That thing is the possibility of scientific views that are at odds with society's real or perceived interests, and the effects of the clashes between those views upon science. This is a difficult topic, for I'm sure that we're generally happy (in principle) with our moral views impinging upon the progress of medicine, even though we might differ upon specifics.

The case of James Watson's utterances that led to his pressured resignation is interesting not because of what he said, but because Steven J. Gould said something equivelent in his book "The Mismeasure of Man"; a book criticising the IQ test.

Moving onto specifics, Watson said "All our social policies are based on the fact that their intelligence is the same as ours - whereas all the testing says not really" , whereas Gould said that IQ tests are biased towards skills that are exercised, and valued in Western culture. Neither authour specifies cultural or genetic causes.

I am not competent to comment upon the validity of their respective statements, but I find it notable that whereas Watson was condemned, Gould was lionised for his comments. What concerns me is that this episode reveals how non-science influences acceptable spoken or published scientific views, and so risks crippling science itself, since recorded science is the sum total of scientific publications. Within NASA, a manager attempted to suppress views that were contrary to "young earth" creationism, and inconvenient views on climate change - of all hues - are suppressed differently in different contexts, making a bit of a political football of it.

More and more, we expect people in respected positions to resign for expressing unpopular views. Does this risk accumulating to the point where it harms science? Publishing an unpopular paper could harm the "standing" of a well-respected journal. There are of course other journals, but there's a point where you can only publish in a poisonous rag which has no peer review.

It isn't only a matter of political correctness, but also modern, manipulative neo-Straussian* moves to control speech that is perceived as being harmful to society by undermining the myths that bind us. The best that we can do at this stage is to remain clear-eyed as to what is going on, and those of us who are batting for one political side or another should see that truth is harmed as we persist in tit-for-tat political censorship.

At the root of this is the growing feeling that reality is known and individual, rather than unknown but shared. Either we cannot accept that we might be wrong, or else, we don't want anyone to be wrong. But apart from being non-sense, we open ourselves up to manipulation, risking eventual tyranny born of solipsism.

*I don't personally believe that Leo Strauss holds the views that some of his "followers" have read into his works. The problem with being subtle is that subtlety can be read as cunning.

Because of this failure to make progress, together with the original subversion of the standards-making process, reform of the standards process is now on the agenda. Is it possible that this reform will be complete before the third (and final) "technical" vote on the approval of OOXML as a standard? Will the committee be able to stave off future attempts to subvert the process by interested parties?

The night before last, I was attempting to get a game compiled to run in 64 bits on my Opteron. It was a ridiculous hour, but I was going to get it working before I went to bed, dammit!

Well, okay, not a good start. I found that SDL_GL_SWAP_CONTROL wasn't recogised, and that I needed to upgrade my SDL libraries to at least version 1.2.10. So I fired up the trusty Yum Extender widget on my Fedora 5 box, and found that I couldn't get it... Unless I pulled from the development repository, which I did.

SDL-1.2.11-2 was to be had, but required at updated glibc. So, without much thought, I grabbed the latest one, and set the game compiling again, and indeed it got a lot further, until the compile got to this line:

/usr/lib64/libSDL.so: file not recognized: File format not recognized

I had grabbed a glibc that was too advanced. Version 2.6.3; well, I had no intension of running cutting edge code anyway, so I erased the files.

rpm -e glibc.2.6.3.x86_64 glibc.2.6.3.i386

Which turned out to be pretty dumb. I had managed to strip the basic subsystem out of my machine. Applications that were running would keep running; no new apps would start.

So (I was tired, remember), I rebooted. Naturally, the boot baulked at the first opportunity. I reset the machine to an install disk to "upgrade" the system to the Fedora 5 base system, but /dev/md1 (the boot sector) wasn't clean, and I was instructed to boot up my system and sort out the problem before attempting an upgrade (sensible advice, but frustrating).

I finally solved this problem after a very short night's sleep (3 hours) by using my Fedora rescue CD, not chrooting (doh!) and fscking the /boot partition. The rescue CD wouldn't let me unmount /dev/md2 (AKA /, the root partition), so I just hoped that all would be well... And it was! Reinstalling the base system happened pretty quickly.

Well, I had been running kernel 2.6.18, which ran all my hardware (including the memory card reader), and generally did the job. But fedora 5 begins with kernel 2.6.15, which means that unless I upgrade, I can't read in an artist friend of mine's photos to use on his website.

Can you get kernel 2.6.18 (Fedora, x86_64) for love or money? Well, I tried for a little too long, but eventually gave up. If I try to upgrade to 2.6.20, this happens; I remember something similar happening last time that I attempted this.

Well, my mission to you, should you choose to accept it, is to locate for me kernel-1.2.6.18_1.2257.fc5 for the x86_64, or else to help me get my SATA RAID 5 partition detected on boot by kernel 2.6.20; Am I missing important kernel options, say?

Thanks in advance!
~Tim (Morosoph)

http://www.jri.org.uk/news/Critique_Channel4_Global_Warming_Swindle.pdf

Following the EU's behaviour with respect to software patents, and the current behaviour with respect to MSOXML, I'm now officially unconvinced by either side. I neither trust government bodies, nor those who are criticising them. Perhaps this was what the programme makers intended. Perhaps it is those with vested interests who are replying truthfully, but misleadingly.

I'd hate to have to make a political decision on the proper response to climate change.

Added footnote (16/Mar/2007): My friend sent me a link to an article in The Independent, and the discussion on the issue on Technocrat is interesting. I would like to see an explanation of CO2 lagging behind temperature increases, as emphasised by eglamkowski, below.

In practice, however, human nature being what it is, we are bound to create war machines. Even if we do not, we should make ourselves aware of an implication of the zeroth law:

A robot may not injure humanity, or, through inaction, allow humanity to come to harm.

The implication is this: any robot that is created that does not follow the laws of robotics, should not be able to reproduce. If it needs to build robots, in turn, they must have a lower complexity than itself, and carry the same condition. Further, a robot that can create robots and does not carry this rule should be destroyed.

It's pretty clear that in the event of war, the three original laws would have to be suspended for the sake of the zeroth, further, having made a strategic decision with (one would assume) a higher-powered machine, that strategic decision should not be overruled because the robots on the ground lack information. Although a better solution might be that war robots carry a "degree of confidence" in their creator robot, or the strategist, this ignores the human hand, where humans will not want robots to be surrendering on their behalf. Humans believe in their wars, and won't want robots contradicting them.

So, why is this implication so important? The answer lies with genetics. The reason that we put so much effort into survival and the protection of our families, and to a lesser extent, our friends, is that we are genetically programmed that way. Those genes that have enhanced our survival qualities have been successful. Unlike most of us, robots can truly be selfless.

However, if robots build robots, mutations are bound to occur. If it were left unchecked, one would find that those mutations favouring the robot's own survival (and those of its 'offspring') would prevail over robots that do not have that mutation. Robots would slowly become selfish, and promote their selves and their own 'relations' above human beings, for at some point, the wired-in laws, insofar as they existed in the first place, would be subject to mutation. Thus reproduction-capable robots not carrying the laws must face capital 'punishment', as must those disobeying them (since the laws could remain intact, yet somehow be "wired around"). Asimov's laws will then be part of the survival criteria, the only exceptions being those robots that cannot reproduce, and therefore never get the chance to evolve.

With Asimov's laws as part of the survival criteria for reproducing robots, we will find the laws being respected and strengthened down the robot generations, for the criteria for robot survival will match the criteria for robot self-propagation.

An article in New Scientist Tech on recent patents reveals Philips's plan to subvert the intent of laws to protect copyright through technical means in order to apply anti-piracy laws to those who wish to watch DVDs from other regions.

According to the article, the effect of this is that in some countries, "watching a movie in the wrong country could land you in jail for 10 years or paying a $1 million fine". The technology is intended for Blu-ray and HD-DVD players, and works by integrating region-protection in with the disk's anti-copying encryption.

Could this backfire? It certainly gives an excuse for those who wish to break the encryption to do so. One that surely has a reasonable chance of standing up in court. Could the effect of this technology be to subvert the tougher anti-piracy law, for the sake of allowing simple arbitration of goods?

• You communicate the most information with a "minority" choice.
• You are actively voting for diversity of representation.
• Your intent will affect the mood of the local population proportionately*, and could therefore win more support for your cause.
• Your vote will give strength to would-be third party voters in future elections.
• Whoever gets elected, they will want to win the next election, and you have given them some indication how to win your vote. You could find yourself better represented than many voters for that candidate.

*I did some canvassing for a centrist, socially liberal party in Britain a few years ago. One strategy was to go after the vote of the less-supported "main" party, which resulted in an equal number of votes falling from the other party, now that their provisional supporters felt less threatened. Voters do sense the intentions of their immediate community when making their own judgements on how to vote.

Further proof of the instict to regulate unnecessarily.

I was going to call this JE "Freedom Brings Responsibility", but the politicians' catchphrase, "explaining" why because you have some freedom left, they should be able to deny you freedoms of their choosing, seemed somehow appropriate.

The take on the following article that I wish to emphasise is that security theatre is harming security.
__________________________________________________

Is this the end of the road for traffic lights?

By David Millward

Most traffic lights should be torn up as they make roads less safe, one of Europe's leading road engineers said yesterday.

Hans Monderman, a traffic planner involved in a Brussels-backed project known as Shared Space, said that taking lights away helped motorists, cyclists and pedestrians to co-exist more happily and safely.

Residents of the northern Dutch town of Drachten have already been used as guinea-pigs in an experiment which has seen nearly all the traffic lights stripped from their streets.

Only three of the 15 sets in the town of 50,000 remain and they will be gone within a couple of years.

The project is the brainchild of Mr Monderman, and the town has seen some remarkable results. There used to be a road death every three years but there have been none since the traffic light removal started seven years ago.

There have been a few small collisions, but these are almost to be encouraged, Mr Monderman explained. "We want small accidents, in order to prevent serious ones in which people get hurt," he said yesterday.

"It works well because it is dangerous, which is exactly what we want. But it shifts the emphasis away from the Government taking the risk, to the driver being responsible for his or her own risk.

"We only want traffic lights where they are useful and I haven't found anywhere where they are useful yet."

Mr Monderman, 61, compared his philosophy of motoring to an ice rink. "Skaters work out things for themselves and it works wonderfully well. I am not an anarchist, but I don't like rules which are ineffective and street furniture tells people how to behave."

In short, if motorists are made more wary about how they drive, they behave more carefully, he said.

The main junction in Drachten handles about 22,000 cars a day. Where once there were traffic lights, there is a roundabout, an extended cycle path and pedestrian area.

In the days of traffic lights, progress across the junction was slow as cars stopped and started. Now tailbacks are almost unheard of -- and almost nobody toots a horn.

However, it is not the cars which seem to be involved in the greatest conflict, it is the cyclists and pedestrians who seem to jostle for space. Driving around Drachten, vehicles approach roundabouts with considerable caution - traffic approaches from the left, but cyclists come from either side.

Cyclists, almost none of whom bother with helmets, signal clearly at junctions making sure motorists are aware of them.

Thus far, Drachten's drivers and pedestrians have voted the experiment a success.

"I am used to it now," said Helena Spaanstra, 24. "You drive more slowly and carefully, but somehow you seem to get around town quicker."

Tony Ooostward, 70, was equally enthusiastic. "Everybody is learning. I am a walker and now you are the boss at the crossroads, everyone waits for you. But at the same time pedestrians wait until there are a number wanting to cross at the same time."

Kanaan Jamal, 39, like many people in Drachten, uses a bike to get around. "It is very smooth -- a lot better than other towns," he said. The consensus is that the creation of uncertainty by taking away the lights and even in some places the road markings has worked

"Anybody who is new here doesn't know what to do. They don't know who has priority, the car, bike or pedestrian. It's all confusing, but because of that everybody takes care," Mr Jamal said.

For the record, so was I; I believed that the anti-DRM provision was opposed to all DRM, rather than just DRM that specifically preventing modified versions of the code from running "turning freedom number one into a sham", in Stallman's words.

For those who missed it, there was an article on the front page Linus Speaks Out On GPLv3, but I went to Groklaw directly, since Slashdot sucks for insightful commentary.

Linus is making some of the same philosophical errors that I took him to task for a few months ago, but has added to that a certain naivety about the legal process, and labelling the goal of maximising freedom as "extreme".

Maximising freedom may well be an intellectually extreme position, in that it isn't a blend of several positions, but it is not a politically extreme position, in that it is what a large number of political activists attempt to do, although the trade-offs are not always agreed (this is not true of politicians, who also seek power for themselves and to favour their benefactors). The idealism of the French flag reflects exactly this position: liberty, equality (the basis for trade-offs), fraternity (sharing the fruits of the work done). I suspect that Tolvald's opposition to the FSF's "crusading" is in fact in opposition to a highly American view of freedom, but the freedom promoted by the GNU GPL is more of the anarchist's view of freedom than the capitalist's, when taken to extremes. Naturally, it isn't in fact anarchistic, for it uses law to maximise freedom.

What about his naivety? It is two-fold. First, he is applying an engineering fix to a political problem, thus the bug (in the DMCA etc) is legislative, and therefore the fix is legislative. This stance is reasonable given legislators that actually listen to their constituents, and wish to deliver the best set of laws that balance their interests, and if they are out of balance, they will attempt to restore that balance in future legislation. If you think that this is what legislators do, then the GPL version 2 is the right one for you, for you will always have the right to reverse-engineer, and the protection of intellectual property will only go as far as is necessary to provide a sufficient incentive to create, without being overly onerous upon further innovation.

Secondly, legislators are not the only ones who shape law. Take the recent action of France's Supreme Court to savage fair use rights. Crusty old judges, I'm afraid, are exactly the types who are most likely to miss the difference between theft and copyright infringement, ignore the economics (since the issue is couched in moral and legal terms), and overcompensate for imagined loss by handing out fines proportional to the infringement. (For the record, I favour proportional fines and|or sentences for making money from piracy, for then it is diverting spending that would have otherwise have been spent upon original work, and therefore is theft), but that is not the issue that I wish to raise today. Fines for copyright infringers are one thing, but what we see is a wholesale attack upon the entire concept of fair use, the right to reverse engineer, and more. The "proportional" response has included an "acceptable" degree of collateral damage, but economic competence would have led to the conclusion that the response was in fact disproportionate.

Given legislation from the bench, legislation through contract is entirely appropriate. I do not wish leave it to my government to defend my freedoms; I also wish to defend it through my own actions, and the rights that I give to people to make use of my work. This is not an extreme position; it is a position that I accept the social contract as decided at such times as the birth of nations, and wish to do my own part to revitalise and uphold my side of that contract.

Footnote: Tom Hudson has said plenty in support of Linus's stance. I think that the best, and simplest response was given by WNight.

Not a thesis, but an example. From New Scientist:

How people with autism miss the big picture

"A PICTURE is worth a thousand words" may sum up how people with autism see the world.

Brains scans of people with the condition show that they place excessive reliance on the parietal cortex, which analyses images, even when interpreting sentences free of any imagery. In other people, the image centre appears to be active only when the sentences contain imagery.

The results agree with anecdotal reports that people with autism are fixated on imagery but struggle to interpret words and language. They frequently excel at recording visual detail, but overlook the bigger picture and the context that comes with it.

Researchers led by Marcel Just of Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, scanned volunteers' brains while they were deciding if certain statements were true or false. Some of the statements relied on analysis of language alone, while others could only be understood by considering the imagery they conjured up. "The number 8, when rotated 90 degrees, looks like a pair of spectacles", for instance, needs both arithmetic interpretation and visualisation of the rotated number.

Just says that the observed over-reliance on the parietal cortex might have arisen to compensate for poor brain connections to the prefrontal cortex, which interprets language (Brain, DOI: 10.1093/brain/awll64). "That makes it difficult to understand complex language and to understand the intentions of other people," he says.

My response:

With regards to your article on autism "How people with autism miss the
big picture", it appears to me to be biased and one-sided.

The title, for a start, is ironic: autistic people will frequently
infer too larger a context, a bigger picture than that which is narrowed
by socially conditioned readings of intent. I have Asperger's Syndrome,
so I have some insight into this. Those same readings make it
impossible to discuss (for example) the science of evolution with some
people; the theory of the selfish gene is taken as scaffolding for
economic atomism with selfish individuals, for example, whereas the
wider picture is that many forms of co-operation and the theory of memes
restores the analysis.

I've seen the reading of intent blind people to a larger concept really
quite often.

Back to the title: I do not think that it helps the different to be
portrayed as inferior, although they may have difficulties. Not readily
narrowing your perception and interpretation to fit cultural norms does
result in miscommunication. Those on the autistic spectrum therefore
suffer for being in a minority, but it is misleading to say that they
have the smaller picture.

My last JE has been submitted as an article.

If you're wondering, my interest in the story is that I've done a small amount of chip design myself, for a small startup, Advanced Rendering Technology, which made boxes that perform ray-tracing in hardware. The modern incarnation of ART is to be found here. For a short synopsis of the company and its history, here is a comment by my old boss.

I'll probably be fit enough to work next year, so I'm hoping to get hold of one of these things... :o)

Note: Original JE deleted as I posted a reply that read a little like sour grapes, due to this article, currently in The Mysterious Future. I hadn't mentioned the word "Opteron". Duh!

Susan Bro, an agency spokeswoman, said Thursday's statement resulted from a past combined review by federal drug enforcement, regulatory and research agencies that concluded "smoked marijuana has no currently accepted or proven medical use in the United States and is not an approved medical treatment."

. . .

The Food and Drug Administration statement directly contradicts a 1999 review by the Institute of Medicine, a part of the National Academy of Sciences, the nation's most prestigious scientific advisory agency. That review found marijuana to be "moderately well suited for particular conditions, such as chemotherapy-induced nausea and vomiting and AIDS wasting.

Let me say here that my youth experience of marijuana is that it is an extremely boring drug, and although I find it ridiculous that the drug is illegal, I think that there are many considerably more important things to get het up about.

My question is that if this administration engage in such outright lying, can you really trust them on anything? To me, this is worse as Clinton getting a blow-job and lying about it, as it involves a conspiracy of liars.

Here is the devastating evidence: a letter to The Register.

Now, I know that The Register isn't exactly the most highbrow publication on the planet, but let us analyse Linus's reply to The Register's earlier article:

Since you seem to be following the kernel mailing list, you could have picked a better email to comment on.

Okay, The Register was seeking to put Linus in a bad light; they could have been fairer to him.

Anyway, look for the one that talks about "reciprocity" to get an idea for why I like the GPLv2, and not the GPLv3 (I don't know how you read the mailing list, but you can search for it at least on lkml.org).

Reciprocity optimises a two-entity system; writing software, however, is a manifold system. The virtue of the GPL is that it spills onwards, and requires that others who want to use its bounty have to reciprocate with the GPL's conception of freedom; not with a particular individual, or collection of individuals. The future developer or user is protected by the GPL. The GPL creates a freedom akin to the free market, and as such protects future transferability, and future trade.

In a manifold system, "reciprocity" is often cartelisation. Higher values turn one against the immediate group for the sake of the larger group. I imagine that Linus is thinking that since he'd like hardware manufactorers to respect programmers' freedoms, so he should act to protect theirs.

It's not about "freedom". It's about "fairness".

Which, btw, is a lot more fundamental concept. "Do unto others.." and all that, you know.

And here Linus betrays where he's really coming from. This is pure Scandinavia. And here he also reveals a lack of philosophical depth.

I know from hard experience that "freedom" is often seen as being synonymous with greed, but it doesn't take long to see why this is mistaken: freedom is essentially the flipside of trust, but trust is a complex beast when one is dealing with something as complex as society. We (by and large) accept laws in order to allow trust to develop. Is other words, we selectively distrust in order to raise the overall level of trust. The GPL functions much in the same way as law does. The BSD licence is more trusting, mostly because programmers who write under BSD licences want it that way. The GPL, however, creates trust further down the line, and trust from those who might wish to contribute to the body of the GPLed work. The GPL is deliberately unfair to the closed shop, for much the same reason that green taxes are deliberately unfair to polluting entities; in both cases, they are seeking to change behaviour. The GPL aims to maximise freedom, and green taxes aim to maximise the difference between the value of 'goods' and 'bads'.

Fairness is just about the worst-defined concept in common use. The golden rule fails as soon as you realise that people want different things (or else there wouldn't be trade), and just about everyone defines fairness as the perfection of their chosen strain of politics (equal opportunity, equal outcome, equal consideration, trade without compulsion, ...), so that to use the word is essentially to have said nothing over and above "it doesn't suit my politics". When you go about defining exactly what should be made fair, then you have something to talk about.

It is my opinion that any definition of fair which justifies the GPL version 2 cannot help but justify version 3, and even prefer it. I understand that the GPL version 2 may be a good compromise for many individuals and entities, but that is exactly what it is: a compromise.

Note to RingDev: I'm sorry, I was (mostly) away from the computer for a few days, so I lost the chance to follow up on your reply, so I posted a delayed response in my last JE.

We are facing the steady erosion of the free use of our property both through legal, and through technical means. I reproduce my post (in response to this post) below, although I have cleared up a few typos on the way:

The brief answer to your point is that Capitalism isn't what you claim it is. Maximum property is not the rule in capitalism, rather, law has evolved in order to recognise that property is not absolute, for example that one, or a collection of people, can attain ownership over land through use, and lack of enforcement. This recognises that the principle of capitalism is a codification of natural behaviour, rather than being an abstract system based upon the absolute value of property.

Look closer, and you find that the deeper principle of capitalism as codified by common law (that is the natural evolution of law according to the rule of precedent, rather than industry lobbies), is far closer to a principle of maximum freedom, than the application of an axiomatic set of rules.

Additional to this, it is worth noting why "fair use" rights exist in law: real value, and freedom is won, in particular by creating derivative works. The restriction of rights that is property can create an incentive, but also creates restrictions, that impede the creation of derivative works in particular. The creation of "intellectual property" clearly has costs and gains to freedom, and in particular to the creative freedom that is the root of the creation of wealth, with is a far vaster concept than money (in truth, the real wealth will be more than the money wealth, for that "imbalance" is what causes the trade to be made in the first place). Investment selects ideas to build on; it is our creativity that causes them to be. To undermine creativity so as to provide "an incentive" is to get things back-to-front.

Personal use is just the tip of the iceberg. Furthermore, you don't get that companies simply don't want to provide fair use. It gets in the way of the greater plan to deny the user as much property as possible, so as to extract more of the value that would otherwise accrue to the customer by eg. having the file in several formats, or playable after a licence runs out. If fair use can be undermined by DRM "so much the better!"

I agree that we already have limited rights of ownership, but the principle that underlies law and practise should still be that of maximum freedom, that is: allowing the right degree of property and enforcement, so that positive freedom (incentive) and negative freedom (lack of obstruction) are in balance. As long as there remains profit in production, negative freedom is worth having. What's more, it's not worth trading freedom so as to ensure the security of the creation of wealth beyond a certain point. Besides, as you must be well aware, the connection between the abuse of freedom through copyright infringement, and the loss of income of artists is tenuous. It might affect the income flowing to music companies, though, but there are evolving far more efficient distribution mechanisms, that can give the artists more 'cake' in absolute terms, even though the whole cake is smaller. Think of the savings in eliminating wasteful administration!

No. The real issue is that of maintaining old business methods and practises. One that will keep certain sectors of industry in business, rather than protecting the creative output that is the economic purpose of these companies. The entire argument about "capitalism" and "communism" is a smokescreen for a far more old-fashioned and tradition argument: the special pleading of outdated industries against forces that threaten to displace then, which require convenient restrictions of freedom.

I know that it took me a few days to reply. I just didn't see the point. But this argument needs to be won again and again, for our conception of property is changing, in part because of the deliberate and systematic misuse of language by those who wish to keep more power to themselves, and their allies. Some of their allies are in government: quite apart from unholy alliances, there is the simple fact that governments, by their very structure, think like large companies, or rather, one set of bureaucrats is much like another, and so their natural instincts will be to protect what they deem to be "stability". Ie. restrictions of freedoms that appear to threaten the relevant establishments attempting to do what they see to be their job. They almost never think of the same outcome being brought about by other means.

My real interest in all this is in the matter of patents, rather than that of copyright. But both are important, and copyright has a wider interest, and (with the GPL version 3 specifically addressing DRM) appears to be very much an issue of the moment.

Footnote: Above, I should really be referring to the free market, rather than to capital; Capitalism is by definition the doctorine of property. Free-marketry is the general rule of freedom in the marketplace. I reverted the article heading, as I'd used "Capitalism" throughout, in the sense that a libertarian would use it, and the post of mine that I quoted cannot be edited.

Ps. DRM and the Death of Culture.