Smári McCarthy`s blagoblag on Yaxic.org

Timoshevski gaped. “You have a Cornucopia machine?” he demanded breathlessly. Burya bit his tongue; an interruption it might be, but a perfectly understandable one.

“Yes.”

“Will you give us one? Along with instructions for using it and a colony design library?” asked Burya, his pulse pounding.

“Maybe. What will you give us?”

“Mmm. How about a post-Marxist theory of post-technological political economy, and a proof that the dictatorship of the hereditary peerage can only be maintained by the systematic oppression and exploitation of the workers and engineers, and cannot survive once the people acquire the self-replicating means of production?”

from Singularity Sky by Charles Stross

Timoshevski and Burya were thinking clearly, but not clearly enough. That quote really struck me, because it shows that in order to cause a revolution you need both a proof of concept and running code. The proof of concept they had. The Festival had the running code.

Alas, I only started reading the book in the bus today and still don’t know how this is going to end. I’m guessing that they’re going to bang into the problem I saw immediately: moving from a state of enforced scarcity into a state of cornucopia cannot be done painlessly. Leapfrogging isn’t always a good idea, although it’s something I’m generally willing to risk.

Remarkably little has changed. They’re faster, they’re bigger, but they’re the same. Thx Jói for pointing this out.

(This post will be in Icelandic. Don’t worry, if you’re not Icelandic you probably wouldn’t understand the silly context of it anyway. Besides, puns don’t translate very well.)

Ég get ekki sagt að ég sé ósammála þeirri umræðu sem hefur skapast um hvort að það væri ekki réttara að taka upp annað orð í stað “ráðherra” sem myndi svara jafnt til beggja kynja. Mér finnst kjánalegt hjá Steinunni Valdísi að hafa hafið þessa umræðu hinsvegar, þar sem að hún hefur ekki komið með neina skynsamlega tillögu að lausn. Það kostar að gagnrýna, og sá kostnaður er betri tillaga. Hafi maður enga, þá er oft betra að þegja bara.

[Breyting: Í ljósi þess að margir virðast ósammála þessari síðustu fullyrðingu vil ég árétta: Það er mjög eðlilegt að benda á það sem illa fer og leita hugmynda - það sem ég meina með þessa fullyrðingu er að þegar einhver í áberandi stöðu fer að hrópa upp vandamál ýmiskonar án þess að hafa leitað til síns fólks fyrst, þá virkar það hálfasnalega. Hún hefði til dæmis átt að bera þetta upp á fundi einhverjum eða jafnvel senda út fyrirspurn um tillögur í blöðin, frekar en að gera þetta strax að vandamáli Alþingis.]

Hinsvegar hef ég tillögu. Ráðunautur. Orðið er í karlkyni en merking þess felur ekki í sér neina mismunun - ekki frekar en sessunautur eða rekkjunautur. Auk þess finnst mér þetta hugtak skýrara á vissan hátt en ráðherra hefur nokkurntíman verið.

Ráðherra má nefnilega skilja á tvenna vegu. Annars vegar sem “herra sem ræður” og hinsvegar sem “herra sem gefur ráð”. Hið fyrra virðist vera raunin í samfélagi okkar en hið síðara er það sem ætlunin var upprunalega. Fyrir þá sem ekki vita fer forseti með framkvæmdarvald á Íslandi, en honum er skylt samkvæmt stjórnarskrá að fela aðila sem kjörinn er í Alþingiskosningum umboð til að mynda ríkisstjórn sem fer með framkvæmdavaldið fyrir hönd forseta (samanber þrettándu grein stjórnarskráarinnar). Þannig dreifist álagið yfir margar hendur og færir valdið frá einum aðila, forsetanum, yfir á marga aðila, sem stýra ráðuneytunum. Hvert ráðuneyti gefur viðkomandi ráðherra ráð varðandi mál sem koma til kastanna, og hver ráðherra starfar svo í umboði Forseta til þess að framkvæma þau ráð. Hann er því öllu frekar nokkurskonar ráðgjafi forsetaembættisins heldur en einhverskonar allsráðandi á sínu sviði. (Maður mætti spyrja sig hvort ræðismenn séu fólk sem ræður eða fólk sem róar, en ræðarar eru klárlega ekki ráðvandir kenni þeir árum sínum um…)

Ráðunautur gefur alveg skýran tón. Í stað Menntamálaráðherra gæti verið Ráðunautur menntamála. Alls ekki Menntamálaráðunautur, því það er bæði forljótt og felur aftur nafnorðið ráð á bak við sögnina að ráða. Þannig yrði Dóms- og kirkjumálaráðherra að Ráðunautur dóms- og kirkjumála, og þaðan af.

Það að taka upp hugtakið “ráðunautur” yrði frábært; íhaldssamari eða valdfrekari öfl gætu kunnað betur við orð eins og valdhafi, forstjóri/forstýra eða eitthvað álíka fáranlegt, en ég held að ráðunautur sé klár sigurvegari í þessari umræðu.

Ég veit ekki hvort að Steinunn Valdís hafi lesið stjórnarskránna okkar, en hún er að hrista alveg rosalega mikið stoðir nýju ríkisstjórnarinnar með tillögu sinni. Orðið “ráðherra” kemur fyrir tuttugu sinnum í stjórnarskrá Íslands, sem þýðir að ef að titillinn er breyttur þarf að breyta meira en tug greina í stjórnarskránni, ásamt langflestum landslögum. Til þess að breyta stjórnarskránni þarf að slíta Alþingi og boða til kosninga að nýju, samanber 79. grein stjórnarskráarinnar.

Ég er þó mjög hlynntur því. Stjórnarskráin okkar er ekki Íslensk þó hún sé á Íslensku, heldur er hún Dönsk. Árið 1944 var ýmsu klippt úr henni og ýmsu bætt við, en ein greinin þá var þess eðlis að þetta væri bráðabirgðastjórnarskrá - enda var hún aðeins kukkluð saman í snarheitum til að þjóðin gæti kallast sjálfstæð. Árið 1945 átti svo að endurskrifa hana, en þess í stað var bráðabirgðaákvæðinu bara hent út og enginn hefur treyst sér til þess að skrifa nýja ennþá. Við mættum alveg fá okkur nýja og nútímalega stjórnarskrá og endurskoða mikið af lagabálkinum okkar líka.

Copyright has been bastardized. Nobody remembers what it was created to protect any more; it has become a tool for companies like Disney to control the ways content is delivered, and so many copyrighted works are out there that nobody can spend a single day without accidentally infringing on somebody’s copyright.

On Sveinbjörn Þórðarson’s blog there’s a reference to an article by John Tehranian. No. Wait. Let me try again. On Sveinbjörn Þórðarsson’s blog there is an unauthorized reprint of the first eleven pages of an article by John Tehranian on the subject of unintentional copyright infringement. Highly recommended read. If it doesn’t show you how stupid copyright law has become… well, then, I guess I’ll have to try harder.

I asked myself that when looking over their fundraiser pages. Last year they counted the number of dollars coming in, and for every donation an entry was available for view on a page where the donor’s name was visible unless he chose not to display it, a message from him or her, and the value of the contribution in both his or her local currency and the equivalent in USD’s.

This year they don’t count dollars coming in but individual donations, irrespective of their value. It strikes me as odd - yes, they want everybody to know that every donation is equally cherished, but the donations are not equal. The goal of fund raisers is to raise enough funds to keep Wikimedia going. That’s a fixed amount of cash. By counting only the number of people who donate, you’re losing sight of that. And by not telling the community - the community that comprises Wikipedia - how much cash is needed and how much has come in, we have no way of gaging how well the fund raiser is going in terms that actually matter to the survival of the project.

This isn’t the first hint I’ve seen that Wikipedia may be straying wayward. As a bureaucrat - a kind of super-admin - of the Icelandic Wikipedia, I know the ins and outs of the system fairly well. I’m also aware of most of the policies. Except, in the Icelandic Wikipedia we use a sensibility policy above all else. We stick to the pillars of Wikipedia, the prime directive of the Neutral Point of View, and so on, but we haven’t actually taken the bureaucrat term to the heights that the English version has, creating a lengthy and complicated policy regarding every possible situation that has arisen. And frankly, most of these policies are bullshit

What’s amazing about these policies is the way they’re executed. A friend of mine who is a long time developer of the Mediawiki software and co-bureaucrat pointed out, after having done some statistical analysis, that most of the people who are busy creating policies are not, in fact, creating content. That is to say, there has emerged within the Wikipedia social network of editors, a natural hierarchical structure in which there is a class that does nothing but exercise dictatorship over the workers.

This crystallizes in the deletionist movement amongst admins on the English version - I don’t know if they are factualist, reductionist or revisionist, but at any rate they have adopted several policies of their own which I cannot find any trace of in the extensive documentation of policies: If ever an article is submitted to Wikipedia which does not comply in full to all of the policies there is a series of events that ensues:

1. An alert is placed on the relevant page noting the form of the exception from policy.
2. The editor of the article receives a message stating that there is a problem.
3. If the editor does not fix the article within an arbitrary period of time, the article is deleted.

What is wrong with this? I think that’s clear: The administrators are not the bosses of Wikipedia. Their job is not to push people around and delegate tasks. If there’s something wrong with an article then yes, by all means place an alert. By all means notify the editor. But if this fails then try and fix the bloody article yourself for crying out loud.

Also, there seems to be some misunderstanding in the ranks of the English admins as to what the meaning of “Encyclopedia” is. From Wikipedia:

 An encyclopedia, or (traditionally) encyclopædia, is a comprehensive written compendium that contains information on all branches of knowledge or a particular branch of knowledge.

Comprehensive, in turn, means “broadly or completely covering”. Which means that, by definition, there should not be any exclusions. Yet the deletionists are busy deleting completely valid contributions to Wikipedia on the basis that they are irrelevant, unimportant or unknown. How do the deletionists know this? Are they magically imbued with the sum of all human knowledge?

I’m going to take two examples to wrap up this discussion. Two articles I know to have been deleted, as I was a contributer to both.

The first is the article on the High Icelandic Language, or Háfrónska, as designed by Josef Braekmans of Belgium. This language has been referenced not only on numerous blogs but also by various Icelandic media, both print and broadcast. The article at the time of deletion contained over a dozen references and a very clear synopsis of the language, its history, its grammar, and so on, and so forth.

The second was the article on the Hexayurt, as designed by Vinay Gupta. The Hexayurt project has won numerous awards, been positively reviewed by various government and non-government agencies, and as of last week has invaded the Pentagon. The article at the time of deletion contained references to most of the news articles wherein the project was featured, including the New York Times.

Both were deleted. Found to have been irrelevant, with unreliable sources. Found to have been objective, with unconfirmable claims. I don’t understand why.

Kevin Rudd, the new prime minister elect of Australia, has stated that he intends for Australia to ratify the Kyoto accord. One of the reasons John Howard gave for being unwilling to ratify the Kyoto accord was a very good one, and I fear it may be one that Kevin Rudd is ignoring or simply unaware of. As much as it gladdens me to see somebody with an inkling of sense at the helm of the Australian federal government for a change, I’m slightly wary of where these good intentions may take them.

Australia is a federation of six states and several territories. The overall governance goes through the commonwealth parliament as legislative authority (a bicameral parliament) and the federal executive council as executive authority (the governor-general grants authority to the elected prime minister).

These parties preside over most of the common affairs of Australia, but many affairs such as environmental affairs, have historically fallen squarely to the individual states. There is nothing in the constitution banning the federal government from taking over environmental affairs (there may be some law, but I am fairly unfamiliar with Australian laws), but it’s one of many things where each of the states has commonly had authority.
Section 109 of the Australian constitution provides that, “where a State law is inconsistent with a federal law, the federal law prevails” to the extent of the inconsistency, so ratification of the Kyoto accord on the large scale would make it a fact on the small scale regardless of the decisions of the individual states.

The thing I’m shaking a finger at isn’t the Kyoto accord - I fully support it although I believe it is far from being enough. What I’m shaking a finger at is that if Kevin Rudd makes a precedence for taking over these typically state-level affairs, he’ll be tipping a lot of the power from the small scale into the large scale in a way that could be damaging in the future.

I would rather suggest that the new Australian federal executive council advise each of the states to ratify the accord individually and then unitedly announce that Australia complies and is willing to take the next step. That would be the democratic way of doing it.

My brother pointed this out:

Amazon Kindle was launched recently, selling out within 6 hours. I wasn’t even aware of it’s existence until Þór pointed it out to me, and I watched the associated video. And you know what? It’s awesome. But for totally different reasons than the video says.

The makers of the video were extremely subtle. They were smart. Hackish, even. Most people probably missed it.

The first page shown on the Kindle is a page from The Diamond Age by Neal Stephenson, one of my favorite books, if not my absolute favorite. And well, I found this to be quite the statement. Iff you’ve read The Diamond Age you’ll know that the alternative title, a young lady’s illustrated primer, refers to a nanotechnological book that the protagonist, Nell, acquires by accident. Here, the folks at Amazon are saying, “hey, you, pay attention, the future is here, this is the next step towards the primer.” And I’m pretty sure they’re right

And I think they’re not the only people who can make that claim. Having done a little bit of playing around with the Linux version of the Android SDK the other day and watching a couple of videos related to it, I’m tempted to select Android rather than Java ME as the primary development platform for the medical diagnosis project that I’ve avoided mentioning on this blog until now. Without going into any details, I’ve teamed up with Birita, Vinay, Jói and a few other people on building a cellphone based expert system for field first aid and triage. I’ve been calling the project Triage Regional Integration for Coordination and Organization of Rescue and Disaster Emergency Relief, as an bit of a pun, as the capital letters spell out the name of a fictional device for much the same purpose. I very much doubt it’ll be called anything close to that when the system leaves the draft form. I digress.

The project is already bearing fruit, perhaps most notably a working draft of an open XML standard for ontology definitions. And it’s attracted some (limited) attention from folks and organizations here and there around the world, even though the specifics are being kept in rather hushed tones so as not to raise any false hopes just yet. The primary problem, as I see it, is that there’s only one of me and my free time is being split rather brutally between the CNC project, this project and a few other things I’ve got up my sleeve.

The key reason not to use Android at the moment is it wouldn’t actually work on any real phones for some months, and it wouldn’t actually work on the two billion or so cellphones in circulation for years. The key feature of the first aid thing is vast distribution, but that can’t happen if there’s nobody who can use the software. But, there is another thing. Android is Java, which means that the core of the app could be written abstractly irrespective of the system, and then bindings be written for Android and Java ME explicitly. This would mean that we’d be able to participate in the Open Handset Alliance’s Android competition, which would mean a potential $25,000 award in March and a quite a bit more if it wins even further. On that bar, screw Java ME. On the other hand, Java ME needs attention. See my conundrum?

Regardless of how we end up solving the engineering and marketing problems, it is clear that with things like Android and Kindle, the Diamond Age truly is near. And if you’ve read the book, then you’ll notice that the theme calls for small scale democracy and large scale anarchy. Which is truly an amazing idea.

(note: Both the Kindle and the Android are based on Linux. Is Open Source winning? Clearly.)

One of the prime components to digital freedom is getting past the concept of having to pay for communications. Mesh networks are ideal for this: with each node on the network being both a user of the network and a repeater for the network, loads are balanced and the network flies as far as the community reaches.

In some countries this is a bigger concern - countries lacking the infrastructure for the Internet that for example Iceland, Finland and Estonia have should definitely look to mesh networks as a cheaper alternative to fiber or copper. Especially with reports of impoverished people digging up the copper wires to resell on black markets.

Anyway, Herbert pointed out this totally amazing guide to building a rural wireless mesh network. The juicy bit is a step-by-step PDF file (44 pages, 3.2 MB).