Lessig’s lecture highlighted his mission to give control of our government back to the people — to the citizens of the US. Fix Congress First is one of the groups encouraging this reform, and I suggest that you go check out their website right now!

Part of giving the Citizenry control is making sure that everyone has free, open access to all of our laws and court case records. Federal court records are in the public domain and are available online through the Public Access to Court Electronic Records (PACER) electronic record system, however access to the PACER system is billed using a per-page rate.

Because the documents in PACER are public domain, once a document is accessed, it may be distributed without restriction or additional fee. As a result, several groups are currently working on opening the vast archive of documents in PACER so that anyone can access any of them, at any time, with no fees or strings attached.

One of the projects trying to free the PACER documents is called RECAP, and is run by the Center for Information Technology Policy at Princeton University.

RECAP has written an eponymous Firefox extension that augments the interface to the PACER website. The benefits of this extension include (as described by the RECAP website):

• Helps you give back: Contributes to a public archive hosted by the Internet Archive
• Saves you money: Shows you when free documents are available
• Keeps you organized: Gives you better filenames, enables useful headers
• …and more

I’ll let you visit the RECAP website to see a video of the interface, but the important part of the idea is that once a RECAP user pays for access to a court record, that record will be added to the set of “freed” records and no RECAP user will have to pay to access that record ever again.

I’m sure you all know where I’m going with this… that’s right, monkeys!

So in a hypothetical situation in which we had a million monkeys, all with no-limit credit cards, PACER accounts, and computers (sorry, typewriters only cut it for Shakespeare), we could let the monkeys wail away at the PACER database, and (given enough time) the set of simians would add all files in the PACER system to the RECAP database.

But who am I kidding? I don’t know a single monkey with a no-limit credit card…do you? I guess we’ll have to use humans instead.

According to my totally scientific calculations, the PACER system has about 100 million pages in it.

Calculation of pages in PACER

According to wikipedia, Aaron Swartz downloaded “about 20% of the entire database” during a fee-free trial.
According to the WIRED article linked to by wikipedia, Swartz downloaded “19,856,160 pages.”

Doing the simple math, Total_Pages * 0.20 = 19,856,160 pages, so Total_Pages = 5 * 19,856,160 pages = 99,280,800 pages.

Call it 100 million pages — that’s close enough for government work.

If one person were to try to download the entire catalog of PACER files, it would cost them a lot. A whole lot. PACER charges $0.08/page, but only charges for the first 30 pages of a document (capping the total cost of a document at $2.40). There are several files in PACER that are longer than 30 pages, but let’s just go for a upper bound here and assume that we’ll be charged 8 cents for every page.

So 100 million pages * $0.08/page = $8 million. Ouch!

Of course, the money doesn’t have to come from just one person. We could ask for donations, but getting people to pay $5 or $10 to free court records doesn’t have the same ring as asking people to donation $5 or $10 to save cute furry animals or cute children.

Luckily for light users, the PACER system has a cutoff point for billing. According to wikipedia, starting in March 2001 “no fee would be owed until a user accrued more than $10 worth of charges in a calendar year.” Ten years later, in March 2010, “that limit was effectively quadrupled, with users not billed unless their charges exceed $10 in a quarterly billing period.”

What if we were to get a whole bunch of people to sign up for PACER, and ask each one to spend a a little less than $10 each quarter RECAPing files from PACER? It would only cost them time, not money.

Hmmm. Let’s crunch some numbers!

We’ve got 100 million pages @ $0.08/page. One person could download
120 pages for $9.60 each quarter, so that gives us
100 million pages/120 pages/person-quarter = 833,333 person-quarters (not to be confused with chicken quarters).

Of course, we don’t actually have that much work to do. Remember that Aaron “the Hoover” Swartz already downloaded 20% of the total database, so we only have 80% of that, or 666,667 person-quarters (Nom nom nom), left to go.

With a total workload of 666,667 person-quarters, that means that we could extract the entire database in
3 months, given 666,667 people,
1 year, given 166,667
5 years, given 33,333
167 years, given 1000

Of course, this is a quick-n-dirty upper bound. We made the assumption that all documents were under 30 pages, but there are certainly thousands of files longer than that, each of which will only be billed as $2.40, saving us many person-quarters. Remember, too, that if more lawyers and paralegals can be encouraged to use the RECAP Firefox extension, the RECAP database will grow much faster. Of course, PACER isn’t standing still, either.

PACER is a living system and will continue to grow beyond 100 million pages of records. Absent any big shift toward open access to PACER, even after the initial “catch-up” step is completed, contributors will need to continue RECAPing new records each month as they are added to the system.

It’s possible that PACER or the FBI might not take too kindly to this “distributed hoovering” approach to freeing the documents stored in PACER, and like in the Swartz case, they might raise some ruckus. That being said, as far as I can tell, the approach I describe is entirely legal. I really can’t imagine a legal reason why the feds would want to put a stop to it.

The Future

Looking to the future, PACER has begun to provide digital audio files from court records. In 2008, 7,400 audio files were uploaded to the PACER system. I haven’t found any data on the file format they’re using for the digital audio, but the PACER website prices each audio file at $2.40.

An individual user can download 4 files @ $2.40 per quarter (and stay under $10), so
7,400 audio files/4 audio files/person-quarter = 1,850 person-quarters

Compared to the 666,667 person-quarters for the paper files, the audio files are chump change. For now. It’s very likely that more and more court proceedings will have digital audio recordings, so not only is the total number of audio recordings in PACER increasing, but the rate at which recordings are being added is probably increasing as well.

It’s all so complicated, isn’t it?

In the end, it would make things much easier if all of these public domain data were just available to the public without fee. Factoring the cost of distributing the records of the court into the cost of running the court seems like a wise and simple solution, however I think that the Federal government is currently happy with the cash cow that is PACER.

So fire up Firefox, get your PACER account set up, and RECAP your $9.60 of files for this quarter. That’s 120 pages down, 80,000,000 pages to go…

–Q

UPDATE – 2010-06-03:
Oops! Wikipedia is off by at least an order of magnitude, according to Tim Lee of the RECAP project (see comment below). “There are about 500 million documents in PACER,” says Tim, “which translates to several billion pages.”

What does that mean for RECAP? Probably that we’ll need to invite more friends to participate!

I try to get my donations in by the 1st quarter of the year, but as this year has been so hectic for me, moving offices around and such, I had to push off the ritual until May. Okay, fine. Maybe it is a ritual for me now!

All told, I came up with about 30 projects on my donations list; these projects were grouped into Priority Categories of Highest, High, Medium, Low, and Not Giving.

By throwing everything into an OpenOffice spreadsheet, I was able to adjust how much I was giving per project in each category and then see a total bottom line for all of the donations together. Giving money to multiple groups at the same time also helped me to spend my time efficiently and reduced the chances of missing a project.

The headers on my table columns were:

• Project/Org Name
• Given in which years?
• 2010 Priority
• Notes on Priority – Why the priority is set at a particular level
• Give via? – Useful if there’s a separate group who handles money for the project.
• Notes for this year – Anything special for this year’s donation.
• Amount this year
• PayPal Fees
• Paid ?

Here’s how I ranked the groups:

Highest

• FSF
• EFF
• Gnash
• SFLC
• Debian
• Xiph Foundation

High

• Free Geek
• OpenBSD/OpenSSH
• Gnome
• Mozilla Foundation
• Open Hardware Foundation
• Cygwin
• Creative Commons
• Pidgin
• GIMP
• Ext2Fsd
• 7-zip

Medium

• FileZilla
• Samba
• VLC (VideoLAN Player)
• Audacity
• PuTTY

Low

• Apache Foundation
• WINE
• OpenOffice.org
• Wireshark
• Blender
• Inkscape
• Mplayer/FFMpeg
• Python

Not Giving

• Ubuntu
• Emacs (part of GNU)
• Subversion/TortoiseSVN
• Replicant/Open phone hacking

On the high end, the FSF and EFF have been strong rocks for us, anchoring Free Software and protecting digital rights for over 20 years. Gnash and the Xiph Foundation were placed in the highest bracket, as development of a FOSS flash player and Free/Open media codecs are one of the biggest barriers to running a 100% Free operating system.

Nearly every system I own runs Debian or a distro based on Debian, and the OS is developed as a purely non-profit affair, so they deserve some cash. And of course the SFLC deserves funding as they work behind the scenes making all of the legal grick and GPL enforcement transparent so that projects can get back to the important things, like bug fixing and new development.

On the “Not Giving” front, some organizations looked like they didn’t need the money. Ubuntu is derived from and gains from Debian development, and has Shuttleworth to back it, said several people, so fund Debian instead. I already fund Emacs development via the GNU project, and I no longer use Subversion or TortoiseSVN at work or home now that we’ve switch to Gnome. In terms of the Replicant project, I’d much prefer hacking on a phone myself.

The rest of the projects fell somewhere in between the two extremes. Well, most of them, anyways. It may sound a little bit crazy, but a handful of projects just look like they don’t need money.

For example, the Pidgin project has had a bug open for several years on how they need a donations button on their website, but still don’t have one. Too bad, Pidgin, I’m sure you could use donations to pay for something — like having someone implement a donations button.

The Open Graphics Project set up a campaign asking for money to buy developers hardware, but last I checked on the LinuxFund website, the goal was exceeded. Not only that, but there was no current news on the OGP website just people cleaning up SPAM since the beginning of 2010. If the program is dead or dormant, I’m going to send my money elsewhere.

The 7-zip project doesn’t seem to have a method of accepting donations, so I’m just going to save that money up and try to fund a project to support the RARv3 format in FOSS.

The PuTTY client for windows is very, very nice, but there haven’t been any updates to the software in over a year. So there’s no new work (AFAIK) to fund.

Overall, I gave money to 25 different groups. My bank account may be a bit leaner for it, but I’m happy to know that so many different projects will be able to benefit from my aide, even if I’m far too busy right now to fix bugs, write test cases, or compose documentation for them.

So who do you give money to? Think that I should include another group or two on my list for next year? Write a comment below and convince me!

–Q

This link will likely die in a couple of months, but here’s the current link to the survey.

I picked up a hard copy of the survey in the Lebanon store, and quickly found that I was much more interested in dissecting the survey than actually answering all of the questions. The survey comprised several pages of questions, and some of them required quite a lot of concentration to answer correctly. Some questions seemed repetitious, and other questions seemed to have too much ambiguity for me to feel comfortable answering.

So, on with the show!

The survey started out with a short note to Coop customers. The note described the normal stuff — the parameters of the survey, how data will be “completely confidential” with only “aggregate results” used for Coop improvements, and (of course) the “carrot”: how there will be a drawing for ten $100 gift certificates. I must admit that I was particularly excited that West Lebanon Feed & Supply was on the list of businesses, but confused that the Coop didn’t put themselves on the list as well — I mean, what’s more useful than an extra $100 at the Coop, right?

The first couple of questions were easy, but the third one was a little harder. They asked me to estimate grocery spending at all stores over the last 6 months, including “not only food but also general household supplies,[sic] and health and personal care products.” Then they warned “Note: the total must equal 100%,” before giving a list of 8 stores plus “other”.

First, trying to estimate this breakdown was kind of hard. Just starting with total stores, I estimated I shopped at the Coop, Shaw’s, Price Chopper, BJ’s, Wall-Mart, P&C, as well as two in the “Other” category (Stern’s Produce and Yiping’s Asian Market). I didn’t shop at Hannaford’s or Market Basket, but I now realize that I forgot to list CVS and Dan & Whit’s at all.

With a list of stores set, I still had trouble figuring out how much I’d spent as I don’t keep precise receipts very long, and sometimes I pick up food and supplies for other people (as a favor). In the end I guessed I spend 50% of my money at the Coop, 30% at Price Chopper, and the rest sprinkled around at the rest of the stores.

Question 4 made me think for a while. After all the flexibility of Question 3 in assigning percentages to different chains/stores, #4 made me choose the single coop location at which I shop most frequently. I shop at the Hanover and Lebanon stores about equally, but I’m nearly never out on Lyme Road. Stuck with choosing just one, I went with the (larger) Leb store.

Questions 5 and 6 were loooong. Question #5 comprised a list of statements about the Coop (which should be answered about the store you chose in Q #4), and Question #6 was the same list of statements, but applied to BJ’s Wholesale Club.

I know that surveys have to deal with generalizations, but some of the statements were downright hard to rank.

First, S: “Prices at the Coop are fair.”

Fair to whom? To me? To the producers? To the Coop employees? I wasn’t sure how to answer that one and I started to have flashbacks to when I took the PSAT and SAT. I remember my mother telling me to stop over-analyzing the imprecision in the SAT’s questions, and just fill in the regular, dumb answer they wanted. As for the Coop survey, I gave up and chose “Neither Agree nor Disagree”.

S: “When items are on sale at the Coop, the discounts are deep.”

Sometimes yes, sometimes no. There are currently deep discounts for coop members on Muir Glenn tomato products (still going until May 2nd, I believe), and there are always heavy markdowns on 7th generation products once a year, and on citrus during the winter citrus sale. But at other times the discounts are much smaller.

I started to wonder if the statements were less about facts and more about trying to gauge consumer perception of products at the Coop. I mean, that’s half of marketing, right?

S: “I have a lot in common with others who shop at the Coop.”

Well, sure, I relate to a number of people at the Coop because they’re my friends. But I think that they’re looking for more sociological stuff like income level, politics, crunchiness, dress, etc… With so many possible components to this question it could be tough to answer; of course, lots of people at the Coop drive a Subaru, have 2 kids and a dog, are white, and eat some organic food and some inorganic food while dressing in jeans and polar fleece and bringing their reusable bags to the Coop.

So yeah, I chose “Strongly Agree.”

Some statements were easier than others, such as “I believe the Coop cares about the local community.” and “The selection at the Coop includes some very expensive grocery products.”

Well of course! The Coop has a passel of programs and works with local groups to try to accomplish great stuff in the community. Heck, the top hit on Google for Community Partner + Month is for the Coop Food Stores. As for expensive products, well there’s a no-brainer! There are $100+ bottles of wine, cheeses at over $20/lb, and cuts of meat that are at least in the teens if not over $20/lb. Those items are on the high side for nearly all Coop shoppers.

Moving on to Question #6, dealing with BJ’s, I had a whole passel of questions about the statements:

“Prices are fair”
The same issue as w/the statement when applied to the Coop.

“I can get the same items at lower prices in other stores than BJ’s.”
Well actually yes, I can get items for lower prices, but then again I priced out 50+ ingredients for Milque and Cookies at the Coop, Price Chopper, and BJ’s in a spreadsheet. I believe that most customers don’t shop like a price-matching machine!

“I believe that BJ’s has environmentally friendly policies.”
Well, BJ’s uses fewer bags than the coop — in fact, they make all people take their stuff in reused cardboard boxes, so they probably use a heck of a lot less plastic than the Coop!

“For what BJ’s offers, the prices they charge are reasonable.”
What about the member fee? For large consumers BJ’s can be more worth it than for small consumers.

“The atmosphere at BJ’s is pleasant.”
I was going to mention that the carts and aisles are larger, which leads to much better cart racing, but I’m not sure how the Tuckies analyzing the survey would feel about that.

“I believe that BJ’s strives to build long-term relationships with its customers.”
Well, yes, in a way — I mean, they do make you buy a year-long membership, which encourages people to take advantage of it as much as possible, and to stick with it for an entire year.

Questions #8 and #9 were two of the most interesting. Question #8 was “Please list the names of up to five products that you think are priced about the same or lower at the Coop than at other stores.”

I haven’t checked these things out, but I went with some veggies (lettuce, often), and bulk foods like spices, brown rice, cornmeal, and (king arthur) flour.

Question #9 was “Please list the names of up to five products that you think are more expensive at the coop than at other stores.”

I went with fish, chicken, ketchup, white bread, pasta, and campbell’s soup.

The thing that people need to remember is that price can seem higher at the Coop because the Coop doesn’t offer the lower grades of certain items, like bleached flour, cheaper chicken parts, lower-grade meats, etc. If you do a straight-across product comparison for things that come in bulk, like King Arthur Flour or brown rice, the bulk bins at the Coop usually win out, but if you’re just looking for the cheapest version of “X,” then the Coop will get undercut.

Question #12 concerned itself with “grocery shopping habits and opinions.”

Part 1 says “A business should give back to the local community.” Now I’m no die-hard libertarian, but I think that businesses shouldn’t have to give back to the community beyond the requirements of their taxes and other legally-required fees. Would I prefer it if they do? Oh, yes. Would their investment in the local community encourage me to patronize them? You betcha!

Perhaps a better statement would have been “I appreciate it when businesses give back…” or “I spend more money at a business if I feel they’re helping the community.”

Part 8 is “I always buy the best.”

Does that mean the best value? The highest-quality product? The highest-priced product?

Part 10 is “Environmental and social responsibility programs increase a company’s costs.”

Well there’s a bag of worms. In some cases some programs can lead toward education and advancement of a community, leading to higher-paying jobs and more income which leads to more money spent at local businesses, including the Coop, and thus in the long term being completely economically beneficial. But many environmental or socially responsible programs take some amount of capital to start and maintain, so they definitely can increase costs.

Question #16 is a small quibble, but I’m surprised that Tuck and the Coop (both rather progressive entities) put down a question of “What is your gender?” followed by only “Male” and “Female” boxes. While discussing this question with a friend, they helpfully pointed out that perhaps the Coop and/or Tuck might be afraid of offending or confusing some group of people if they were to put down an “Other” category.

Question #20 was great: “We’re almost done! Do you have any other feedback for the Co-op?”

I must admit that by this point I was pretty tired with the whole process, so I just scrawled in the box: “Nope. This survey is already long enough!”

Overall, I think that the Coop asked a lot of useful questions of customers about their shopping habits. I’m especially interested in how consumers perceive the Coop as compared to how they perceive BJ’s. I’m also a little curious as to why BJ’s was selected for this comparison instead of a supermarket like Shaw’s or Price Chopper. Do you think it might be because both BJ’s and the Coop have a membership model?

And how about Questions #8 and #9? I’ll have to do some comparisons myself to see if I correctly predicted which products were cheaper/same-price at the Coop and which were more expensive, but I’m going to guess that the average Coop customer is going to have some trouble identifying 5 items in each category off the top of their head.

As always, I wish the Tuck School the best of luck in helping the Coop improve their food stores. As fun as it is to be critical of this work, I reckon that it must be a tricky thing to try to come up with surveys that capture significant amounts of useful information without being so long and dense that no one bothers to complete them.

Update (2010-04-25): I just was poking at the online version of the survey and it used Price Chopper as the 2nd store in the comparison. This seems to indicate to me that they are randomly choosing a 2nd store to compare against the Coop.

– Q

Have you taken the Tuck/Coop survey? Did you author the survey or are working on analyzing the results of the survey? Are you a completely unrelated party, perhaps on an entirely different continent, but feel compelled to throw in your $0.02? Marvy! Leave me a comment below and I’ll try to pay attention to it soon!

One of my Coding is Not a Crime stickers adorns my laptop of the era, one is filed away somewhere I can’t find at the moment, and one I remember giving away to a friend. Perhaps my favorite sticker of all time, I had no doubts that the EFF would continue to make them and we donation-willing sort would continue to pay perhaps a little above market price for them, happy to fill the coffers of the Defenders of our Digital Rights in the process.

But, alas, the stickers are no more. As I grieved while at Libre Planet a couple of weeks ago, the EFF hasn’t sold the stickers for several years.

The current EFF sticker pack goes for $8 and includes stickers with the words

EFF.org, FREE SPEECH, PRIVACY, FAIR USE, INTERNATIONAL, INNOVATION, E-VOTING RIGHTS, R.I.P. DRM LOL, COME BACK WITH A WARRANT, and DEFENDING RIGHTS IN THE DIGITAL WORLD.

All of the work done by the EFF is important, and some of the current sticker slogans are even a bit catchy, but I still think that nothing (yet) tops the Coding is Not a Crime stickers. Slapping one of these suckers on the lid of your laptop is a great way to announce your support of programming freedom and can lead to lots of interesting discussions with others. I’ve personally had people come up and complement me on the sticker, so for you shy folks out there who want to become a little more social, these stickers would be great.

So here’s what I’m thinking: Someone should make another run of these stickers — either the EFF or some interested individual. Hmm…I guess I just volunteered myself, didn’t I? Well,I’ll try to find a moment today and see how much it would cost to get bumper stickers printed up. It can’t be that much, can it?

If you have an idea for a better sticker than Coding is Not a Crime, work for the EFF and want to produce this sticker again, think that Coding IS SO a Crime, or just want to sell me pills to enlarge the mortgage on my luxury watch, leave a comment below. I may even read it!*

–Q

* Ha, ha, no! April Fools! — Why would I read your silly comments?

Except I can’t show it to you. But not for the usual reasons…

Update: I’ve found the full text and included it at the bottom of this post.

The reason I can’t show it to you is because that page on opensource.com is giving us the following error:

Access denied
You are not authorized to access this page.

Hmmph!

I initially found the link to the post while browsing the #swpat tag on Identi.ca. After encountering the Access denied barrier I became even more curious about the article. Was it not yet ready for publication? Was there something factually wrong in it? Did it cause an incident and have to be removed?

The answer, of course, might be something much simpler and less racy. I mean, someone might have frobbed the wrong knob in the blog software and unintentionally made the post private.

So many possible explanations, so little time.

So I went out and googled around, using what little information I did have, namely the title of the blog post as embedded in the url. And I found on Facebook what appears to be a chunk of the post:

Stuck in a 20th century business model? Hack it.

by JWhitehurst

The business world is changing at a rapid pace. Sooner or later, any 21st century business leader will face a wall built by 20th century business models. For open source software, that wall was software patent law.

Software patents aren’t used to protect the inventor; they are often used to halt innovation. If you come up with an idea that’s similar to mine, I can prevent you from bringing that idea to fruition–even if I opt out of doing anything useful with my idea. Even if your idea rose up independent of mine.

The author of the post, DiscoveringTheObvious, is still trying to track down the full text of Whitehurst’s blog post, so if you have any leads or have access to the full text, please pass it along to one of us.

All in all the post sounds very interesting. I hope that someone will release it to us in its entirety very soon so that we can hear what RedHat’s CEO has to say.

–Q

Update (2010-03-28): I poked around and found the full text of the article in Google’s cache. It’s CC-BY-SA, so I’m posting it in its entirety below:

Stuck in a 20th century business model? Hack it.

Posted 17 Mar 2010 by Jim Whitehurst (Red Hat)

The business world is changing at a rapid pace. Sooner or later, any 21st century business leader will face a wall built by 20th century business models. For open source software, that wall was software patent law.

Software patents aren’t used to protect the inventor; they are often used to halt innovation. If you come up with an idea that’s similar to mine, I can prevent you from bringing that idea to fruition–even if I opt out of doing anything useful with my idea. Even if your idea rose up independent of mine.

It’s clear that what drives the economics of the 21st century will be fundamentally different than what drove the economics of the 20th century. In the 20th century, our economics were built around physical assets. Those assets were optimized by ownership and scarcity.

Our legal system is based around a model of property and property ownership. Property ownership may be essential for stability in an emerging economy, but can be a hindrance when so much of the capital of the 21st century is intellectual.

Actually, software began with a fundamental problem: The marginal cost to copy it was close to zero. In terms of building business models around software, that wasn’t a feature; it was a bug. You can charge for it once, but then people can copy it for free. The answer was to lock it down–to apply an older legal system of copyright laws to source code.

A few decades later, we went one step further and applied a patent system to software and locked down the ideas, too.

Certainly Microsoft was key player in applying this model to software. What’s interesting is that the Bill and Melinda Gates foundation will only fund research into AIDS now if the researchers agree to fully open their results and allow the be used or built on by anyone else. Even Gates understands the power of collaboration and what it can do.

The problem is that locking up information fundamentally suboptimizes the value of that information.

If we don’t find a way to build business model innovations in this new world of ideas, we’ll sub-optimize value as a society. We need to unlock the power of participation.

That’s not to say we need to give things away for the sake of giving them away–we do it to create value. Information is fundamentally more valuable when it’s shared and others can build upon it.

Innovation is a collaborative, stair-building process. Sir Isaac Newton famously wrote, “If I have seen a little further, it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.” We produce the greatest innovations when build on each others’ ideas. (Even Sir Isaac repurposed his observation from a 12th century axiom.)

When someone locks down a segment of this information process, by protecting not the expression of an idea but the idea itself from being remixed or built upon, innovation suffers. Rather than building to greater heights of innovation, construction effectively grinds to a halt.

So when the open source software community found certain proprietary software companies abusing the 20th century model of patents, they did what any self-respecting coder would do. They hacked the system.

A number of companies supportive of open source worked together to buy up lots of software patents. They pooled these patents together into the Open Invention Network, building a set of “defensive” patents that would be exercised in the event of legal attack by proprietary software companies. They are helping to protect Linux from ongoing legal battles by using the 20th century patent system in an innovative way.

Likewise, when it became obvious that the copyright system would allow people to “lock up” their changes to open source code, the community decided to hack the system. Using the legal framework of copyright law, they turned it on its head and created “copyleft”–in particular, the GNU General Public License (GPL). Now, open source coders could free their work by applying the GPL to it, which would require any further contributions to be released under the same license.

We’ve seen this same principle at work outside the open source software world, in the Sand Hill Road venture capital community. In fact, I would argue that one of the reasons the US has been so particularly successful in fostering technology startups is because we have a much better system of allocating capital to new ideas.

In the past when people with innovative business ideas needed funds to bring their ideas to market, the banks and traditional capital markets often locked them out. The capital markets had developed to allocate massive amounts of capital to companies who need it to build infrastructure like railroads or other large efforts. Few technology startups need capital in that way. So the venture capital community formed–a group that looks at ideas and people’s track records over time and tries to allocate a minimal amount of capital to help good ideas move forward.

Venture capital hacked the traditional capital system and stepped up to provide capital to innovators. Without this hack, many of our 21st century businesses would not exist as we know them today.

What’s clear is that just because we have to live in a system today doesn’t mean we have to be held back by it. When you’re facing what seems like an insurmountable 20th century barrier to innovation, take a good look at the framework. Then hack it.

Software patents, as you might assume, are patents that cover software. These patents don’t cover a particular implementation of an algorithm or series of algorithms, as one can with a copyright, but instead cover the algorithm itself….implemented on a general purpose computer.

“What, what?,” I hear you saying “but how can this be? Algorithms and math are not patentable in the US.” And while you are correct when you say that math and algorithms are not directly patentable in the US, you have missed a most devious and ridiculous loophole, first allowed by the US Patent Office, and then later perpetuated by the courts. An otherwise unpatentable algorithm, when loaded on to a “general purpose computer“, suddenly becomes part of a patentable whole.

Now I know what you’re thinking: “How can the act of loading the algorithm on to a computer suddenly make it patentable?” And I must agree with you. The fact that software patents have been routinely found legal, shoehorned as they have been into the existing patent law through an idiotic and non-transformative hack, makes me believe that several of the sitting justices are at the very least uninformed about computers and math, and at the worst may be egregiously misinterpreting the law due to a lack of faculties necessary for comprehension of the complex systems about which they are ruling.

(Yes, I just called you dumb, judges. Get over it, then ask your grandchildren to help you learn more about computers. They’re really quite fun and won’t bite. The computers, I mean.)

There are groups of people working to overturn the existing rulings about software patents and to get rid of software patents once and for all, such as End Software Patents, but it would be very nice if programmers could route around software patents today so that we could get real, important work done.

One example of important work would be the inclusion of various patented codecs into Free Software programs such as Gnash and Firefox. The only major hurdle to the direct inclusion of codecs such as Sorenson Spark and H.264 into these programs is that these codecs are covered by one or more software patents. As you may have guessed, the owners of these particular patents aren’t interested in providing Free Software projects — or anyone else, for that matter — with royalty-free, perpetual licenses.

So what do Free Software developers do?

We route around the problem!

Remember that algorithms aren’t directly patentable. What is claimed in all of these software patents is the combination of [algorithm] + [general purpose computer]. We can’t often change the algorithm (e.g. if we need to interoperate with a particular codec), so let’s change the general purpose computer!

Let’s say that we have a program that decodes video codec X. Written in some common language like C or Python, we can easily get the program to run on all kinds of different computer systems. But what if we don’t let it? It would be easy to include some code in our program that prevents the code from running on a general-purpose computer:

CASE:
  ($MY_SPECIFIC_MIPS_PROCESSOR)
    decode_with_codec_X();
  ELSE:
    crash();
 

I’m not sure how the courts envision a general purpose computer, but I believe that no matter how they try to define the term we will either be able to include (artificial) restrictions into our code so that we are no longer infringing, or the courts will have to define a general purpose computer so generally that one could argue that one’s brain falls under the description. Hopefully, if the latter comes to pass, the courts will end this preposterous farce once and for all.

But let’s not hold our breath…

–Q

Good.

In true wömblian fashion (and yes, you naysayers, that umlauted beauty tucked neatly into the beginning of this sentence is indeed a word, at least in the environs of this website) I have procured a domain entirely appropriate for me. Without meaning to hurt any feelings, whether it is appropriate for you or not is not really any of my concern at the moment. It’s my domain, I’m hanging on to it, and you can’t have it. So there!

…still there? Good, I didn’t really mean to ruffle your feathers. Just…you know….got a new toy and all, still feeling a bit possessive and all that.

Rest assured, good people, that I have chosen a delightful name. A name that pays tribute to the wonderful and marvelous Edward Lear, a name with a unique panache, and a name with only a few hundred Google hits. To put it another way, of course it had to be unique: all of the shorter, more obvious domain names have long ago been snatched up!

I had hoped to come up with some rather clever or witty reason to explain why I can’t tell you the domain name yet. I was thinking that it might have something to do with ruining the stock market (already happened), secret Cold War espionage (the Cold War’s been over for 20 years), or the electricity going out in my house, resulting in me having to eat all of the ice cream in my freezer, thus giving me an incredible headache, leading to a flash of brilliance in which I invent a time machine, go back a dozen years, and prevent Barney the Dinosaur from ever being created (or something like that). Well, I think you can see quite plainly how well that brainstorming session turned out.

The long and the short of it is that I registered my domain, but I haven’t had time to put put any content yet. I know, I know, it’s an extremely lame excuse. But it’s also totally true: If you go to my domain today, all you’ll see is a lonely directory listing showing only the two files favicon.ico and favicon.gif. But it’s also true that I’ve been trying to get holiday cards done, sort out random boxes of papers that I may or may not have written a decade ago, and catch up with family and friends.

And I’ve been making sauerkraut. Delicious, delicious sauerkraut. And I’m going to claim that the sauerkraut has been the cabbage that broke the camel’s back, so to speak. With so much to do, I just haven’t had time to website-it-up.

But soon, it will be complete. A fully-functional battle station shiny website. I may transition my blog over there, but moving the blog and other hosted resources certainly won’t happen right away.

Keep watching this space for updates! Just don’t hold your breath — I always seem to be busy with more and more things!

–Q

There’s always so much to do and so much to see in Portland. Living in a relatively small community in New England means that coming back to Portland is almost like venturning to a large city. Portland will never be a large city like New York or Boston to me, but there do seem to be new buildings popping up like weeds, and the traffic always seems a bit heavier each year. I say seems as it does seem that way, although I am wary that I might just be wistfully imagining a more perfect past Portland, the way that everything was larger when you were younger and the way that men’s suits, a salesman told me today, always seem to shrink in the closet.

Each year I trek down to Free Geek, get over to the various yummy stores like New Seasons and Sheridan’s Fruit Company, and spend time seeing what’s changed downtown.

I always joke that had Free Geek started a few years earlier, I might have frittered away spent all of my time there instead of graduating from high school. I’ve been working on getting something like Free Geek started in my neck of the woods, but wrestling with several issues including location and population density. Speaking of small populations, would you believe that we don’t even have any Trader Joe’s in the Upper Valley? Oh Portland, you have such a well-stocked array of merchants, and there are so many wonderfully happy and friendly people here.

But perhaps I cut Hanover and Norwich and Lebanon and all of the other towns and regions short. Just down the road lies the headquarters for the King Arthur Flour Company, whose quality flours are available all over the nation (and beyond), and while Portland may have wonderful duck ponds, I never got a chance to skate on them the way I can skate on various ponds in New Hampshire or Vermont the whole winter long (and for free!).

Both the Northeast and the Northwest have so much to offer, and while I will likely spend several more years zig-zagging back and forth from one coast to the next, keeping my skates sharpened and my puddle-stomping boots shined, I do stop from time to time and wonder: Should I ever fly South for the winter?

Happy and warm,
– Q

P.S. If I were to venture down South for a visit, where should I go? Leave a comment below telling me where to travel!

I saw the notice on the WordPress blog about the “Giving Thanks” contest earlier this week and knew that it was just the right kick-in-the-pants to get me to try out the MiniDV camera that I recently purchased on eBay. So I grabbed a few of my friends, asked them what they’re thankful for, and cut it all together into a short video. Thirty seconds isn’t that much time, especially when your friends are so voluble!

I wasn’t really sure how this film would turn out. I shot a lot of footage, but as I only had 30 seconds for the final cut I had to really pare things down to make sure that I could include a clip of each person.

Filming each person was fun. Pure and simple. Each person had their own unique quirks and mannerisms that really came out when they were put in front of a camera lens. Percy with the sheep, Alex with a ping pong ball, and a highly-caffeinated Nida all presented unique challenges when filming (such as keeping the subject in frame!) and offered not only different answers to “For what are you thankful?”, but even took different approaches to answering the questions.

Okay, enough chatter from me. Here’s the meat of this post, the video:

I actually have about 20 minutes of source footage, so I might make a couple more videos of more reasonable length later this week. I still have a lot to learn about video editing, but I’ve got some good teachers!

Truth be told, I actually bought the camera for conversion of VHS home video to digital format. Because the Canon zr100 has an analog-to-digital-via-firewire passthrough capability, I can play VHS tapes in a VCR, then hook up video/audio out to the camera, then pipe that into to my Ubuntu laptop. Many modern camcorders connect to computers via USB and do not support this kind of digital pass-through capability, at least not reliably on the Linux kernel.

The camera was about $80; 5 tapes were $12. Under $100 and I’m shooting video and converting all of my VHS tapes that are gathering dust. Pretty big bang for the buck.

Although I wasn’t sure what I was getting myself into, shooting this turned out to be rather fun. For my first movie, I think this turned out pretty darn well!

A big thanks to all of the friends that participated. To all those friends who I didn’t nab for this project, rest assured that I’ll show up, camera in hand, to draft you for one of my next videos. I’m thinking of either some kind of surrealist montage or a lighthearted horror flick.

–Q

At first thought, the whole thing does sounds a bit contrived, but the execution is rather extensive and well thought out. The group’s website even includes a useful FAQ page that includes such Q&A’s as

• How do you ensure that your representatives won’t be Raptured?
• How can we trust that you’ll honor your service agreement, afterall you ARE atheists. [sic]
• What if one of my family members is left behind? Will you still take possession of my pet?

I mean, it would be rather…unfortunate, shall we say, if 3 out of 4 family members were Raptured and the 4th one somehow didn’t make the cut. Three people would be up in Heaven, while the odd man out would be on Earth, in what are estimated to be pretty harrowing conditions.

So you might be wondering: What happens post-Rapture to all the people and stuff left on the planet? Does God just CTRL-A, CTRL-X everything left on Earth?

Well, not exactly. If you’re not familiar with the general conditions, they include asteroids hitting the Earth, the crust of the Earth breaking open, locusts and other animals scurrying about stinging people, and the oceans turning to blood. Yes, blood.

If you’re anything like me, one of the first questions you might ask is: I wonder if there’s enough Iron on Earth to turn the oceans to blood?

So let’s see. The Internets say that you need “about 200 milligrams (mg.) per pint of Blood” to make hemoglobin,” and that the oceans are about 1.3 billion km^3 in volume.

Google tells us that 1 kilometer^3 = 2.11337642 × 10^12 US pints.

That means that 200mg Iron/pint x (2.11337642 × 10^12 pints/km^3) = 4.22675284 x 10^8 kg of Iron/km^3 of blood.

For the entire oceans,
4.22675284 x 10^8 kg of Iron/km^3 of blood x 1.3 x 10^9 km^3 liquid/oceans = 5.49477869 × 10^17 kg Iron/oceans. Correcting for our Sig Figs, that’s 5.5 × 10^17 kg Iron/oceans of blood.

Wikipedia tells us that the Earth weighs about 5.9736 × 10^24 kg. Divide the weight of the Earth by the total amount of Iron we need and we get 1.1 * 10^7, so you’d need about one 10-millionth of the weight of the Earth, in Iron, to make nice Iron-red oceans.

But how much Iron is there really on Earth? Wikipedia says that the Earth is about 32% Iron, so it shouldn’t be too difficult to shift a three-hundred-thousandth of that total into the oceans.

So there you have it. All the Iron you’d need to turn the oceans to blood is available right here on this planet. If God is a conservationist, he could just reuse the Iron here instead of needing to expend extra energy making Iron out of nothing or bringing an Iron-rich asteroid to Earth and disintegrating it.

There’s another good reason to use the Iron already on Earth: By conserving mass, that should hopefully be enough to keep the Earth in a stable orbit.

And now you know!

Updates:
2009-11-30 – Earth weight/Iron needed ratio is 1.1 * 10^7 (not 10^6, as I initially wrote).