Things of Certain Interest

A lack of agreement...

2010-04-05T13:10:00.000-07:00

I listen to both NPR and talk radio daily. Both are informative and insightful on different subjects, and both are likewise infuriatingly myopic on certain subjects.

Today, the myopia appears (to my eyes) to come from talk radio in the form of a conversation about drugs (particularly marijuana), and their legality or lack thereof.

This is just my opinion, but I had to disagree (as I always do on both this issue and the issue of Tattoos) with Michael Medved and one of his two guests...well, both of his guests, actually, but mostly one of them.

Typically, on his show, there will be a proponent from each side of the issue, and this was a typical discussion. The usual boilerplate arguments were given from both sides...drugs are bad, and more legal drugs are more bad...drug regulation means more control and costs less...regulation means more use...regulation means less criminal activity related to drugs...etc, etc.

The thing I disagreed with in particular today was a seemingly simple statement by the anti-legalization/regulation guest, in which he said that a large percentage of kids said they did not use drugs because they were illegal, and they were afraid of how that would look to friends and family.

I immediately thought of a different approach that has been even more successful...namely the war on tobacco.

If the main thing keeping kids from pot, etc, is jail, and the main thing keeping kids from smoking is advertising, then which campaign is more successful? Why is criminal punishment supposed to be the best way to address drug use?

It is exceedingly difficult (at least it was for me) to find reports comparing anti-smoking advertising to smoking rates (although reports on what people say is effective or reports on smoking rates themselves abound).

Anti-smoking ads started in the 60's, and that's coincidental to when data for smoking rates seems to begin, so lets just say that the two are related. Without showing causation, we can say that during the time that there have been anti-smoking advertisements, adult smoking has dropped from about 43% of the population to about 20%. Reported smoking among high-school students peaked at about 36% in 1997, and has dropped to about 20%, as well.

That ain't bad.

Unfortunately, the numbers for gauging efficacy of the legal system in curtailing illegal drug use are far more murky for other reasons. Most reports skew heavily one way or the other in terms of expected outcome, methodology, and results. Because of that, let's try to use the same comparison for marijuana (that way we don't have to worry about nebulous "overall" drug use numbers).

Historically, we have about 10 more years of controversy surrounding marijuana (1950's prohibition being a good starting point). Since then, there has been some level of legal opposition to marijuana use. Usage (college students who had at least tried marijuana) peaked in 1971 at 51%, up from a level of 5% in 1967. In 1997, the level was 31%. In 1999, 38% of high school seniors said they had smoked marijuana within the past year. That number was down to 34% in 2005. I'm looking for a more comprehensive set of statistics, but I don't have any reason to believe they're wrong.

Again, we have a problem with comparing numbers reasonably (peaks at different times, different sources for data, etc), so any conclusions have a degree of opinion to them.

With that said, going from 51% to 34% is pretty good progress, too.

So, what's the difference? Whether people go to jail strikes me as an important one. Also, whether pre-adults become engaged in criminal activities other than drug use (who's selling the drugs?) seems to be different. Can't buy pot at the local BP station. We've poured money, lives, and manpower info enforcement that, it seems to me, would have been better used elsewhere.

You're free to disagree, and I'm sure some do, but I'll just have to say that on that count, there is a lack of agreement between us.

Practising Law Institute - Patent Practice Center - Responding to Groklaw Regarding Bilski

2008-11-14T07:15:00.000-08:00

Practising Law Institute - Patent Practice Center - Responding to Groklaw Regarding Bilski

I read the following paragraph (among others) in the linked article:

The other main objection I have to the Bilski decision is that we now have to live in a fantasy world where software is protected if and only if it is connected to hardware. So the hardware takes primary dominance and the software, which is what makes the device work and breathes life into the tangible piece. It is terribly disingenuous to force one to call software something other than what it is in order to get protection for it. This will just lead to manipulation and obscure reality. Why must we live in a world of make-believe?

My response...

Reading this post has frustrated me a little...

You *write* software...it is an instruction manual meant to be read by computers to enable them to perform some particular task (akin to "The Joy of HomeBrew", but in code).

When one *discovers* a new algorithm (you can't create something that's simply waiting to be found), it enters the world of human knowledge as a recorded idea. Ideas, in and of themselves, are not patentable. Ideas that lead to the development of physical devices that perform a specific function are also not patentable, but the machines may be.

That crossroads is where things have gone awry. Companies that sell products historically protected their new products via patents. Developing a new engine or widget requires physically creating something, and outlay of resources for physical stuff. Patents protect the companies investment in development of those wdgets.

In software development, newer companies said, "Hey, we're inventing stuff, and it took us hours and hours and lots of money to develop this", and reasoned that patent protection ought to be available. The fact that the resources spent were purely thought and man-hours (not tangible, physical object creation) was ignored.

Following this logic, one could argue that portions of movie scripts that represent a completely new plot element might be patentable. That is no less absurd than the idea that software that represents a newly-discovered algorithm might be patentable.

a+b=c is an algorithm, x*y=z is an algorithm. Does the fact that someone was the first to discover that a+b=c mean that they can enjoy a temporary monopoly on the process of addition? At its essence, that's what the argument over software patents is about.

2008-08-15T16:27:00.000-07:00

Kdenlive - Open Source Video For Linux

2007-05-17T13:07:00.000-07:00

Kdenlive - Open Source Video For Linux

Looks like jumpcut for the home PC...I may have to get a machine set up to try this out...

I Chat, Therefore I Am... | Technology | DISCOVER Magazine

2007-05-17T09:27:00.000-07:00

I Chat, Therefore I Am... | Technology | DISCOVER Magazine

So, what happens when two machines start up a conversation in a chat room? I've heard far less coherent conversations from real humans...

YouTube - Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth

2007-05-15T10:45:00.000-07:00

YouTube - Math Education: An Inconvenient Truth

Nothing like making things harder on the kids...

Myspace.com

2007-05-06T12:19:00.000-07:00

Hugging banned?

Just a really nice story...

Legal action could follow Digg's encryption key U-turn | OUT-LAW.COM

2007-05-04T13:35:00.000-07:00

Legal action could follow Digg's encryption key U-turn | OUT-LAW.COM

Okay...so, a string of 32 alphanumeric characters is considered part of their encryption technology, and cannot exist anywhere outside of that? I think it's time I delved into my old math roots and figure out some different ways of generating arbitrary source text for specific MD5 hashes...

Groklaw - Two Conferences You Might Want to Attend

2007-05-04T13:06:00.000-07:00

Groklaw - Two Conferences You Might Want to Attend (and a serious head-scratcher from PJ)

There have been a very few times where I've disagreed with Groklaw's PJ, but unless I'm misunderstanding her sentiment, I'll have to increment my instance counter ($pj{'disagreements'}++).

PJ quoted Professor Lee Hollar, who said:

"I'm proposing a new, limited patent-like protection. It combines the disclosure and claiming requirements of patents, so that the current database of patented technology can be substantially expanded, with copyright's infringement defense of independent creation. Because protection comes into being only when a registered innovation is actually used in commerce, many of the problems with "patent trolls" are eliminated. And providing such an alternative would allow more substantial examination of regular patents through greatly increased application fees and more stringent requirements. The protection is particular suitable for software developers who have created new techniques. Without such protection, there is no way for an open-source software developer to keep those who don't want to share with the community from using their new technique."

PJ then responded:

"I love this idea. And Amédee Turner, Queen's Counsel, Honorary Member of the European Parliament, will be speaking..."

I don't profess to know as much about the law as PJ, but I know plenty about the monetary resources of small development outfits, and "greatly increased application fees" doesn't sound like something developers on small budgets would love (taking for granted that we're stuck with software patents for now).

More stringent requirements sounds fine...I'd personally like them to be stringent enough that software doesn't qualify at all (a point of view I believe PJ shares). Most things that help stem the tide of software patent applications are probably to our benefit, however, the end of the statement made by Mr Hollar is what has me scratching my head.

In those last two sentences are a pair of comments about [open source] developers who have created new techniques. I suppose that here, again, it's reality (software patents exist) vs. the ideal world (software is protected by copyright alone), so if the comments are meant to address specific concerns that have been expressed by developers, I can understand them.

For me, where those statements go off the tracks is in how they relate to the spirit of free software development in general. The main point of free software development is that software is something that anyone can create, and that by allowing the free sharing of the ideas, concepts, and functions made visible in code, we all learn more than we would have if it was all a big secret.

Yes, there will always be leeches who take what they want from what's freely available and then refuse to share what they create from that, but they are the poorer for it, not the developers that they've taken it from.

I don't see a burning need to keep "those who don't want to share with the community from using [some random technique]", since it doesn't do harm to the original project, and underscores the fact that open-source development works well enough that proprietary companies sometimes find it easiest to steal to stay competitive.

All in all, I have to say that I don't love this idea. At a minimum, I like it a lot less than the idea of abolishing software patents. Maybe I misunderstand, maybe I'm wrong, and (a distant third) maybe I'm right about this...one way or another, I'm sure PJ will clear the air.

Dr. Dobb's | AJAX: Selecting the Framework that Fits | May 1, 2007

2007-05-02T15:14:00.000-07:00

Dr. Dobb's | AJAX: Selecting the Framework that Fits | May 1, 2007

Slashdot | Censoring a Number

2007-05-02T08:41:00.000-07:00

An insightful comment:

they hardly do themselves any favors when they decide not to support all these geeks' OS of choice, so that if they want the shiny new high-definition movies, and many of them do, they need to marshal all of those computer skills and idle time towards utterly destroying the 'unbreakable' copy protection scheme that accompanies each generation of media.

So, there I am, merrily skipping along through comments about a certain unspeakable number (kind of a "We do not speak his name!", but related to HD video discs).

The comment above is simple and unassuming, but man does it ring true.

Think about this: who do you know that's the first one to have all the high-tech/high-performance gear? First one on the block with surround-sound? A DVD player? An HDTV?

I'd bet even money that it's a geek. More than likely a single 25-35-year-old male employed in some sort of tech job who has money to burn and a desire to have the newest and shiniest of things.

Let's entertain another thought: who do you know that's the most likely to tinker with something? Attatches item A and item B together when the two are ordinarily not connectable? Writes a program to be a coffee timer and then solders together a serial cable, a relay, and a wall outlet to make the whole thing work? Decides that they want to run some variety of Open-source operating system because they can make it do whatever they want it to do?

There is, I believe, a significant overlap there. The simple fact that a large quantity of people appreciate both newer media formats (assuming they offer increased fidelity reproduction of the source material) and the freedom to tinker means that there's incentive to make something happen.

The fact that the creators of said media formats purposely make it as difficult as possible to view the content they encode on anything other than their approved devices means that the "something" will be discovering a way to overcome that limitation.

"saviorsloth" had it exactly right (and said it in a lot less words than I just have), but it bears further discussion. What can the creators of this digital content do to improve the situation?

Basically, they have two choices. They can abandon the arms race, or they can maintain the status quo.

In the second case (the status quo), they still spend big wads of cash developing encryption, worrying about rampant copying, and trying to get stereo makers to encrypt the signals going to loudspeakers.

I'm not a business analyst, but I am a consumer, and I know that I'm getting *really* tired of having to deal with intrusive technology that forces me to either spend a lot of money or accept a lesser experience (Time Warner cable replaced a DVR with a newer model that has replaced my previous DVI connection with a component cable...it sucks).

In the first case (standing down), they could use the money saved on not developing arbitrary encryption to distribute the media at lower prices (thereby eliminating both the need to hack the encryption and much of the incentive to copy).

Why is there a market for pirated versions of CDs or DVDs? People don't think they're worth the full price. It's bad enough to have to pay 8 bucks a pop to go to a theater for a new release that turns out to be not-so-great, but 15-50 dollars for a movie released on DVD (or even HD-DVD/BluRay) is probably the wrong price range.

If we're talking about production costs, let's think about how much it costs to make a pressed DVD/CD/HD-DVD/BluRay disc today, and then factor in the cost of packaging, etc. For a typical run of 1000 DVDs, you're looking at $1 each for pressing and a little more than that for the cases with outer wraps. Let's add, say, another 50 cents for the cost of the little miscellaneous flyers, brochures, and menus that get stuffed inside. I'll be generous and round up to $3.00 for all of that.

Tack on another 50 cents each for the cost of getting them to a distributor's warehouse, and we're at $3.50. Add in 10 cents each for the cost of the distributor getting the disc to a store. Tack on 2 dollars in markup so that the content creator makes a profit. We're talking $5.60 before it gets to a retailer.

So, now the disc is at a store that's paid 5.60 for it. They want to make a profit, too, so they sell it for $10.00. At that point, they sell every single one of their DVDs and there's still consumer demand (plus you'd have a hard time downloading them or getting a pirated version for much less).

Over-simplified? Of course. Basically correct? Probably. The RIAA and MPAA can, of course, continue to shoot themselves in the feet, but who **in their right mind would want to do that?

**I have no idea what the mental state of the person or persons in charge at the [RI|MP]AA is/are. They may very well not be in their right mind.

Doctors Change the Way They Think About Death - Newsweek Health - MSNBC.com

2007-05-02T07:05:00.000-07:00

Doctors Change the Way They Think About Death - Newsweek Health - MSNBC.com

Heart stopped? Don't worry, you have an hour or so...no, really.

colr.org

2007-04-20T20:58:00.000-07:00

colr.org

Coolest color picker evah!

Drink 'more harmful than drugs' | UK Latest | Guardian Unlimited

2007-03-23T07:57:00.000-07:00

Drink 'more harmful than drugs' UK Latest Guardian Unlimited

The ordering on the list seems pretty common-sense to me (except maybe for tobbacco being ranked higher than cannabis.