In the beginning, language is spoken.

It is communicated from one person to another with the accompaniment of cues like body language, pitch and intonation, even pheromones communicating fear or excitement. It is intended to be used together with these cues.

And so it is for many years.

Then written language is created.

Written language is tough, because you have to deal with the fact that language is meant to be accompanied by many cues which you no longer have at your disposal.

It's also tough to be precise, because the language is very flexible and meant to be suitable for a great many other expressive pursuits whose needs are contrary to the goal of precision.

Writing is intended to be done once and distributed to an audience to stand as it is written, and so it is treated as an art. A writer is expected to put effort into making it just right before releasing it.

And so it is for many years.

Writing is used to codify laws.

Societies get more complex, the limitations of the common language are met, and new languages are created with new syntax, based around old ones.

Legal language is created to express such things as rules and contracts.

We are all systematically bound by what is expressed in these languages, and irrespective of our personal opinions or even our ignorance, we materially put our support behind these expressions by our participation.

Most people don't understand this language, and its meanings are often unintuitive and convoluted. Unless you have access to great wealth, you can't even learn it.

If you do have access to great wealth, you can hire teams of experts who have dedicated their lives to exploiting the convolutions of this language.

And so it is for many years.

Technologies arrive that allow the written word to be communicated broadly with great speed and great ease.

Speed enough that it can be used for a casual conversation.

Ease enough that you can casually reach a world audience during any 5 minute break in your schedule.

Language starts to break down.

Emails and instant messages are misunderstood more often than not.

People attempt to inform themselves, and they encounter linguistic constructs that exist for the higher purpose of eliciting emotional responses when used by artists.

They are manipulated and misled with misdirection and emotive imagery.

People are unable to concisely specify their agreements with their fellows without the assistance of a professional, but they are bound by them in ways they do not understand.

They are unable to understand the agreements that they make with commercial interests, but they are bound by them in ways they do not understand. These agreements are crafted by teams of people who dedicate their lives to being skilled in exploit your lack of understanding to their advantage.

Most people are unable to walk into a courthouse and express for themselves why they should not be punished.

If the attention of the system is ever placed upon them, their fate lies in their capacity to find someone who understands the language and rules of the law well enough to compete on their behalf.

It leads a person to think... shouldn't the language we use to make our agreements and our laws be straightforward enough that everyone can learn and understand it?

Shouldn't we insist that it not only be understandable, but understandable in a timely enough fashion to make all our decisions from an informed position?

Shouldn't every single human being on earth be capable of communicating with precision?

How would you do it?

My mind drifts to the book 1984.

Language is stripped down, shorn of the capacity to communicate things which disadvantage the state. Extraneous words are discarded. A standard is made, everyone is taught and kept up to date, and it is impossible to communicate outside of a very rigid framework.

It is put forth as a nightmare vision. The ultimate control of the population by the state.

But what if everyone was bilingual?

What if there was one language that was very precise, and it was engineered to be easy to understand.

Imagine if it was utterly devoid of the sorts of communications that could elicit emotional responses in people and make them choose something because the language made them feel good.

Now, if that was the only language that you knew, it would be very easy to organize with precision, but there would be no room for creativity, or expressions about the human experience, or creating things that were appealing to the primitive side of what we as humans are.

So you'd need a second language. One that was rich with multiple interconnected meanings, flexible, emotive, organic. A romantic language.

Two modes of communication, understood by all, with a social structure that indicated by decorum which mode should be used for which purpose.

This would still allow for that decorum to be broken when important things that fall outside the realm of tradition need to be said.

This would mean we could get rid of both lawyers and advertising.

We would have a civilization where every one of us understands what is going on well enough to participate, well enough to put transparency to purpose when we demand it, well enough not to be bamboozled and swindled anymore.

If you were going to pursue it as an agenda, you might choose something like English, which has strong representation as the language of business, then have an engineering team skilled in information theory create a suitable subset of the language, and go about the developing world educating people in that subset of it, allowing them to be advantaged by participating in world business.

Then choose a romantic language well represented in the developing world, Spanish perhaps, and take the two pronged approach of providing easy access to education in the romantic language to children in the English speaking world, while investing heavily in the creation of cultural works in that language. These children would end up thinking of English as the language for serious things and Spanish as the language for creativity and expressions of feeling and passion.

Inside of a couple of generations of spreading bilingualism in this fashion, such a structure could be realized across the globe.

Peoples cultural languages would end up being folded into the Romantic language over time, making it an increasingly rich means of expression and preserving history.

Malicia is the art of a slave.

That is to say, it was evolved in Brazil by African slaves, preserved in the art of Capoeira, and roughly translates as "deceptive tricks".

It is the art of appearing weak when you are strong, as practiced and evolved by those who are helpless to prevent their own death at an enemies whim.

Cringing as though afraid, standing on ones face as though awkwardly fallen, feigning injuries, these are all tactics practiced by master Capoeiristas.

These become even more apparent when you watch the Angola mestres.

It is an interesting look through the eyes of an oppressed people.

To rule is to create a system. A system is by nature inflexible. Any flexibility it exhibits should be of a preconcieved nature, because the value of a system is in its reliability.

It must suit its participants. The less it suits its participants, the more enforcement cost will be imposed upon the system, and the less effective it will be.

It should be minimal in scope. A system should exist to protect specific needs in a reliable fashion.

In an ideal system, any person should be able to fill any role, and every person should be exposed to each of them.

Adhering to such ideals in designing systems ensures that every person understands intimately how the needs of their life are met, and cannot argue for change or discontinuation from a position of ignorance.

It also ensures that the needs that the system are fulfilling are met in a resilient fashion.

The system should not be able to lose coherency because of the loss of any person. People are too dynamic and transient in their nature to be depended upon as individuals within a design.

No person should have such heavy responsibilities laid upon them as would be imposed if it were designed otherwise.

No reasonable person should live in a system where their needs rely on the continuing competency and goodwill of an individual without making efforts to escape that situation.

The trick to leading is to use people well.

If you can use people well, they will love you for it. If you can make people believe that you will use them better than they will use themselves, they will give themselves to you.

To use people well, you must understand and know them. If you cannot know them, you cannot use them in a subtle fashion.

To use people well, you must love them. If you cannot love them, you will use them frivolously, rudely and in a fashion that does not respect them.

You must understand them, tax them without asking more than they can give, make them feel that their efforts further their own personal goals and will benefit other people at the same time.

If you ask more of a person than they can give, they will fail, and what they could have achieved will be wasted. They will develop habits and practices that lead to failure, and they will be shamed. If they do not escape you, they will be ruined by what you have done to them.

You must never ask people to do what they cannot do.

If you ask less of a person than they can give, their potential will be wasted. They will not grow, but will instead be stunted and destroyed. If they do not escape you, they will be ruined by what you have done to them.

You must always find a way to exploit what a person has to offer.

Lead in this way and you will be beloved, and all mankind will lift you on their shoulders.

This feels like a mega-spam entry, and I'm very self conscious about posting it, but I'm excited about this and I wanted to share . . .

I just published my third book, The Happiest Days of Our Lives. I mention it here because it's all about growing up in the 70s, and coming of age in the 80s as part of the D&D/BBS/video game/Star Wars figures generation, and I think a lot of Slashdot readers will relate to the stories in it.

I published a few of the stories on my blog, including Blue Light Special. It's about the greatest challenge a ten year-old could face in 1982: save his allowance, or buy Star Wars figures?

After our corduroy pants and collared shirts and Trapper Keepers and economy packs of pencils and wide-ruled paper were piled up in our cart, our mom took our three year-old sister with her to the make-up department to get shampoo and whatever moms buy in the make-up department, and my brother and I were allowed to go to the toy department.

"Can I spend my allowance?" I said.

"If that's what you want to do," my mom said, another entry in a long string of unsuccessful passive/aggressive attempts to encourage me to save my money for . . . things you save money for, I guess. It was a concept that was entirely alien to me at nine years old.

"Keep an eye on Jeremy," she said.

"Okay," I said. As long as Jeremy stood right at my side and didn't bother me while I shopped, and as long as he didn't want to look at anything of his own, it wouldn't be a problem.

I held my brother's hand as we tried to walk, but ended up running, across the store, past a flashing blue light special, to the toy department. Once there, we wove our way past the bicycles and board games until we got to the best aisle in the world: the one with the Star Wars figures.

I'm really proud of this book, and the initial feedback on it has been overwhelmingly positive. I've been reluctant to mention it here, because of the spam issue, but I honestly do think my stories will appeal to Slashdotters.

After the disaster with O'Reilly on Just A Geek, I've decided to try this one entirely on my own, so I'm responsible for the publicity, the marketing, the shipping, and . . . well, everything. If this one fails, it will be because of me, not because a marketing department insisted on marketing it as something it's not.

Of course, I hope I can claim the same responsibility if (when?) it finds its audience . . . which would be awesome.

Seriously, have all the old schoolers gone underground? This is news for nerds that is really gonna fucking matter and we get nothing?

Maybe being owned has cost us something here we are gonna regret.

Act.

http://www.savetheinternet.com

Just, No.

http://yro.slashdot.org/article.pl?sid=07/04/27/1626243

Nothing needs to be said. Writing should not be a crime.

FYI, the text of what he wrote is at the chicago tribune ... not particularly pleasant, but hardly worth an arrest warrant.

Rupert started it with this:

Fairbanks to St. Petersburg.
Great circle distance: 3,840 miles
Google directions distance: 9,631 miles
My score: 2.508

I answered by stretching his route slightly: Kantishna Station, Alaska to Skarsvag, Norway. It's a pretty long journey no matter how you look at it.

Google's route: 10,411 miles
Great circle distance: 3,141 miles
It has a score of only 3.315, but it'll take 34 days to make the journey!

This one seemed like a good North American entry:
Google's route
gets a score of 3.7.

But North America is tricky. Just about every goat and Jeep trail is mapped, and we Americans cannot abide straight lines that aren't paved. Rupert's still managed to find some good ones: Route to distance gives a very respectable 5.6.

I've headed over to the Balkans, where the maps are usefully short on detail. Here's my latest entry. Lecce, Italy to Tirane, Albania: Route to great circle.

1267 km by Google, 216 km straight arc. Score is 5.866.

It's kind of a pain because you have to snarf the lat/lon from Google's URL and adapt it to the great circle calculator, but it's fun to exploit holes in Google's map coverage.

Simple tasks like switching between Firefox and Thunderbird are driving the load on my machine up over 4, and if I'm trying to run Amarok at the same time, it drives it up to 8. In fact, my machine frequently climbs up into the 7-9 range, bringing my apps to a crawl and frustrating the hell out of me.

So I've decided it's time to buy a new computer. I'm going to replace my aging Sony Vaio desktop machine (which runs Linux) with something newer that has more RAM, a faster processor, and a bigger hard drive.

The thing is, I'm not entirely sure where to start looking. A quick walk through Circuit City a month or so ago lead me to believe I can get a rather "big" computer for as low as five hundred bucks, which further leads me to believe that if I were to buy something online, I can get a huge pile of RAM, a fast processor, and a big honkin' hard drive for even less.

I run Kubuntu, and use KDE as my desktop (though I occasionally switch to Gnome when I get bored) and I mostly use Firefox, Thunderbird, OpenOffice.org, Amarok, and run PokerStars in wine. I'm looking for something that can do all of that without slowing my machine to a crawl.

Anyone have any suggestions on where to start looking?

Edit: I don't think I have the patience to build my own machine out of individual parts. I also don't have any real loyalty to any particular company or architecture. New Egg has lots of machines with AMD processors, and though I've always had Intel processors because more things seemed to run on x86, that's not as much of an issue as it once was, right?

I've decided to move any "journal entry" type outpourings to my occasional blog at blog.gornall.net

Wearing a blue suit and a tight smile, the fed faced his audience.
And this wasn't just any audience. It consisted of 300 potential offenders, rounded up on Tuesday so Jon Dudas could lay down the law to them.

In this Star Tribune story, Jon Dudas, the director of the USPTO was speaking to an elementary school assembly of second through fifth graders. So instead of "students" or "kids", it's now acceptable for reporters to refer to them as "potential offenders"? This is plus ungood.

[This is actually just here for reference - it's a post from my history that I've referred to a couple of times, and it's a pain to find...It's been slightly updated for formatting, clarity and grammar. Here's the original Post]

Some history:

Waaay back in the mists of time (1988) I was a 1st-year undergrad in Physics. Together with a couple of friends, I wrote a virus, just to see if we could, and let it loose on just one of the networked machines in the year-1 lab.

I guess I should say that the virus was completely harmless, it just prepended 'Copyright (c) 1988 The Virus' to the start of directory listings. It was written for Acorn Archimedes/BBC micro's (the lab hadn't got onto PC's by this time, and the Acorn range had loads of ports, which physics labs like :-)

[edit: the above is misleading - it only worked on BBC's. The lab had 50 or so BBC's and 2 Archimedes, and I was trying to convey that as well, and mixed up the words]

It spread like wildfire. People would come in, log into the network, and become infected because the last person to use their current computer was infected. It would then infect their account, so wherever they logged on in future would also infect the computer they were using then. A couple of hours later, and most of the lab was infected.

You have to remember that viruses in those days weren't really networked. They came on floppy disks for Atari ST's and Amiga's. I witnessed people logging onto the same computer "to see if they were infected too". Of course, the act of logging in would infect them...

Of course "authority" was not amused. Actually they were seriously unamused, not that they caught us. They shut down the year-1,2,3 network and disinfected all the accounts on the network server by hand. Ouch.

There were basically 3 ways the virus could be activated:

• Typing any '*' command (eg: "*.", which gave you a directory listing. Sneaky, I thought, since the virus announced itself when you did a '*.' When you thought you'd beaten it, you'd do a '*.' to see if it was still there :-)
• The events (keypress, network, disk etc.) all activated the virus if inactive, and also re-enabled the interrupts, if they had been disabled
• The interrupts (NMI,VBI,..) all activated the virus if inactive, and also re-enabled the events, if they had been deactivated.

On activation, the virus would replicate itself to the current mass-storage media. This was to cause problems because we hadn't really counted on just how effective this would be. Within a few days of the virus being cleansed (and everyone settling back to normal), it suddenly made a re-appearance again, racing through the network once more within an hour or two. Someone had put the virus onto their floppy disk (by typing *. on the floppy rather than the network) and had then brought the disk back into college and re-infected the network.

If we thought authority was unamused last time, this time they held a meeting for the entire department, and calmly said the culprit when found would be expelled. Excrement and fans came to mind. Of course, they thought we'd just re-released it, but in fact it was just too successful for comfort...

Since we had "shot our bolt", owning up didn't seem like a good idea. The only solution we came up with was to write another (silent, this time :-) virus which would disable any copy of the old one, whilst hiding itself from the users. We built in a time-to-die of a couple of months, let it go, and prayed...

We had actually built in a kill-switch to the original virus, which would disable and remove it - we didn't want to be infected ourselves (at the start). Of course, it became a matter of self-preservation to be infected later on in the saga - 3 accounts unaccountably (pun intended :-) uninfected... It wasn't too hard to destroy the original by having the new virus "press" the key combination that deleted the old one.

So, everyone was happy. Infected with the counter-virus, but happy. "Authority" thought they'd laid down the law, and been taken seriously (oh if they knew...) and we'd not been expelled. Everyone else lost their infections within a few months ...

Anyway. I've never written anything remotely like a virus since [grin]

Simon.

I'm impressed!

So far, pretty much everything but playing DVD media has just worked right the first time out of the gate. I decided to run the Gnome based core system and I'm liking it. Still miss KDE, but the differences are not stark enough to worry too much about. What I need is there with few hassles.

Most importantly, the package management system is top-notch. Things just install with few worries. It's not that I can't go get some code and install it, then configure, etc... I can. It's that I don't often want to. Very good show so far.

One worry these days. How does one capture a snapshot of all the important software in case of a shutdown. With the legal environment today, this is a clear reality. As much as I love just grabbing the necessary bits online, will they be there later when / if I need them again?

I am absolutely stunned that Slashdot's editors would give credibility to a completely false story, pushed by a paid industry PR professional. As Rugrat said,

The "article" is not an article, but a press release written by an employee of a public affairs company.

"Tom Harris is mechanical engineer and Ottawa Director of High Park Group, a public affairs and public policy company."

For a website that spends so much time and energy combating FUD from Microsoft, and the MPAA and RIAA, it is baffling that FUD that was paid for and is pushed by the oil industry would make the front page here.

Come on, Slashdot. You can do better.