Advogato blog for vicious

More on the UK law

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 18:08:20 GMT

A few more comments on the UK nonsense about the new UK law.

Ignoring any moral arguments against these laws, did anyone actually do the analysis of the cost vs. benefits? I mean these laws have direct costs for 1) ISPs 2) small businesses/libraries/etc…3) the increased costs to the state for enforcing such laws. There will be indirect costs for 4) all internet users as the cost of connection is raised. Finally, this will mean loss of connectivity, either in certain contexts or simply due to rising costs hence there will be a cost 5) the economy as a whole.

Alright, what about benefits. Did someone do actual accounting how much the entertainment industry will gain from these rules (I am assuming they are the biggest beneficiary). Not how much they are saying they are losing. That’s a made up number. But in reality, did anyone analyze how higher the profits will be with these rules in place? What needs to be taken into account is that some people who download illegal content would not buy it legally, and further what needs to be taken into account is that such rules will only reduce the rate of piracy (presumably) and will definitely not eliminate it. People copied content before the internet and they will continue to do so. Perhaps less so, but it will continue to occur.

Finally, did anyone independent really analyze the benefit to society and economy from the increased profit of the entertainment industry? Is there a pressing need? Are there fewer artists that create content? Are movie studios not making new movies? Would really more content be generated with these rules in place? Do make sure to figure into any analysis that decreased connectivity will to some degree stifle content creation, and besides the negative effect on society that this may have, this will also have a negative effect on the very industry which they are trying to “protect.”

Another perhaps strange effect is that people ARE willing to pay for things even when it is possible to get them for free. Economists often forget to figure in this effect. If you look at statistics of album sales during the napster days, you will notice that sales were up when napster was around and there was plenty of illegal music sharing, and sales went down around the same time that napster got shut down. Without drawing a conclusion of causality, such correlations should be on better scientific footing that simply the “obvious” conclusion that the music industry could have made even more money if napster wasn’t around.

I have not seen any such analysis done anywhere. The only arguments for are the faux-common-sense arguments that espouse the obviousness of the benefits of such rules and therefore there is no need to actually figure out what the benefits are.

Of course I am assuming that internet access does contribute to value creation in an economy and it is not true that internet is used solely for viewing porn and downloading illegal music. If I am wrong in this assumption then of course these rules are a boon to the economy. It will be a double whammy, less illegal downloads AND people will probably do actual work out of boredom from not being able to access porn.

UK, bad economy, and Wi-Fi

Sun, 28 Feb 2010 16:14:02 GMT

Apparently, the UK thinks that its economy will improve if they make sure no one uses public wifi. I am always surprised by UK law. Of all the democracies (technically UK is a democracy, even if they cling to pretending that they are a monarchy), UK seems to be the weirdest.

Internet providers are now on the same playing field as gun sellers. They must take steps to ensure that their customers don’t do crime. Obviously, downloading free music is on par with killing people. If you rob a bank and use the bus to get away with the loot, does the bus company lose their license? But robbing banks is not so bad apparently. Just don’t download that mp3.

It’s not even clear that it will protect anyone but the large entertainment industry. And it is not even clear it will do that. You know … people copied content before the internet …

Next time you go to UK, better not plan on reading your email in a coffee shop. Also better plan on getting coffee somewhere else than your favourite coffee shop since that will be closed.

another reason why I hate git

Sat, 27 Feb 2010 23:12:51 GMT

So with git, I have to commit before pulling latest changes. OK, why is this braindead: I generally just go to my source tree and start hacking. At some point I want to commit so I think “hey … maybe someone did something else” so I do git pull and git yells at me. I have to do a commit. Well, if I do a commit and the changelog has changed, then the next pull will automatically will have a conflict to resolve. This means SEVERAL extra unnecessary steps simply to commit something that doesn’t have any a-priory conflict with any other commits other people did.

I am sure git is great for people who want to spend their days playing with git. But it sucks if you simply want to code. Oh CVS, where are you?! CVS also has lots of braindamage, but the braindamage only makes you work hard in exceptional situations. Git does things “correctly” apparently, but to do so, it makes you work harder in every situation.

interview and spam

Fri, 12 Feb 2010 14:09:15 GMT

Good thing I have gmail spam filter turned off on messages coming from my work address. Yesterday I got an interview request which gmail wanted to mark as spam. It was in fact telling me that it could have gotten rid of this spam for me if I only have removed that offending filter.

legitimizing terrorists

Thu, 11 Feb 2010 15:32:40 GMT

The recent bruhaha about treating the christmas bomber as a criminal brings up some ironic memories. I remember when IRA was still trying to fight a war and they were so angry at the British government treating them as criminals. They would have loved to be part of a war. It would legitimize their struggle. What they would give to be tried by military tribunals.

America was founded on the “rule of law” and “equality of everyone.” Should we sacrifice any of those values for the mere possibility that someone might talk more than if we treat them according to the law? There is no guarantee that keeping someone without a lawyer and handing them to the military will make them give more or less intelligence than interrogating them lawfully.

diffyqs errata

Wed, 10 Feb 2010 21:08:16 GMT

Now that I am teaching Math 285 (shorter version of 286) I am using my differential equations notes again. Furthermore, a friend of mine is using them for a reading course for a student. Hence lots of typos and errors are being found. On the errata page I only list the serious errata, not simple grammar problems and such. For chapters 0 and 1 (the ones I covered so far), I have had 14 errata. That’s about 2.7 pages per one erratum. That’s not too bad I suppose. Especially given that there was no editorial process yet. I suppose one can expect a similar rate of errors later on, though some of the later chapters have had a lot more work put into them, so I hope they are more correct. For example, the PDE chapter and the eigenvalue chapter had large parts used twice already, so I assume I have caught more bugs there.

Anyway, I went through certain parts of the notes today and found 5 errata (chapters 2 and 6). My most common mistake (actual mistake that was not caused by a simple typo) is forgetting to apply chain rule somewhere. By reading ahead, I am trying to cheat my students out of extra credit (they get points for finding new mistakes in the notes)

Today they had a test and I noticed a rare phenomenon. A 3-chain of students trying to copy (I don’t believe they were very successful). One was trying to copy from another who was trying to copy from another. The last person in the chain was not even being very careful about it, but I suppose that if any information passed through the chain, then it ought to be garbled beyond recognition by the time it reached the end. I am sure that this is a very noisy channel.

karmic and bugs … and xsplash should die!

Tue, 26 Jan 2010 17:13:44 GMT

Karmic is not turning out to be a very successful ubuntu release for me. I am hitting far more bugs than usual that are also not being fixed within the updates. The bugs have been reported but do not seem a priority. One is for example that udev/kernel do something weird and then keep eating cpu/memory. This leads to the computer having swapped everything useful out at some point. So after a while, the computer is slow as hell (unusably slow, especially coming out of screen lock). Restarting udev solves the problem but 1) I always forgot to do that and 2) it makes removable media not work. So I moved to current lucid on my main machine which seems to be working fine with me hitting no bugs yet (that’s rather odd, I generally hit many a landmine going with a development release).

The other bug I’m hitting on my netbook. The standard netbook interface is flashy but 1) slow 2) unusable with the keyboard (there is keyboard navigation, but it is so incredibly buggy it is useless). Standard GNOME is also too much for the small screen and low memory with no swap. So I am using fluxbox on it (actually I almost started using fluxbox on my main machine …) it is spartan, but after you set things up, it is really fast. Though the issue that took me the longest was the long time after login before the desktop would appear. It seems that someone had the bright idea of making the xsplash thing the default for everything with a timeout of 15s. There is no configuration, no way I could find to easily kill the splash save for removing the xsplash binary. It is a hardcoded hack that gets automatically run for EVERY session, regardless of whether the session supports it or not.

Who’s brainless idea was that? That’s why I had gdm sessions have a .desktop file, so that I can put easily readable properties there about what the session can do. So add something like X-GDM-Supports-xsplash=true godddamn it! How hard is it to implement? Far easier than a flashy pointless splashscreen which should not exist in the first place.

And that’s the other thing. What’s wrong with people who add splashscreen to anything. Splashscreen are generally annoying and make startup slower. Especially if they are moving. You are competing for very scarse resources to simply move useless pixels around. Problem is that even if you time things to make sure that resources are not being taken up, you can’t test every configuration (i.e. someone not using GNOME, obviously that configuration was not tested). The boot looks just fine with xsplash removed. I have not done timings with GNOME, but using fluxbox the boot to desktop time goes down by about 10 seconds.

I’m just mad since I wasted so much time trying to solve this mess.

free speech

Sat, 23 Jan 2010 19:12:12 GMT

Now that spending money is considered free speech (extreme interpretation of the phrase “money talks”), I am wondering when shooting people will also be considered free speech. I mean shooting people (and before that, poking others with very sharp objects) is a longstanding tradition in political discourse. As the saying goes: “You get a lot further with a kind word and a gun than with a kind word alone.” Obviously, using guns in speech is instrumental.

Another consequence of the recent decision: If corporations are now considered people for political speech, shouldn’t they also acquire all the other rights guaranteed by the constitution? I think they should be able to vote. I’m starting 100 new corporations just for that purpose right now …

Irish blasphemy law

Sat, 2 Jan 2010 17:08:32 GMT

Well apparently according to a new law in Ireland blasphemy is now illegal. Blasphemy is defined as: publishing or uttering matter that is grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by any religion, thereby intentionally causing outrage among a substantial number of adherents of that religion, with some defenses permitted.

To me, that law satisfies blasphemy by its own definition. While not strictly an atheist myself, I would conjecture that simply the fact of making blasphemy illegal, is “grossly abusive or insulting in relation to matters sacred by atheism. Atheism is a religion; an atheist believes in the nonexistence of something, which is just as much an unsupported proposition as other religions. To be religious means that you believe in a fixed number of gods. Atheists believe that this number is 0, Christians believe this number is 1, etc…. Actually Christians also believe 3=1, meaning that Christianity is a mod 2 religion. The only non-religion is agnosticism, which simply doesn’t specify the number of gods in existence. I suppose as an agnostic you also can’t specify, which domain the number of gods exists in. Common sense would suggest that the number of gods is a number in , but as we have seen it is also possible that this number is in . I personally think the number of gods is .

I am sure now I can’t go to Ireland.

paranoia … tsa … health care? … crosswalks?

Wed, 30 Dec 2009 17:11:38 GMT

So apparently the TSA has gone totally nuts after the christmas bomb incident.

One of the voices of reason is Nate Silver. Nate calculated the (astronomically low) odds of being on one of those flights affected by those 3 attempted terrorist acts over the past 8 years. Do note the word “attempted.” There has not be a single successful one since 2001. So over 8 years, 0 people died. Each year, approximately 45000 Americans die from lack of health insurance. Let me make that bold: Approximately 45000 Americans die from lack of health insurance. Hmm, that’s not enough, let’s make that red and bold and larger: Approximately 45000 Americans die from lack of health insurance.

That’s better. Now notice the difference. Even if we include 2001 in our statistics (and we can include all of recorded terrorism history in the US if we want to), that’s still less than one tenth of the deaths in 10 years (or a hundered years) by terrorism, than in one year by health insurance.

Now for the crosswalks. When my wife interviewed at one company in San Diego, she asked why there wasn’t a crosswalk across the busy street that was between the two buildings the company was renting. Apparently the city refused to put in a crosswalk if there wasn’t a deadly accident on the street.

And now thanks to someone who didn’t manage to blow up his crotch (or actually that’s the only thing he managed to blow up). We won’t be able to use blankets for the last hour of the flight? They will frisk babies (and take their blankets?). They are endangering the health of millions of passengers to protect us from 0 deaths in the past 8 years. Furthermore, it is unlikely that the lack of blankets would have prevented a single terrorism attempt in the entire history of terrorism. I think that’s bordering on criminal on the part of TSA.

But let’s reiterate the main numbers: 45,000 each year die from lack of health insurance, in the past 8 years, nobody died from airplane terror.