is a misconceived idea. Someone in the system thinks the use of resources in building these cities has a purpose, and since the purpose does not seem to be immediate use, the idea of an investment or hedge is the explanation that makes sense to me. It's just an attempt to understand why these cities exist. Is there a simple explanation I don't know about?

I was assuming the cities would become occupied within a few years, not left empty for a decade or more. The shift from rural to urban has been happening very fast in China. I think China is expecting almost 100 million additional city dwellers within the next five years.

I've been thinking about these empty cities, and it strikes me as an indication that the planners of the Chinese economy are expecting continued increase in the value of commodities relative to other capital. If they expect to need more urban housing and infrastructure in the future and also expect the price of commodities (and also labor for construction, perhaps) to increase significantly, it makes sense to build them now. Since China already keeps a lot of capital in the form of US treasuries, it makes sense that they would want to diversify their investments by also building up a surplus of physical capital such as housing and other infrastructure.

Apple's market cap is 300 billion. Johnson & Johnson and Procter & Gamble are both at 180 billion. Pfizer is 160 billion and Pepsi is 110 billion. So why exactly is Apple a silly example?

I never get tired of re-reading this. It goes right to the heart of what is magical and wonderful and also scary about computer programming, the sheer power of abstraction available and the unintuitive consequences that are a result of those possibilities.

It also makes me wonder how much we can rely on things generally held to be secure. I certainly have never tried to guarantee that the compilers I get from the distros I use are fully honest, much less disassemble my BIOS, and of course the tools I would try to use even if I did achieve that level of paranoia might not be reliable and I would need other tools to test the tools, and the next thing you know I'm out in the woods sawing at trees to get lumber to carve because only a hand-built analytical engine is a reliable and trustworthy platform in any provable way.

Certainly Dennis Ritchie is the primary author of C, but given the very close historical relationship between C and unix, we know that there was a tight synergistic evolution that shaped each in relation to the other. As an example, very early C didn't have structs, but Thompson clearly needed a bit more powerful abstractions for some of the work on converting unix into C from pdp assembler, so Ritchie added them.

I was really just quibbling over definitions and connotations, when I hear of an "indirect" involvement I think of something very different and much more remote than the deeply intertwined stories of unix and C and Thompson and Ritchie at Bell Labs in the 69-74 era.

This is a great article, although of course there are a few things to quibble about. One that stuck out to me was this: "One of the inventors is Ken Thompson of Unix and Plan9 fame, and he was indirectly involved with C as well."

I'd have to say that Ken Thompson was directly involved with C, not just indirectly!

Wait, doesn't that actually support what I'm saying? I recall a shooting war in which a lot of people died as part of the process by which slavery stopped being a reality in the USA. Or is that your point?

I think it is entirely possible Bitcoin will provoke the mother-of-all battles for control over communication networks and how people use them. The outlines are very clear: Bitcoin allows nearly complete escape from the current financial regulatory systems that control currency movements and taxation. Trying to prevent people from moving money from one country to another or using Bitcoins for buying drugs, weapons, whatever is impossible without a truly draconian censorship and control regime in which private citizens are more or less forbidden from using encrypted communications.

I see government control over money as basically an immovable object - I don't think so-called constitutional protections mean anything when it comes to governments doing what they feel is necessary to maintain control. Internet freedom and encryption are not as much of an irresistible force as net-romantics would like to think.

If anything can force governments into legislating backdoors into all encryption systems and creating a clearly established set of "choke points" for control of data flows, it is the possibility of Bitcoin and other crypto-currencies to render basic imperatives of the modern nation state impossible to enforce.

It is more or less infinitely depressing to me, because as much as I would like to believe that the "good guys" are going to win, I doubt it. People generally don't realize how much we are already living in a dystopian panopticon, and Bitcoin is one of the rays of light shining through the cracks in the prison walls.

What is even more depressing to me is my own cowardice. I am too scared of the US government to even try to resist in any way, no matter how trivial. I would like to participate in Bitcoin and other projects, but I don't want to end up in a federal prison for conspiracy to assist in money laundering and tax evasion, as I imagine that any participation in Bitcoin will be interpreted by government prosecutors of the near-future.

As usual, the Freakonomics brand name stands for an idea that seems sensible and provocatively contrarian on cursory examination, but fails hold up when you dig into the facts. There are some issues with the current rare earths supply, but most commentators believe they are transient and will disappear now that prices have risen to the point that production makes economic sense.

The current design of Bitcoin is obviously not correct for the long term, and I am sure it will be supplanted by more evolved crypto-currency systems. There is absolutely nothing preventing people from taking the open-source code and creating an alternative "Bittoken" currency which changes problematic design elements such as the minting/issuance model.

Given the rewards that have already accrued to Bitcoin early adopters, I am surprised other competing cryptocurrency networks have not yet already been created. Lots of people who wish they had started mining coins back in the days before GPU mining would be eager to get in on the ground floor of an alternative.

Most problems with the critiques of Bitcoin like those in the linked Quora post is that they are debunking a straw man - the idea that Bitcoin is intended as a universal replacement for all other currency systems. By those standards of course it will fail. Looked at in another way, think of Bitcoin as something more like MMORPG loot. If people are willing to spend vast amounts of "real money" on items for their WoW character, spending that money on Bitcoins instead makes it seem like a sane investment rather than just flushing it away.

I've mentioned before that I think governmental action to criminalize Bitcoin and analogous technology is an even more serious threat to long-term value. If there is one thing that really might make the world's governments team up to completely ban strong encryption, it is a potential threat to governmental control over taxation and currencies.

Thanks for the reply, and your accusation of hypocrisy has some justice to it. I actually have a lot of respect for you and appreciate your projects and most of your writing, but I still don't think you handled this entire situation as well as you could have. I apologize if some of my vocabulary ("tantrum") is itself an example of what I was criticizing.

This is a very good feature, but I am also afraid it will make Zed Shaw and others think that his attempt to out-troll the trolls and multiply internet drama was a force for positive change. "If you throw a big enough temper tantrum and incite a large enough shitstorm, developers will address your concerns" is an unfortunate precedent. The fact that controversy and negativity attracts eyeballs and can trigger improvements is understandable, but it also creates perverse incentives.

I try to stay educated about modern physics, but this article leaves me scratching my head. The idea that time is just a measure of change, and all we really have is sequences of observations and a causal structure is not new at all. I have seen "timeless" proposals (for instance Julian Barbour's ideas) that seem both more radical and better supported than what I can understand of this summary of the work.

I can't tell if they are proposing something new, or just trying to change some of the vocabulary and mental models we use for current physics.

The Lance Armstrong metaphor is painfully accurate - using unethical methods to win. To me this is the essence of what is wrong with a perspective that prizes results and disregards moral imperatives. We see it in the celebration of Zuckerberg's Facebook despite the well-established fact that Zuckerberg did things like break into journalist emails and call his users "dumb fucks" for trusting him. Celebrating the era when Microsoft was dedicated to crushing competition by leveraging its market power and OS monopoly to lock everyone else out is to celebrate something which should be condemned.

This is a clear case where we see the idea that governments should represent the will of their citizens break down completely. Every power structure serves its own needs first. In areas where the interest of governmental systems and the citizens are in alignment, democracy can work - but when there is a conflict between the will of a power structure to extend its power and influence and the desires of the citizens, governments almost invariably choose to serve their own systemic interests.

Internet censorship is a dramatic example of this. Even in democratic societies with large majorities in favor of free communication over the internet, the internal imperatives of governments to monitor and control trump the will of the people, no matter who is in power. In the matter of desiring to be able to read everyone's email, the governments of the world are in nearly unanimous alliance against their own citizens.

I predict in about ten years things will go the other way - they will raid you because they suspect you of participating in cryptographic non-governmental currencies, and if they just find some grow lights and plants you will be fine. It seems like that is the direction of things.