Category: quotes

If I were writing laws such that I wanted everybody to agree on how to interpret them, I would use the software development life cycle: First, have lawmakers (analogous to “developers”) write drafts of the laws. Then a second group (the “test case writers”) would try to come up with situations that would be interpreted ambiguously under the law. Then a third group, the “testers”, would read the proposed law, read the test case situations, and try to determine how the law should be applied to those cases, without communicating with the law writers, the test case writers, or each other. If there’s too much disagreement in the third group on how the law should be applied, then it’s too vague to be a proper law. The only laws which made it through this process would be ones such that when they were finally passed, most citizens (the “users”) could agree on how to interpret them, in cases sufficiently similar to the ones the test case writers could come up with.

Bennett Haselton, quoted from Next Year’s Laws, now out in beta! [slashdot.org] Read on Slashdot [slashdot.org].

The whole article is worth a read, don’t let the computer programmer jargon in the quote scare you. Some of the comments are quite insightful too and worth a read. I like the idea of the double blind test for laws that Haselton describes but as one of the comments points out, it is impossible to predict how a law will be read in the future, which is why we have courts and lawyers in the first place. But I think looking at the Software Development Life Cycle [wikipedia.org] is helpful here too; it is impossible to fully predict how the users of your software (or any other product) will use the product or what changes will be desired in the future. The SDLC does not end when the software goes into production, if the software works there will no doubt be updates, if it does not work there will be updates or new software or the software will die. Maybe we should not just use the double blind test when a law is written, maybe when the courts need to step in the law itself should be subjected to possible change and modified so that it meets up-to-date test cases.

“The horror of what is taking place in Iraq exceeds my worst fears five or six years ago (after Bush came to power). I am horrified at the disastrous mistake involved. Imagine the complete madness in trying to occupy a large Arab country in the middle of the Arab world, a culture we know precious little about, and who speaks a language only a handful of our specialists can speak, with armed forces which we have limited control of and with a large army of private soldiers …. The whole thing is a scandal … a series of lies. I don’t understand the motivation for the war, but suspect the real reason for the war, which one would suspect of a country which is a third oligarchy, a third plutocracy and a third theocracy, is that it simply is a profitable machine.”

Harold Bloom [wikipedia.org] quoted in Harold Bloom: ‘What We Are Seeing Is the Fall of America’ [alternet.org].

“…the funny rule about IETF RFCs (Internet Engineering Task Force Request for Comments) is that if you wait long enough just about every one will eventually be required”

Robert X. Cringely, from “The Once and Future King” [pbs.org].

I like this quote because I’m a fan of the IETF [ietf.org] and the work it has and is doing in standards.

I became a standards geek a few years back while working on a system for MMS [wikipedia.org] (more commonly known as picture messaging,) interoperability. In the course of working on this system I read a number or standards from various standards groups; the 3GPP, the 3GPP2, the ETSI, the OMA and the IETF among others. Invariably the common feature of the standards produced by the telephony standards bodies was their complexity. Nearly all the documents of the 3GPP, the 3GPP2, the ETSI and the OMA i read felt like the classic standard by committee. It was easy to read many different agendas into the various parts of the standards. I remember one line in a 3GPP standard that basically said; ‘this is the standard, but if you agree on something else you can use that too.’

The juxtaposition of these telephony standards with the IETF documents is amazing. Very few of the IETF docs run to more then a few dozen pages and each document deals with a single thing rather than trying to define the entire world. Given that IETF (and other standards docs) have their own language I won’t try to suggest that one will understand an IETF doc on first reading it but I do think that a person totally unfamiliar with the standards world would more quickly come to understand the standard in an IEFT doc than in any of the other standards bodies various documents.

The telephony world no doubt makes money but is today moving toward the same models that underly the Internet and it is the IETF who designed and defined the Internet’s protocols and functions. I think the success of the Internet speaks a lot about the quality of the work the IEFT does in standards. As Cringely says, sometimes they are years ahead of the rest of the world but it’s good to know that someone is thinking that far ahead.

“In 1800 less than 3% of the world lived in cities. Most people lived their entire lives without ever seeing one

In 1900, 150 million people lived in the world’s cities. That number has now surged past 3 million and last year crossed another tipping point: more than half the people on Earth now live in cities. By 2050—it will be more than 2/3 of us. Humans are now an urban species, cramming into vast urban agglomerations.”

192021.org [192021.org]

192021.org is an interesting site. An organization dedicated to dealing will all aspects of the urbanization of the human population of the Earth. It is mind boggling to think that more than 3 billion people live in cities—more than half the worlds population lives in cities.

I live in Singapore, one of the cities that 192021.org notes will have more than 20 million people living in it sometime in the 21st century—that is assuming that global warming does not cause the ocean to rise an wipe Singapore off the map completely. But I grew up on the very outskirts of the suburbs of a very small city, less than 40 thousand people! I enjoyed, still enjoy, wide open spaces, trees, mountains, fields of green growing things, the singing of bugs at night and birds in the day. I hope to be able to return to wide open spaces one day. I don’t want to call 20 million people neighbor.

“The appearance of motion: it’s sad, wouldn’t you say, when this is what American business has come to.”

Robert X. Cringely, from “When Netowkrs Collide: AT&T suddenly doesn’t like Apple so much.” [pbs.org].