So I just finished my first small/medium-sized project in Java. There’s a few things that stuck out at me.

1. Boilerplate, boilerplate, boilerplate! Why do I have to create so many oneline getX functions? What’s with the verbosity? What’s with the creating classes after classes for the simplest extensions?
2. …string1.Equals(string2)? Really?
3. Uggh, lack of closures. Had to create an entire class hierarchy (complete with discounted boilerplate!) just to get a freakin’ lambda.
4. No tuples. What. The FUCK.
5. Oh, hey, this for (Type var : list) syntax is surprisingly elegant for Java – whaddya mean I can’t stick a literal list in there? No, of course not, that would make too much sense.
6. Ick, no deep copy. Spent so long tracking down a bug that boiled down to array[][].clone not doing what you’d expect.
7. Wait, are you seriously saying the () at the end of a function call with no arguments is non-optional?
8. if statements. You want two clauses, you have to go if ((-a-) && (-b-)). And then they complain about Lisp’s parentheses.
9. Nothing like macros or eval. There’s so many places I could’ve reduced duplication and verbosity – and Java code definitely needs it.
10. Objects don’t evaluate to true? Seriously? You’re not Haskell, stop pretending your type system is anywhere near as robust. In the meantime, is being able to write if (obj) instead of if (obj != null) that terrible?
11. What’s this about “int cannot be dereferenced”… oh, that’s right, you don’t have true OO. Seriously. It’s 2009. You should’ve fixed that a long time ago.
12. Dying … of boredom … during compile cycles. After living with a REPL for so long it’s almost unbearable.
13. Solitary mark in the plus column: The existing API stuff is really nice. I’m not sure there’s anything in there that’d be too hard to write, but it’s good to have tested code right there.
14. Subjective little mark in the negative column: I don’t like C-style syntax in languages other than C. It just doesn’t fit well with Java’s verbosity.

Bear in mind that these were all issues that cropped up one small/medium project. I don’t think I’ll be willingly going back to Java again, but the concept of JVM languages is sounding more interesting.

I implemented this, and liked it. Speed, nom.

But! I happen to be using an ailing old laptop, with roughly as much RAM as a toaster. It could just handle the extra load, but the profile directory was constantly spewing expletives at me – most notably, failing silently when trying to install addons.

There did exist RamFS, which grew and shrunk in RAM as needed. Still, that’s a lot of memory…

And, well, the idea itself didn’t seem that elegant to me. Storing an extra copy of your profile directory? and resynchronising it with the harddisk copy every so often? This is Linux, after all, the OS that gives you fine-grained control of your system should you so desire – surely there must be a cleaner way.

And then … from what I understood, SQLite was IO bound in writes. Reads shouldn’t really need locks or suchlike, right?

This is what I did:

$ x=[random junk firefox uses]
pushd
cd ~/.mozilla/firefox
mv $x.default $x.default.fs
mkdir $x.default.tmp
mkdir $x.default
echo firefox.tmp $(pwd)/$x.default.tmp ramfs noauto,user,exec 0 0 | sudo tee \
    -a /etc/fstab
echo firefox.cow $(pwd)/$x.default aufs \
    dirs=$(pwd)/$x.default.tmp:$(pwd)/$x.default.fs=ro,noauto,user,exec 0 0 | sudo \
    tee -a /etc/fstab
sudo sed -i 's/exit 0//' /etc/rc.local
echo "mount firefox.tmp\nmount firefox.cow\nchown -R $(whoami): \
    $(pwd)/$x.default.tmp\nexit 0" | sudo tee -a /etc/rc.local
echo rsync -av --delete $(pwd)/$x.default/ $(pwd)/$x.default.fs/ > ~/bin/cpfox
chmod +x ~/bin/cpfox
popd

Then crontab -e and add cpfox to it, maybe once every halfhour.

Neat, huh? At least the intent – aufs layering a dynamically growing ramfs on the filesystem, and the changes being synced across every so often. I’m not too sure if the actual implementation does what I want it to, and it could probably do with a ram-clear every now and then.

If anyone has any tips, please! Meanwhile, I hope this will help some people out there.

He’s a suicidal Republican assassin trapped in a world he never made. She’s a psychotic impetuous lawyer with an incredible destiny. They fight crime!

This time, it would all be worth it.

He fired his grapple hook, and moved carefully up. Fourth … fifth … sixth. There. He carefully sliced some glass out, and slipped in.

He padded inside, carefully finding the bedroom. He’d been careless once before, but this was not the place for those thoughts.

He took a moment to look around. The standard donkey, the smiling blackface, that insipid slogan. His source had been right on the money – this was another of the fanatics. Volunteered day in day out at the local center, no doubt – it made him sick, and not just the exploitation of the system.

He looked at the mark. Stupidly beatific smile on his face, cuddled up. Safe and secure in his own dream world.

He sighed. This was always where he got second thoughts. Not because of any sympathy, no, absolutely not. But because the missions were all that gave him focus, drive, purpose. He had no desire to regress to listlessness.

He shook his head, and carefully assassinated the mark. He watched himself do this dispassionately – where’d the drive and zeal he’d once had gone?

He left via his getaway car, and drove away to the prebooked motel, already feeling drained.

The next day’s news. Happy shiny people talking about happy shiny policies and happy shiny ideas and happy shiny futures. He looked at his bag, and at the twist of rope sticking out, but didn’t even seem to have the energy to attempt it. What kind of life was this to lead? Why on earth was he doing this, when all it did was be sensationalised a little, never stopping or even giving pause to the country’s slow inexorable slide into its own destruction?

He kicked himself back into the bed. No, he just couldn’t take it. He could not force himself to live longer in this horrible, corroded country and world. He would simply -

His cellphone rang.

He hit answer and speaker. “Yes?” There was no need for names.

“Another specimen of the virus has been found. Head over to Shangri-La, and you’ll be given the details, and your payment for the last strain.”

He nodded listlessly, and, realising, spoke. “Yes.”

Maybe this time it would all be worth it.

“Police have found the dead bodies of prominent local Democratic supporters, Asheet Narjwal and Timothy Clyde, in their homes this morning. The state has offered protection to any other campaign leaders, and most have taken up the offer. Noted local libertarian Bartholomew Ressinger has turned down this offer, however.”

“Heh. I’ve got so much protection of my own that I’m confident I won’t need anything else. Heck, apart from all the tech, I’m a licensed gun owner! The killer’d have to be bloody suicidal to come after me…”

Yawn. Daybreak. Open eyes, flick off autopilot, and look up.

The fog clears, reveals the world. Horizon curving up into the vertigo-inducing distance. Sky above me.

Red.

I have to fight the urge here, to sweep the flyke around. The sky is always red here, in the morning. Your sun dying does that.

I stretch, and sit up. I’ve travelled… a good distance throughout the night. Not that it matters, but I like covering these distances. It’s a goal, of sorts.

I splash my face, call up a food bar, and start looking for somewhere to touch down. The map shows me an city not too far off, next to a forest I can regen fuel in. Ok. Let’s try that.

Yup, definitely abandoned. Not a sign of life or power anywhere.

I park the flyke in the forest and head to the still-imposing city. There was apparently a military base here, and when I get there I see it’s been, unsurprisingly, swept clean. I’m about to leave when I notice a small disk, wedged into the far corner. Interesting.

I take it, and head for the city complex. There’s a few power cells (more power never hurts), and — jackpot! — a preserved garden, in some form of greenhouse. This will feed me for weeks, and will be a nice change from the Nutritious All-Natural freakin’ tasteless bars.

I carry my hoard back, and dump it into the flyke. The grass and that tree in a perfect circle around it’s disappeared, so the tank’s full. Hey, I can make that a project – find out how to make the regen signature less obvious.

I strap in, take off, and feed in the disk.

It’s a letter.

“If you’re reading this, sweetheart, I haven’t been able to convince the radzi to let you and Harz come with us. So, I want you to remember every single thing I’ve told you about living in a red giant world…”

I blank it. I do not feel comfortable reading some soldier’s goodbye to his family. They must be dead, the poor bastards. There were precious few of us who were prepped enough to survive alone on the ringworld after the radzi upped and left, let alone those who realised it would die as well. And then there’s me, but I got lucky.

It’s only after I’ve flown through the day, through the shadow square-created fog that always denies me a sunset, that I realise there’s far more used space on the disk than the letter would account for.

The brute-force attack is finished by morning – the passphrase is another message from the soldier. I feel nauseous at this, but control it before the flyke’s systems try to, uh, “help”. It’s decrypting the contents now anyhow.

I sigh. I’m going to have to regen fuel again today. A brute-force attack and then decrypting roughly four terabytes of data ain’t cheap. It’d better be worth it.

The city I land in has retained some of its beauty, since the Abandonment. If I squint I can almost see the children cavorting, their parents watching them and smiling, the radzi watching them and not smiling so much…

I shake my head, and scavenge. The shadow square’s almost here by the time I remember to head back, backpack depressingly light.
When I get in the flyke, it pings me. The decryption is complete. I take off, and run the binary in a sandbox.

It’s an AI. A sentient one, by its confused activity, until it finds the speakers and microphone interfaces.

“Hello? Harz? Maria? It was Harz who decrypted it, wasn’t it, he was always such a smart littl’ kid…”

Now I really do vomit. It’s a brain-scan of the soldier – he must have gone to terrible expense to get this done, not to mention ethical dilemmas and hiding it from his superiors. And now I’ve woken him up, to tell him what?

That his family, whose company he was expecting to wake up in, are dead? That he’s been in stasis for over ten years? That the world he knew has changed so drastically that he might as well as have flown to the other side of the galaxy? That all he has for company in an entire world is one wanderlust-infected old man, walking the world to his death?

I switch off the AI, and lie back. And – a part of my brain is churning away that cities must dissipate the fog somehow but I shut it up, because I can see the evening sky.

It’s red.

No one knew how it started.

There’s this theory that ideas, cultural concepts as they are, evolve and spread by natural selection. They are said to mutate, vary, breed, and procreate similarly to actual life. Furthermore, there are analogies to pathogens, ideas that don’t benefit the host but are exceedingly good at replicating. If this theory of memes is taken as true, we can never know how It started, save for valiant and dedicated efforts of future poltivologists.

All we know is that on the twenty-fifth of December, two thousand, three hundred and forty seven, a majority of humanity woke up with the burning desire to have no more Victors in their lives.

No one left for work. Well, I suppose a few people would have, and wondered at the lack of rush hour traffic. But most left their homes, carrying anyone named Victor with them. Some had enough presence of mind to go through their morning routine first, and some were bleary-eyed and in their nightwear.

I am told that there was a sense that the Victors had “won” something. At least, this was true in the local strain of the mirus, though I believe with my rudimentary knowledge of the theory that it was one of the fundamental concepts at the source.

Anyway. They marched us into the Outside exits, and very simply, kicked us out into the wasteland. We were shellshocked and culture shocked and many of us didn’t survive outside our environment. Some went crazy and ran off. Others refuse to do anything but sit by the entrance and hope they’ll be let in. We had a killer, who took out his anger on the rest of us. He died in the struggle.

But, on the whole, it seems like Victors have a strong survivalist streak.

So we regrouped. We gathered — it took two days for a sort of local gravity to attract everyone to one spot on the circumference of the arcology, and we think there’s another settlement diametrically opposite. We renamed, and we organised. At the suggestion of a historian, we tried eating this weird red round things, and drinking from what looks like a blue sewer, and they seem to satisfy our hunger and thirst.

We still don’t know why they did it, or what they thought afterwards. Our communications are choppy, and our power is rapidly running out. Some genius invented a way to power our radios by cranking this handle, and others are working on reverse-engineering our batteries for storage. We’ve been using as little power as possible, which means using high-powered portable computers for a /chance/ at choppy research access is right out.

And as for the future… well, who can say? Some of us remember enough geography to say that the city of ardent (ha, I don’t need to capitalise it anymore!) is to the west, and we may as well travel there to meet up with its Victors. And after that… I suppose we will eke out a sort of living and society.

We are Victors, exiled. We have to make the most of it.

It is my stage name, whatever. My act is very different from the normal ones Usmiecha sie Klaunow do, with very many reasons. For one, it is at night – late night. For two, it is not advertised, and only those who know and those who those who know have told ever come. For three, it is not a happy act.

No, not for me.

They tell me I am – a very good actor. They tell me this because they see my act, — they see my act, knowing what they will see — and they see what I do, and they think, “Oh, this woman, she must be acting, yes?” They cannot think of the idea that it is not an act. And I am not permitted to tell them. I am not permitted to tell anyone.

It is not an act. But it is – entertainment. If they thought it was real, they would still be entertained, those who come. Horrified, perhaps. Shocked. But not unentertained.

I am dragged out. Sometimes this is on a leash, sometimes just by my clothes. I scream, here. I scream and shout and dig my nails (my nails, which they always paint and manicure, every single time) into the ground. It looks like it is an act.

They – well, it’s not a they, yet. There is only one person at this point. It is different, each time — I do not know who it is, until they come to my room and drag me out. He leers at me, sometimes. He will do worse, later.

They all will. They – abuse me. Every time, I get many many bruises. My hair rips, and my makeup runs, and I am forced through indignities and humiliations. When the Vladca comes out, I have broken a bone, one or two times.

And always they will think it is an act. When they shout at me and laugh, it is an act. When I scream, it is an act. When I cry out, it is an act. When I bleed, it is an act. When I curse them and promise to kill them and swear at them and then collapse, it is an act.

When I flick out my small knife, and stab and kill the Vladca, they stop. They do not stop thinking it is an act, no. But they do realise they have never seen this before, or never heard of this being done.

When the others rise from their stupor, and start yelling, they do not know. They are confused. Still, they think it is an act.

When I run, run as fast as I can through the small flap I have cut away before, and they yelling gets louder, it looks like an act again. They think it is an act.

Then, when they hear the dogs, they clap. They clap loud enough for me to hear, though I am far and running. I think the others said it was still an act, and they believed them. It would not be hard to fool them.

I do not know if any of them ever wondered why the Midnight Special was never performed again.

In this particular case, we were excavating the ruins of some unknown little Egyptian tomb, way out in the middle of nowhere. Well, Egypt, I suppose, but it sure as hell felt like the middle of nowhere. And we kept calling our client back, every week or so, saying we’d found nothing, nothing at all, and he’d say, in his gruff Russian accent, “Ze tomb o Shinkozenhenmen is zere, I know it! Keep zigging.”

Whatever we tried, sonar, line drilling, even density calculations from this one earthquake that we excavated through, it all gave exactly the same result — that there was nothing there, and ze Russian baztard waz crazy. But hey, he paid a lot, and by the hour, so we kept on it.

So that was our first mistake. We never thought to ask how he knew. We just figured was that this was roughly our equivalent of the quiet life.

Have you heard the rumours that the Egyptians were actually incredibly advanced, but most of their technology was lost? It’s true. It’s fucking true.

That’s what we found. A block of earth that was exactly the same density as its surroundings, responded to sound in exactly the same way, and was conveniently in the one place that none of our drill-scans checked, that managed to contain this massive hall.

And I mean massive. Maybe your average skyscraper would have fit in it, if you broke it in half and laid the two halves next to each other.

So, well, we’re not idiots, we’re excavators, so we don’t go in. We call up our client and he gets incredibly excited and says he’ll meet us here in a couple of days and we shouldn’t touch anything.

So, of course, halfway through the bloody first day, Derek, our resident geek, gets all excited (something about null fields), and heads in with a boatload of our equipment. Idiot slipped through my arms like a snake. He managed to say, and I quote, “This stuff is awesome! Is that a – it looks like a fusion device! This is brilliant, it’s like a tribute to Mad Science! I’m going to -”

Here his voice gets all screamy, and the line dies. And the earth drops away from under our feet, dropping us into the hall. There’s the geek’s body, and one of his stupid friends try to run towards him, and gets mowed down by this flying… thing.

So I duck and roll to the side, and I watch. I watch my entire team, one by one, get brave and decide they’re going to make a run for it, and get killed. In a new way each time.

Whoever designed those deaths wanted to see blood. Lots of it.

Finally, the bastard Russian gets here. I shout out a warning to him, and he just grins and waltzes right in, as if he owned the bloody place. And he doesn’t fucking die. He stops when he sees the bodies, and shouts at me, asking if Anyzone elze iz alive. I say no, and cautiously stand.

Then, if you bloody believe it, the bastard laughs maniacally, twirls his moustache, and fucking shoots me in the head.

It’s not my looks, and it’s not my reputation, for I have neither. It’s not my mannerisms, for those are always perfect.

And yet, I am always strange, and always alone. Always.

I head into this new town — no, “Sheydin” is its name. Must remember that. I look around, unable to keep my optimism at bay. One young fellow waves at me, grinning impishly. This one — he is the apprentice. I catch him and ruffle his hair. He squirms free, tugging at my backpack. I swat his hand, and he runs off. The little rascal, I must remember to think of him as The little rascal.

I head to his — no, my home. I kiss – my wife, and she laughs at me, swatting me with her apron. I must remember now, for the wife always seems to be the first to suspect.

“Ma’dear! How’s ya’un the kids!”

I haven’t got the tone quite right, I can tell. Was it the gruffness? Yes, he wasn’t that gruff. I file through my thoughts and — she’s looking at me oddly. Oh no. Sweet Gods, don’t let it happen this soon! At least give me a single blessed week!

I scoop her up, and laugh boomingly, trying to make light of it. She buys it, laughs along, and jumps off and returns to her cooking. I sigh inaudibly and head upstairs, dropping off my backpack.

A novelty coin drops out, out of the pocket The little rascal’d opened. I pay it no mind and head upstairs. The boy screams “Dada!” and leaps into my arms. I spin him around once, and let him go, and he immediately runs downstairs. This is normal, I think — the kid’s getting a treat from his mother now.

I sit down on my bed — heavily, of course, this one seems incapable of anything else. The kid squeals from downstairs, and his mother’s voice filters up. I grin. I think I’m going to like living around that bundle of energy.

Moon’s Day, things went awry. I should have picked up the signs earlier, but I was careless. Happy.

I headed for the blacksmith’s, where he had worked. The little rascal was there, glaring at me. I didn’t know why. I tried to cheer him up, but he deliberately reached into the same pocket of my pack. I swatted at his hand, almost reflexively, and he leapt back as from a flame. I filed it away, but thought nothing of it.

The following day, The little rascal took his leave, to go hunting in the woods with some men. I’d have loved to go, but he wouldn’t have, so I worked away at the anvil and then headed home to my beautiful family.

It is that night. I wake up to see my wife, sobbing, attempting to smother me. Crying “Changeling”. They must’ve found the body — the rascal knew. I quickly shift to an agile form and leap out the window, marking Sheydin off my list.

I’m always strange, I said. Always found strange. Always run out when I try to be less alone.

Ah well. I look at the lights of the new city, licking a wolf bone. Bravik, maybe you’ll have me.

She grasps for it, and accidentally turns the tv on. This suprises her; she turns to see what has happened and falls. I’ve dived for her, but it’s too late. She doesn’t seem to notice — she’s looking wide-eyed, from the moving pictures to the plastic buttons in her hands, making the connection between the two. She giggles her charming adorable beautiful little giggle, and tries pressing another button. This one changes the channel, and she looks on in awe.

I gently reach over and grasp her, and bring her into my lap. I think she may be ignoring me, as she still hasn’t given a single sign that she knows I’m here. She presses another button, and this one turns the TV off.

I reach down to her and gently tease the remote out of her hands. She looks up at me, finally, and giggles. I smile down at her, and then lift her up and rub noses. She simply giggles and giggles, as if I’m the funniest thing she’s ever seen. That might even be true. When I pull away, her eyes gleam wickedly for a moment, and then she reaches over and grabs my nose.

I smile at her, and set her down. She lets go of my nose at the last possible second, and then immediately grabs the remote again. I try to tease it out of her hands, and she frowns and looks up at me sadly.

I stare into those sad eyes, into my sad little girl, and even as I release the remote some part of me is applauding her and cheering her on for learning what she can do this early.

I fall for it — of course I fall for it, and I know I will fall for it every single time for the years to follow. I let her have the remote. She immediately brightens up, giggles at me again, crawls out of my lap, and goes back to pressing the buttons. I smile back at her, but my heart aches. I know that this is just the beginning, that my beautiful little baby girl will grow up, and will do whatever she can to get whatever she wants. And I know that I will give it to her.

I reach over, grasp my giggling little girl, and envelope her by the waist and rest my head on hers. If that is to be, then let me spend some more time with her now. When all she wants is to play with the remote.

He'll die tomorrow, Sir Arthur /* From the point of view of the Americas. */
Zero hour, one point five     /* It seems fitting that he died in the "future". */
And he will have left us
Forever by then

His last voyage awaits
His odyssey
And we wish him the best
And hope he finds his gates

Chorus:
	(1:But|2..:And) I think it's gonna be a long, long, time
	'Til I stop turning around wanting to find
	Him alive and the universe at his side
	Ah, no no no...
	A visionary
	Arthur Clarke, showin' us the wonder in the skies
Chorus repeats

A brilliant writer
He went so far
Flying off into space
We hope his destination is
"Full of stars"

And all his science
He did understand
He loved it, and
Taught us to too
He showed us what
Magic was

Chorus x 2

I think I'll miss him for a long, long, time x 7

(For Sir Arthur C. Clarke. 1917-2008.)

For some reason this essay got a C. I still haven’t figured out why, and the IB doesn’t tell you.

This essay is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2. Here is a pdf, and source follows.

%        File: extessay.tex

%     Created: Wed Jun 20 12:00 AM 2007 E

% Last Change: Tue Aug 21 03:00 PM 2007 E

%

%   Copyright 2007 Sohum Banerjea

%

%   This essay is released under copyleft; you can redistribute it

%   and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public

%   License, version 2 as published by the Free Software Foundation.

%

%   You should have received a copy of the GNU General Public License

%   along with this essay.  If not, see http://www.gnu.org/licenses/.

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\lhead{Sohum Banerjea}

\chead{Candidate code: clq357}

\rhead{Session number: 001161-002}

\begin{document}

\bibliographystyle{agms}

\title{Is copyright still relevant? A discussion of change, new technology and

an old idea.}

\author{Sohum Banerjea}

\maketitle

\begin{center}

Candidate Code: clq357 \par

Session Number: 001161-002 \par

Word Count: 3371

\end{center}

\begin{abstract}

 Although copyright has been an extremely useful concept in the

 development of our society, its effectiveness and validity

 have been brought under question by the emergence of fast,

 unrestricted copying and dissemination tools, namely, the

 computer and the network.

The additional restrictions placed upon copyright in an

 attempt to keep it relevant have caused copyright to stray

 from its original aim of providing an incentive to innovate to

 protecting already innovated ideas.

Thus, an attempt must be made to wholly change and rewrite our

 concept of copyright.

The copyright reformation movements which have risen today

 have supplied us with valuable insight into the good ideas

 which can be implemented, and the mistakes which can be

 avoided during this attempt.

\end{abstract}

\newpage{}

Copyright is a concept, giving the legal right to copy a

work to someone. The ``work'' must generally meet certain minimum

standards of originality, and the ``someone'' is usually the person who

created the work.

Copyright has its history in the popularisation of the printing press, when

Charles the Second of England, became concerned at the unfair copying of

books. The Statute of Anne, of 1710 \citep{anne}, is recognised as the next major step,

giving the author of a book up to twenty-one years of ``the right to copy''

their book, in the form of printing and thus selling copies.

The Statute of Anne grew out of older concepts regarding the right of

the author who created the work to have control over its distribution,

of the right of investors into the book to gain monetary compensation,

and the rights of consumers who owned a copy of the book, treating the

copy as property. These, known as the ``common-law rights'', as they

were not enforced by any statutory law but were commonly held to be in

effect anyway, were the subject of much debate later in England's history.

Before the printing press, there was little opportunity to test these

concepts, as making a full copy of a work was a laborious and

time-intensive process. Upon the introduction of the printing press,

it was possible to mass produce books -- but it was prohibitively

expensive unless one wished to resell these copies. Of course, it

was the publishers who then first sought to regulate the copying, and this

led to the Statute of Anne.

When the first copyrights began to expire, a debate erupted about

whether the publishers still then had a common-law copyright in

perpetuity. The view of copyright as a property right emerged out of

this, where copyright was held to be analogous to the rights obtained

by owning physical goods.

The state overturned this idea, ruling that they had effectively limited

copyright to those fourteen to twenty-one years, and that the

publishers could not expect a perpetual monopoly on the right to

copy, and thus publish, works.

It is then plain that copyright's sole purpose was to encourage

innovation by giving a temporary monopoly, a reward, to publishers and

taking a right the public had but could not use, the right to copy. As

\citet{rmscopy}

argues, copyright was a bargain made between the producers and the

consumers, taking away something that was essentially worthless to the

consumer -- the ability to copy the books they owned -- in exchange for a

greater pervasion of media.

The original copyright was only applied to books, but as

methods and techniques for widespread creation and duplication of

differing media, such as paintings and photos, video, and music, have emerged,

copyright has been extended to them as well. The view of the property

right also grew into prominence during this period.

Copyright today has been internationalised thanks to the Berne

Convention, and is applied to any creative work as soon as it is

``fixed'' to a medium. The author is granted exclusive rights to the

distribution of the work, as well as any derivative works, until he

disclaims them or the copyright expires. This is indicative of a

culture where an author ``owns'' the work, and thus has the legal

right to do with it whatever he wishes.

Our concepts of ownership and copyright are associated with a

particular work. If I write an essay, like the one you are reading, my

work is now copyrighted by me. Someone can write an essay which is word

for word identical to mine, and then we both have separate copyrights

on the individual essays, regardless that one can be seen as a copy of

the other. With information in physical form, however, the chances

against this happening are astronomical; thus in most

cases it is assumed that one or the other has plagiarised, and we can

turn to physical evidence (in the worst case scenario, the ink can be

chemically dated) to determine which is the original.

Not so on the internet. It is very easy to make a bit-for-bit

identical copy of an intellectual manifestation, which can then be

copied several times over and scattered to the far corners of the

world within seconds. Since these copies are, by definition,

identical, and thus don't have any distinguishing features like those a

physical copy would, it is impossible to determine, (by comparing

these bits), the additional information about which copy was the

original. Since any attempt to transfer this information about data

will also have to be transferred as data, as bits, and thus can also

be made a one-to-one copy of or even removed entirely, no distinction

can be made between the original, and the copy.

The restrictions imposed upon a society in its formative stage will

cause said society to form around and to conform to these

restrictions. The converse -- that any freedoms the hatchling society

enjoys, that any restrictions not imposed on the society will not be

honoured within it is also true. Our physical society, when forming,

had an actual restriction, in the form of the laws of physics, against

copying objects, and thus formed a way of rewarding original

copy-creators and restricting copying. The internet society, when

forming, did not have a restriction when it came to copying anything,

and thus, the moral concept of a ``right to copy'' did not form. A

culture has formed where this concept that certain people have a

``right'' to copy something, while others don't, is not even

thinkable.

Consider this thought experiment. Suppose a lifeform existed that was

able to rearrange matter to mimic another set of matter. Now consider

their society, as it forms and develops. It is plain to see that they

will never come up with the concept of ``copyright'', as they can

create copies very easily. It will be natural to them to copy things

and as unnatural to impose restrictions on it as it would be for us to

restrict moving our limbs.

It is also plain that their society's economy will not collapse

uncontrollably because publisher's revenues are slowly eaten away,

as they will have never developed the concept of publishing, at least

as we know it, in the first place. Their society will develop a

different way to reward innovation than the one we are familiar with.

This is exactly what has happened on the internet. The internet

society, regarding copying digital objects as natural and restrictions

against this copying as unnatural, disregard copyright. It is merely

the mismatch between this and the rules that have emerged in our

physical world that causes problems.

Our copyright grew out of a situation where it was assumed that any

copying done would be for profit. This was because a significant

monetary and time investment was required to ``copy'' something --

that is, to produce the original \emph{en mass}. Neither of these

investments are required on the internet, and thus any possible

motivations for even thinking about the ramifications of copying are

removed by the simplicity and accessibility of the ``Copy'' button.

I am writing this essay within a plain text file. As soon as I make

this text file available on the internet, anyone can copy it and use

it for their purposes within seconds, without any way to determine

which is the original.

With copyright in effect, this person should be penalised for making

the exact copy, whatever it's purpose, just as if they rewrote and

bound George Orwell's ``1984'' by hand.

Today, the public has the tools to create an exact bit-for-bit copy of

any work that can be represented digitally. The computer and the

internet are the ultimate copying and distribution tool, not only of media

we already know, but of any future form of media that can be represented in

bits. Thus, the bargain, made centuries ago, where the public gave up

an effectively worthless right, has changed. Now, the public can

easily copy and distribute anything, and thus it is not something they

are willing to give up.

Traditional media companies, who own the most copyrights in today's

world, and thus have the most to lose if the copyright system is

abolished, have actively resisted any change. Their entire business

model is built on the difficulty and illegality of duplication of

works; that is, copyright. Thus a Digital Millennium

Copyrights Act (DMCA) has been passed in the United States of America,

setting the precedent for many similar bills in other countries. It

attempts to control and criminalise the ignoring of copyright, and protects

the intentions of technology such as Digital Rights Management (DRM).

This DRM is fundamentally flawed because it tries to express the concept of

originality that cannot be embodied within bits with bits.  This has

led to widespread ``cracking'' of weaker forms of DRM (that is, most

of it), even though the DMCA explicitly makes this illegal, and,

eventually all it causes is mere inconvenience. Also, the global

internet society, transgressing as it does legal boundaries, makes it

next to impossible to track down copyright violations. Attempts like

the General Agreement on Tariffs and Trade (GATT) have been made to

allow international legal protection of copyright, but they are

largely ineffective. It is also worth noting that copyright violations are so

rampant that most effort is focused on larger names and copyrights,

usually the ones with the most money.

It is also interesting to note the actions of the United States

government on the copyright issue. They have not only made the longest

possible copyright term the default term, but it has acquired a habit,

recently, of extending the length of copyright whenever major

copyrights, like those of Mickey Mouse, and the ones previously held

by Jonathan Swift, are about to expire. The practical upshot of this

is, that in the 1900s, most work from roughly the 1880s and earlier

were in the public domain, freely available for the layperson to work

on, while today, in the 2000s, almost no work later than the 1930s is

similarly available. \citep{copyrightflowchart}

So, not only is copyright, as a concept, is meaningless when ``Copy''

buttons are as accessible as they are, but copyright itself is failing

to live up to the standards it used to have.

The alternative methodologies hinted at in the above hypothetical are

now emerging. Two separate but closely connected organisations have formed, the Free

Software Foundation, and Creative Commons, speaking for open source

and copyleft licenses. They argue for the same basic thing: to

allow creative and intellectual manifestations to be freely copyable,

modifiable, and redistributable.

To borrow a quote from these movements, they wish to promote a

culture in which works are ``free as in speech, not free as in

beer.'' \citep{freeasinbeer}

Lightly called ``copyleft'', as a play on the word ``copyright'', the

licenses these movements have created deliberately waive certain

rights allowed by copyright. They

explicitly allow anyone who receives a copy to not only make further

copies, but to study, share, change, and distribute these changed

works. Some include a clause stating that any derivative works must

also be released under the same license, effectively forcing the work to

remain forever unbound by copyright.

Copyleft has not only worked; it has thrived. The GNU

General Public License (GPL), particularly, has allowed the

massively-distributed creation of an entire operating system that is at

least as good and in many situations better than traditionally developed

operating systems. Creative works licensed under copyleft licenses have

allowed them to be built upon and redistributed in massive quantities.

As an example of a copyleft-based creator, there is Jonathon Coulton,

a songwriter, composer, and singer.

JoCo, as he is affectionately known to his fans, has his songs

licensed under a Creative Commons license. This has spawned numerous

derivative works, including music videos, and even fan-fiction, and a

contest in the mainstream magazine ``Popular Science'', thereby generating

huge amounts of exposure, and boosting him to success. (It doesn't hurt

that he is an excellent artist.)

As mentioned above, there are two major copyleft movements. The older

one is the Free Software Foundation (FSF), which maintains their flagship

GNU General Public License, (as well as all other related licenses).

It was created by Richard Stallman, arguably the founder of copyleft.

The GPL is a curious license, which waives most, if not all, rights

that the author of a work is entitled to, but it adds two constraints.

The resulting work has to also be licensed with the GPL (this

requirement has caused the GPL to be labelled ``viral'', which is an

accurate description, though the word has its negative connotations),

and all GPL-licensed works make their ``source'', a non-degradable and

easily-manipulable version of the work, freely available.

The FSF, as evidenced by their name, focus mainly on software. The

Creative Commons movement was formed more recently to try and transfer

the success the GPL has enjoyed to other media. They have been successful in

drawing attention to the inadequacies of copyright and the alternatives.

The movements describe their licenses as ``an alternative to copyright''

(although, realistically, they harness the power of copyright today to

enforce their restrictions -- a clever way around the system which

was first thought of by Richard Stallman, with the GPL). The licenses

are basically ``mix and match'' sets of restrictions that the creator

of a work can apply on his work. These include Attribution, the

requirement that further distribution and derivations of the work

contain a pointer back to the original creator; Non-Commercial,

guaranteeing that no-one can profit of your work; and Share Alike,

an implementation of the GPL's ``viral'' nature.

There are licenses for combinations of these restrictions, and

all of them are presented in a human-readable, a machine-readable and

a lawyer-readable version.

In many respects, though, Creative Commons has failed. They have

diluted their brand and rejected their implied goal of creating a

creative commons by allowing licenses such as

Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives (which merely pays lip service to

the ideals in question). This is seen as a missed opportunity, as

creators can then use these licenses, which barely confer any further

freedoms than copyright, and still feel as if they are part of

the movement. \citep{ccnc}

The requirement that any derivative works also be licensed under the

same license is an interesting idea, and speaks of Stallman's

foresight. It creates another domain, separate to that of copyrighted

works and the public domain, which is self-contained in the sense that once a

work enters it, it cannot leave.

This is important. What this ensures is that any work, once licensed by a

GPL-like ``viral'' license, is guaranteed to forever be freely available to anyone.

However, this is only valid if my comment about the source

being a non-degradable version is strictly true. Unfortunately, it is

not.

The GPL, and other ``viral'' licenses merely require you to provide

the source \emph{of your own copy}, and the Creative Commons

ShareAlike option does not even require this. In whatever

sense the modifications you have made are degradations, the copy that

you are providing is degraded already. An obvious example where this

modifications is clearly degradation is cropping or resizing an image,

or stripping functionality out of software.

In the programming world, there is a deeply ingrained \emph{cultural}

requirement to preserve the original somehow -- a major GPL supporter,

the Debian Project, maintains the original version of all source code

they modify and integrate side-by-side with their modifications. More

generally, code is a medium which it is relatively difficult to degrade, at

least, if you want the code to work afterwards.

There are only a few possible changes code can absorb and still function,

and thus, under most situations, the problem never really arises.

Unfortunately, this is not true for other media. Now, there is no

preexisting cultural requirement to preserve the original. Even if

one existed, the feasibility of storing copies of the original of rich

media along with your copy drop sharply when compared to code,  and it

is extremely easy and simple, (and common, comprising the bulk of

further modifications), to degrade these media. The media in question

do not have a simple undo process.

\citep{dim-gplvcc}

There is talk of bringing in a Preserve-Original option to the

Creative Commons licenses, but the practical issues alone stop this.

It would arguably be a major, unnecessary deterrent in the adoption and

use of these licenses.

This brings up another point, that these restrictions are only

possible because of the power that the creator holds. The copyleft

holders are able to force consumers to agree to the terms (chiefly,

the ShareAlike term) purely because of the overarching power of

copyright today. This means that the copyleft domain may be orphaned

as effectively as the public domain has been, by new changes in

copyright law.

This is the other problem with the copyleft of today: it is entirely

possible that every piece of work under the licenses will find the

copyleft restrictions suddenly freed, and the works then effectively

placed in the public domain, unless the transition is managed

smoothly.

So much for the practicalities. There is also a philosophical side to

copyleft. Since copyright is inherently selfish, it places the benefit

of the individual (the content creator) above those of the public (who

would be benefited from this creative work entering public

availability). Thus, it is a good fit for a capitalist economy,

wherein, by definition, people and corporations capitalise on others.

Copyleft is an antithesis. It ensures that the content creator will

not be able to capitalise on his work by decreasing the benefit to the

public. Any capitalisation of the work must be done within the

framework of public availability, instead of the other way around. It

does reduce the rights of the content creator, but this is to be

expected.

It is clear that the internet, because of its

structure and origin, is communal and definitely not capitalist. It

contains capitalist extensions of our physical world, but due to its

very nature, where every network packet, every bit of information

travelling through it is given equal priority, it cannot be

capitalist.

(Incidentally, the Internet Service Providers who control

large parts of the backbone of the internet are slowly making attempts

to specifically prioritise packets for capitalist purposes. An immense

outcry has risen against this effort, under the name of ``Save Net

Neutrality'', showing that the communal internet is the preferred

model. \citep{google-nn} )

There are copyleft-based companies, making their way in our capitalist

world, but they are not generally large. The reason for this is that

large companies run contrary to the ideals of greatest benefits for

the most people. The aim of copyleft is to address the shortcomings of

copyright in today's world, which include an excessive concentration

of wealth gained by essentially exploiting the copyright mechanism

\citep{osbillions}.

Thus, in the court of public opinion, copyright as it exists has

essentially become defunct. It is next-to-impossible to enforce, is flawed

deeply in today's world, has promising alternatives, and runs contrary

to global humanist ideals.

Copyright was never intended to be a property right. It was never

meant to confer the properties of physical objects on ``pure

thought-stuff'', as it were. It was meant to extend and support

innovation by providing an incentive to innovate in the first place. A

copyright system where the right to copy is treated as property, that

is not only owned by the person while he is alive but also by his

descendants long after he is dead runs contrary to this ideal.

There will certainly be some major change to copyright law within the next

generation -- the system as it exists today is far too unstable to

endure. What

is still undetermined is how the law will change, and what freedoms it will

confer to whom.

The internet medium has given our culture the opportunity to bring our

society back in line with the original ideals of a free culture, by

giving us the technology and capabilities required to freely make use

of our culture.

All that remains to be seen is whether we shall take this opportunity, or

not.

This work is licensed under the GNU General Public License.

All rights reversed.

\newpage{}

{\small

\begin{thebibliography}{Creative Commons (0000)}

 \bibitem[Stallman, 1996]{rmscopy}

 	Stallman, R. M. (2007). \emph{Reevaluating copyright: the

 	public must prevail}. From

 	\url{http://www.gnu.org/philosophy/reevaluating-copyright.html}

 \bibitem[Scott, 2001]{frictionless}

 	Scott B. (2001). \emph{Copyright in a frictionless world:

 	toward a rhetoric of responsibility}. from

 	\url{http://firstmonday.org/issues/issue6_9/scott/index.html}

 \bibitem[Lessig, 2004]{freeculture}

 	Lessig, L. (2004). \emph{Free culture}. New York, NY: Penguin Group.

 \bibitem[Skala, 2004a]{colour1}

 	Skala M. (2004). \emph{What colour are your bits?}. from

 	\url{http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004061001.php}

 \bibitem[Skala, 2004b]{colour2}

 	Skala M. (2004). \emph{Colour, social beings, and

 	undecidability}. from

 	\url{http://ansuz.sooke.bc.ca/lawpoli/colour/2004080902.php}

 \bibitem[Atwood, 2007]{osbillions}

 	Atwood J. (2007). \emph{Where are all the open source

 	billionaires?}. from

 	\url{http://www.codinghorror.com/blog/archives/000842.html}

 \bibitem[Creative Commons, 2007]{ccmission}

 	(2007). \emph{History}. retrieved June 31, 2007 from

 	Creative Commons website: \url{http://wiki.creativecommons.org/History}

 \bibitem[Stallman, 2005a]{fsfwhatis}

 	Stallman R. M. (2005). \emph{What is copyleft?}. from

 	\url{http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/copyleft.html}

 \bibitem[Stallman, 2005b]{pragmatic}

 	Stallman R. M. (2005). \emph{Copyleft: pragmatic

 	idealism}. from \url{http://www.fsf.org/licensing/essays/pragmatic.html}

 \bibitem[Pilgrim, 2007]{dim-gplvcc}

 	Pilgrim M. (2007). \emph{In which I simultaneously

 	praise and criticise Creative Commons, and we all take

 	predictable positions discussing it}. from

 	\url{http://diveintomark.org/archives/2007/02/15/cc-vs-gpl}

 \bibitem[Avalon Project()]{anne}

 	8 Anne, c. 19 (1710). from

 	\url{http://www.yale.edu/lawweb/avalon/eurodocs/anne_1710.htm}

 \bibitem[Lessig, 2006]{freeasinbeer}

 	Lessig, L. (2006). \emph{Free, as in beer}. Wired,

 	14.09, Retrieved July 23, 2007,

 	from \url{http://www.wired.com/wired/archive/14.09/posts.html?pg=6}

 \bibitem[Pilgrim, 2006]{ccnc}

 	Pilgrim M. (2006). \emph{Waiting for the revolution} from \url{http://diveintomark.org/archives/2006/09/15/cc-by-nc}

 \bibitem[Google, 2007]{google-nn}

 	(2007).

 	\emph{Net neutrality}. Retrieved August 14, 2007, from

 	Google website: \url{http://www.google.com/help/netneutrality.html}

 \bibitem[Bromberg and Sunstein()]{copyrightflowchart}

 	Bromberg and Sunstein, \emph{Flowchart for determining when

 	U.S. copyrights in fixed works expire}. Retrieved

 	August 24, 2007, from Bromberg and Sunstein LLP Web

 	site:

 	\url{http://www.bromsun.com/practices/copyright-portfolio-development/flowchart.htm}

\end{thebibliography}

}

\end{document}

This essay is released under the GNU General Public License, version 2. Here is a pdf, and source follows.

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%   Copyright 2007 Sohum Banerjea

%

%   This essay is released under copyleft; you can redistribute it

%   and/or modify it under the terms of the GNU General Public

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begin{document}

title{9) Mathematicians have the concept of rigorous proof, which leads to

knowing something with complete certainty. Consider the extent to which

complete certainty might be achievable in mathematics and at least one

other area of knowledge.}

author{Sohum Banerjea}

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Candidate Code: clq357 par

Session Number: 001161-002 par

Word Count: 1499

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The process of mathematical rigour is the process of checking for

contradictions in a mathematical proof, and if there are none, there

is said to be ``complete certainty'' about the final statement.

This proof, then, is said to be a complete and unshakable guarantee that

the statement in question is true.

This raises a red flag straight away. Proofs cannot, by themselves,

provide complete certainty -- as defined, they need certain premises to work.

Proofs always rely on a body of logic to be the framework for the

proof, and at the simplest, they rely on certain core axioms.

Axioms, statements that are assumed to be true and are then used as the

basis of a logical system like mathematics, are what keeps any proof

from being able to provide complete certainty. Even if the proof merely depends on

``self-evident'' axioms, there is always the possibility that these axioms

are invalid, removing the absolute-ness of the absolute proof.

Descartes, a 17th century philosopher, attempted to create a

philosophy based on merely one premise: ``I think; That which thinks

must exist, thus, I exist.'', commonly abbreviated to ``I think,

therefore I am.''

But even this philosophy depends on the assumptions ``That which thinks,

must exist'', and ``I think''. It relies on these being true, and

although we dismiss these as irrelevant, it is still a dependence, and thus

still prevents the philosophy in question from complete certainty.

So, it is not possible to have an ``absolute proof''. However, it is

possible to have an absolute proof, assuming certain axioms are

true. Since this is a more meaningful definition, I shall be using it in

the rest of the essay.

Then, the next point is, which set of axioms? In mathematics, this may

seem to be a simple question -- just use the axioms that are used

``normally'' -- that is, use the axioms that give rise to the number

system we have today, like the Axiom of Induction.

However, this is not as simple as it seems. G"{o}del showed us that

all consistent mathematical systems are either non-computable or

incomplete.

What this means is that it is impossible to formulate a system of

mathematics, a set of axioms, which satisfies two separate criteria.

These are a) its theorem space is computable -- that is, a given a

sufficiently long, finite, amount of time, all the possible theorems

in it can be calculated, and b) that the system of mathematics is

powerful enough to prove or disprove every possible statement that can

be formulated within it -- that is, give them a ``truth'' in

the context of the axioms. cite{godelpaper}

Thus, although most mathematical statements can be given an

``absolute'' validity, where ``absolute'' is dependent on the axioms

used, there will always be some statement within any reasonable,

usable mathematical system which cannot be absolutely shown to be ``true''.

A point against this is that, since G"{o}del's theorem has to be

formulated in a logical system, it can only be as true as emph{its}

axioms.

This is true. However, G"{o}del formulated his theorem in first order

logic (FOL) cite{godelpaper} -- a system that formally mimics the way our mind works. If the axioms of

FOL are not true, that would mean the very processes our

brains utilise to reason are flawed. Then we would have no way to even

find out that FOL is flawed, since we would have to

reason about it with the implementation of FOL in our brains.

This leads us to a rather unique situation. Mathematics, the most removed and

abstract of systems, has been let down in one specific instance -- all

that is required -- by the fallibility of the human brain. As far as

humans are concerned, FOL emph{is} an absolute truth.

Adding to the confusion are the different possible mathematical systems we

could use that differ in areas far removed from  ``everyday''

mathematics, including surreal numbers cite{knuthsurreal},

which implement the concept of infinitesimals (roughly the difference

between $0.dot{9}$ and $1$, which in ``normal'' mathematics is

nothing).

There are many different possible mathematical systems, and all of them

have equal claim to being the ``true'' one, if there is indeed such a

thing. The common subset of some of them that we use in day-to-day

mathematics has not been chosen for any ``true-ness'', but because it is

simple, easy to grasp, and useful.

So, the concept of ``complete certainty'' is unclear even in the most logical

and abstract of fields, that of mathematics. If this is so, what hope do

other, more real-world applicable fields, fields that are burdened with the physical

world that mathematics tries to abstract away, have?

Surprisingly, there exists a roughly analogous amount. For although

the same real-world problems that plague mathematicians in search of ``complete

certainty'' apply to scientists as well, and introduce an

``as-far-as-we-are-concerned absolute'' into the equation, they also

manage to ground science, and base it firmly in reality.

This may be an odd statement to make, as we are used to thinking about

science in terms of hypotheses and proofs. If I make a hypothesis, and

then I collect data which matches it, surely the hypothesis in

question is proven?

That is not exactly correct. It commonly said that ``A

hypothesis cannot be proven, merely disproven.'' This is because

testing a hypothesis involves getting real-world results that support

it, but there is no way of guaranteeing that that the emph{next

result will not be different.}

The other thing that we cannot guarantee is whether the hypothesis is

only an approximation to the truth. The classical example is Newton's

Laws of Motion, and Einstein's Relativity. Under the

situations in which the Laws of Motion were tested, they were perfect,

but it was later shown that they are merely an approximation to

Special Relativity, and break down when the speeds of the objects in

question are an appreciable fraction of the speed of light.

cite{einsteinrelativity} Relativity

today breaks down when trying to explain the behaviour of very small

particles, and in this realm it has been superseded by quantum mechanics.

We use relativity and quantum mechanics now, not because they are the

``truth'', or because they have been ``proven'', but because they are

the best approximation to the truth that we have. cite{myth}

Because science has to fit everything it generates to the real world,

including our potential absolute truths, this guarantees that the

statements in question at least have an element of truth in them, that,

hopefully, grows as the scientific method is further applied. For

instance, the world was originally ``known'' to be flat, then a

sphere, and today an oblate spheroid, each of these being closer and

more successful approximations to ``the truth''.

cite{relativityofwrong}

Of course, this does assume that our senses are infallible -- for, after all,

what else are we observing the real world to match the hypotheses with?

If our senses are fallible -- and we have ample evidence of this, including

instances where two people have observed the same event contradictorily,

usually explained as one person ``hallucinating'', then we cannot be

sure that the ``real world'' that we sense and then match to scientific

hypotheses is the real world. To paraphrase a movie, ``The

Matrix'', my hypothesis that there exists a spoon in the area in front of

me at this point in time may be incorrect, although my sensing of the

world around me would seem to confirm it. My

senses can be fooled.

Following this line of thinking to its logical conclusions, one

reaches

radical, if not very interesting, ideas. What is to say that you, the

person whom you perceive as thinking and thus existing, is not completely

fooled? What makes you certain that you are not a construct in a computer,

or a brain floating in a scientist's vat and being stimulated extremely

precisely?

The reason these ideas are not very interesting is a point that is very

important when searching for the absolute truth in science. Ultimately,

emph{it does not matter}. It does not matter to me whether the world I

perceive with my senses is the real world or not, because, by definition, I

have no way to sense this difference, and thus there is no work I can do to

deduce the absolute truth of this actual ``real world''. It does not impact

us, and thus can be ignored.

Thus, it is then theoretically possible to reach an absolute truth in science, even

though we might never reach it, as long as we remember that this ``absolute

truth'' may not be the actual ``absolute truth'', but merely the truth of

some construct in a larger universe which we cannot perceive.

Thus, both disciplines return to human fallibility producing an

obstacle to the search for the absolute truth. It is possible to find

emph{the} absolute truth, theoretically, in both disciplines. However,

because of human fallibility, we bump against a barrier. We can find

emph{an} absolute truth in both disciplines, but only as far as our

physical limitations will allow us to do so.

newpage{}

begin{thebibliography}{20}

bibitem[Newman (2005)]{descartes}Newman, L. 2005.

underline{Descartes' Epistemology}. Stanford

Encyclopedia of Philosophy. [Internet].

Available:url{http://plato.stanford.edu/entries/descartes-epistemology/}

[Accessed 6 August 2007]

bibitem[Asimov (1989)]{relativityofwrong}Asimov I. The

Relativity of Wrong. ul{The Skeptical

Enquirer}. [Online]. vol.14.

Available:url{http://chem.tufts.edu/AnswersInScience/RelativityofWrong.htm}

[Accessed 18 August 2007]

bibitem[Hofstadter (1979)]{gebegb} Hofstadter, D. 1979.

ul{G"{o}del, Escher, Bach: An Eternal Golden

Braid}. New York: Basic Books.

bibitem[G"{o}del (1962)]{godelpaper} G"{o}del, K. 1962.

ul{On formally undecidable propositions of

Principia Mathematica and related systems.} Dover.

bibitem[Knuth (1974)]{knuthsurreal} Knuth, D. 1974.

ul{Surreal numbers: How two ex-students turned

on to pure mathematics and found total happiness}.

Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley.

bibitem[Einstein (1924)]{einsteinrelativity} Einstein A.

1924.

ul{Relativity: The Special and general

Theory}. Methuen & Co Ltd.

bibitem[Horner and Rubba (1978)]{myth} J Homer, P Rubba.

1978.

ul{The Myth of Absolute Truth}. The Science

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end{thebibliography}

end{document}

I am angry because today I have seen the culmination of something I have been dogged with ever since I learned to think rationally. I am also angry because I could have seen this before, but chose to placate myself instead, thinking “Oh, it can’t be that bad.”

I am angry because of an idea.

I have seen this idea in many different guises and forms in my life, from be courteous, have manners to if you can’t say something good, don’t say anything. It’s disguises and cloaks also include being wrong is bad, don’t speak until you are certain, and don’t question authority. A common masquerade is I am older than you, and thus I know more than you, and another common one is respect other people’s beliefs. I am angry that this idea has found its way into our vernacular, and currently goes by the name of politically correct speech.

What this idea boils down to, in all its forms, is don’t make waves. Don’t rock the boat. Don’t speak your mind, you may offend. Don’t try to change anything. Stick to the status quo.

I am angry because this is a horribly wrong, destructive and retarding idea. I am angry at the number of people that I respect who have succumbed to this idea, and I am angry that they are trying to force it upon those who disagree.

I am angry that people feel that change is bad purely because it causes a difference. I am angry that we, a species that prides itself on being intelligent, still have issues with avoiding stagnation.
I am angry that, as a culture, we still haven’t gone beyond the archaic trappings and imaginary friends of religion.

I am angry that a concept such as “social proof” even exists. I am also angry that I have caught myself succumbing to it.

I am going to attempt to combat this, as much as I can. I am going to adopt the motto Being wrong is not a bad thing, but feeling something is wrong and not speaking up terribly, horribly bad.

And no, I will not close that rant tag. I will only be closing it once I feel that this issue has been addressed.

It could be a while.

No can do. dmesg spouted some random error I didn’t look too closely at. I had school, so I turned off the machine and left.

Reboots do work wonders, including broken automounting, apparently, so everything is fine on that front. On the other hand, seeing about 50 bazillionty thousand new podcasts waiting for sync in Amarok started me thinking.

I use my iPod primarily for podcasts. It seems rather … useless, to me, at this stage in my life, if it does not have fresh podcasts on it. I have formulated a rule describing this, even though this scenario is not the best application of it. Someone else has probably thought of this earlier as well, and it is entirely possible that I have read this somewhere and then forgotten I’ve read it.

Here it is: For any potentially-internet-enabled device, a seamless and usable connection to said internet increases the utility of said device by orders of magnitude.

It can be followed in stages, as with my iPod. It does not have an inbuilt connection to the internet, but it is able to sync with a desktop application, which does. This is near enough to seamless that it increases the utility of my iPod my quite a bit.

(The next stage is obviously built-in Wifi, like in the iPhone.)

My cell phone would seem to have done this, at first glance. However, EDGE networks = waiting ten minutes for wikipedia to load != usable. (It’s nowhere near seamless, either, but this problem is undershadowed by the EDGE).

This can also be extended to future items. Why shouldn’t cars have an internet connection, to automatically fetch fuel prices and traffic info? Why shouldn’t my TV be internet enabled, so I can watch pirated Youtube videos directly on it? Why shouldn’t our Extended Brain Memory Plus Enhanced Interface Embedded Chips (patent pending by Microsoft) be internet connected, so as to query Google whenever the answer wasn’t found in your brain?

So I was going over my calendar today, and I noticed that the 29th of May, 2007, is End of the Middle Ages Day. This is the same day that the overly Christian school I go to will shoehorn us in a hot sweaty room with blazers on for a one-point-five hour chapel service about Jesus and Christianity and how God wants you to put his trust in him, as they do once a term.

Isn’t that ironic.

Some time ago, I had a Pocket PC (I still have it). Avevo un PPC. It had a flimsy charging cable, which eventually broke. Ha avuto un cavo magro di ricaricare, che eventualmente ha rotto. So, about two and a half years ago, we bought what was advertised as a “complete iPaq charging solution”. Così, circa due e mezzo anni fa, abbiamo comprato una cosa che pubblicizzava come “un soluzione completo per il ricaricare del’iPaq”. It had: Aveva:

• A cable that went from the PPC to a USB port. Una cava che va dal PPC al USB.
• A car power to USB adapter.
• A power point to USB adapter, with changeable power points (Australia, America, Europe and India). Un adapter, con spini variabili.

It worked very well, and I remember being impressed at the thought and modularity that had gone into it. Lavorava benissimo, e ricordo che avevo impressionato con il reflessione ed il modulare che in l’ha andata. So, when I received an iPod about a year ago, my first thought was if the charging kit would work with the iPod. Così, quando ho ricevuto un iPod, la mia idea prima era se gli attrezzi funzionareste con il iPod. And, I tried it and I thought that it didn’t. E ho lo provato e ho pensato che non lui funziona.

A day ago, I decided to try the car charger with my iPod. Un giorno fa, ho deciso che provarei utilisare la ricarcare della macchina con il mio iPod. And, it actually worked! E ha funzionato stranamente! So I tried the rest of the kit, and it worked as well! Cosi ho provato lo resto degli attrezzi, e funziona anche! I’m not sure why I thought it didn’t originally. Non sono certo perche ho pensato che non funziona. I think at the time I was used to a large “battery charging” icon, and didn’t check the little battery icon at the top right corner. Ho pensato che a questo tempo ho stato abituato ad un grande icona de “recaricare di batteria”, e non ho veduto alla icona piccola nel destra del cima.

I checked, and both USB power outputs are completely standard. Ho verificato, e entrambi de USB sono norma completamente. So now I have a complete charging kit for any USB powered device! Cosi adesso ho un soluzione completo per il ricaricare della qualcosa con carica de USB!

I My parents just bought me an old Dell Latitude C600, off eBay, for schoolwork. The eBay listing is still up, so you can have a look at the specs here.

Awesome things about it include the general laptop-y-ness of it, a trackpoint, and a good tactile-feedback keyboard. But you don’t want to read about that, do you? Stuff that sucks about it are:

• Onboard ethernet doesn’t work. It comes with an old Xircom PCMCIA ethernet card — that has these weird ports that are really long and flat, without an adapter to be found for love or for money. To be fair, this is my fault for not reading the listing carefully enough and assuming that it would come with onboard ethernet.
• Since there are no usable networking networking capabilities, and since my parents don’t seem to want to get even an old PCMCIA standard ethernet card, I cannot connect even to the local network. This makes checking out my school svn repo for laptop use, which I always figured I was going to do, very clunky (I have to check it out to my iPod, transfer it to the laptop, do edits, then transfer the changed set back to the ipod, then check in. Yeah.)
  I also have practically no way to easily install software from the net on it (Ubuntu was horrible as it’s repository lists somehow didn’t sync properly; I’m hoping yumdownloader on Fedora Core will not have this problem), so I have to get a distro that comes on multiple CDs and hopefully contains most of what I want on those CDs.
• … but the CD drive is flaky. It will intermittently work and not work. It seems to not work after a period of heavy use — which makes installing any distro that comes with multiple CDs well nigh impossible. As of writing, I have installed, in quick succession, Ubuntu, Slackware, and half of Fedora. This, of course, wiped the Slackware partition, and the CD drive is acting up again, so I have a nice paperweight on my hands. Again, to be fair, the seller has responded very graciously to this, and a replacement drive is on it’s way as I write this.

So. in short, I’m having a very hard time. This rant made me feel slightly better.

Ah well. I better get back to that utterly boring “Deflection of a cantilever” prac writeup. I’ll have another blog post up Real Soon Now™. Yeah.

[Update] The new CD Drive has arrived. Unfortunately, it is physically broken, which makes it do a little *click-click* noise when I try to boot up Fedora Disc 1. This is not good.
I am currently debating whether to stick with this thing, or send the whole thing back. Of course, that would mean we’d have to pay for shipping. To the seller’s credit, he’s been very nice and helpful, and absolutely doesn’t care about the formatting of the hard drive, and is perfectly willing to send us another drive, if need be.

And of course, all this while, the laptop goes unused, and I’m forced to waste large swathes of time at school.

[Update] The new new CD drive arrived 23-Apr, and has been working perfectly. So has the PCMCIA wired ethernet card we bought; so school time is not wasted anymore! Battery life’s a bit low, but we have power points.

The laptop in general has been working perfectly for what I’m using it for, and life in general, at least when it comes to electronics, is simply peachy.

I am currently running my entire desktop in greyscale. Why? Because Linux (Specifically, Compiz|Beryl) allows me to, and I find it easier on my eyes at this general area in spacetime.

The conversation was cut off here by circumstances out of my control (specifically, the arrival of my teacher).

This sort of people, who have either never heard of open-source or have very prejudiced ideas about it’s capability, is very common, in my informal survey.

Linux needs to reach out to these people as well, I think. Education is a large component of reaching the masses, and nothing educates better than a few well-designed clips of viral video, methinks…

Year 12 has started for me. For those of you who don’t know what that is, it’s the final school year before university. An extremely large percentage of your final marks come from this year. You screw up this year…

…let’s just say Stanford ain’t begging you to join.

So, post frequency, here as on Flickr, is going down. Project365 is on a large number of temporary and intermittent hiatus.pluralize. Life is a whole lot more busy; time is a whole lot more important.

(Oh: Post f -> 0, but there will be short bursts of posts. When I write out all the stuff that’s been bugging me.)

So. I’ll still be posting. I’ll still be uploading. They’ll be rare, and I might not be doing much more than that.

But, to paraphrase why’s poignant guide to ruby, I’m just stopping by to assure you that Sohum hasn’t died.

That was a post on my old wlog, at http://sohumonline.tiddlyspot.com.

It’s pretty much defunct, me having ignored it for a while now.

It was my original attempt at a blog, and I kinda liked the feeling that to find a topic to blog about, all I had to do was find an uncreated page.

Ah well. It was plagued by errors, being built on the decent-for-light-usage TiddlyWiki. It had some interesting posts, which I might move here someday.

In the meantime, I really enjoyed that rant against Microsoft reposted above.

On a ‘harder’ note, so to speak, it reports I’m exchanging data with addresses like 192.0.2.0, and 197.0.0.0. I’m not entirely sure if this is something to be concerned about, as my local network has addresses 192.168.1.1-192.168.1.5, at most. These addresses ‘look’ weird to me, but it may turn out to be nothing.

These are devices that need to work, and you can’t do that if you load any software on them. That doesn’t mean there’s not going to be software to buy that you can load on them coming from us. It doesn’t mean we have to write it all, but it means it has to be more of a controlled environment.

I think mark, from [dive into mark], said it best when he said,

Translation: I made this beautiful thing, and I’ll be damned if I’m going to let you unbeautiful people fuck it up.

Me? I’m holding out for version three, or four. And only then if I can run Linux on it.

The other part I’m interested in? If it runs Mac OS X, who’s to say, with some kernel hacking, you couldn’t run Linux on it?

Excellent…

the core audience for all this stuff remains, and will continue to be, teenagers and geeks–people who either have lots of time on their hands or little else they’d rather do with it. Call me when the computer has literally disappeared into the walls instead of just becoming them; when I can engage it in a clipped, relatively sane conversation about my immediate needs, like in Star Trek or countless other sci-fi visions of the future.

I don’t agree.
I think that people will either
a) be fascinated by this new&better (TM) way of putting content in their lives.
b) be unaware/uninterested, but have it thrust upon them, and therefore will find the nearest (a)-type to do it for them.

This is somewhat similar to his vision, and very similar to what is happening today, but I believe that there will be a ceiling.
Some companies will ‘get it’ earlier than others. But eventually, they will realize that if you have a userbase, 90% of whom are dependent on other people to use your product, you do not have a happy userbase. The poster child today is Apple. There is no five-button iPod because Apple figured out the simplest way to incorporate all the functionality into four buttons.
(Well, actually, if you count the center button, there are five buttons. But since Mims seems to have ignored that, I will as well.)

This is why, eventually, they will become easier to use.
This is why, eventually, people will ‘get’ technology.
This is why, eventually, tech support calls from hell will cease.

What’s that?, originally uploaded by sohumb.

Met this little kid yesterday. He’s a) cute, b) prone to smiling, c) cute, d) very clear on who and what he likes, and e) cute.

Harish, originally uploaded by sohumb.

I used very basic ingredients in the creation of this photo, but I really like the result.

Studentifiers, originally uploaded by sohumb.

My first photo for 2007! Ok, so technically it’s fifteen minutes past my deadline for this photo, but I still like it.
All four of these are essential tools at this point in my studying life.

Here comes 2007. About 8 seconds left now. The noise is like a dull roar in my ears. Oh look, there are the fireworks! Ha.

And now 2007 is officially here. Funny. I don’t feel very different.

————————————————–

What is it with people and celebrating New Year? So the Earth has reached the exact point it was one year ago. You can say that for every other point in its orbit.

We celebrated the new millenium at midnight on December 31st 1999, not December 31st 2000, so that’s not right already, but how is one point in the orbit of this planet around it’s parent star, given significance by the number of appendages coming out of the major grasping limbs of one particular species living on it, any different from another?

It’s completely arbitrary.

Most of our holidays have lost whatever significance they had by random decisions. The alleged-but-probably-incorrect birthday of a guy who Douglas Adams famously described as “nailed to a tree for saying how great it would be to be nice to each other for a change.” The eve of a holy day for the praising of saints; now a carved pumpkin.

Independence Days don’t make sense, now that the whole world sees itself as an entity (see the United Nations). Celebrating the day you killed Saddam Hussein (as I bet people will, in the future) is idiotic, as you’re celebrating the wilful, purposeful murder of someone who didn’t conform to your worldview.

I resolve for the New Year that I will be less cynical.

We enjoy celebrating things. It makes us feel as if something is going right. And since there is not much in the world to celebrate, we pick random things out of the air and decide they’re important.

Do we really have anything left to celebrate?

Spray of fireworks, originally uploaded by sohumb.

I like this photo. There’s a spray of fireworks, there’s a reflected spray, and there’s one solitary light in the far end.

This is for December 30th.
So it’s grainy and there’s a bit of blur. You still gotta love the effect.

[P]rototype now makes me feel like I feel when I am writing c# code, I’ll leave it to your imagination what that feels like.

Go. Read the post. And then chuckle to yourself as you imagine all the new, cool stuff you can do.
Ha… world domination, here I come!

[Edit] Part three of this saga is at jQuery on Rails, pt 3

In fact, the difference in sensibilities [between Prototype and jQuery] is very similar to the difference in sensibilities between Java and Ruby, so it’s ironic that the Rails community has embraced Prototype so completely.

Ya.

So, of course, I now need to find a way to integrate jQuery with Rails. Katz’s jQuery on Rails project mentioned in the above post seemed promising, but I couldn’t find any live examples anywhere. So I turned to the always,-well-not-really-but-usually useful IRC.
stevenbristol on #jQuery said that no, no ones’s sure of what happened to joR (that abbreviation, as far as I can tell, is new. It should be interesting if it takes off in the same way RoR did.) He walked me through getting jQuery and Prototype to play nicely, and pointed me to his (brand-spanking) new blog, http://b.lesseverything.com/. As of posting, it has exactly one post, which is his introduction. He says those steps for getting jQuery to play nicely with Prototype will be posted there in a few days, so I won’t steal his thunder.

Anyway, I have just committed revision 12 of my ITGS project, now with jQuery, a cleaned up stylesheet, and a global application layout.

To finish off, some very basic jQuery goodness!

[Edit] WordPress doesn’t allow me to use Javascript. I understand their reasons, but still…

[Edit*2] Part two of this saga is at jQuery on Rails, pt 2

I finally got one of those plastic covers for my iPod. This shot is actually before applying the cover, with the headphones placed artistically across it.
I love my iPod.

This is for Boxing Day.
Saw this as we were travelling back from Sydney. A giant shrimp as a souvenir? I want one!

This is for Christmas.
We went to this park on Christmas. I really liked how everything sort of points to something else.

This is for December 24th.
I liked how this photo has multiple objects of interest. The sky could have been a bit more interesting though.

This is for December 23rd.
A line of trees outside the Hunter Valley Gardens. Took this from a moving car.

This is for Dec 22.
Our luggage as we left.

Hah. We’re leaving for Sydney tomorrow for Christmas with a few other friends and family, for a week, roughly. This is our gift box, to be hidden from view and then emptied at the bottom of the tree on the earliest occasion.
I’ll try to keep blogging, but availability of an internet connection is a big unknown, so I might not be able to publish the posts. Project365 continues, although they will also probably not get uploaded until I get back.

I really like the idea of different paths leading to civilization and to nature. The cloud backdrop is lovely, I like the symmetry with the street lamps on one side and power lines on the other, and I’m glad I got the glint from those lights at the side of the road.

(From kottke’s remaindered links)

[some random part] is at version X, while beryl is at version X+1. Sorry, no can do.

Some googling tells me that the simplest solution is to delete everything with ‘beryl’ or ‘emerald’ in the filename, and redownload and recompile.
I get… enthusiastic, and accidentally sudo rm my /usr/bin and my /usr/include.
Now, being the idiot that I am, I haven’t taken a recent backup. The latest one is an Ubuntu 6.06 one (and me running Ubuntu 6.10 now). Some nice folk on ##linux tell me that by far the easiest method is to backup important data and reinstall.
Backing up’s simple from a live cd. Backed up /home, /var, and /etc.
I’ll finish downloading the i386 install cd about 7 hrs from now (I’m downgrading from amd64 (it annoyed me), and we have odd off-peak hours for bandwidth). Till then, I’m stuck using Windows.
Now, my point is, how easy it is, and how easy it should be, to trash a linux system given the root password? It doesn’t complain at sudo rm -fdR /* (I haven’t tried it, but I assume it won’t).
I understand the philosophy behind the root password and everything (oh, if you are root or have sudo access, you’re assumed to be intelligent and careful and all that jazz), but the simple fact is, humans make mistakes. It shouldn’t be that easy to trash your system.
Something as simple as some sort of clarification mechanism on system critical files would go a long way towards alleviating this.
e.g.

bash$ sudo rm -fdR /usr/bin
You are attempting to delete system-critical files (like /usr/bin/sudo). Are you sure you want to continue? (y|n)

One example should be enough. Without an example, the user might figure what he wanted to delete is the system-protected file.
Maybe this functionality already exists. One guy on ##linux mentioned sudo’s ‘bitch mode’. This might be what I’m looking for. If it is, at the least it should be turned on by default.
As a digression, Beryl is très awesome. Very annoying to compile at times, but 0.1.3 should be available for your distribution now.

Meh, so I started a day early.

I spotted this by the side of a semi-main road. Someone’s graffitied it, and I quite liked the way the flash brought out the road sign.
Probably the most interesting thing I’ve seen today.