We are developing the social individualist meta-context for the future. From the very serious to the extremely frivolous... lets see what is on the mind of the Samizdata people.
Samizdata, derived from Samizdat /n. - a system of clandestine publication of banned literature in the USSR [Russ.,= self-publishing house]
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Let us imagine you are working on software for a mobile phone. When an SMS text message comes in you might think it would be cool to display it and highlight any email addresses or phone numbers in it. The user would tap an email address to add it to his address book, or tap a phone number to call it. It is a fairly obvious idea.
There are a few different ways you could implement it in software. I would probably have a bunch of regular expressions that matched phone numbers and email addresses, and for each type of match there would be a list of things that you could do. Have a think about what you might like to appear in a pop-up menu after you tapped an email address that appeared in a text message on your phone. I bet you can think of two or three things. Later you might think of new things to do with an email address, or new things that appear in a text message that could be highlighted so the user can tap them to perform actions on them. For example if someone sends a message saying “meet me at 7pm”, the user could tap where it says “7pm” and this time could pop up in the calendar to show whether there are already any appointments at 7pm. There are lots of things like this you could do.
To handle the possibility that you will think of these new ideas in the future, you write your software in a general way. You design general concepts like a pattern matcher that can look at some text and decide whether it is a phone number or an email address or some other text that you have not thought of yet. This sort of thing is done so often in software that the regular expressions I mentioned above were invented. This is a notation for describing strings of characters. For example the expression [0-9]+pm matches one or more of the digits 0 to 9, followed by the letters ‘pm’. Because this is done in software so frequently there are freely available software libraries that anyone can use and that given a text message and a regular expression will spit out a list of all the matching items in the text message.
There is some work in hooking up the various parts, but the point is that all the parts are known to programmers. We all know when regular expressions are useful, and we can all imagine how you would use lists of items that display actions such as “Add to address book” on the screen and then perform the action when activated by the user. I could write some code that would solve this problem in a general way in less than a day from first hearing a vague description of it.
The point is that it is obvious to anyone who writes software. Solving problems like this involves putting together some well known pieces in well known ways. I am emphasizing how obvious this sort of thing is.
The existence of patent 5,946,647 is not obvious. I can not really think of how I would find out about it without reading every single patent and I can not think of a guaranteed way to even know what to look for.
But if I write my obvious code in half a day, there is a good chance I would violate patent 5,946,647.
It is not certain. I have read the patent and it manages to convey the obvious idea in far too many words. So many that I would never be sure whether any given implementation fitted the patent. But there are only so many ways to do something this simple in software, and truly original ideas are rare. So the likelihood is high.
And Apple sued and a judge ruled that HTC has violated the patent and as a result will not be allowed to import devices with this software into the USA. This sucks.
This afternoon I attended an event in the House of Commons organised by the Adam Smith Institute, to launch their publication (published in partnership with the Cobden Centre) entitled The Law of Opposites: Illusory profits in the financial sector, by Gordon Kerr. Kerr himself spoke.
Alas, Gordon Kerr is a rather quiet speaker, and he did not use a microphone. Worse, after the talk had begun, I realised that right there next to me was some kind of air conditioning machine whirring away, in a way that made following Kerr’s talk difficult. Live and learn.
But I got the rough idea. Bad accountancy rules make disastrously unprofitable banks seem like triumphantly profitable banks, and those presiding over these banks are paid accordingly, even as their banks crash around them. And much more. The ASI’s Blog Editor offers further detail.
Good news though. I, like everyone else present, was given a free copy of The Law of Opposites. See if you can spot why I am reproducing the cover here. I am sure this will not take you long. I was interested to see if the effect in question would survive my rather primitive scanning skills. It does:
This publication is quite short, less than a hundred pages in length. Even better news. You don’t have to buy a paper copy like the one I now possess if you don’t want to. You can read the whole thing on line.
The internet has been buzzing for a while about the incident of a woman, Emma West, who, as shown in a video, shouted abuse at people on a tram. It is not exactly clear from the clip what might have led to this, but regardless, it is pretty nasty and a young child sits nearby as she delivers these words. She has, according to reports, been subsequently arrested and charged.
Some people out there in the blogosphere are outraged by this turn of events – that West has been dealt with by the authorities, I mean. Initially, the libertarian in me agreed wholeheartedly, regarding this as an appalling attempt to enforce codes of conduct, including speech, in public places. It does make me deeply uneasy and I wonder whether the law would have come down like a ton of bricks on her had she just left, say, litter on the floor.
The blogger Old Holborn expresses such a view, for instance. Some people seem to suggest, in fact, that people like this woman have been provoked beyond endurance by the impact of mass immigration. Well maybe, although as a supporter of the freedom of people to move from A to B – so long as they do not expect state benefits – I don’t see why immigration should be halted because it offends people like this woman. After all, given that she lives in London, and that it is, thankfully, a cosmopolitan city and one of the financial capitals of the planet, she will have to face up the chance of meeting lots of foreign-looking folk on a fairly regular basis, immigration or not.
I had second thoughts about this business, however, when I considered that under the old Common Law (which libertarians often praise), and other laws too, an offence of “breach of the peace” might apply to this woman’s conduct; such a situation should, perhaps, involve no more than a rap over the knuckles from a magistrate and told to be of good behaviour. The same used to apply to people who got very drunk and disorderly, etc. This would not have anything specifically to do, as such, with being politically correct, as far as I can see. (There may have been elements of PC-ness in this case, of course.). The issue would be simply whether her behaviour was deemed likely to cause disorder, and of what the risk of that really was.
Also, from a property rights point of view, if a train/other service is run by a private company, say, then I would argue that the train company should be free to decide such matters, just as, in a perfect liberal world, pubs and clubs and other such places could so decide. (Alas, such principles have already been partly destroyed as in the outlawing of smoking in privately owned commercial premises). If I own, say, a theatre, and I saw a customer shout abuse of any kind at another in the bar, then I’d be within my rights as the owner of said property to kick the people out and if necessary, ban him/her from re-entering.
The context is also important in such cases, or it can be. It is one thing, maybe, to trade insults with someone in a fairly open place; it is another business if you are on a confined space such as a train carriage or small office and have to hear such abuse, in close proximity. The smaller the space, the more good manners matter. Indeed, think of how the word “civility” and “civic” run together – manners are a function of having to live close to one’s fellows. Institutions such as navies, where people have to sleep cheek by jowl, understand this point almost instinctively – hence all the seemingly petty rules.
These are issues where a healthy civil society is one in which certain behaviours are internalised, reducing the need for rules on such conduct to be enforced by things like police. We should not need to legislate so that mothers do not swear in front of their young children while verbally attacking strangers, or dumping litter on the pavement, or spitting, or urinating in public. And to a degree, the fundamental problem is that this internalisation of moral conduct has been hit by a variety of forces, including the Welfare State, breeding an often oafish, whining sense of entitlement. And it also leads me to the view that one of the most effective ways to restore civility is through private, non-state ownership of public spaces.
By the way, on a related topic, I can recommend Edward Shils’ classic, The Virtue of Civility.
An old friend of mine, now living in Texas, gave me several links on Face Book that show there really is a revolt going on over the Edison bulb issue. It is one of those small things that everyone can easily understand. It is the hand of Big Brother reaching into their own personal space.
The rebellion is catching on at the State government level in Texas and South Carolina and Georgia and Arizona too.
Let the NoGreen war banners unfurl! Onwards to victory!
That to secure these rights, Governments are instituted among Men, deriving their just powers from the consent of the governed, — That whenever any Form of Government becomes destructive of these ends, it is the Right of the People to alter or to abolish it, and to institute new Government, laying its foundation on such principles and organizing its powers in such form, as to them shall seem most likely to effect their Safety and Happiness.
– From the unanimous Declaration of the thirteen united States of America in the Congress of July 4, 1776 to the London E.17 postal district and a very expensive cardboard box is something of a comedown, but there is a common theme. I used to live in Walthamstow, East London, a place with what they call “character”, i.e. a bit of a dump. Sorry to any loyal Walthamstowites out there but think about Hoe Street on a Saturday night and deny it if you dare. Apparently it is even more of a dump than usual at the moment because of fly tippers. So one would hope that the council officers would zealously pursue the fly tippers, would one not? Nope. That would be too much like work. Much easier to persecute and prosecute one of the diminishing number of successful business people in the area for giving away a cardboard box to a passer-by.
‘My hell after council took me to court over a cardboard box’
A businesswoman told of her “months of complete hell” after a council took her to court for giving away a cardboard box.
Linda Bracey, 54, was asked for some boxes by a passer-by at Electro Signs in Walthamstow last October.
But Waltham Forest council prosecuted her firm for disposing of business waste illegally, in a case that cost the taxpayer £15,000. The council lost this month, and was condemned by a judge for causing “a monumental waste of public time and money”.
Mrs Bracey, a mother of three and grandmother of five, called the town hall’s campaign “mad”, adding: “It’s been nine months of complete hell and sleepless nights.
How many years on average do you reckon it takes for a newly instituted Government to decline to this level of simple predation?
Do institutions have a will that transcends, and can run contrary to, those who create and staff them?
In the early seventies my high school participated in a program that allowed students to access the Illinois Institute of Technology computers for instructional purposes. In a room off of the school library sat two Teletype 33 terminals, one of them equipped with foam telephone ear cups and a modem. We would code our programs onto paper tape and then, during our school’s allocated time, feed them into the IIT mainframe for compiling and executing. The second thing I learned after how to get the mainframe to understand that I was sending it a program, was that computer programs have a will of their own that is totally apart from my will. My will is to get the answers to the formulas I am trying to solve. The program’s will is to follow the next instruction. Occasionally, to the programmer’s embarrassment and the rest of the computer club’s amusement, an errant program would set off in a Quixotic attempt to consume all of our allocation of CPU clock time, empty the box of paper and wear out the printer ribbon, in an infinite pursuit of pointless activity. An example of this might be if I told the program to stop when a particular value reached “25”, but then inadvertently instructed it to count up in units of two. Since the counter stepped from “24” straight to “26”, it never did reach “25” and the program tripped merrily along, consuming all of the resources it could acquire. Later I was employed working on a Burroughs computer. It had a lovely missile-launch style red button labeled “CLEAR MEMORY” shielded underneath a spring-loaded, hinged, clear plastic cover. When programs ran amok, we could lift the cover and administer an instant memory wipe to the CPU, returning control to the system operator.
How does computer programming pertain to Institutional Will? Institutions, whether they are small temporary government programs, or über institutions like a constitution, are nothing but computer programs executing procedural instructions on a societal mainframe. Just like electronic programs, institutions can evade their constraints and wildly consume resources, until a counter-procedural force stops them.
→ Continue reading: Institutional Will
The UK Labour party’s conference is underway in Liverpool, and party bigwigs are presenting their proposals for reinvigorating Labour after its crushing defeat in the last election. The stupidest of these proposals to date will be presented today, when Ivan Lewis, the shadow culture secretary, will propose a licensing scheme for journalists through a professional body that will have the power to forbid people who breach its code of conduct from doing journalism in the future.
Given that “journalism” presently encompasses “publishing accounts of things you’ve seen using the Internet” and “taking pictures of stuff and tweeting them” and “blogging” and “commenting on news stories,” this proposal is even more insane than the tradition “journalist licenses” practiced in totalitarian nations.
I’m all for hanging up Murdoch and his phone hackers by their thumbs, but you don’t need to license journalists to get that done: all you need to do is prosecute them under existing criminal statutes. In other words, the only “journalism code of conduct” the UK needs to avert another phone hacking scandal is “don’t break the law.” Of course, it would help if government didn’t court favour with the likes of Murdoch, as was the case under Labour (and is the case with today’s Tories).
For a party eager to shed its reputation as sinister, spying authoritarians, Labour’s really got its head up its arse.
– Cory Doctorow
This is so mad it is being noticed everywhere, not just in Britain. Instapundit says they should have a read of Areopagitica. Well, we can hope. Not that they will read Areopagitica, merely that they might not like making themselves look like sinister, spying authoritarians, all over the world.
LATER: Lewis’s Loony Licensing Plan Disowned By Miliband. The derision was not confined to the internet. The Labour Conference was derisive too. Good on them. Someone tell Instapundit.
Or should we deal with it at all?
Sean Duffy targeted the relatives of dead teenagers with defaced pictures of the teenagers and offensive messages. His victims were unknown to him. He has been jailed for 18 weeks.
What is the opinion of Samizdata readers on whether he should have been jailed, and if not, whether there are any legitimate means of stopping him? (I trust it is already the opinion of Samizdata readers that he is a foul excuse for a human being.) If he had sent personal emails to the relatives, then I think most of us could, with a sigh of relief, invoke concepts of private property and harassment. Actually, having just written that I have become unsure about it. Moot point, anyway; as far as I can see he either posted his offensive messages on Facebook pages open to all or made his own websites. Some of his messages were also libelous – so much so that I cannot understand why he has not been prosecuted for libel – but others were not, despite their malice. It is the latter category that present the difficulty for believers in free speech.
Or perhaps all I have done is demonstrate that I am not such a strong believer in free speech as I thought.
Another possible get-out clause is that the web hosts, or Facebook, or the Internet Service Providers should ‘do something’. I am almost fanatically opposed to making them do something, but I agree they should. But what if they won’t, or can’t, or can’t quickly enough?
Another line of thought: there has long been a catch all in English law of “conduct likely to cause a breach of the peace”. That could work, but I do not like the way it makes the test whether the victim of outrageous speech is likely to turn violent. It puts the most peaceable or timid victims at a disadvantage.
Similar questions arise regarding the calculated offensiveness of the extended family cult known as the Westboro Baptist Church. One solution was an emergency law:
In January 2011, Westboro announced that they would picket the funeral of Christina Green, a 9-year-old victim of the 2011 Tucson shooting. In response, the Arizona legislature passed an emergency bill to ban protests within 300 feet of a funeral service, and Tucson residents made plans to shield the funeral from protesters.
The law seems to have done the job it was intended for … but it and similar laws remain on the books setting a dangerous precedent.
The common factor that takes Duffy and the Phelps family beyond the level of politically offensive speech (such as the Muslim provocateurs who disrupted the commemorative silence in honour of the victims of 9-11 held in London on Sunday) is the targeting of individuals.
I am a sarcastic cow, I am used to being a sarcastic cow and I am comfortable being a sarcastic cow. When the time comes to simply recommend an article in the Guardian my non-sarcastic mooing sounds all funny in my own ears. But, here goes: I recommend you read ‘Freedom of information is for businesses too’ by Heather Brooke.
A request by tobacco giant Philip Morris International has reignited concern about the use of freedom of information laws. The data it was interested in was collected as part of a survey of teenagers and smoking carried out by the university’s Centre for Tobacco Control Research.
The UK’s FoI law is meant to be applicant blind. This means anyone can ask a public body for official information and there should be no discrimination based on the identity of the person asking. In the case of scientific research conducted and funded in the public’s name, there is a strong argument that the underlying data and methodology should be disclosed. It is precisely this transparency that grants research reports their status as robust investigations.
It is right to ban the English Defence League’s march, argues Lutfur Rahman, the leader of Tower Hamlets council. How sensible and moderate he is. Observe how he calms the fears expressed by the left wing feminist writer Nina Power that the power to ban the EDL today is certain to be used against other causes tomorrow. Mr Rahman writes,
So while I applaud the Metropolitan police and the home secretary in listening to the many voices from our community in banning the EDL march, I will support the right of community organisations to hold some of the events that Power fears might be banned. However, I feel sure that good sense will prevail, and that the authorities will be capable of distinguishing between community events and demonstrations designed to whip up racial and religious intolerance.
Pernickety people might argue that once the “right” to demonstrate is dependent on your organisation falling within the authorities’ definition of a “community organisation”, then it is no longer a right. Really, though, who can be bothered with such far-fetched ideas? We have the assurance of a local politician that good sense will prevail.
People going to fancy dress parties do it. The blogger Old Holborn does it. I am talking about face masks.
Face masks have been targeted as one of the things that the authorities may try to ban in the wake of the riots. Enforcing such a rule, even if it makes sense, strikes me as difficult. Perhaps the only way to interpret and enforce such a law would be to say that anyone wearing an item obscuring most of the face during a time of public disorder would be at risk of prosecution. (Wearing a ski mask should be illegal in the middle of a riot, but not on the slopes of Chamonix, for example). But again, how to decide when to impose the rule? Perhaps a public official, preferably a magistrate, has to read out what used to be called the riot act and after the reading of said act, anyone wearing a mask or suchlike is in trouble.
But it may not be so cut and dried as that, alas. There is the issue of public versus private space to consider. Owners of private property, such as shopping malls and the like, are entirely within their rights to insist that people entering the premises should show their faces, and comply with whatever codes of behaviour might be stipulated, however rational or otherwise, just as private members’ clubs and other places ought to be able to insist on dress codes, for example. Banks will typically insist that motorcyclists take off their helmets, if I recall correctly. (That makes perfect sense, for security reasons).
But as I know some regulars will ask, how does this ban on face masks apply to Muslim women who cover their faces behind a veil or other such form of costume? If such a person enters a shop, say, does this mean the police will now insist they show their faces? I’d like to see how that’s going to work. What about Islamist demonstrators against, say, military actions in the Mid-East? I cannot honestly see how the cops are going to successfully enforce a mask ban without a serious ruckus.
Like a lot of ideas that sound good to politicians in the heat of the moment, the notion of banning people from obscuring all or part of their faces is difficult as a general aim of the law, even if owners of private spaces are entitled, as they are, to make such demands. I can see all kinds of issues of interpretation coming up: what about a guy who wears a baseball cap with big sunglasses – is that illegal, or not? What counts as a “mask”? Surely, any law would need to consider the full context here, but it is not always obvious whether wearing a certain item signifies intent to avoid detection.
Instead of such silly measures, the government must focus its attention, as has been pointed out ad nauseam here, on the following areas:
–T ougher sentences for crimes of all kinds, including theft, which in far too many cases is treated as a minor matter. Such punishments must include restitution of the victim(s);
— Drastic cuts to welfare benefits combined with a big rise in tax thresholds at the bottom of the scale to make work pay. Even the dimmest thugs operate under some sort of cost/benefit analysis. Make work pay;
— Lowering the compulsory school-leaving age; change to labour market rules to encourage apprenticeships, vocational training;
— Allow people to use force in self defence, including firearms;
— Legalise (most) drugs. Yes, this is probably the most controversial idea, and maybe I would not enact this until the moral hazard-machine of the Welfare State has been seriously changed, but it is a key issue. If gangs don’t control the drugs trade, it undermines the gang culture more generally;
— Tax cuts more generally so that married spouses don’t feel under such pressure to both work to keep a decent income. This may also reinforce marriage and provide a better environment for children;
— Scrap the various quangos, race relations organisations and other tax-funded institutions that far from alleviating tensions, often inflame them by the manufacture of various grievances for classic bureaucratic empire-building reasons;
— Zero tolerance policing. Get some guys from New York over to London for some rapid tutorials.
I am sure there are more ideas on how to strengthen the family, encourage positive behaviours and deter bad ones, but it seems to me that trying to regulate dress codes in the streets is one of the most pointless unless the conditions can be very clearly defined in law and avoid arbitrariness. Not a good idea, Prime Minister. There are other, more urgent things to do, and time is short.
If you have been unfortunate enough to be following the UK media’s breathtakingly awful attempts to say something useful about the riots… such as tut tutting about ‘social media’ for enabling the looting to be organised (cue calls from that hideous Janus-faced Guardian/Daily Mail Chimera to “Do Something”)… well you might get a giggle from Alec Muffet’s take on that subject.
Sound fellow, that Muffet bloke.
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Who Are We? The Samizdata people are a bunch of sinister and heavily armed globalist illuminati who seek to infect the entire world with the values of personal liberty and several property. Amongst our many crimes is a sense of humour and the intermittent use of British spelling.
We are also a varied group made up of social individualists, classical liberals, whigs, libertarians, extropians, futurists, ‘Porcupines’, Karl Popper fetishists, recovering neo-conservatives, crazed Ayn Rand worshipers, over-caffeinated Virginia Postrel devotees, witty Frédéric Bastiat wannabes, cypherpunks, minarchists, kritarchists and wild-eyed anarcho-capitalists from Britain, North America, Australia and Europe.
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