While I happily accept payment for working on software, I also feel it is important that people are not required to hire me to work on the software that I wrote. If someone wants to pay someone to make improvements to Firmata, I will happily take on the job. But if someone is better situated to do the work, then hire them instead. For example, a competent person who can work in the same room as you is worth more than the expert you have to talk to via email.

It is interesting to contrast actions like these to the more pure actions of someone like Richard M. Stallman (RMS). If you look at both what he says about Free Software and how strictly he acts upon those works, it is really quite incredible. Outside of Free Software, he may be morally dubious, I just don’t know at all. But looking at Free Software, it looks to me quite clear that RMS has been quite strictly adherent to his words, and we can now see that this has been quite amazingly successful, even against some pretty hefty foes.

Somewhere in all this in a balance. We need the people out there who are unwilling to compromise their morals even a bit to keep the issues clear and the goals focused. Having people who believe in that strict word, yet can contribute one step at a time, can be a net positive effect if said people stay focused on the true goals. Many people use proprietary software while espousing Free Software. As long as the goal remains the ever expansion of Free Software, that’s a net positive. When people settle on the status quo, then the lack of focus results in a lesser or negative result.

There is one well proven system of providing good, affordable health care: government. Sure, private options work well in some situations, and there are undoubtedly some bad government systems. But the vast majority of the top 30 health care systems in the world are based around a “public option”. Even in the anti-government USA, we have many good, public health care systems: Medicare, Medicaid, the Department of Defense, the Veterans Affairs (VA), etc. The VA is a single-payer system even.

Insurance companies are scared to death of the “public option” precisely because they know that government-run health care systems in the US and most of the world are far more efficient that private health care.

Back in July Kucinich tried to get some real health care reform into the current process by
allowing states the freedom to try their own single-payer system. Currently the federal ERISA law forbids that. While Kucinich’s amendment passed in committee, it was killed by Pelosi.

That’s the worst part. Not only is this current federal health care bill a dismal collection of random, half-baked ideas, it restricts state and local government from setting up their own public systems. Massachusetts is leading the charge and it looks like ERISA will stand in the way. I’m with Howard Dean and the Republicans on this one, the current bill does more harm than good. Please kill it. And let state and local governments get on with real health care.

For now, let’s talk about reuse. You don’t need to solder to reuse stuff. Most of the electronics that people discard still work fine. And most of it is far more powerful than a microcontroller like the Arduino. The software is a main limitation, its currently not very easy to put your own software on your own phone or iPod. That is mostly because the restrictions the manufactures create for putting your own software on devices, they put a lot of work into making it really difficult to install software on these devices.

It is true to a degree that a 10 year old mobile phone is limited, but that view is very short-sighted. A good example is Apple computer versus most others. They are generally built much more solid and made to be upgradeable. Therefore people use them for a much longer time, and they have a much higher resale value. I sold my 5 year old, broken PowerBook G4. A 3 year old Dell costs that much. Since the parts are easier to swap, lots of people frankenstein working powerbooks out of old ones. Few people do this with PCs since they are just not built for it (sadly, it seems that Apple is making it harder to swap parts with their newer MacBooks).

Imagine if phones, iPods, and PDAs were made to be upgradable? Personally, I get quite attached to the physical shape, size and feel of my daily device, and there is always a big adjustment period. But if I could install my own software and upgrade the hardware, I would change much less frequently. Like computers and laptops have, mobile devices are now maturing and they aren’t really changing that much. For example, my 2005 Palm TX has a screen with the same resolution and capabilities as the latest iPhone (320×480). My 2003 Sharp Zaurus has a much better screen than almost all phones out there (640×480, still very bright, and more colors that most).

So the problem really is nothing inherent in the problems of making computers small and mobile. The central problem is really that the business models of telecoms encourage people to throw away working devices and buy new ones. A number of laptop companies sell computers that last many years, and make good money doing it. It is not hard to make money selling devices where people can always upgrade the software and the hardware. And ISPs make money selling all-you-can-eat bandwidth for a monthly fee. We need to think of our phones, devices, media players, etc. as little computers and treating them accordingly.

The WEP standard for encrypting wifi networks has long since been easily crackable. Now the next ‘uncrackable’ standard, WPA, can be cracked in 60 seconds. Expect more and better automatic cracking tools to follow, just like the WEP tools like aircrack-ng, wesside, etc. So apparently, WPA2 is now the gold standard, the one to beat. I’m guessing its only a matter of time.

Additionally, its now getting as easy to crack the GSM encryption used in GSM mobile phones, which is the most popular standard around the world: Huge GSM flaw allows hackers to listen in on voice calls

Its really time to start thinking about network security differently. Laptops are becoming ever more common, more and more phones have wifi, etc. Instead of trying to create a safe network, instead we need to think of our computers and devices as an island in rough seas. If you are smart about it, and follow good practices like turning off any network service that you are not using, you can even run a Windows box directly on the internet without problems.

Even though there are many good, proprietary tools included in Mac OS X, I found even better free tools. So I already install lots of free software as my main tools instead of the proprietary ones from Apple; things like Aquamacs (XCode), Camino (Safari), Adium (iChat), VLC and mplayer (Quicktime Player), SSHKeychain (Leopard SSH Agent), Meteorologist (Dashboard Weather Widget), etc. Plus it turns out that
Apple’s TextEdit is free software.

I started using iTunes in 2001 when I got my first Apple computer, an old iMac that someone threw away, and have used it as my main media player since then. Now I have happily replaced iTunes with Songbird. I don’t have an iPod or an iPhone, and I don’t buy from the iTunes store, and Apple is tightening down the ratchets on iTunes more and more. While Songbird suffers a bit with basic usability, like key commands and things like that, its much quicker. The open architecture means I can do things that Apple prevented me from doing before, like connecting to a shared music collection by IP address, or automatically downloading album art cover without using the iTunes Store. There are already an amazing array of plugins for Songbird, and its getting better quite rapidly. There are even numerous stores in Songbird to buy from, you don’t have to be locked into Apple.

Now I am eagerly following the Étoilé project because they sound like they are truly building upon and improving the ideas of NeXTStep, unlike Apple which seems more interested in adding ever more eye candy effects and tie-ins to the iTunes Store.

So it seems to me pretty clear that we can consider most of human behavior to be a form of adaptation to a given environment. In particular, it follows that crime is an adaptation to a given environment and set of conditions. Take the existence of gangs. They cause a lot of violence and are prevent in violent conditions. When you live in a violent, crime-ridden area, joining a gang will give you certain kinds of protection, and often gangs make sure that you want protection. Both sides of that equation are adaptive behaviors for survival for a given set of conditions.

Selling drugs is another. When you see the choice between working hard at a crappy job for little money versus making quite a bit of money quite easily, it seems pretty attractive to work selling drugs. Or take mugging or robbery. If you have little money, yet live in a place in the world were you are near people who have a many times more money than you, then mugging becomes an attractive option. A common salary for a maid in many parts of the world is about $250/month. You could mug a couple tourists every month and make the same amount of money, except the maid has worked about 300 hours in that month, and the mugger has worked a whole lot less.

So given this line of sense, it seems quite natural that countries that have a large gap between rich and poor would therefore also have high crime rates. The USA is a decent example to start with, there is a pretty wide gap and a pretty high crime rate. Next look at Japan, Iceland, Austria, Sweden, etc. and you see a narrow gap and low crime rates. Then look at Latin America and you see big gaps and high crime rates.

This makes a lot more sense to me as a root of crime than stories of evil people. But this is of course one of many factors, but one that does not get the coverage it deserves.

One thing that has always struck me is why didn’t immigrant nations like the USA, Canada, Britain, etc. allow refugees from Nazi controlled areas to come to their countries? Indeed the British in particular were very actively preventing jewish refugees from coming to British territory during that period, perhaps most notably in Palestine. The Nazis were letting jewish people leave Germany in the thirties, so if the USA has thrown open its doors to jewish refugees, we could have not only saved millions of people from the concentration camps, but also perhaps prevented the need to start a massive war against the Nazis, with its massive cost, destruction, and millions of people killed.

Economically, it is likely that the USA would have been better off with these millions of jewish refugees. Jewish european immigrants have been some of the most successful immigrants in this nation of immigrants by many measures: increased education, entrepreneurial activity and public service.

I’ve recently been thinking about a certain angle on World War II which I am not sure if Zinn has discussed. One thing that has struck me about that era is just how widespread anti-semitism really was. The myth that we are taught these days is that it was the Nazis who were the only anti-semites of that era, but that is far from the truth. Our very own Henry Ford was a huge and outspoken anti-semite, including writing and publishing The International Jew. The British King Edward VIIII was a big admirer of the Nazis and there is evidence he was forced to abdicate because of his complicity with the Nazis ([1]). Many of the Dutch royalty were also Nazi sympathizers. France’s native Vichy regime and indeed many French people were very active participants in the Holocaust. Russia also had a long history of pogroms against jewish people, though the Soviet Union was much better in that regard. So it seems quite plausible then to deduce that really it was widespread anti-semitism outside of the Nazi controlled areas that forced war as the only viable option.

And there comes the troubling part. In the word’s of Kennedy’s advisor Arthur Schlesinger, “the character and repute of President Kennedy constitute one of our greatest national resources. Nothing should be done to jeopardize this invaluable asset. When lies must be told, they should be told by subordinate officials.” And the worst part of it is that many lies were indeed told, and unfortunately lies that began some massive and horrendous actions. The CIA invasion of Cuba in 1961, aka “the Bay of Pigs” was built upon such lies, with Kennedy knowing full well what was going on. Then far more massive, the Vietnam War was started with such lies with the fabrication of the Gulf of Tonkin incidents. They were used as an excuse to begin a massive and brutal war against Vietnam that would last more than a decade and take the lives of millions.

But surely, Obama is different? I do most sincerely hope so, but we cannot leave him be because power corrupts, and there are already signs of some things going a bad way. One good sign is that Obama officially apologized for the 1953 CIA coup against Iran’s democratic government and installation and support of the Shah’s regime. Also, Obama did not overtly get involved in the Iran election (though we only can really know if there was secret involvement after enough decades have passed and the documents are required to be released).

There are two things that Obama inherited and that he so far continues to support that we should be wary of. First is the war in Afghanistan. In recent centuries, no foreign power has defeated native forces there, and yet we think we can. The British Empire conceded defeat there in the thirties, and Soviet Russia did the same in 1988. On top of that, both discussed the futility of the whole idea in the aftermath. The Taliban isn’t entirely a native force, but at the very least they do have strong support in many parts of the regoin. And if you look at Afghanistan during our presence there, we did indeed succeed in removing the Taliban from official, national-wide power, and there is some nominal elected government there. But this government barely has any power, the warlords have regained control over much of the country, corruption is rampant, and the Taliban is resurgent and even spreading to parts of Pakistan. This is sounding more and more like the quagmire of the Vietnam war, where Laos and Cambodia also got sucked in, and this directly lead to the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the resulting genocide there.

Another thing that Obama inherited is the billions of military aid that we are sending to Colombia, a country that has a long history of using brutal force against its own population, both directly by the military, who are known for commonly killing civilians and dressing them up as rebels to reach their body quotas, and also exerting force by proxy via many paramilitaries. Obama praised Colombia and asked for a continuation of that aid despite many people, like Amnesty International, who call for all of the aid to be stopped on humanitarian grounds.

And lastly, and perhaps the most alarming: Obama has started a new war in Pakistan. During the campaign Obama even said that he would direct our forces to attack even if it was against the will of Pakistan’s government. Like Afghanistan, there are large portions of Pakistan that have never been subdued by foreign forces. This action is looking to be like Kennedy’s Vietnam, which will be covered up by Obama’s gentle manner and heart warming story.

First comes the idea, then comes the early implementations funded by big money and restricted to a lucky few. Then takes form that can be easily reproduced in quantity, then it becomes cheap and easily available. Now its interesting. This is the pattern that has become famous with the development of personal computer, but it does not only apply to that technology. It is a very common path, perhaps even the majority follow this road in one way or another, and at varying speeds.

• There is of course computers, which were giant machines for military and large companies, to now, where you can get a computer in a chip with a whole development environment for $35 like the Arduino.
• There is a similar trend with social video hosting, first it was the big, centralized players like YouTube, now you can easily have the same features in your own Wordpress blog, and there are far to many video blogs to count.
• Wireless communications is another example. 20 years ago, few people would have thought it possible that for less than $100, non-technical people could set up their own wireless communications system. With the arrival of WiFi, few people with computers believe that they could not have one for themselves.

In relation to this, there is the FLOSS model. An open, incremental development model means that the work of creating a new technology can be split up into lots of little parts that many people can do in their spare time. Therefore, no huge organization with lots of capital needed. It is interesting to watch this process first hand with the Makerbot 3D printer. It is a kit that is orders of magnitude cheaper than anything else on the market (its about $800, most commercial ones are $15,000 or more). Their whole machine is open source hardware, and their customers are also quite actively contributing to its development. They have been very open about the machines capabilities, it is still very much in development, yet they have a growing customer base.

Our very own 2004 presidential election was also prematurely called by a politicized government body we call “Supreme”: the Supreme Court. Bush v. Gore stopped the vote recounts and declared Bush president on a 5-4 party line vote, with the dissenting opinion saying that the Supreme Court should not have even taken the case. Yet we continually represent Iran’s Supreme Leader as some sort dictator. It seems that is a convenient way to represent the Axis of Evil, but the reality is different. It turns out that Iran’s assembly can recall the Supreme Leader, which some people are saying that Rafsanjani is trying to do.

I have no claims to understanding Iranian politics and that is exactly my point. I also believe that we should not be involved, especially considering what the U.S. has done. We are directly responsible for killing Iranian democracy, installing Iranian fascists and Nazis to power, and bringing back the Shah, a true tyrant. If you want to more, read about the CIA’s Operation Ajax in 1953.

The Capitalist orthodoxy has declared that expensive labor thwarts innovation. How can a business afford to buy all that fancy innovative technology if they are paying their workers well? I think a much better question is: how can we better utilize that well paid employee? So you could pay low wages and have a lot of people doing menial tasks. Or you could pay solid wages and have good, well educated people working very productively.

Each business would have to employ a lot less people in this model, but isn’t that the whole point? If each business can do the same work with much fewer people, then we’ll all be better off since we’ll all be so much more productive.

You can see a sign of this in how countries calculate produtivity per person. American employees get high productivity scores partially because they work long hours. When you look at productivity per hour, European workers are more productive.

Something about property rights have always felt not quite the same as the right to not be killed or tortured by your government, or the right to say what’s on your mind. I haven’t pinned it exactly, but one thing that illustrates these doubts well is the fact that many cultures in the world do not have property has a central organizing idea. The Bushmen of the Kalahari Desert are a classic, maybe cliche example. There used to be a lot more out there. Another example are the Native Americans who famously “sold” Manhattan to the white people for some beads. In their culture, they did not have the same idea of property as the white people. There was not a strong concept of individuals owning land. The land was there and people could use it. For things like hunting, where there could be contention, they negotiated who could hunt by doing things like exchanging beads to gain permission to hunt on land controlled by a different group of people (I am not a historian, so that’s my vague remembrance of the history).

The Arawaks, the people that Christopher Columbus completed wiped out in one of the largest and most effective genocides in history, also did not have a strong sense of individual property. The chroniclers of the Columbus’ voyages talked about how the people would freely share things of value. There were many other such cultures around the world, but the vast majority of them have either been wiped out by people like the conquistadores or totally subjugated during colonialism and had systems of property rights imposed on their culture.

Now that said, I am not opposed to property rights. When you look at property rights in the context of culture and history, I think it becomes clear that the right not to be murdered is universal in human cultures, but the right to own property is far from universal. So if we believe in democracy, that peoples should have a right to choose their own destinies and organize their own societies, then it seems clear that peoples should also have the right to choose how they organize use of finite resources like land.

I just had a thought while riding the subway into Manhattan on my way to teach which I think has quite a bit to do with the current culture of free software. The free software community was initiated by lots of very shy but also communally oriented white males. For many reasons, back then, engineers were already basically all white males. For someone like myself, I have always been interested in working for the good of the community, due to my mother’s constant discussion of this when she raised me, and through my direct experience at Hidden Villa, a summer camp founded as a response to the Japanese Internment during World War II. (The idea was that if children of different backgrounds became friends at a young age, then they would not form the racial biases that triggered Japanese Internment.)

So these things instilled in my a sense of wanting to work for the good of community. But being painfully shy made it very hard for me to interact in groups of the kind that normally people organize to do community-based work. So as I found these communities on BBS’s and then later the internet, I found I could interact with a large group without feeling shy at all. This is something that I still hear today. For example, I have been writing so much text and staring at screens so much that I really want to have higher bandwidth communications for meetings, like voice or in person. Many people that I work with online are resistant to that, and some have said that they think not everyone in the meeting will have their opinions heard. The preference is IRC (text chat rooms).

So you have a lot of shy people who are driven to interact via text on the internet, and these are the people who started working all this free software. There is also an aspect of geek machismo that comes into play, and gender roles in general. In the US, we are bombarded with media that portrays certain gender roles. One of those is that men should be macho to some degree. So the shy dorky males like me also have that impulse, but the expression of it is often in terms the code that we write or the debating of ideas. One other piece of this pie is that the disconnected nature of digital media also tends to lower inhibitions, so people write things in text that they would never say to someone’s face. Altogether, this makes for an intense culture that is probably very difficult to deal with for many people outside of it. But I don’t think this is “the reason”, just one piece of a complicated puzzle.

http://www.guardian.co.uk/world/series/gaza-war-crimes-investigation

Of course, Hamas, Hizbollah, and other groups do the same thing against Israelis. The key difference is that we are not funding them, while we are directly funding Israel’s military to the tune of billions of dollars a year. Those civilians, hospitals, and medical workers were attacked using weapons supplied directly by the US government. In fact, our government stepped up weapons shipment to meet Israeli requests for more weapons. Supposedly, our laws say that we cannot give weapons to groups that break the Geneva conventions. Apparently, no one in government, including the Democrats and the Republicans, think our laws are worth enforcing.

Rahm Emmanuel supports Israeli military actions like this one in Gaza. Do you think the Obama administration is going to bring change with Emmanuel as the Chief of Staff? Ultimately, it is not useful to takes sides on Israel-Palestine debate. It is useful to stop funding military action on all sides.

So I have to once again speak against Israel here since my money is funding their evil deeds. It goes without saying that I do not support Hamas’ idiocy, and as an American, my money doesn’t either. I recently met Tom Tlalim, an Israeli living in the Netherlands, and he gave me an very insightful perspective on the state of the land of his birth. Basically, the massive military aid that the US gives to Israel ensures that only the militaristic politicians can stay power. That is what those billions that we send over there get used for.

It is also interesting to note that Egypt once supported the Gazans, for better or worse. But now the US has bought Egypt’s complicity with Israel against the Gazans. We send massive military aid to Egypt and now Egypt helps tighten the prison walls around the Gazans and helps Israel starve all of its inhabitants.

I just read an interview of Arnon Soffer, apparently credited as being the archtect of the current Israeli plan to pull out of Gaza and the West Bank, and instead launch vicious attacks against them. Now I feel I understand their crazy motivations:

http://jewschool.com/2009/01/06/14707/israel-and-gaza-one-geographers-prediction/

So how about we bail out the people who are losing their jobs and make sure that they can get access to high quality education so that they can improve themselves and the economy?

So far, there is no SIP/VoIP stack included, you can get that with a Nokia N80i and some other Symbian devices for a long time now. As least Android is open enough that it seems that you can do add a SIP stack yourself, if you want. Some are saying that T-Mobile is expressly blocking VoIP.

It does look like Google has started to release the source for Android, which is great news but I haven’t heard yet whether or not they have really released everything. I am guessing they’ll probably do something vaguely like Apple Mac OS X, where the sources for the foundations are released, but as you go up thru the libraries and to the applications, less and less of the sources are released. It looks like Google has released the sources to the core apps, so they are already doing a lot better than Apple.

For more on the topic of the openness of Android, check out Android; The not-so-open open platform, it’s a well annotated discussion. The author discusses the trick of code signing, so that Google/T-Mobile can still control which code can run while releasing all of the source code.

It is an extraordinary period in history. All over the world, there were revolutions of all sorts, from communist to fascist, from anarchist to democratic, from dictatorships to returning monarchies. All sorts of new ideas about how to organize societies and economies were being tried, many failing. And as they failed, for various reasons, there were all sorts of conservative and reactionary responses.

Some of the most profound experiences in my life have been anarchic in their character, like the building of the jet fish called Death Rattler with Madagascar Institute. While there was supposed to be a leader of this project, he had been absent during most of the month of prototyping in New York, then arrived later than a bunch of us in Amsterdam, where we built it. We had a very capable and creative bunch of people, so rather than waiting for this leader to arrive, we just starting designing and building this project. At first, the leader seemed quite annoyed that we were not following him, but I think he was also taken with the enthusiasm and energy of the project, so he joined in the anarchy and we built a crazy machine from scrap metal in two weeks.

So then to see how spanish anarchists were just stepping up and organizing all
sorts of things, while trying to provide for everyone, it is really
quite inspiring. So far, I have dug deep into the anarchist side of
things, reading George Orwell’s Homage to Catalonia, which is a
great book. Then read some of the writings of various anarchists, and I’ve watched all sorts of newsreels.

My obsession still continues… we just watched Libertarias, which was interesting, but unabashedly told from the point of view of anarchist women. Then we watched Spanish Civil War, Part 4: Franco and the Nationalists today, which is a typical documentary in that it tries to show both sides of the story. And I want to watch La Guerra Cotidiana (The Daily War) soon, I find that personal perspectives are the most important. What I am missing is a strongly pro-Franco view on the war, though I have looked. It seems that the Francistas were more interested in repressing any discussion of the war rather than even giving their side of it. Or perhaps there were lots of Francista materials that have since been repressed.

Back to Free Software: after watching Eben Moglen talk about Software and Community in the Early 21st Century, I think I finally realized why this piece of history has such resonance for me: first, the self-organization of the spanish anarchists really highlights two things that are very important to me: a sense of duty to the community combined with freedom from abusive power in as many respects as possible. I see a lot of parallels with the development of the internet and free software. The core ideals of free software are very strongly aligned with the core ideas of anarchism: the ideas of mutual aid and sharing combined with essential freedoms.

I’ve seen a number of betrayals of these ideals from people with in, like the watering down of core values of free software by people who triumph “open source”. And I’ve watched the forces of free software meet some very powerful opposition. In this regard, I think the people involved in free software have been much more successful than the spanish anarchists, but in a more limited realm. At this point, I think can say that the key difference is how they treated the opposing forces. Under the anarchists, there was the widespread burning of churches and violence against Catholicism. Mostly, the Free Software Movement has aimed to get people to join rather than to fight them.

The Free Software Foundation provides a good example of taking a very different approach. When enforcing the GPL, they have deliberately avoided confrontation as much as possible. Though they were entitled to damages and such, they have always pursued compliance over damages and even publicity. This in turn made it much easier for the companies who were initially violators to come to adopt the ideas of free software.

With the fall of Communism, we got a massive swing towards a utopian Capitalism in a lot of the Capitalist West. In the nineties, it was common to believe that we had “broken the business cycle” and there would be no more busts, only booms. Well, that was obviously false, and the dot-com economy collapsed, along with companies like Enron. But of course, Capitalism wasn’t flawed, there were other issues, so we did it again, this time with real estate and insanely complex and opaque financial instruments. And this time, it looks like we are in for a severe recession, or perhaps even a depression.

Even the previously infallible Alan Greenspan had to change his beliefs, he found a flaw his model. [1][2][3][4][5][6]. A while back, I read this interesting analysis of how the current system is getting things wrong like the pricing of large corporations, one of the very things the Capitalist system is supposed to excel at.

It seems pretty obvious that capitalism combined with democracy is a pretty good system for dealing with commodities and efficient production. But it would be silly to say its perfect, and to stop trying to improve upon it. Capitalism has a lot of waste and often ends up creating large, destructive hierarchies. Ever work at a large corporation? It can be mind-numbingly boring and stiffling. Just like Capitalism replaced previous systems like Feudalism, it is becoming quite obvious that digital media is starting to stir up the organization of a new system.

Growing up, I believed that this was a great state of affairs, probably like most Americans. When I was a teenager, we hosted a woman from the Soviet Union. We wanted to show her the bounty of the United States, so we took her to a grocery store. In our heads, we had the stereotypical image of Communist stores with empty shelves and long lines. She was indeed awed by the selection, but not at all in the way we expected. Her strongest impression was, “why do you need so many different kinds of toothpaste?”. To her, it was absurd. That response shook my understanding of the world.

In Austria and Spain, two places I’ve spent quite a bit of time, when you want a beer, you order “a beer”, and they bring you a beer. There is no questioning of which kind of beer. Often times there are one or two other options, which you can ask for by name, but you need only ask for “a beer” to get a beer.

I often times think of New York City as a different country than the rest of the United States. Perhaps it better reflects the way that the United States was before the vast suburbanization of the country. In the regards to the issue of choice, the part of New York City that I live in seems closer to Austria or Spain than the rest of the U.S. Here it is typical to order “a slice” (a slice of cheese pizza) or “a regular coffee” (coffee with milk and sugar).

I’ve been a member of the Park Slope Food Coop since 2002. It is a very successful (almost 14,000 members) grocery store where you have to work 3 hours a month in order to shop there. It is also somewhat democratically run. Compared to something like Whole Foods, this store is pretty small. Yet I never have found it lacking things I want. When I think about it, it does lack a lot of things that I never buy.

I was recently in Sewanee, Tennessee, where I was reminded of more typical American culture. I saw a “greek hummus” sandwich on the menu, and thought it sounded good, and the description looked complete. When ordering this sandwich, I was surprised by the number of questions before I could get my sandwich: “would you like white, wheat, rosemary, or rye bread”, “what kind of cheese, we have american, cheddar, swiss, and provalone”, and of course “to stay or to go”.

The most ironic part of this American obsession with choice is that we so often settle for a number of choices within a really small range. So many restaurants only have soft drinks as options, but there is of course a range of soft drinks. Soft drinks give you the illusion of choice, you can choose between 5 different kinds of sugar water. They really are all the same thing with different flavor syrups added. Compared to the differences between wine and horchata, two common Spanish drinks, the choice of soft drinks looks pretty ridiculous.

Another example are the two political parties, the Democrats and the Republicans. They really are quite close in the political spectrum. Sure, there are some differences, but you can see how close they are by how the vast sums of corporate donations swing from one side to the other quite easily. Those doners want to give money to the winner, since they’ll have the power, but they are too worried about some drastic change. Seeing a political campaign in Austria really opened my eyes to this. The range of views expressed there was very wide. The Communists were saying “drugs should be legalized” (Drogen soll frei geben). This does not mean medicine, it means things like cocaine and marijuana. The Freedom Party was saying something on a more paranoid side of the spectrum: “Immigrants. We understand the worries of the Viennese”. As in the immigrants are causing problems. That is a pretty stark range of choices.

The perception of touch in our hands is strongly tied to our visual perceptions of the things we see in our hands. When these two perceptions don’t match up, there is a feeling of numbness, perhaps unconscious but present nonetheless. At this point, we are so used to this feeling that we don’t really ever think about it.

I recently upgraded to Ubuntu Hardy, which has some Compiz effects enabled by default. Compiz is software that allows a wide range of visual manipulations of all sorts of elements of the GUI. The most common one is the “rubber” windows. Basically, it makes the normally stiff window into a rubbery thing. When I first saw this, I thought it was very nifty, but merely eye candy that I would shortly turn off once the effect became annoying. I was very much surprised to discover that instead of it becoming annoying, it was the stiff windows that bothered me. I started to find the errant few windows that were not rubbery where the annoying ones.

I think there is a similar thing going on with sound design for computers. When computers got sound, both Windows and Mac OS X were plastered with interface sounds. Almost everyone found them really annoying and quickly turned them off. So they were mostly removed as a default thing. But some sounds have crept back in. Like the mail-sending and trash-emptying sounds in Mac OS X. When such effects are carefully considered and used judiciously, they are actually quite useful.

Richard Stallman responded to the book, in this article and in his style cuts right to the core issues of the problem at hand. When the owner of the device has full access and rights to the software, source code and all, then the owner can do everything she needs to ensure that the people who sold it to them are not doing malicious things to them. Read the article for more info.

http://bostonreview.net/BR33.2/stallman.php

Even proprietary software companies behave similarly. It doesn’t matter whether Windows 2000 was working fine for many people, Microsoft discontinued support for it regardless. These actions are also driven by their business model of selling software as if it was a physical thing. You pay for it once up front, but now they are expected to release updates even though the customers are no longer paying.

Not surprisingly, we now have a crazy cycle where the hardware is designed to be disposable. Mobile phones are often so buggy, they crash when making phone calls. This isn’t the result of some conspiracy fomented by some hidden cabal. This is the result of the way the industry is structured, and the idea that software should be treated as a physical thing. If the industry was structured around free software, we’d see very different behavior. This article outlines the issue quite nicely:

Open Source, the only weapon against “planned obsolescence”

- limited access publishing (e.g. Elsevier): It is so expensive to get access to most academic scientific journals that many universities and colleges in the US, let alone less rich nations, do not subscribe to a lot of them. The Public Library of Science is doing en excellent job of publishing true, open access journals: http://plos.org

- closed access data: Although there is a lot of pressure for academic scientists to publish their results, there no such pressure to publish the source, i.e. the raw data that the results were based on. If the gatherer of the data, doesn’t publish it, it remains totally locked away behind a wall of copyright. So this definitely isn’t open source, since no one can get to the source to try their own analysis. Science Commons is talking about this issue some, http://sciencecommons.org/

- completely closed process: many if not most scientific labs are super secretive about what they are working on because they want to be the first to publish, and they believe that restricting access to this process will help guarantee them future grants.

So compared to free software, current academic science completely fails in the these three regards, and perhaps others. The New York Times recently ran an article about what they call “open-source science”. It seems to be mostly about funding research via cash prizes and is very vague on the details. It almost reads like PR for the companies featured.

As for this funding model, I think that this model of using a competition for prize model can be useful for some developments, but it needs to be one of many approaches. If this was the only funding model, we would be worse off. For example, in the drug industry, it is well demonstrated that the for-profit R&D model is very good at successive improvement of existing techniques, but bad at all other types of research. Basically all groundbreaking drug research is done by government funded R&D that has very few direct returns to the funding agency. So these two different funding models complement each other.

Now, there is starting to be a lot of attention being focused on mobile phones and internet. People barely ever make calls, it’s far too expensive. The most popular uses by far are texting and money transfers by sending airtime minutes via SMS. Of course, lots of people are very excited by this idea, but it reminds me of when I worked at a dotcom and we were doing banking sites in the late nineties. No one gave a shit about security then, so now we have a flood of phishing and assorted other attacks. This same thing is happening with these mobile mobile transfers, and the microfinance banks are starting to get involved.

I think the time is ripe to nip this in the bud. These services are just starting up now. They are well enough established to see how things work, but not so well established that they can change a lot yet. If people had paid real attention to the security issues about online banking in the late nineties, things would be far better now. We have the opportunity to learn from our gross mistakes, let’s not repeat this mistake.

Here’s one example service from Kenya:

Safaricom M-PESA

There were special low-power processors designed for them, small high resolution screens started to show up, and flash memory got ever cheaper and easier to use. Without most people noticing it, their handset had morphed into a pretty powerful computer. The handset manufacturers and telecoms took advantage of this and started offering more and more features. They could always sell more handsets and services as people started using their phones for more than just simple phone calls. Since most people didn’t think of their phone as a computer, they didn’t really think about being able to upgrade the operating system or install new software, things we all take for granted on our computers.

The vast majority of mobile phones completely block the possibility of upgrading the operating system at all. They even successfully lobbied to make it illegal for people to do it themselves. The Digital Millenium Copyright Act (DMCA) makes it illegal to unlock built-in features or try to circumvent their blocks in order to upgrade the operating system. Thankfully, the Library of Congress was given the power to issue exemptions to the DMCA restrictions [1]. And they did just that, so now people are allowed to fully own their devices, and upgrade their software, or unlock features.

Mobile companies do their best to continue this myth that phones are by their very nature fixed devices. Their business models drive them to tell their customers that they are only consumers, the telecoms will magically provide software on their phone.

It is now quite clear, mobile phones ARE PCs, they have fast CPUs, memory, and storage just like PCs. They are even started to have graphics processors like PCs. The ARM CPU architecture is as ubiqitous in mobile devices as the Intel x86 architecture is on home computers. All these mobile and embedded devices are almost as generic as the generic PC. Now, if computer manufacturers started treating their customers as telecoms treat theirs, there would be widespread revolt. “What do you mean, I can’t install my own software?”; “Are you seriously telling me that I can never upgrade my OS?”

The world is now at the point where most people will only ever experience computing with a mobile phone. In the developed world, we are shifting more and more things to our mobile devices. The PC unleashed an amazing explosion of innovation and growth, are we ready to give them up just because the mobile industry is built upon faulty business models which are protected by the monopolistic behavior of massive corporations?

• mobile phones allow us to keep in touch with people far away, while isolating us from the people who are physically present in the same space
• the nomadic laptop cafe goer is connected to the whole world, while disconnected from the people they are sitting next to
• television allows us to sit on our couches while seeing the places all over the globe, but if you observe the TV viewer, they are in a zone where it doesn’t matter who’s on the couch with them

It is key that we get this straight when talking about technology. Is technology really “bringing us closer together”? In general, technology has triggered more isolation from the people we are sitting next to, while we can have a somewhat closer conncetion to people far away. A mobile phone is also a very useful tool for organizing people to share the same physical space. By providing information, mobile phones could create more connection between people in the same room. It’s really a matter of how we think about it.

The mobile phone networks were built to fulfill a social demand, rather than to create a market. But this media was created almost entirely by private companies whose business model was selling service by the minute. This created a medium that encourages users to be using it as much as possible no matter what they are doing. “Thus, it might be argued that the emerging industrial society of the 19th century invented the telephone to meet its communications needs. This thesis will argue in Chapter 6 that the mobile telephone was developed in the 1990s largely in response to this type of widespread social need, not random technological breakthroughs.” (Anthony Townsend’s Thesis) When the telecoms have driven the technology, the result has been quite different. WAP is an example of the mobile phone companies designing a technology to restrict users access: “WAP wanted to keep users as consumers, never producing. Always consuming.”
Clay Shirky

The bottom line is that mobile phones are little computers, complete with screens and keyboards. Yes, even a 7 year old phone without Symbian or a color screen. Basically all current mobile phones are faster than the Apple II, which was a triumph in getting interactive computers to the masses. What makes mobile phones so different from the Apple II is that the companies who sell them actively try to prevent people from hacking on their own devices. What made the Apple II such a massive success was that Apple encouraged people to develop and share code for it, true to the ethic of the Homebrew_Computer_Club that it was a product of. So when you get down to it, mobiles phones are a platform where there are strong forces trying to keep you dumb and to make sure that you only ever have read-only literacy in the device. Yes, even the glorius iPhone is very much a full-fledged member of the club that wants to keep you from creating on your own software. You not only have to pay Apple $99 for the privelege of putting software on your own device, but most people who apply to be iPhone developers have been rejected.

This draconian lock down on Apple’s part might be the inspiration for people to start hacking their own phones. It wasn’t so long ago that the DMCA made that illegal. Thankfully, there is some intelligence at the Library of Congress and they have since made it legal for people to install software on their own devices.

I recently ran the iPhoneDevCampNYC with others and through this process, I have come to a realization. Apple has created a very nice piece of hardware that many people want. But since they have restricted its use and availability, there is now a massive demand for hacking the iPhone. Thanks to the work of the iphone dev team and others, it is quite easy to circumvent Apple’s restrictions. 250,000 iPhones never had their AT&T service activated, that means almost 20% of iPhone buyers have been hacked to be unlocked.

One people realize that they can control their own devices, I think it will be quite hard to put the genie back in the bottle. Just like how the demise of Napster actually made peer-to-peer software stronger and more popular, Apple’s restrictions could end up creating a stronger and more organized hacker community. The delayed release of the iPhone SDK already created a large community around the unofficial SDK, now we need to work to keep that community alive, and continue to be the center of innovation for the iPhone.

Then as more open projects like OpenMoko and perhaps Google Android come along, that should further the pressure on mobile manufacturers in general to open up the devices.

Their whole business model is all about minutes, they want to get you to spend money on a per minute basis, even though their costs basically do not change in relation to minute usage. Their costs are almost all fixed on a monthly basis. But since they can make more money charging per minute, they don’t use an internet-style periodic charge for unmetered service.

Telecoms are also very actively lobbying to stop governments from setting up their own wireless networks. Sadly, they have been quite successful in this. Philadelphia has been running a free wireless network in its center for a while, and it served as the inspiration for a number of other municipalities to try the same thing. In New York City for example, it would cost the city less to run a wifi network than it does to run the streetlights. No one would say we should privatize the streetlights or even put meters on them, so you’d have to stick a quarter into the streetlight to get 15 minutes of light.

Sure, the capital expense would not be small, but if you deploy the network using the existing power grid and physical infrastructure of the streetlights, it will be much cheaper. The per-unit costs of streetlight versus outdoor wifi access points, they are comparable. When you look at electricity usage, wifi takes a tiny fraction of the amount of power, think 400W for a streetlight versus 15W for a wifi access point. Then through in mesh and powerline internet distribution, and you have a robust and ubiquitous internet infrastructure. Yes, mesh and powerline have not been deployed and tested on a grand scale, but there are already a number of successful implementations of both. Mesh networking is so cheap that people in many cities are building citywide mesh networks out of their own pockets (e.g. Funkfeuer and Freifunk).

In any case, I will continue to struggle with the spotty and difficult VoIP-over-wifi experience, until we have networks that promote our shared values rather than fight to destroy them all in the name of profit.

Facebook, MySpace, LinkedIn, and basically all of the social networking sites do just that. There entire business model is based around the idea that they are going to try to get you to direct as much as your social interactions as possible through their site so that they can sell as much advertising as possible. One interesting thing is how these companies got themselves into this position. Most of these social networking sites started as a non-commercial project, perhaps with some initial intentions of turning commercial, but perhaps not. After generating a substantial user base, they have switched to completely commercial.

Facebook is a great example of this idea, since they are constantly expanding all of the options available for interacting. Their open API encourages more people to create ever more ways of interacting with people via Facebook, and that in turn drives people to use it. I see two directions that this could go. First, they become ever more popular, and the vast populace that used to spend so much time behind their televisions will now spend their time behind their computers. So while it is purportedly all about friends, it will in effect take people away from their friends and encourage them to only interact with their friends via these commercially mediated spaces.

Second, most people realize that their relationships are better when someone else is not mediating them for their own profit, so these sites fade from popular use. There is definitely value to social networking sites, but this seems to me to be the achilles heel of the genre. As long as they are tightly focused, like LinkedIn, which focuses on business connections, it seems to me that they won’t suffer nearly as much from the ills of commercialization.

Perhaps it would be possible to start a non-profit social networking site, which could encourage creativity without the pressures of the business world. It may sound crazy, but wikipedia and craiglist are two examples of how to make such a thing work.

Also, Apple generally makes it easy to upgrade and fix them yourselves, and there is a real market for it. (http://ifixit.com) Compare that to any other maker. I just sold my 5 year old, 800Mhz PowerBook with a broken screen for $200. Compare that to a refurbished, 2-3 year old 1.4 GHz Dell laptop with a 90 day warranty for $300. It’s hard to even find Dell laptops for sale older than 3 years.

To be clear, in no way do I support Apple’s resistance to implementing computer recycling, that’s a important effort to keep all that toxic material out of the ground. But I think that the debate over recycling is coming at the expense of the more important issue of building devices to last. The making of electronic devices generates a lot of pollution and requires a lot of energy and resources during the manufacture. Yet people treat them as disposable. Apple is fully complicit in this when you look at iPods and other devices. If there was a small effort put into making electronics repairable and upgradeable, we’d save a lot of money, energy, and pollution.

Call me sentimental, but I got quite attached to my old powerbook, and had it been possible to fix, I would have. Instead it is going to be an organ donor and I bought another one which I hope to have for longer than 5 years.

You can follow this pattern again and again thruout human history. 10,000 years ago, painting was a rare skill, now every child in school in the U.S. learns to paint on a level pretty close to prehistoric paintings. 150 years ago, photography was very expensive and it took substantial technical training to become a photographer. Now, anyone who can point-n-shoot is a photographer. And many of those point-n-shooters are actually taking very accomplished photographs.

We’ve reached a point where the majority of people in a developed world are very highly educated and functioning. In the U.S., about 85% of people graduate from high school. [1] A number of other countries are well above 90%. That means that all those people spent at least 13 years in school. Even compared to a century ago, this is a dramatic difference. As people become more educated, the bar is raised for “high-art”.

Now many people have this idea that “high-art” must be separate from more widespread art, but now the education difference between the “high-artist” and the average person has become quite narrow. The original impulse for high-art was for highly developed art, which meant choosing a person and devoting extra resources so that person could spend time developing their art.

Now it seems that since the difference in education and resources between “high-artists” and the average person is becoming ever more minimal, this “high-art” impulse has shifted to focusing on obscurity. It is rare that an artist is actually working in a medium that just about anyone could learn in their spare time after work. So in order to maintain the cache of “high-art”, the art world has become focused on making things about obscure insider references to a very insular world that really has nothing to do with
the original idea of having someone who works beyond what the average person is capable.

This means to me that “high-art” is becoming increasingly irrelevant. And you can see this in the flurry of artistic output that is available on the internet. I say we are all the better for it.

This is the question that many people willingly ignore. Think of the fair trade activist who wears Nike shoes. Yes, it’s an iconic image, but I think that it illustrates quite well the point I am trying to make. We like the things that corporations sell, obviously, because we buy them. If we believe that a corporation is destroying our world, then quite simply, we should not give that corporation our money.

To me the real way to change is to vote with your dollars. Support the people you believe in directly, by giving them your business. I do not mean to say that we should not regulate businesses, I definitely believe that regulation is an essential part of the whole mix. But what really irks me is that so many self-proclaimed environmentalists continue to drive cars, buy lots of electronics, fly on airplanes, etc.

On a similar note, many people complain about locally owned stores being replaced by chain stores. If you think chain stores are bad, don’t shop at them. Yes, it is usually true that you will hand them less cash for a product than you would at a small mom-n-pop store. But you will pay in indirect ways as your town falls apart because everyone goes to the mall now, and your culture falls apart as you give up local control over the landscape of your town to all those chain stores.

I guess it can all be summed up in the old adage, “practice what you preach”. That’s easy to say. Now I encourage people to look at the practices of the people or organizations you give your money to. If you don’t like things that they do, don’t give them your money.

Looks very nifty and fun, but too bad they don’t have an real applications in that demo. Like what if you want to do something to those images he’s throwing around. Where is the means for navigating the functions, or the magically disappearing replacement for menus? I am not skeptical of the ideas, I am more skeptical of his Ted presentation. I’ve played with that screen, they do have interesting ideas, and it works pretty well. But they are not well developed as a whole, they are still very much vaguely connected ideas. He talks really big, “the interface just disappears”, yet he doesn’t show very real applications, they seem very much like cool demos without a lot of meat.

A great example of a real paradigm shifting demo is Augmentation Research Lab’s 1968 Demo, aka “the Mother of All Demos”. They introduced the basics of the GUI, hyperlinks, and video conferences in a system that actually worked and that they all used everyday as their main computers in their lab. I really doubt that the researchers at the MRL at NYU are sitting in front of one of those for their main computers everyday.

For more on the 1968 demo, check this: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Mother_of_All_Demos

It has been interesting to follow the progress of this project and its demos. The more recent demo videos have gotten to be much more impressive, they are showing actually useful applications for it. And the language has gotten more subdued. I think they realize that, while very useful, there interface is not a replacement for the WIMP interface steered using a keyboard and mouse. It seems that the culture has been infected with demoitis. People developing new software spend a lot of effort on hype and demos, which inevitably takes away from getting actual work done, so much so that many of these projects that get lots of hype fade away into nothing after the hype.

I don’t think the software creators are only to blame (only largely), it seems that the grants and new media academic establishments expect lots of demos and press, even if it comes at the expense of actual, working implementations. The Augmentation Research Lab’s 1968 Demo were in a very different situation. They were given lots of money and were not expected to show anything substantial for years. When they gave their demo, they had a working system that they had already been using in their day-to-day work for a while. I think this is something that we need to consider if we as a society are going to continue to develop innovative means of interaction.

One key reasons is that face-to-face communications and collaboration are much more fulfilling than doing the same via email, IRC, IM, etc. But in the case of the academic communities in NYC, there should be a lot more crosstalk, but some institutions really actively avoid external interaction.

Part of this is driven by the “business model” of many universities (yes, people who run universities think like that, tho many of the academics are isolated from it). Most universities in the US need students to pay tuition in order to pay the bills. If there is lots of external collaboration, then there is perhaps less incentive to pay the $40,000 a year to be part of that community.

One thing that inspires me is barcamps/unconferences, and I believe this is what the role of the university should be. A university should be an institution that supports education and research. Access should not be arbitrarily restricted by things like money, degrees, affiliation, etc. Anyone who wants to come should come and participate. There will be of course trolls, spoilers, people who talk too much, etc. Such things are a part of life everywhere.

We are human, and an essential part of our nature is communication. Therefore, if we don’t have the collective social skills to handle this, it is time to develop them. In doing so, we will gain a vast improvement in the exchange and development of knowledge. For example, at the barcamps and unconfernces that I have participated in, I have seen these collective social skills being used and developed. And when it works, it is really an inspiring experience, and provides an experience that is much closer to the ideal of a conference in terms of the amount of knowledge developed and exchanged.

So now the missing link in all this is the funding. That is a big reason why I am happy to be working at Polytechnic University. It is an institution that has withered a lot from its glory days. In the language of those in the university business, it’s a “third tier” university. One of the key benefits is that there is a quite a bit of space, classrooms, exhibition space, and an 350 seat auditorium that are very much underused. That means I can host events paying nothing for the space. Other universities in the area charge their own faculty and staff thousands for access to the same space.

Also, my job supports me so that I have time to help organize such events. It’s actually not very expensive for the university at all, and we can provide something really quite unique in the NYC area, and much closer to my ideal of an academic institution.

There are now so many ways of publishing, and the academic world is largely stuck on the old publishing papers on expensive dead tree journals. The all-important CV is supposed to list a person’s publishing activities, but yet it seems no one seems to know how to deal with adding websites, blogging, etc. to a CV. On some level, the distinct role of academia should be changing because there are many people doing real research on their own, without any affiliation to any academic institution, and often without any graduate degree.

A great example of this is bittorrent, it was created and written by Bram Cohen while he couched surfed for 2 or so years. He was just a hacker figuring out things largely on his own. Now there are hordes of academics discussing bittorrent, following its example, wishing they had created something anywhere close to as influential as bittorrent.

In a similar manner, digital media is changing the text we read from static, printed pages to ever-evolving documents, with no inherent restrictions on who can edit or contribute, (e.g. Wikipedia). These developments are fundamental to the nature of digital media and computing, and to ignore this in education would be to cripple our students. This should be directly reflected in the curriculum itself. No matter how brilliant the teacher, the class will always have something valuable to add to a class. Digital media greatly increases our abilities to enable such participation within the controlled environment of the classroom.

This also allows students to rapidly start contributing to the curriculum. First, starting with very simple ways, such as correcting typos or mistakes, then moving on to creating examples to further illustrate ideas, to ultimately teaching younger students using the same materials that they learned from and contributed to. Much like how students should start reading and writing and using and programming computers at the same time, students should start from early on both learning and teaching. As any teacher knows, teaching a subject is a very effective method of learning that subject in depth. Students can then be learning teach while learning through teaching, breaking down the artificial barrier between the learning and teaching that often exists in educational environments.

There is some software that has done away with “save” and just made it an automatic thing (like pen and paper). Two notable examples are Palm Pilots and the wonderful Mac OS X writing program, CopyWrite. Using both, I have found myself freed of all sorts of stupid compulsions and problems, and have yet to see any good reason why File->Save is still the norm.

Yes, this is a little detail, I choose to focus on it because it demonstrates how calcified the world of user interface design has come. It’s all about smoothing over warts rather than stepping back and looking at why there are so many warts to begin with. There is always the interplay between standardization, which has many benefits, and experimentation. I am a strong advocate for standards, but at this point, there is something else happening. Something more like fear of change that becomes so endemic in large organizations like corporations. Perhaps that’s why it took upstarts like Palm and CopyWrite to make these baby steps to more rational computing.

Also, I think that things that automatically correct errors often cause more problems than they solve. A good example is HTML parsers from before XHTML 1.0. Basically, instead of giving errors when they encountered bad HTML, they attempted to guess the intentions and render that. That led to lots of pages that were unmaintainable because they were so obstuse and buggy. Then many pages wouldn’t run on small devices like phones, etc. because it takes to much CPU power to do all that error correcting.

If you look now at HTML, XHTML is definitely what people are using, which is actually quite strict. And instead of testing web pages on every single browser and version that people could think of, companies are now spending that effort on making full featured sites. All these AJAX sites are the perfect example, like Google Maps, etc.

And lastly, as Paul Vixie, one of the main authors of DNS software, pointed out, what’s the difference between typosquatting (i.e. googl.com going to a site with random ads) and this service? It’s really the same thing when you think about it.

Coming from a free software developer, saying everything will operate like free software may be a bit arrogant, I will admit. But it is important to note that the core ideas of free software did not originate in the world of computers. Academic traditions are often cited as the root of these ideas. There are many other examples. Before recording and the widespread use of sheet music, music was also firmly rooted in this method of development. Musicians freely lifted and used other people’s music, playing it, modifying it, passing it on. This was an essential part of the composition process. I think there are probably many other examples that would serve as excellent examples, like storytelling traditions, and recipe swapping. These ideas are present throughout the development of humanity.

Of course, everyone is entitled to be compensated for their work. Nobody has a right to economic exploitation, and everyone has a right to earn a living. That’s essential for people to survive, so if we are interested in supporting human endeavor, we need to support humans. Whichever culture figures out how to make a system that takes advantage of the lack of scarcity of digital media while ensuring that people can earn a living producing it will become far more efficient. This is the dawning of the next economic system, this is just like the tulip markets in the Netherlands centuries ago, which started capitalism. Capitalism took over because it was more efficient. Economies which produce free media will take over from capitalism because they are more efficient. You can already see this in action, look at GNU/Linux vs. Microsoft. GNU/Linux is built largely by volunteers, many of who are teenagers and hobbyists. Microsoft is one of the richest and most profitable companies ever, and they are known for hiring the best of best. Their only real threat these days is GNU/Linux.

Traditional instruments have a great advantage in this regard. There standardization allows musicians to learn and share an existing body of technique. Musicians using standardized instruments can learn from existing masters, as well as collaboratively develop and share a body of technique further. Musical technique can be modular as well, with musicians learning controllers, synthesizers, and even mappings as distinct “modules” of technique. Using high-level software modules with standard human interface devices make a modular approach to instrumental technique increasingly feasible.
Modular technique allows musicians to play newly created instruments with some degree of existing skill, putting virtuosity within reach. These modules of technique can exist separately from whole instruments, therefore a shared body of technique is starting to be developed.

Knowledge of particular synthesis methods is an example of modular technique that has been common in the computer music world for a long time. Many musicians and composers choose a specific synthesizer (software or hardware) and learn the details of the range of sound that it can produce. For example, someone knowledgable about FM synthesizers has a strong idea about what modulating frequencies make vibrato sounds or how high to raise that frequency to stop sounding like vibrato. This knowledge can be usefully applied to any implementation of this algorithm much like how trumpet mouthpiece technique can be usefully applied to a french horn. It can also be applied regardless of the control interface.

Turntable and DJ mixer interfaces have long been standardized, providing a common platform for turntablists. The body of technique is quite established, with a variety of techniques for manipulating the turntables and mixer, with specific names such as “the chirp” and “the flare” [password-protected source, arg!] . Using different source records dramatically changes the resulting sound, i.e. scratching beats versus tones, yet the same techniques apply. The turntables are even becoming a general controller with software like Final Scratch or Ms. Pinky.

Already some musicians are defining technique for consumer controllers. A paper by Wessel and Wright [password-protected source, arg!] describes a few techniques for the graphics tablet: “Drag and Drop”, “Scrubbing”, and “Dipping”. The video game world provides further examples for technique with standard controllers, with an established body of technique, for example: “Pawing (verb): the act of lifting a mouse and returning it to the center of your mouse pad. Useful when trying to make a sequence of fast mouse movements” [source]. Serious video gamers spend years perfecting their skills in interactive tasks that require similar levels of control and concentration as making music. Though certain controllers are better suited to specific games, the technique developed on a given controller outweighs the possible benefit of changing controllers. Similarly, they are hesitant to use unorthodox controllers partly because the technique has not been developed, nor would the user community be as large.

If this approach was applied broadly, skilled performances with new instruments would be within reach for a wide range of musicians.

Humans started out making their own tools because there was no one else who could do it. As society progressed and we became more and more specialized in our skills, we find that those of us who want to express ourselves are using tools created by people who we will never even meet. It is therefore difficult to affect the development of these tools in any way. Software has the power to accelerate this trend, with proprietary software locking us out entirely. We could always modify our brush or pen, we cannot modify Macromedia Flash. Software also has the ability to reverse this trend when it is free (as in speech). When the software is free, that means the tools could be built by highly skilled developer, yet it is possible for anyone to modify it.

Everyone should own their tools like traditional artists and craftspeople do. Traditional artists spend a lot of time figuring out the tools they want, usually customizing them, like paintbrushes and chisels, and even making the tools themselves. Sculptors hone their chisels, reed instrument players make their own reeds, wood and metal workers are constantly making new tools to solve unusual problems. Proprietary software makes this quite difficult at best, impossible at worst. Even for the Flash expert, it is not easy to write Flash plugins, and even if they can write plugins, what those plugins can do is limited by Macromedia’s design choices. Digital artist should own their tools just like traditional artists can. Free software is one essential aspect of this, and programming literacy is another that is often forgotten.

The problem is not only that humans need to gain literacy in programming, but also that the tools need to gain fluency with humans. Programming environments are usually designed by and for experts who were educated as engineers. Even though Java, Python, etc. are relatively new languages, they are strongly rooted in languages like C, which were designed for computer efficiency over human efficiency. Even the QWERTY keyboard was designed to hamper the human in order to protect the machine. The ideal tool complements the user’s thought process. The ideal tool is accessible to the beginner yet powerful for the experienced.

At the root of this problem is how most people view programming: a specialized skill that few need to learn. Instead, everyone who uses a computer should be able to program a computer. Programming literacy should be as commonplace as reading ability. Everybody who can read also writes at least sometimes. Anyone using software should be at least able to modify software, if not create their own. Computing devices now are almost always built for one sided interaction: the programer creates it, and the user uses it.

Few users question this, most people think it must be this way. This is what what most of us have experienced, and most of us have been taught. There are a number of different projects such as Pure Data, Processing, and Arduino that are demonstrating that read/write computer literacy is not only feasible but something that people desire. Add together free software, free hardware, and programming literacy, and we should now think of all people as creators and users, and all devices as programming platforms.

This is not a new idea, far from it. In fact, it was one of the driving ideas behind the development SmallTalk at Xerox PARC. Object-oriented programming, the largest advance in programming in the past 30 years, traces its history through SmallTalk. But sadly it is an idea that has been once again cast aside as the product managers embraced the power of Object-oriented programming to produce better software while skipping over the core idea that the whole system should be open to all users to modify and create as well as merely use.

The current BSD attribution clause is harmless because it clearly defines how attribution is given: just include the license file with the files that you distribute. When releasing software, there are many files that need to be included, and there are already well established techniques of managing files, so they is a minute burden. On the other hand, the Creative Commons’ attribution clause is very broad, making it worse than the original BSD license. (see section 4(b) of Attribution 2.5 Legal Code). The CC licenses are a notable improvement over completely closed licenses, but when compared to the proven free software licenses, there are problems, including some that have been recently solved.

Lawrence Lessig and company are most definitely lawyers. Lawyers generally believe that the law works while forgetting that the law is really expensive. So when it comes down to it, are you going to spend $5000 to $10,000 suing someone who didn’t give you attribution? If it was free content, they would still be able to distribute it for free. What I am saying is that yes, I believe that we should give credit where credit is due, but attribution clauses don’t really help with the problem while adding a real cost to using media with such a license.

The cost is that you have to track down and ensure the attribution information and make sure you get it correct. The CC licenses makes it even worse because it does not even specify how you must give attribution, but instead says that its up to the author. So if you were making something like Debian, you would have to track the specific attribution requests of thousands of different authors. Same goes for a track that uses a lot of samples, or a movie built from footage of many sources. That takes a lot of time, and the person has to be educated in the specifics of the license issues.

Another cost is for works whose author can not be found. If you stumble upon a 50 year old work with a CC-BY-SA license, and you want sample from it. You will need to track down that author in order to find out how you must attribute the work. Unlike the BSD licenses, the CC-BY-SA license does not specify how you should make the attribution, it leaves it up to the author. This is the exact same problem with current copyrights and will lead to lots of abandoned work being left in limbo. The CC license is an improvement over more restrictive licenses since the work would still be able to be viewed and distributed, it would not be legal to sample from it or modify it.

There are more and more examples of unforeseen problems that are cropping up as we find new uses for collections of human knowledge, and new methods for searching through them. One example that was recently brought to my attention is scientific data sets. As scientists post their data in common repositories, more people can search through them using and ever expanding selection of tools. Now consider a search that returns data from 50,000 different data sets. If those data sets were released with a license that used an attribution clause, you would now have to track down how 50,000 different authors want to be attributed. That is serious work which would seriously curtail research.

There are some attempts to deal with these issues in the CC-By clauses in the licenses by discussing how the attribution needs to be handled when included in a “Collective Work”, but it is still very murky, and there is not a “Human Readable Code” version of this text for those of us who just want to put our work out there rather than try to comprehend thick legalese. For more discussion on the problems of CC licenses, check out the reports Debian-legal workgroups on this topic:

debian-legal Summary of Creative Commons 2.0 Licenses
Debian Creative Commons Workgroup report
Debian and the Creative Commons

As for the other side of this debate, this blog post covers some of the possible advantages of attribution clauses:

Attribution and full-blooded open sourceness

There seems to be a common thread in these environments. They are very open and supportive, with little or no criticism. Grading is basically non-existent (i.e. basically everyone gets A’s). People are allowed to get away with just about anything in terms of the work they do or don’t do. On one hand, I think some of this is essential to creating an environment where people are free to try out new ideas. As with any experiments, most of the ideas turn out to be crap, but a precious few ideas make it through, and perhaps in a way that would have not otherwise occured. There are many derivations on this model, from famous research labs like Xerox PARC to various art groups.

In the academic environment, there seems to be a lot of chaff, hangers on, people just going thru the motions. At MPZ it was an extreme split, half worked very hard, the other half did almost nothing, barely even going through the motions. At ITP, the lows were not as low, but I’d say about 60% of the students just go through the motions. Other alumni I have discussed this with were less generous, saying that figure is closer to 90%. In any case, we all agreed that there was at least 10% that was working hard and actually producing interesting work. What I wonder is whether having a large body of slackers is an essential element, or whether there is some way of having an environment of free creativity where the majority of those involved are working hard.

Before starting at ITP, I was working at a lot with the art combine Madagascar Institute. This was, and still is, a very inspirational group to work with. Anyone can show up and join, there is no application, or membership, no fraternity trials. Yet this group works very hard, and shows a lot of talent in building and organizing amazing creations with very few resources. There is also a educational aspect to it. There are regular classes and workshops, and people come to work in order to learn various skills, and apply newly found skills. Many people arrive with few of the skills needed, and through the years of working there have become quite accomplished.

At ITP, there were quite a few resources, yet easily a third of the people where just there to hang out, not really doing anything at all. It was really only about 10% of the students at ITP that I felt compared to the level of the Madagascar Institute people that I worked with. I found this extremely frustrating, here was an environment with resources to offer, but most people just want to go get plastered every “Thursday Night Out” as a warm-up for their weekend of partying. This seemed to me to be a spectacular waste of resources, and I cannot stop from thinking what the Madagascar Institute would pull off with a fraction of those resources.

One thing I noticed is that a lot of ITP students came from families with quite a bit of money, and many of them would be supported by their family completely if they were in school. So they could go to ITP, and just do the bare minimum to make it thru, and they would otherwise have their lives paid for. Sounds like a built-in motivation to slack off and go get drunk. Another problem is that many people want the degree as a stamp of approval on their resume, so they maintain their full time jobs, and go to ITP on the side. These are really just some guesses. I am largely mystified at what would otherwise motivate people to to spend lots of money if they did not intend to fully take advantage of it.

Music Program Zero at Bard College was a similar environment. Of course the rich parents are going to pay for Bard College! So what if you are majoring in DJing, yet only really spin some records for a few hours a week, and spend most of your time partying and buying records and used clothes (you can’t look rich, that just would not be very artsy). There were two DJing majors at MPZ when I was there. One of them just hung out and bought records, the other actually worked very hard and gave some inspired concerts of turntablism.

Now compare this to Madagascar Institute. Undoubtedly, there are a few who have mysterious sources of funding, that’s always the case in the art world. But chances are, you won’t get any credit from the rich family for hanging out with a bunch of broke artist types making events and contraptions out of scraps and garbage. So there is the natural self-selection. There is a long list of people who come and go, helping and learning little bits here and there, then fading away. There is also a solid core, many who came with substantial skills, but all learned a substantial amount through working at Madagascar Institute, both through workshops and classes, and through working on all sorts of projects.

So now, Madagascar Institute is very strapped for cash (in fact, I think you should donate money now), so what would happen if you have the resources of NYU combined with the inspired, driven work of Madagascar Institute? That would be the place to be. The hard part of the question is how to make that happen. I aim to start to answer this question in continuing posts to this here blog thing.

I’ll start now with some quick observations. One of the realities of ITP is that tuition actually pays a lot of the bills to keep the program running, so there needs to be quite a few students who pay full tuition. Funding is the unavoidable question, the money has to come from somewhere, and many (most?) art programs are funded this way. Also, there is a hidden benefit to having a bunch of people just hanging out. Since there is a large body of the ITP population who are not working hard, they are often interested in playing with other people’s projects. Quite a few people are willing to try out whatever you might post up, and that kind of feedback can be very helpful.

The other thing that I can see is the structure of the university setting. It is limited access: you must apply, be accepted, and pay a lot of money to participate in this community. Part of this is unavoidable because of the funding question. If people can freely come participate in the community, a lot of people wouldn’t pay for privilege. It seems that many believe that restricting access to a precious few is a benefit. My experience at Madagascar Institute made me unlikely to believe that any more. All sorts of people showed up, those who didn’t work just stood by the wayside and watched, but didn’t get in the way. Those who knew nothing but wanted to learn and were willing to work were rapidly sucked in and put to work. Sure, first they had to start as a “monkey”, doing menial tasks, but opportunities were plentiful for people to step up and take on new challenges with guidance from skilled people.

Perhaps Madagascar Institute does not produce anything like the kinds of focused learning like a university setting, and this could be recognized as a shortcoming of that environment. But then you have to consider that it is also an extremely low budget organization. The amount spent on one student at Bard College or NYU ITP in a year would cover the annual budget of the whole of Madagascar Institute many times over.

Instead, I think that the free software community can start small and make a meaningful impact, while learning how to develop any hardware device. A good example is the Arduino project. The Arduino is the free computer that you describe in the article, albeit a very small one. It is based around a 16MHz Atmel AVR ATMEGA8 microcontroller. It only has a USB connection and a bunch of analog and digital I/O pins.

This thing has more processing power than the first computer my family owned in 1986. That one cost almost US$5000, the Arduino costs US$35. You can build one yourself for less than US$10. The whole development environment and libraries are free software, available under the GNU GPLv2 (now that Sun released Java under that license [source]

Yes, its a small start, but there are some very important lessons being learned here. First off, how to create a manufacturing and supply chain for free hardware. That’s already working, you can buy the Arduino readily in North America and Europe. More work is being done along these lines in Colombia, South Korea, and other places.

Also, just like free software is architected and built in a very different manor than proprietary software from giant companies, free hardware is developed in a very different manor than hardware designed and built by giant companies. So that means we should not be purely thinking of imitating the models we see in the proprietary hardware world. Instead we need to find which models work best for free hardware.

http://melbourne.indymedia.org/news/2006/11/130885_comment.php

I was inspired to post a comment pointing that out since I’ve been reading some history of the sixties and seventies. There were many activist groups that were torn apart by the conflict between the pro-violence and non-violence camps. In particular, I was very disappointed by the collapse of the Midpeninsula Free University, in Palo Alto, California, where I grew up. This was a free university where anyone could teach and anyone could take classes. It lasted almost 10 years, but in the end was destroyed by Maoists who took it over to use as a recruiting and training venue for violent protest. We can all see quite clearly now that in that era, non-violence was far more successful that violence, look at the massive mobilization and significant and lasting change that Martin Luther King, Jr. and company were able to achieve. I shudder to see that advocates of violence could again destroy the foundations of a new movement on the scale of the sixties that we are building.

And for some constructive ideas, there are still some ideas from that forgone era that are useful now. Saul Alinsky provided some very clever and effective non-violence protests that we can learn a lot from. For example, he organized a toilet sit-in at the Chicago O’Hare airport to get the mayor to pay attention to their cause. When faced with the news hitting that none of those business men flying in could go to the bathroom, the mayor paid attention. Check out this synopsis of his Rules for Radicals or read the whole book.

And to end of, I think the EZLN can teach us a lot about how to conduct a protest. Below is a video of the power of non-violence in action. The Mexican military had illegally set up an base in Chiapas in southern Mexico. The locals had been tormented and harassed by the Mexican military, so they did not want them there. They took non-violent action, and stormed the base, facing down soldiers with rifles, machine guns, and grenade launchers pointing at them. The military withdrew later the same day in response to this protest:

EZLN takeover of illegal military base

:0
* ^X-MSMail.*
{
    :0 B
    * filename=.*\.(txt)\.(com|exe|js|pif|scr|vba|vbs|zip)\"$
    /dev/null
}

Basically, this rule first looks for any message that has the header X-MSMail in it. Microsoft mail programs use this header, so basically I am targeting email from Microsoft mail programs for extra filtering. Then the next step of the rule filters out any message that has an attachment of types: com,exe,js,pif,scr,vba,vbs,zip that are also labeled as .txt. I guess this is the preferred format for virii.

Wow, I never thought such a simple rule could save so much of my time!

In these ‘minishops’, people could drop in and start from scratch, bring in ideas from the other workshops and minishops, or work on projects they are already had going. On one hand, it made structured learning and teaching quite difficult since people would drop in at any point of the day and stay for varying lengths of time from hours to days. Even their skill levels varied widely. But this was an experiment, so we were game for seeing what we could make work. I have always been a devotee of following inspiration. It gives us the drive to pursue goals that we would otherwise find difficult. The minishops were scheduled around inspiration. One thing is for sure, we have a lot to learn on how to manage such a situation, but I do believe that many did take away a useful and lasting chunk of knowledge.

The lecture is rarely a good place for learning technical skills, whether in a classroom, a workshop, or wherever. The vast majority of students learn such skills best using hands-on practice. The classroom can be a good environment for lectures and discussions. Therefore it makes to keep the theory in the classroom, and break out learning the skills into separate, hands-on workshops. An essential part of learning programming and electronics, among other things, is feedback. The student hears a bit of new knowledge, attempts to utilize it, then sees what works and what didn’t. This is what makes hands-on learning work.

So what worked in this setting of inspiration-based learning? Students with projects got further along on their projects, some got their projects working by the end. Having a real problem to solve is very important to making hands-on learning work. If students were willing to try things and work by themselves for some part of the time, they could learn relatively quickly. When they hit the hardest problems, the teachers were able to step in and assist. Students who were looking for step-by-step did not fair well.

All in all, I was surprised how many people stayed and worked, and for long periods of time. This was during an art festival, they could have been out and about, enjoying a wide range of interesting art, music, performance, etc. But they choose to spend hours in the dark corner of the Brucknerhaus lobby. That’s got to say something

Hmm, sounds plausible, right?

There is a very good reason why “reduce” is the first of the 3 R’s. Reusing and recycling decrease the impact, eliminating the activity altogether eliminates the impact all together. Many people think the 3 R’s apply only to garbage, but that is only part of the equation. What is more important is that we reduce consumption. Few self-proclaimed environmentalists really want to hear that. They don’t want to give up the organic produce flown in from the southern Hemisphere during the off-season, the myriad appliances, the latest hybrid SUV, the vacations all over the planet, the iPod, the new mobile device every year, and so on and so forth.

Perhaps these icons of environmentalism are really salves to assuage guilt of those who are consuming much more their share, and are smart enough to know it. One thing that is iconic to me is the large collection of plastic bags that any self-respecting environmentalist has beneath their kitchen sink. All of these bags are, of course, a travesty upon the environment and we need to reuse them, they never should be thrown away. But sadly, there seems to be not so many uses for them, or its just too easy to forget and not bring them back to the grocery store to be reused. So they pile up underneath the sink.

I was just standing in line in a haven of environmentalism, the Park Slope Food Coop, with backpack on so I wouldn’t have to gather still more plastic bags in my kitchen. I saw a strange device which turned out to be a plastic bag drying rack for those so dedicated that they indeed wash their plastic bags to reuse them, presumably again and again. This got me thinking about how effective is it really to reuse these bags. To take a rough measure of the impact, I chose to think about the amount of oil involved. Plastic bags are made of oil, and oil is used to generate the energy to make them, so its safe to say that most of the cost of those bags is probably the cost of the oil. One of those supermarket bags costs roughly 1 cent, to be generous.

Now consider that the vast majority of Americans will drive to the grocery store, many people even drive to the Park Slope Food Coop. Now let’s say you live close to your grocery store, 5 miles roundtrip, and as a good environmentalist, you drive a hybrid. In the real world, hybrids get 35MPG at best. At $2.70/gallon, what gas is at in New York right now, you’ve just spent 39 cents on gas. That equals 39 plastic bags. Now consider all those people in SUVs getting 15 MPG (that’s being generous), their trip equals 90 plastics bags. This is not even including the costs of buying and maintaining the car. It looks more like the car is what we should be talking about, not the plastic bags.

It has been experiences like these that made me start thinking about measures of environmental impact. In an very general way, I think that you can measure your environmental impact by the amount of money that you spend and how much money you earn. Money is quite simply a measure of human effort. And if you are earning lots of money, that means that many people are exerting in order to pay your wages. The amount of money you spend is quite obviously related to the amount that you consume. Of course there are some things that scuttle this logic. For example, organic food mostly likely has a lesser impact that non-organic food, and it costs more money. So that example shows where spending more money means a lower impact.

But when it comes down to it, if you look at what people consume, then you can get a very good idea of their environmental impact. Low income people are often deemed bad environmentalists because they rarely buy organic food, drive beat up cars, throw trash around, etc. But if you look at what is actually being consumed, it becomes quite obvious that the upper middle class, organic environmentalists are really responsible for a much larger impact. For example, residents of New York City has been recently found to have a lower average environmental impact that the average American. It might seem obvious that this is because of the all the educated, organic-eating environmentalists, or because the majority of New Yorkers don’t own a car. I am sure this is a factor, but I think a perhaps more important statistic, and one that is almost always overlooked in such discussions, is the fact that New York has about an 20-21% poverty rate. The national average is 12-13%. So perhaps someone should study this relationship too. But my guess is most educated, environmentalists don’t want to hear the answer: we all need to reduce our consumption.

I did just find that I can get a broken-ish MinGW MSYS shell by sshing into Cygwin, then running /cygdrive/c/msys/1.0/bin/sh --login -i. But it inherits the environment variables from Cygwin, and so it barely works. I did find this Python script that is supposed to fix that problem, but no luck for me.

Has anyone out there done this successfully?

For people who work in software and security, its well established fact that obscurity does not equal security, and that opening up the source makes software and even hardware more secure. Everyone knows that opening up government to scrutiny makes government less corrupt. Yet Diebold and others are still getting away with threatening people who show just how bad their machines really are.

More more information on this topic, Freedom to Tinker looks like a very good place to go.

This all leads me to the next step. The processing power and hardware needs for building a voting machine are not expensive or hard to use. Basically all of the needed free software for making one of these machines exists, there are well established methods of building hardened boxes that many amateurs do at home.

So my question is, why aren’t there more people working on this themselves? Just because we have a government doesn’t mean we have to sit around and wait for them to do things, let’s do this ourselves!

And in the end, I’ll bet such grassroots machines will be far more secure and far cheaper.

In the developed nations, most of us are well insulated from the effects of all this pollution, so its easy to forget about all this. Now in the art world, people are also using more and more electronics. Yet even tho there is an ancient tradition in the human pursuit of creativity for reusing things that are around us to create art, it seems that the world of electronic art has completely forgotten about this. We throw away mobile phones, computers, iPods, etc all of the time, even tho they could easily be repurposed.

First and foremost, I have to say I am no angel, and I really don’t want to look like I am trying to claim the moral high ground. Instead its far more important to get the ideas out there and for everyone to realize what we are doing, and the effects of our actions. But since I am also deeply immersed in the realm of electronic arts, I thought I would throw out some ideas. First off, free software like GNU/Linux, Pure Data, Audacity, etc. are written by scrappy, broke people, so such software generally runs quite well on old hardware. Then throw in all those amazing Linux geeks who hack into everything from Linksys routers to iPods to xboxs. You can run GNU/Linux on any of these things, and this opens up a lot of new possibilities that the original creators never intended.

Lastly, I think that the best works of art are born of limitations. When someone has absolute freedom, they generally make crappy art. Limiting yourself to recycled hardware can often trigger unique ideas that otherwise would lay undiscovered given the latest, greatest computer to run your software on.

So the topic I am dredging up now is why I have slowly become a vegetarian and strive for eating no animal products. Lots of people like to argue, for some strange reason, that humans are not meant to eat meat. That’s a pretty silly argument since we have canine teeth like tigers and wolves, and we have the digestive tract and ability to produce enzymes that allows us to derive a lot of nurishment from meat. So I have to say I am not opposed to the idea of eating meat, and I will never deny that meat or dairy products taste really good. But there are numerous bona fide reasons that humans should eat a lot less meat, like one or twice a month at maximum.

To start with, the levels of meat eaten in the rich countries are far from sustainable It takes a lot of feed to get cattle and pigs up to market weight. The iconic image of this idea is the vast amounts of rain forest that is cleared every year to make fields for beef cattle. If the whole world ate this much meat, we would have very, very little forest left. The fact is most of the world subsists on beans for protein, not meat.

Next, cattle yards, pig pens, and chicken sheds generate a shitload of pollution. If you have ever been anywhere even close to one of these places, your nose will tell you how bad it is. And its not just odor pollution. What comes out of these places kills the surrounding plants, rivers, lakes, etc. as it leeches thru the soil. The animals wade thru it continuously in conditions so bad they need to be constantly on anti-biotics.

Then there is the issue of humane treatment. People like to think of cute family farms, where all the animals have names, but the truth of the matter is that those places are brutal meat factories. They spend their lives packed into horrible places wallowing in their own excrement. The sight of it is absolutely disgusting.

Then there is the issue of workers rights. The meat industry has injury and death rates that are 5 times the national average. Meat factory workers are treated among the worst of any out there and paid very low wages.

And if you think that its ok to gorge on meat as long as its “free range” or “organic”, read this article and think again:

It’s Not Enough to Be a Vegetarian By Christina Waters

I am sure there are other reasons as well, here’s some more on related topics:

Chemical Farm, By John Feffer

Finger-Lickin’ Bad, By Suzi Parker

Fowl Play In the Slaughterhouse, By Stan Cox

According to the above article, some scientists have found that they can create aggressive or non-aggressive rats depending on which genes they flip. This might be some kind of contributor to something that I have thought about a lot: why European cultures are so bent on destruction and domination. Perhaps there is something to the aggressive gene.

It seems that basically all humans fight, though on vastly different levels. Some societies have/had no organized methods of warfare while others are completely organized around destruction on a massive scale. Perhaps the aggressive gene has been rampant in Europe for millennia, because it seems people and cultures of European descent lay waste on scale that no one else comes close to, and have been doing so for a very long time.

Then shortly thereafter, we had “International Day” at the high school. People from all over the world who lived in the area were invited to give a talk about their country. Somehow my mother had recently met a visiting professor from Palestine, and naturally invited him to speak since she was sure there were no other Palestinians speaking yet. This was not a hidden political maneuver, my mother was and still is an ardent supporter of Israel with many Jewish friends. Then the mother of a good friend of mine found out about this, they were Jewish and fervent supporters of Israel. This mother demanded that this man be banned from speaking because he was Palestinian. My mother disagreed and thought everyone should have the right to speak, they fought over it, this mother said I was no longer allowed to hang out with her son any more, and they would no longer speak to us at all. Something seemed very wrong here and this experience embedded in me the desire to get behind the facade on this issue. And over the decades, as I have read the history myself, as I have seen Israel’s actions for myself, it has become blatantly apparent that Israel, at best, was not a force of good in the world.

After college, I moved to New York City, a couple of years later to Brooklyn. By chance, I moved to an old Arab neighborhood, and for the first time in my life, I interacted with Arabs. My childhood view of Arabs derived from the racist American popular culture (Arnold Schwarzenegger’s True Lies is the perfect example) had faded, but I still had this vague impression left. As I began to regularly interact with Arabs, I made a couple of Arab friends, I was shocked to find how different Arab culture is from the ridiculous stereotypes. From what I now know, Arab culture is one of the warmest and most generous of any that I have experience.

Then Sept. 11th hit, I still lived in the Arab neighborhood, and it was obvious that this neighborhood was going to be a target for people’s anger. I wanted to do something to prevent that. Atlantic Avenue, normally a bustling strip of Arab stores and restaurants was a ghost town. Thankfully, the NYPD had posted cops all up and down the street to prevent a repeat of the attacks that had happened as a reaction to the first World Trade Center attacks in 1993. I went and ate in the restaurants, I shopped in the stores. I saw signs for a rally in support of the neighborhood to prevent violence against Arab-Americans. This was the most emotional march I have ever attended. Thousands of people of all kinds of backgrounds showed up, many religions including orthodox Muslims and many Jews, every race, a real cross-section of New York. We were there to say that we do not hate our Arab neighbors whether in Brooklyn or on the other side of the world. “Our Grief is Not a Cry for War!”. That was the prevailing mood and I was truly optimistic, it was an amazing time. The fact that the U.S. has responded with stepping up the level of wanton destruction and violence still bears extremely heavily upon me. But I am still proud to say that over 75% of New Yorkers who voted voted against Bush and his war mongering, despite the fact that we were the ones who were directly attacked. I am also proud to say that I have many Jewish friends who have also had similar awakenings and now feel compelled as citizens of Israel, whether by law or in spirit, to speak out against the gross injustices that both the U.S. and Israeli governments support there.

Now since I am writing this in the context of the current Israeli invasion of Lebanon, I have to say that this is the background of why I oppose military action whoever is doing it. And this is part of why I feel so compelled to argue vociferously against Israel. I am used to being surrounded by people who blindingly support Israel, as I had previously. I feel I must also open people’s eyes to the truth of the matter. Everyone should be held responsible for their actions, there is no denying that. That of course includes Hezbollah, Hamas, the IDF, the PLO, and the citizens who actually have a voice to affect these things. I think there is already a massive chorus of criticism against the Arab parties in this conflict, and I certainly make sure that none of my money or effort goes to support violence of any kind. But against my wishes, my money is used to support violence because the US sends tons of military aid to Israel. It is clear that extremists have taken over on all sides involved, and we should not support any of them.

Every American should take an active interest in this situation because we are directly and massively involved in it. The U.S. sends billions of dollars of military aid to Israel every year, and regularly acts on behalf of Israel in the UN and other contexts. We are currently rushing more massive bombs to Israel so it can continue to demolish apartment buildings, roads, hospitals, etc. I believe that as a citizen and taxpayer of the U.S., I need to make my views on the subject heard, and I need to act upon them. It is not only Israel that I express these views about, it is anywhere where the US is actively involved and/or funding terrorism, war, destruction, and corruption. Sadly, there are many places in the world where the US is guilty as charged.

Hezbollah is a frightening force, no rational person would argue that Israel should not have responded to Hezbollah’s attacks. The question I propose is: what Israeli response would have most benefitted Israelis? Hezbollah attacked and kidnapped Israeli soldiers and launched and handful of rockets at Israel. Most of the world condemned this action, including Saudi Arabia. When Israel started attacking, most of the Arab world held back their usual criticism for a bit. Here was great opportunity to try something different.

Since the beginnings of Israel’s offensive, almost 2000 rockets have hit Israel, and 52 Israelis (33 soldiers and 19 civilians) have been killed. Does anyone actually think that there would have been more deaths and more rockets if Israel had not attacked? It looks quite clear that this attack against Lebanon has actually contributed towards increasing Israeli deaths and increasing the damage inflicted on Israel.

“Forty-five Israelis were killed in Palestinian militant attacks in 2005, the Israeli internal security agency Shin Bet has reported…” “377 Qassam rockets” were launched towards Israel. “The main reason for the decline, Shin Bet said, was the informal truce observed by some Palestinian groups.”

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/4574720.stm

To put this into perspective, Israel as a nation without the occupied territories has a population of about 6.2 million. Just over 500 Israelis (civilians and soldiers) have died from the current intifada, 2000-2005, in Israel, so about 85 people per year. So that’s a murder rate of about 1.4 per 100,000 residents for Israel. There are roughly 400,000 Israelis in the occupied territories, and if you add in the Israeli deaths from the occupied territories, you get 950, or 158 per year. That makes a rate of 2.4 per 100,000 residents.

http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/middle_east/3694350.stm

Now let’s look at U.S crime rates for 2000 (all in per 100,000 residents):

http://www.disastercenter.com/crime/nycrime.htm

Washington, D.C.: 41.8
Louisiana: 12.5
New York City: 8.7
Arizona: 7.0
California: 6.1
United States: 5.5
New York: 5.0
Georgia: 3.3
Minnesota: 3.1
Connecticut: 2.9
Israel (with occupied territories): 2.4
Oregon: 2.0
Vermont: 1.5
Israel: 1.4
Maine: 1.2
North Dakota: 0.6

So looking at murder rates, Israel is safer than Vermont. Including the occupied territories, Israel is still quite a bit safer than Connecticut or Georgia.

So why do Israel’s much lower murder rates justify such drastic action? Fear is a powerful motivator, and I do not doubt that the fear of suicide bombers and Hezbollah attacks that people feel is real. So the question really is, who actually benefits from Israeli military attacks? I think that most of the 90+ percent of Israelis who support this current action do not. Throughout the world, fear mongering has proven to be a very effective means for politicians to gain and keep power, I don’t think this works differently in the Middle East.

Here’s the file that I use:

/* Picked up from Help search on Key Bindings. Good stuff -shane */
/* ~/Library/KeyBindings/DefaultKeyBinding.dict */
/* from: http://www.gnufoo.org/macosx/index.html#emacs

for a listing of all possible options:
http://developer.apple.com/techpubs/macosx/Cocoa/Reference/ApplicationKit/ObjC_classic/Classes/NSResponder.html

and even more info:
http://www.deepsky.com/~misaka/MacOSX/KeyBindings.html
*/
{
“~f”=”moveWordForward:”;
“~b”=”moveWordBackward:”;
“~< "="moveToBeginningOfDocument:";
"~>“=”moveToEndOfDocument:”;
“~v”=”pageUp:”;
“~d”=”deleteWordForward:”;
“~^h”=”deleteWordBackward:”;
“~\010″=”deleteWordBackward:”; /* Alt-backspace */
“~\177″=”deleteWordBackward:”; /* Alt-delete */
“~/”=”complete:”;
}

http://www.nytimes.com/2006/01/20/technology/20google.html

With that data, the government can google everyone in it to easily find things they are interested in. Have you any relation with anti-war organizations? They can easily find you, the gov’t is already monitoring anti-war organizations. Even PETA is now monitored by the FBI. Ever emailed someone named Osama? Its actually a common name. Or maybe you support the left wing gov’ts being elected in Latin America. The U.S. has already backed a coup against Chavez, and you only need to look at what the U.S. has done in Latin America thruout the 20th century to know that they’ll probably be tracking that too.

You can help the situation by rejecting Google’s cookie in your browser, which is what Google uses to track you. But if you use any Google service that uses a login, then all your info is stored in their databases. Even if Google really lives up to their motto, “don’t be evil”, the government can subpoena Google’s database, and they have no such mantra they follow.

So in order to create new instruments and achieve gain kind of skill with that new instruments, I think the skill has to be modular, you get good at the joystick and the mouse; then get good at various synths, software, sequencers, whatever. Then you have those separate modules of skill. Then if you make an instrument, you can pick and choose from those modules of technique and have to some skill when you play your new instrument.

The video game world does provide examples along these lines, gamers develop skills on their controllers of choice, then can transfer those skills to different styles of games.

sustainable: “an action or process that is capable of continuing indefinitely” [source]

The most glaring example of this is when the word is applied to cars. Oil is a finite resource that causes many problems. Hybrid cars will never be sustainable because they run on oil. Even electric cars are nowhere near sustainable since most of our electricity comes from burning coal, oil, and natural gas. And it will never be environmentally sound to move around 4000 pounds of metal in order to transport 150 pounds of human. On top of all that, it takes a lot of oil to manufacture a car (plastic, grease, lubrication, etc.), and it generates a lot of pollution (solvents, fumes, paint, etc).

Another example of this is solar powered gadgets. A lot of solar powered gadgets are being produced these days and being labeled “sustainable”. Making something solar powered does not change the fact that a lot of energy was spent producing it (generally oil or coal energy), they are almost always are made from plastic (again, oil), the manufacture of electronics creates a lot of pollution (heavy metals, toxic solvents, etc.), and on and on.

So to me, it seems that the word sustainable has come to mean “some token gesture to environmentalism to assuage our guilty consciouses for our vast over-consumption”.

From April 4, 1967, Riverside Church, New York City.

As I have walked among the desperate, rejected and angry young men [in the ghettos] I have told them that Molotov cocktails and rifles would not solve their problems. I have tried to offer them my deepest compassion while maintaining my conviction that social change comes most meaningfully through nonviolent action. But they asked – and rightly so – what about Vietnam? They asked if our own nation wasn’t using massive doses of violence to solve its problems, to bring about the changes it wanted. Their questions hit home, and I knew that I could never again raise my voice against the violence of the oppressed in the ghettos without having first spoken clearly to the greatest purveyor of violence in the world today – my own government. For the sake of those boys, for the sake of this government, for the sake of hundreds of thousands trembling under our violence, I cannot be silent.

… Now, it should be incandescently clear that no one who has any concern for the integrity and life of America today can ignore the present war. If America’s soul becomes totally poisoned, part of the autopsy must read Vietnam. It can never be saved so long as it destroys the deepest hopes of men the world over.

… Somehow this madness must cease. We must stop now. I speak as a child of God and brother to the suffering poor of Vietnam. I speak for those whose land is being laid waste, whose homes are being destroyed, whose culture is being subverted. I speak for the poor of America who are paying the double price of smashed hopes at home and death and corruption in Vietnam. I speak as a citizen of the world, for the world as it stands aghast at the path we have taken. I speak as an American to the leaders of my own nation. The great initiative in this war is ours. The initiative to stop it must be ours.

In 1957 a sensitive American official overseas said that it seemed to him that our nation was on the wrong side of a world revolution. … I am convinced that if we are to get on the right side of the world revolution, we as a nation must undergo a radical revolution of values. We must rapidly begin the shift from a “thing-oriented” society to a “person-oriented” society. When machines and computers, profit motives and property rights are considered more important than people, the giant triplets of racism, materialism, and militarism are incapable of being conquered.

A true revolution of values will soon cause us to question the fairness and justice of many of our past and present policies. … A true revolution of values will soon look uneasily on the glaring contrast of poverty and wealth. With righteous indignation, it will look across the seas and see individual capitalists of the West investing huge sums of money in Asia, Africa and South America, only to take the profits out with no concern for the social betterment of the countries, and say: “This is not just.” It will look at our alliance with the landed gentry of Latin America and say: “This is not just.” The Western arrogance of feeling that it has everything to teach others and nothing to learn from them is not just. A true revolution of values will lay hands on the world order and say of war: “This way of settling differences is not just.” This business of burning human beings with napalm, of filling our nation’s homes with orphans and widows, of injecting poisonous drugs of hate into veins of people normally humane, of sending men home from dark and bloody battlefields physically handicapped and psychologically deranged, cannot be reconciled with wisdom, justice and love. A nation that continues year after year to spend more money on military defense than on programs of social uplift is approaching spiritual death.

America, the richest and most powerful nation in the world, can well lead the way in this revolution of values. There is nothing, except a tragic death wish, to prevent us from reordering our priorities, so that the pursuit of peace will take precedence over the pursuit of war. There is nothing to keep us from molding a recalcitrant status quo with bruised hands until we have fashioned it into a brotherhood.

This ride was awesome, lots of people were in all sorts of costumes, bells were ringing, people cheering, thousands of LEDs blinking. The heavy police presence was imposing, but it was nice to have the cops stopping traffic while the pack biked thru, averting the usual honking and aggressive encounters with some drivers. But it also means that we didn’t get to fill Times Square completely with cyclists, which is always a highlight. And to cap it all off, right as we were coming to the end of the police designated route, a couple of people at the front of the ride started yelling “fuck this!! don’t go back to Union Sq!! Take a right!!!” The light was green, we were following the traffic laws, so the police watched dumbfounded as hundreds of cyclists broke from the police route, and went down the West Side Highway, and cruised around the West Village, with people stopping on the sidewalks, and poking their heads out of their windows to cheer the mass along, and the sound of lots of sirens in background as the police tried to regroup. Luckily the ride ended before the NYPD could deploy their RNC-style pen-and-arrest tactics, so the only people arrested were looking for some civil disobedience action.

Here’s a good thread about the legal issues:

http://info.interactivist.net/article.pl?sid=04/10/26/0042213&mode=nested&tid=14&tid=1

The NY Times has been covering it to, with their slant, calling it a ‘demonstration’ quite plainly, though many if not most riders do not aim to join a demonstration, but rather just participate in a monthly bike ride:

http://www.nytimes.com/2004/10/30/nyregion/30cycles.html

You can read more about the issues here:

http://www.eff.org/deeplinks/archives/001375.php

What we should be doing is using our skills and pooling our resources to set up our own servers. My eds.org email account is such a server, it hosts many websites (bittorrent is hosted there for example) and email mailboxes for about 50 people. Its a PC only slightly better than what you can find on the street these days. The bill for the internet colocation facility is about $80/mo, or about $1.60 per user per month. And I’ve known the guy with the root password personally for 15 years. I trust him implicitly.

“Of course the people don’t want war. But after all, it’s the leaders of the country who determine the policy, and it’s always a simple matter to drag the people along whether it’s a democracy, a fascist dictatorship, or a parliament, or a communist dictatorship. Voice or no voice, the people can always be brought to the bidding of the leaders. That is easy. All you have to do is tell them they are being attacked, and denounce the pacifists for lack of patriotism, and exposing the country to greater danger.”

– Herman Goering at the Nuremberg trials

But I think that when you look at immigrants from poorer nations, then its a foggier picture. They send back a ton of money to support families. Isn’t Mexico’s single largest source of ‘export’ income money send back from the US? This is the case for immigrants all over the world. Just about every NYC cabbie is sending the bulk of their money to their homeland. I have also seen the direct result of money being sent to homelands: in Viet Nam, the richest people were often only rich because they had relatives in the US. In Belize, our hotel owner had lived in Michigan for 8 years, and saved up enough to build a small hotel in his hometown.

But on the other hand, if these people who emigrate could not have emigrated, perhaps they would have put that energy into their own countries. They would probably not have earned as much money overall, but they probably would have contributed to their country in other key ways, like changing the culture to break class barriers, or by organizing people to resist corruption. It seems that if there is an outlet for frustrated people with skills, then the ills of that given society will change slower since there would be less pressure.

This is what my father says drove him from Austria: while the government funded his medical education completely, the society was still very conservative and to be a Doctor, you had to come from the “right” family. He felt he would never have a decent job no matter what he did since he was from a working class family and a rough neighborhood. But had he not had the option of emigrating, I don’t think he would have capitulated and just worked the shit jobs in the State mental hospitals. I think he would have made a fair amount of noise, which would have helped change that culture of classism.

Though I played music in the Western tradition for many years, I was not inspired to write in this tradition. The sounds that heard in my head didn’t work within this system, so I didn’t pay it much heed. I began to explore other creative outlets. In college, while studying photography and sculpture, ideas about sound began to creep back in. I began to envision, instead of the fixed, silent image, capturing characteristic moments with motion and sound.

The discovery of computer music brought me back fully to the realm of sound. Suddenly I found a musical realm with the power to express these sounds I had always heard in my head. As I explored this new medium, striving to recreate these internal sounds, I felt the influence of the my other studies creeping in. In order to make the sounds relevant, I felt there needed to be a physical component. I was able to bring these ideas together starting with the Dark Passage event, The Feast of the Ascension.

By creating a soundscape for a section of New York’s first aqueduct, I was able to take my impressions of the space and express them with sound. The sound then created the mood of this particular interaction with this space, thereby making the experience of the 20 or so participants more of a shared experience.

Further work with Dark Passage and the founding of Ars Subterranea has given me outlets to further explore this idea. For each group, I did a multi-channel sound installation which created very different impressions of the space suited to each event. Dark Passage events have small groups of participants who take part in elaborate games, so a intimate experience was called for. Ars Subterranea’s Inaugural was open to the public with many hundreds of visitors, so the experience was an entirely different one.