Believe In Robots

In what now seems like a long time ago I was once a anxious kid. (Not to say that I am not anxious now.) At that time one of the topics which both made me anxious and filled me with interest was religion. Specifically I was interested in (and tortured myself with) how my faith buttressed up to certain ideas which were in conflict with it. It was my intent to see if I could read, discover or puzzle out my own solutions to such weighty contradictions.

I was (and remain) very interested in science. I understood that the speed of light was a constant and what a constant meant. I had a cosmos-esque understanding of the big band and believed in evolution. I also did not believe that these things were at odds with my faith. However people of faith still railed against both big bang and evolution and I enjoyed reading about the conflict, feeling out the texture and breadth of the arguments.

I eventually discovered a bit of text which so triumphantly beat back the proponents of a young universe that I continue to be stunned the argument is not more widely used.

I was in 5th grade (I think) and I was at my public library, reading a pro-science article on this very subject via the big macrofiche reader in the back of the library. ( It would be another two or three years until I would have internet access at home or via my local library and the bulletin board systems I started dialing into the year before had very little such info.)

This particular article was stunning in the simplicity and elegance of its article. It simply pointed out that once one looked at the speed of light and the distance of the stars we could see in the night sky and crunched the math the only way that a young universe was possible, is if the light to us from those stars had been created already in transit.

From that point forward I could not comprehend how anyone could bother to believe in a young universe. Even to my young self it seemed to me the only people who had room to counter this kind of argument would be to posit the existence of a lying god, one who would deliberately deceive his creation.

Why people continue to debate the big bang and evolution I do not know. The speed of light already won this argument a long time ago.

I have been seriously considering voting third party this election cycle and just to head off certain knee jerk reactions (which tend to be warranted when certain types say such things) I wanted to go ahead and assert:

• I am still a proudly insanely left.
• Obama is the clear best choice between him and the rest of the GOP candidates.
• I would rather shoot myself than be a Ron Paul supporter.
• All the GOP candidates can go die in fires as far as I care.
• I am going to die a thousand deaths election night if Obama looses to any member of the GOP.

The reason for me to vote third party is a criticism one does not hear much of. Simply put, Obama is bad at being a progressive.

Obama is being a very good sane voice right now for women's rights and birth control and he is also adequate to a point on gay rights (although he is on the record as against marriage equality.) He also from time to time makes the effort to ask congress to tax the rich. However this is really the bulk of his liberal street cred.

A short but not exhaustive list of policy issues and stances of his administration that bother me include:

• Promised to close Guantanamo Bay and then decidedly has not.
• Wanted to continue the Iraq war and only did not because Iraq refused to give us continued immunity to war crimes.
• Paints the above as fulfilling his promise of ending the war in Iraq.
• Expanded the CIA redention and torture program.
• Made killing people in the middle east with robots a thing.
• Actively lies about the civilian casualties with said robot attacks.
• Gutted the single player option after colluding with insurance agencies.
• Has supported in general the expansion of oil drilling despite ecological disasters.
• Has filled the Treasury and his staff with largely conservative economists.
• Is lending use of drones to the US police force.
• Defended warrant-less wire tapping.
• Is pro more destructive IP law down the road (if not for SOPA presently.)

This isn't much of a surprise when one stops and thinks about it. Despite the right's violent cries to the contrary, Obama is a centrist. The democrats have largely moved to the center, while the republicans have moved violently extreme leaving the country with no true left. The Democrats by and large have given up on repealing the patriot act, pulling out from our war on terror and moving forward with a green new deal (Which is by the way one of the things former President Clinton talked up while campaigning for the democrats in 2008.)

And seeing as I am fairly far left leaning, I am left a bit unhappy to be left unrepresented.

Being someone who does follow third party politics and has encouraged unhappy conservative voters to vote third party. I cannot help but realize that Jill Stein of the Green Party is an insanely good match to my own political beliefs.

Now in the past I have often expressed some desire to vote third party but then as election time came closer I would inevitably vote democrat to fend off the republic hord and un the game of voting for the least-worst party it makes a lot of sense for me to vote Obama. Just as it made quite a bit of sense for me to vote John Kerry before him. However it strikes me, that this game is one with no end. One never gets the government one wants voting this way. I will never contribute to the political momentum necessary for me to see a far left leaning president by continuing to show the democratic party I favor centrists. Such voted do count as consent and approval for the platform of the party. It signals to the party that you desire the country to be run as per their platform. It is not simply a vote "against" the party you wish to see fail. It is often discussed as such by the winning party after the election. (Something which did prompt me to register independent after the last election.)

Now a clever critic of this may then say, "But Wes, third parties are bound to loose anyway thus one throws away the vote."

After much mulling over this very thought and in light of freak successes by third party's of the past. I am inclined to think that this is perhaps a self fulfilling prophecy. When polled the majority of citizens are willing to vote third party if they think the third party has a chance at winning. Combined with the mysteriously successful runs of others like Ross Perrot I believe the only thing which prevents third party candidates from winning is the illusion itself that they cannot win. The best way to combat such a thing is to of course become one of the few who backs such candidates.

The clever critic could of course also say, "But Wes, if the GOP win you will have wished you had voted for Obama."

The crazy awful thing is, the same electoral college which prevents the popular vote from deciding who wins the election is itself a kind of way for me to hedge my own bets in this regard. Unless Obama looses in my district by an infinitesimal number of votes (likely smaller than the margin of error) I can remain confident that my vote for a third party did not hurt his cause.

So unless someone or something changes my mind. I am seriously considering casting my lot with the green party this year.

I have been running a Thinkpad X41t convertible tablet as my primary computer for some time. I chose it because it is the only tablet PC I have found which can be run GNU/Linux sans any proprietary drivers or binary blobs (once the stock wifi card has been swapped out for an IBM 11a/b/g Wireless LAN Mini PCI Adapter II.)

Its not as speedy as many newer tablets but it is a resiliant work horse and I find it an invaluable machine. I would recommend it to anyone looking for a tablet PC well supported under GNU/Linux. All hardware works with the drivers available in Debian Stable (6.0 at the time of this writing) with nothing installed from the non-free repositories. I have had to make some tweaks to get everything running smoothly under Debian, so I thought I might post some of that here.

Some of what I am writing here assumes a Gnome 2.x world. Although only by the tinest bit and I imagine it could be reproduced in Gnome 3.x or any other desktop enviroment with ease. I myself plan on upgrading to Gnome 3.x when the next version of Debian Stable rolls around.

Getting the Stylus Up and Running

The Xorg that ships with Debian does not automatically detect the stylus so X must be configured. To do so first generate an xorg.conf by following the instructions on the Debian wiki. Then add these lines under "ServerLayout":

        InputDevice     "stylus" "SendCoreEvents"
        InputDevice     "cursor" "SendCoreEvents"
        InputDevice     "eraser" "SendCoreEvents"

And add these sections anywhere (although after the mouse and keyboard sections seems reasonable):

Section "InputDevice"
        Driver        "wacom"
        Identifier    "stylus"
        Option        "Device"        "/dev/ttyS0"
        Option        "Type"          "stylus"
        Option        "ForceDevice"   "ISDV4"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Driver        "wacom"
        Identifier    "eraser"
        Option        "Device"        "/dev/ttyS0"
        Option        "Type"          "eraser"
        Option        "ForceDevice"   "ISDV4"
EndSection

Section "InputDevice"
        Driver        "wacom"
        Identifier    "cursor"
        Option        "Device"        "/dev/ttyS0"
        Option        "Type"          "cursor"
        Option        "ForceDevice"   "ISDV4"
EndSection

Handwriting Recognition and On Screen Keyboard

For handwriting recognition and an on screen keyboard I use CellWriter. Available in the debian repositorites.

I set the /apps/gnome-screensaver/embedded_keyboard_command key in gconf to "cellwriter --xid --keyboard-only" so that I could unlock the machine sans the physical keyboard.

To ensure that I could use handwriting recognition or a virtual keyboard with GKSU I also set the "/apps/gksu/disable-grab" key to true. Which is technically a minor security risk, but one I indulge for the sake of convenience.

Screen Rotation

I borrowed and modified this script from elsewhere on the internet to drive screen roation. I unfortunately have forgotten the original author:



/usr/local/bin/rotate

#!/bin/bash

STATUS_FILE=~/.rotate-status

function rotate() {
    case "$1" in
        3|right) N=3; T=cw ;;
        1|left) N=1; T=ccw ;;
        2|inverted) N=2; T=half ;;
        0|normal) N=0; T=none ;;
        *)
           echo -e "Useage:\n  $(basename $0) [left|right|inverted|normal]\n\n\
If no option is given, rotates the screen 90 degrees to the right.\n";
           exit 1
           ;;
    esac
    whoami > /tmp/.lastUserToRotate
    chmod ugo+rw /tmp/.lastUserToRotate
    xrandr -o $N & \
    xsetwacom set stylus Rotate $T & \
    echo $N > $STATUS_FILE
}

if [ "$#" == "0" ]; then
    rotate $(((3+0$(cat $STATUS_FILE 2>/dev/null))%4))
else
    rotate $1
fi

Keyboard Keys

Tablet keys must be assigned keycodes before they can be used. I added the following line to rc.local :

setkeycodes 6e 109 6d 104 69 28 6b 1 6c 120 68 220

This maps the enter,escape,page up and page down keys on the tablet properly with no further configuration. I then mapped the rotate button to the rotation script and the toolbox button to CellWriter in the Gnome Keyboard Shortcuts prefrences.

Power management Issues

Power management works out of the box. However if the system is suspended or hibernated while the screen is rotated the system looses stylus orientation and calibration. The xsetwacom command can restore this, however this is a bit tricky as xsetwacom must be ran from within a X session. To do this not only must the command be run as the logged in user, but the XAUTHORITY cookie must also be passed. I wrote two scripts to solve this problem. The solution is a bit of a hack but should work in a multi user enviroment.

The first script stores the current path to the XAUTHORITY cookie in a hidden file within the home directory. (As of GDM3 the path to the XAUTHORITY cookie is no longer easily predictable.)

/etc/X11/Xsession.d/100_xauth

#!/bin/sh
echo $XAUTHORITY > ~/.xauth
whoami > /tmp/.lastUserToRotate
chmod ugo+rw /tmp/.lastUserToRotate

This second script captures the current stylus rotation state on suspend or hibernate and recalibrates the stylus when the system is woken. Values for BottomX,BottomY will very depending on make, model and resultion.

/etc/pm/sleep.d/100_wacom

#!/bin/sh
PATH=/sbin:/usr/sbin:/bin:/usr/bin
if [ ! -f /tmp/.lastUserToRotate ];
then
    exit
fi
USER=cat /tmp/.lastUserToRotate
if [ ! -f /home/$USER/.xauth ];
then
    exit
fi
if [ ! -f /home/$USER/.rotate-status ];
then
    su - $USER -c "echo 0 > /home/$USER/.rotate-status"
fi
XAUTH=cat /home/$USER/.xauth
case "${1}" in
        suspend|hibernate)
                su - $USER -c "XAUTHORITY=$XAUTH xsetwacom --display \
        :0.0 get stylus rotate > /home/$USER/.stylus-status"
                ;;
       resume|thaw)
        setserial /dev/ttyS0 port 0x0200 irq 5 autoconfig
        su - $USER -c "XAUTHORITY='$XAUTH' xrandr -display \
        :0.0 -o /home/$USER/.rotate-status"
        su - $USER -c "XAUTHORITY='$XAUTH' xsetwacom --display \
        :0.0 set stylus rotate none"
        su - $USER -c "XAUTHORITY='$XAUTH' xsetwacom --display \
        :0.0 set stylus TopX 0" 
                su - $USER -c "XAUTHORITY='$XAUTH' xsetwacom --display \
        :0.0 set stylus TopY 0"
                su - $USER -c "XAUTHORITY='$XAUTH' xsetwacom --display \
        :0.0 set stylus BottomX 24576"
                su - $USER -c "XAUTHORITY='$XAUTH' xsetwacom --display \
        :0.0 set stylus BottomY 18432"
        su - $USER -c "XAUTHORITY='$XAUTH' xsetwacom --display \
        :0.0 set stylus rotate cat /home/$USER/.stylus-status"
                ;;
esac

Other Software

I highly recommend both Xournal (available in the Debian repositories) and the Grab and Drag extension for Firefox/Iceweasel.

One of the things I still marvel at is how the internet enables one to talk to and communicate with authors and creators.

I find I am still somewhat surprised that I can wonder over to www.identi.ca and talk about a problem I have with Linterna Magica ( http://linterna-magica.nongnu.org/ ) and the lead coder responds directly to me with corrections and is asking me to try out the new development build. Without me having to file an impersonal bug report. It is handled in conversation, personably.

Or how I can make a post over at FudgeRPG.com and mention that I converted the rules to ePub for use with digital readers and have Steffan O'Sullivan the man who wrote the game recommend where to upload the file because he wants a copy.

Back when I was reading comic books I had similar thoughts when I realized one could simply go to the author's forum and ask questions of the author. I marveled at it because my mind had a lot of mental cobwebs locked into the formation of how I digested comic books as a kid, where the only chance to participate in a dicussion with the author was to pray a letter landed in the questions column at the end of the issue along side a brief answer.

When I was a kid, my sister and I wrote a few authors as children. Doing so was like sending a message in a bottle, you had no notion if you would get a reply or not. It was often hard to find an address and it was an act done in isolation.

I remember when I got internet access I emailed authors occasional that listed electronic means of contacted them in their books. I was so startled when it worked. ( Jonathan Littman and Joan Lyn Slonczewski come to mind. )

There is something special about engaging in a back and forth with someone with a published work. It is something in my experience which isn't easily reproduced by most newer forms of social networking either. When you subscribe to their feed and see their posts stream through your little social networking window, it rarely seems to be altered by your own posts.

Perhaps this latter bit is a by product of some sort of signal to noise ratio in the various mediums and perhaps its also a function of just how popular a creator is. In fact as I dwell on it, I assume it must be the case. I am reminded at the grin that emerged when Nina Paley liked a post of mine and how my heart warmed when the lead singer of the Shondes friended me right back.

Crowdsourcing of content is also a kind of magic to me. To follow an author's work and then help them and become involved in getting the product published/printed/pressed is in its own way delightful to me. To have books on my bookshelf with my name in the credits because I helped make them possible even in a small way endears them to me.

I wonder if this magic will be taken for granted by people who can not remember the dark times pre internet of before or if it already is?

Given enough time if you talk to people who enjoy genre fiction (as I do) you will hear a very loaded statement stated plainly as fact, delivered along the lines of:

"Oh, well that is not really fantasy/scifi.."

I personally believe this kind of statement is claptrap, and I want to try and endeavor to explain why.

I don.t want to dwell on the definitions of what IS science fiction or what IS fantasy because anyone who spends more than ten minutes thinking on the subject will soon realize it is a bit of a pointless exercise. The moment you try to draw borders around these concepts is the moment you start excluding things which are often thought as not needing to be excluded.

Usually when I start to point this out to people and talk about things as being in terms of a gradient with some things falling in between they start to nod about and kind of agree. However, the language in which we use to describe these works remains very binary so it inevitably happens again or people concede that my point is likely but is somehow un-compelling.

One of the reasons this eternal debate was brought forward into my mind as of late is the unfortunate passing of Anne McCaffrey. Her most famous book series the Dragons of Pern is often thrust into such debates. To cite Wikipedia:

There is disagreement whether to classify some of the series as fantasy rather than science fiction and what to classify for children, youth, or adults. While the earlier novels in the series have elements also present in fantasy (low levels of technology, fire-breathing dragons, feudal societies), the prologue explains the events take place on a colony world. The first novel was originally serialized in Analog Science Fiction/Science Fact (1967), and that magazine did not publish fantasy. The publisher (Del Rey) lists them as science fiction titles, and McCaffrey herself describes them as science fiction and stresses the scientific rationales behind the world she has created. In more recent novels, the series moves toward more overt science fiction as the colonists rediscover their links to the past and develop much higher levels of technology.

What is interesting to me about this is what one commentator in particular has to say on her work:

Commenting on the Locus list, David Pringle calls them "arguably science fiction rather than fantasy proper" and names McCaffrey one "leading practitioner" of the planetary romance type of science fiction.

I think what is interesting in that bit of text is that Mr Pringle labels her work as planetary romance. Planetary romance is not a genre often spoken of in many of my social circles and is arguably a genre which has lost a great amount of steam in the past decade or so. People do not use the term to describe much work these days but it is a genre which smacks right in between the fantasy and science fiction genres we use today. It struck me instantaneously as a good classification of McCaffrey.s work.

This connects to a similar problem I have had. In the past I have had to explain to people that as a general rule I prefer romantic fantasy over most other forms of fantasy. The problem that rears its head with this is that I must inevitably differentiate between romantic fantasy as a genre and romance novels proper. There is in fact a difference.

A kind of disrespect for the term romance has sort of emerged which implies that if your novel is associated with the term, its primary purpose is a conduit for feeding a kind of saccharine romantic love via textual I.V. to the reader.

Romantic fantasy tends to be much more about the interpersonal relationships of the characters and possibly the politics therein. Romantic love may or may not be a part of that. Its name seems to be derived from medieval chivalric romances which could but did not always dwell on courtly love.

Much of the same thing can be said about planetary romance and yes even scientific romance (as science fiction was once called.)

In fact the older terminology for classifying everything broadly as romance and issuing sub genres like this is far more appealing to me and I think is far more accurate in many respects. It also leads to far less binary thinking about the genres. I am sure it may have its own border disputes but it seems to be a far better than our current method of classifying things as whole-sale fantasy or science fiction.

I would be interested in knowing why we stopped classifying these genres this way. I think the modern view of the romance novel as inherently non-legitimate is perhaps a part of it, but certainly that wasn.t the only cause. In fact romance novels proper were certainly contemporary and coexisted with these other genres for some time.

I also find it interesting in my experience that female readership seems to skew towards romantic fantasy and some of the planetary romance while male readership tends to skew more closely to "Traditional" high Tolken-esque fantasy and hard / military sci-fi, while simultaneously commentators consider the later somehow more pure or more real forms and the former .un real., impure or flawed.

The designer of the original Macintosh who revolutionized the world by democratizing easy to use computing and decided to couple it with an affordable yet easy to use graphical user interface died of pancreatic cancer. His name was Jef Raskins and he died with little fanfare in 2005.

I do not like being the sourpuss on this topic. I do think that Steve Job's death is a loss and that he does deserve being mourned. However, I do not think the effort to canonize him at this very moment ought to engage in sweeping revisionist histories propagated misinformation into the popular consciousness which erases the work and contribution of many others. Therefore after hearing Boing Boing's Xeni Jardin tearful announce that she must "do him justice" and to announce him as the man who single-handedly democratized technology across the industry, I feel moved to address this issue more comprehensively.

Steve Wosniak's role as Apple's co-founder and inventor of the Apple I, II and III are quite simply constantly ignored and have been for some time. Steve has never been credited with their design, instead people have always attributed to him the marketing feel and drive behind making the Apple and the initial corporate entity it became.

Jeff Haskin's pitched the idea for the original Macintosh to Apple leadership in parallel to Steve Job's own Lisa computer. By Jeff Haskin's own account Jobs attempted to kill the Macintosh project off in its infancy. Hasin's went over Job's head at the time and developed the Macintosh project, while doing so he codified a number of practices today, often seen as synonymous with Jobs. He wanted to tightly bundle the hardware and software, such that the software "knew" what to expect on it's tightly defined hardware. He eschewed user upgradability for cheap single all in one designs, etc.

Susan Kare designed most (but not all) of the well known iconography, user interface elements and fonts. Of which most were the enduring elements of the Mac OS line's visual style through the "classic" series. She stayed on at Apple for quite some time and is perhaps the actual driving force behind much of classic Mac OS's user interface, the look and feel of which is still felt in the design of Mac OS X's UI today.

It was when the Lisa was a known failure and Steve Jobs was removed from that project that he forcibly took the project from Haskin's in it's last year before completion, where much of its design and architecture had been finalized. This is to say that he did not contribute to the Macintosh Project. His biggest contribution seems to have been the inclusion (but not the design) of the mouse. It was originally intended to be left out, by default, to lower costs. (Mac OS v1 being able to be driven by both hotkeys and mouse input.) Jobs did rightfully argue that including it by default was the best thing to drive the system's popularity. An idea I imagine he did take from the Lisa.

When Job's was ousted from Apple in 1985 he took many designer's graphic artists and engineers with him and created NeXT. He paid famous graphic designer Paul Rand the staggering sum (at that time) of $100,000 to design the product's branding and style. Avie Tevanian lead the team which designed the Operating System on top of the Carnegie Mellon Mach microkernel (Which by the way, the CMU Mach microkernel gets around in computing history, whole books could be written on it's influence.) Frog Design Inc designed the original NeXT "Cube" hardware for Jobs. (They themselves being the designers of the original Apple IIc case. They had also invented the design iconography used in virtually every "classic" Mac which came after. The iconography itself was branded the "Snow White design language.") Jobs did demand that the NeXT workstation BE a cube, however as far as making that happen in both form and function they were indeed entirely responsible. Susan Kare once again was on board and once again designed the visual style of the NeXT operating system.

NeXT's hardware was ultimately unprofitable. The hardware side was canned shortly after the second revision. NeXT ultimately tried to peddle its operating system independently of the hardware. Ultimately that too was a failure, however Jobs was able to convince Apple otherwise. He sold NeXT to Apple with a few unfulfillable promises and a prayer of what the OS could do for them and used it as leverage to return to Apple proper.

Once returned to Apple Jobs killed all the product lines he could which were not directly part of his vision. This included the profitable and popular Apple Newton series of tiny hand held portable computers. He also shortly started a new wave of design and brand identity at Apple. The iMac and iBook was the central key launch point for this endeavor and they were designed by Jonathan Ive in 1998 with strong design influences from the canceled Newton eMate.

From the original iMac Apple rapidly catapults into modern computing history eventually getting out the door (albeit very late) their new version of Mac OS X, which in and of itself was NeXT's operating system, heavily redesigned and ported away from the Mach Microkernel to the BSD Kernel.

Yearly since the cancellation of the Newton line Jobs was approached and asked if Apple would revisit the hand held computer or PDA. His constant refrain to this was a resounding no. Periodically telling people that ultimately the question was nonsensical and that people do not really "want" such a thing.

After the invention of the original iPod (Again designed by Jonathan Ive in 2001) and throughout the eras of the "classic" iPod's reign the question occurs annualy, "Will Apple make a more generic general purpose iPod, one which kind of resembles the Newton?" Jobs answer is constantly the same every year until the very year of the actual iPod Touch in 2008. A device whose operating system, visually style, tight integration and bundling of a single programming language borrows extensively from the Newton, a product developed by Apple years before sans their illustrious leader.

Jobs was indeed a leader with incredibly strong vision (albeit at times narrowly so.) Without him it is indeed doubtful that Wosniak would have corporatized Apple successfully. He also did shape and pioneer the computing landscape in many important ways. He very much got right that computers did not have to be a plain unappetizing box. This insight did cause him to seek out and use visual design and brand iconography to great effect in ways I continue to marvel at. He did manage to single-handedly convince the market as a whole that design was important. His genius also lay in identifying and using the talents of others. A month ago when Job's stepped down from Apple Treehugger ran a story which I think illuminated this. They called Jobs the biggest modern patron of design the world has known. While Jobs did dabble in design work from time to time he always did so with help for he himself did not have any background or training as a designer. He was not and never had been an engineer or a programmer. He had a keen aesthetic sense and he hired those who complimented it. He demanded his vision be executed at the company even at the expense of practical concerns, this lead to many success and failures in measure. The Mac "Cube" (a throwback to the NeXT cube) while stunning was prone to over heating. The iMac mouse colorfully known as a "hockey puck" was one of the designs of the iMac most attributed to him, and is considered unusable by most. The list of impractical design oddities that Jobs reigned over is almost as extensive as his successes, if one looks.

Jonathan Ive's designs of hardware honestly stun me. I maintain that the original iBooks remain the most gorgeous laptops ever designed. Susan Kare and other earlier Mac graphics designers and artists are responsible for the vast majority of Apple visual touchstones still used today. The individual projects themselves were lead by various men and women in various capacities across Apple's history.

Steve's Job recognized their talent and got them all in the same company doing their great work. He recognized the importance of design and sought out good designers.

But he did not himself spark the computing revolution. Without Jobs we would still have affordable graphical personal computers today, we would have had MP3 players and smart phones and such. Advances would still have been made in user interface with increasing care taken to ease of use.

He did not create the industry nor did he do the design work, programming or engineering for which Apple was famous for. He had the good sense however to recognize that it was important.

He helped shaped the industry and for that he should be recognized. But let us not forget or erase the important contributions of others in doing so and let us not make the mistake to claim that the entire modern computing world hinged on his solders.

He was a man. An interesting and complicated man. He was no saint but was at times one of the greatest business men in his field. Let us mourn him for who he was and not who we want him to be.

I am writing to you today as an atheist who has been avidly following your podcast online for the past five plus months. In that time I have micro-blogged about your show on the social networking sites I participate in. I have spoken favorably about your show to friends, colleagues and neighbors. I have found your show an invaluable resource when debating relevant topics. I am in short not simply a fan but a supporter and a beneficiary of your work.

However, I am also writing you today as a gay man. While historically in this role I have had nothing but praise for your show (including your show's criticisms of how gay liberation movements often eschew atheism.) Your most recent show gives me pause. I speak of the October 2nd show entitled "The Amazing Colossal Emails."

In this show the subject of coming out is discussed with emphasis on how it is cashed out within the atheist visibility movement and within gay culture respectively. In lieu of, a nuanced discussion of how one ought to fight for a minority's rights versus one's own happiness and safety, Sam makes a disturbing set of assertions with the conscious intention of emotionally provoking those who disagree with him:

The gay rights movement got a little bit of this too .. ...you have to be out of the closest, you're nobody if you're not out of the closest... .. and Im going to say this... ...and this is to incite those people.. .. ill flat out say this... .. the people who are saying that, are the people who have nothing to lose by coming out. Its a safe decision for them to make. .. it wasn't a safe decision for me to make...

I was frankly a bit shocked and hurt by this very assertion. It is also an argument I did not expect to hear coming from like minded people who value reason and logic in their discourse. Taken at the most minimal level it either asserts that whole categories of people who most certainly exist do not, or it belittles the real pain suffering and loss of gay men and women who happen to agree with what is essentially a political idea. Sam then ends his claims with the statement about the real dangers to himself when he came out of the closet as an atheist, as if the dangers and losses he faced were somehow greater or more real than the gay men and women whose existence he denied.

It is an argument from emotion, presented with no supporting evidence and was entirely without empirical data. Instead of exercising the principle of charity the weakest interpretation of the opposing argument was given. The implication of which, was that proponents of this idea feel it should be carried out even if it would physically endanger peoples lives.

It is not my belief that your show intentionally went out of the way to hurt and belittle the pain, loss, shattered families, and the real physical injuries received by others.

It is also not my intention to demand a retraction or extract an apology.

However your show and you yourselves are better than this.

Please find time on your show to engage in a nuanced discussion of this topic where both sides are presented. A discussion which avoids dangerously dismissive and emotional language. The notion of one's obligation to come out when one is sheltered. aided and helped by the very same community their invisibility hurts is a complex one and you do yourselves, and your listeners, a disservice by presenting it as a caricature.

In spite of this I do hope you continue the excellent work you do for myself and other atheists.

- Wes

The argument for and against Digital Rights Management has been made countless times. I do not desire to repeat them all out here. Suffice it to say I agree with Richard Stallman's take on the whole matter, if you are unfamiliar with it you may read it here: https://www.gnu.org/philosophy/opposing-drm.html

Large corporate content owners are of course happy with DRM. Many small time companies and individual authors are also happy with it. As are many individual users who consume said material.

Those who are familiar with the negatives of DRM who also happily consume it tend to as a general rule consume it for convenience. Content providers quickly realized that platform compatibility was a leading inconvenience for customers during the DRM wars of the music industry. One of the lessens they learned from this was to make their services available on as many proprietary systems as possible. Amazon is prolific with it's “Kindle” application as is Barnes and Nobles with theirs. Even video content providers realize this, the wide hardware platform compatibility of Netflix directly contributed to their current success.

The other way that these corporate entities increase their convenience and perceived value are the tangential services associated with the content. Whether it be cloud delivery or social media integration this adds perceived greater value and added convenience in the tacit rights vs DRM bargain the consumer makes. These same services however also add a greater “inertia” to the DRMed product. The more integrated a consumer's life is to these services the less they feel they have the freedom to leave, should they ever desire to.

Those with a utilitarian bent on the whole DRM issue of course are not bothered by such claims. For them the DRM battle with the music industry (now largely won) was a battle largely over convenience. The music industries DRM battle by virtue of being in the wrong time and place within the context of technological history was won due to the fact that they could not provide a level of convenience on par with the DRM free alternative. If for example broadband had been more prevalent and Spotify along with other such services had been born a little earlier it may have ultimately been a battle the RIAA would have won.

The problem (in my opinion) of this position is that in the present it gives further control of the entire industry to a small cabal of companies. In some cases these companies are also attempting to expand or own the whole “stack” in a manner of speaking. Amazon for example is not only attempting to become the dominant eBook distributor (like it is the dominant dead-tree-book distributor online) but they wish to also own publishing and editing.

Those not bothered by these trends often point out that they “trust” or “like” the institution in question. Consumers have traditionally and in large volumes trusted Apple's iOS platform and now the iBook store within it. They have a history with the company or brand and they lean on this to continue to trust it in the future.

This question of ceding control to a company which also gains the same control by its own sheer momentum is what bothers me the most. I do not think anyone has in their mind what kind of damage this bargain in the present might just be inflicting on the future health of the industry.

Barnes and Nobles came into existence in the print business in 1873. They became an institution which sold books in 1917. They have already influenced the print book industry for over a century and in six years will likewise have influenced and presided over the retail end of the same industry for a century. They have successfully done this in the “platform” of dead tree books. A platform without vendor lock in, drm and extra services to add “inertia”. With these kinds of controls how long could a modern dot-com reign? How tight will the cabal grow given a century or two, given how tight it has grown in a decade or so now?

I am not saying that Amazon, Kobo, Barnes and Nobles and yes, even Apple desire and plot towards some sort of Lex Luthor style control over the entire business but I think when industries tend towards cabals then the giants of the industry have a high tendency on stepping on the ant like people, no matter how well intentioned. To add to the dilemma these same giants could span a century or more. The very trust in the companies longevity a consumer may have actually adds to this very problem and does not help, despite what they believe.

But what kind of damage are we talking about here?

Censorship I think is a large issue. A number of fans of the book in digital print have hand waved this issue. The famous case of Amazon zapping hundreds of copies of “1984” remotely from devices across the country is deemed an exception to this and to a great extent, rightfully so. The publisher who placed the content within Amazon's network did not have the rights to do so. Amazon found themselves distributing a “pirated” book in the original pre-internet publishing sense of the term.

However what does not get covered much are the books dropped from such services because the religious right creates sufficient noise to have books featuring erotic or sometimes simply risque same sex content. Ars Technica has covered this on occasions in the past but it never quite gets the same level of coverage. Largely I expect because it effects a fringe amount of consumers and it isn't deemed as “respectable” content by and large. Apple themselves has been known to censor graphic novels for merely showing a same sex kiss, banning it from their store before the religious right has the chance to get their ire in full swing. This kind of phenomena can be applied to any content deemed dangerous by a large enough segment of our culture. What is applied to one politically dangerous idea now can easily be applied to another in the future. Luckily we have many stores and platforms to choose from (including dead-tree) in the present. However whether this remains true is exactly the kind of problem I am speaking to.

Price collusion is potentially a real threat. Living in the era of oil and cellular cabals, I do not think I need to spend much time arguing this point. Some who trust specific companies may counter this point by stating eBook vendors have historically created their market share by using low prices. However, such is always true while competition is steep and the market is young. Even if it remains true the integration of publishing and editing into one giant “stack” run by the same ebook vendors, if successful, will simply cause collusion in the other direction where the industry will be dictating to authors what price they must sell their books at. As this continues the number of alternative avenues the author has will diminish.

The ending of hardware compatibility or the service itself is a threat. As the industry grows and matures, the pool of users not yet drawn into the one player or another within the cabal will dwindle. As this happens compatibility with third party devices and services will look less like a good way to entice additional users but more of a waste of money and manpower which could simply be applied to first party services and hardware. These third party services or hardware will simply “stop” being updated and new first party devices will be rolled out at discount rates as an apology. As the cabal tightens whole companies will bale out of the business leaving their content locked into a proprietary system. If no way to break the DRM can be found, or if users are not sufficiently technically skilled to break it they will have lost small or large libraries of content. Users continuing to support legal eBooks will then simply invest in whatever cabals remain, continuing the cycle and causing the cabal to tighten over time.

However such problems are not an issue for those who have a steadfast conviction that their company of choice will remain altruistic or will remain invested in the industry for their lives. However I return to the notion that even the most friendly of these giants will eventually step on their users.

As an example of this I would like to take a moment to talk about Microsoft. Now I can imagine the objections mounting to such a statement even as I type it. For many Microsoft remains the epitome of evil in the technology industry. I myself am no fan. However allow me to defend my selection for one moment.

Microsoft despite the evils of its 90s incarnation is a brand numbers of people trust. It is a company users have, mostly forgiven and have become fans of. I myself do not know a console gamer who does not own the current Xbox. Microsoft Exchange has become the defacto corporate email standard, even implemented by their fieriest competitors. Microsoft even tacitly or in some active cases supports compatibility and interoperability with open source endeavors. The industry and the technology sector (no matter how much I or you may personally disagree with the decision) have largely forgiven the company for the ills of the 90s.

Microsoft does a lot to endear its trust these days. They have many good products from the pure utilitarian convenience point of view. Their branding is synonymous with the PC and their operating system and their practices are widely regarded across the software and gaming communities as a “more open” than Apple's.

However, Microsoft in the past month announced a secure booting scheme, mandatory for OEMs shipping Windows 8. This scheme will preclude the machines from being able to boot any other operating system but their own. Depending on the OEM it may not boot any other OS at all. I do not think Microsoft had in mind Linux when it came to this policy, nor do I believe it comes from some sort of anti competitive decision deep within the company. If one listens carefully to their response to critics it is one of confusion. This particular decision will reduce malware on their system possibly making certain forms of it extinct. It is also theoretically possible for them to also bolster DRM products within the Windows 8 ecosystem using this same technology. They are confused by critics because they simply did not notice the mere 2% of GNU/Linux users when they made this decision. They are operating in a market where they own the hardware platform unopposed. While it is true Apple competes for them in raw sales they themselves are so tightly bundled to their unique hardware platform Microsoft for all intents and purposes can act as if it is synonymous with PC. What they are taking away from the 2% of GNU/Linux users (and 1% of all others) will add tremendous convenience to their users and the third parties they do business with. It is also something very few of their home customers will care about in the end. The giant here is mostly literally stepping on the ants even though their intent was not one of harm.

Let us look at another even more relevant example. Six to seven years ago Microsoft was one of the dominant eBook players. The industry was divided largely between Adobe, Palm eReader, Mobipocket and Microsoft. Microsoft had the longest customer history as a brand amongst any of them. The Microsoft lit format was common at everythird party eBook store. No one had any expectation for Microsoft to disappear over night nor did anyone have any expectations they were suddenly going to get out of the digital content game.

This past year Microsoft discontinued the lit format and is announcing the end of life for many of their authentication servers. EBook forums and blogs I frequent are filled with users trying to make sure their books are sufficiently liberated for fear of loosing them.

I own dead-tree books that were given to me when I was a child. I still own books my mother read to me before I could read.

The shelf life of Microsoft lit? Depending on when you bought the eBook, a decade perhaps?

The point I am endeavoring to drive home at the heart of all of this, is that the sacrifice that we make at the altar of convenience with all digital content, including eBooks, is not a sacrifice we pay in the present. Your faith in the company in question may be accurate in that they may do business in that medium for your whole life. However, the sacrifice will be paid. If not by you due to some well meaning but thoughtless decision on their part in the near future then by the whole culture wrapped up in its ecosystem down the road. And when we buy into it, we make that said ecosystem larger and we make the problem bigger, diminishing alternatives which eschew the problem altogether.

Selling the future health of the industry for present convenience is unfortunately the norm for the technology sector. We have made this mistake countless times and continue to do so. The list when you stop and think about it is huge. It is how Microsoft did become the over inflated monster it was in the nineties. It created the problem we now face with IPv6. It is at the heart of every social networking vs privacy debate.

At some point we have to stop repeating this mistake and god damn it the written word is something worth standing up for.

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