Xarg blog Archive

I have been reading most of my news in an aggregator this week and I realize the short textified descriptions in the RSS are really annoying. I am going to change the code so I send full posts in the RSS.

I am incredibly disappointed that the Supreme Court did not fix what is manifestly a bad law, one that is clearly not in the best interests of the people: The Sonny Bono Copyright Term Extension Act. It is unrealistic to expect the court to impose rationality and correct for the failure of congress to do the right thing when confronted by a law that is not unambiguously unconstitutional. From the last paragraph of the majority opinion:

Beneath the facade of their inventive constitutional interpretation, petitioners forcefully urge that Congress pursued very bad policy in prescribing the CTEA's long terms. The wisdom of Congress' action, however, is not within our province to second guess. Satisfied that the legislation before us remains inside the domain the Constitution assigns to the First Branch, we affirm the judgment of the Court of Appeals.

I feel for Larry Lessig given his incredibly hard work and well reasoned arguments. The public has lost here and Justice Breyers dissenting opinion states that quite clearly:

It is easy to understand how the statute might benefit the private financial interests of corporations or heirs who own existing copyrights. But I cannot find any constitutionally legitimate, copyright-related way in which the statute will benefit the public. Indeed, in respect to existing works, the serious public harm and the virtually nonexistent public benefit could not be more clear.

I saw this word somewhere and did not know what it meant. It turns out to be an excellent word for describing a lot of what goes on in online communities.

It comes from Parkinson's Law by C. Northcoate Parkinson. He describes how a planning board will approve spending millions of dollars to build an atomic power plant but if you go to them to get approval to build a bike shed they will argue endlessly. The problem being that the atomic power plant is so large, complex, and difficult to understand that no one can really argue about how exactly it is done. On the other hand, everyone knows what goes into a building a bike shed and so everyone feels qualified to argue about the details.

For some reason, technical discussions seem to be particularly susceptible to bikeshedding. There was a great post by Poul-Henning Kamp on the freebsd-hackers list which describes a particularly virulent attack they had on their list and submits a plea to avoid it in the future. I think just writing the code is a good antidote to engaging in the arguments in the first place. If the functionality is straightforward and easy to implement then just do it rather than argue about it. Most of the people spending their time arguing probably have enough inertia that they are not going to write any code and consequently, if you do have the initiative, the code itself is the most suitable response. As Poul-Henning Kamp said:

I wish we could reduce the amount of noise in our lists and I wish we could let people build a bike shed every so often, and I don't really care what colour they paint it.