As everyone knows, Scientology gives one superior cognitive skills, as displayed in this brilliant bit of JavaScript:
function validZip(s)
{
if(trim(document.getElementById("M_land").value.toLowerCase()) != "sverige")
{ return(true); }
s = s.replace(/ /g,"");
s = s.replace(/1/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/2/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/3/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/4/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/5/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/6/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/7/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/8/g,"0");
s = s.replace(/9/g,"0");
if(s == "") { return(true); }
if(s == "00000") { return(true); }
return(false);
}
The tech works, as they say.
For non-programmers: this function is supposed to determine whether a given string is a valid zip code. It does this by replacing each digit in the string with a 0, and then seeing if the resulting string is equal to “00000.” If the string contains something other than digits, then this comparison will fail and the function will return false. But Javascript has a native functionality for string pattern matching called regular expressions, so the last 12 lines of this function would be more succinctly expressed with something like:
return s.match(/^\d{5}$/) || s == ""
The expression /^\d{5}$/ means “match any string containing exactly five digits.” The really funny thing about this is that those expressions enclosed by slashes in the “replace” lines of the original function are regular expressions, so whoever wrote this obviously was familiar with regular expressions. He (or she) simply extremely bad at using them.
Hat tip: Lippard
Julian has a great piece in the American Spectator reminding conservatives that they used to care about civil liberties:
After the humiliations of Watergate, however, conservative legal thinkers began to insist that Congress and the courts had overstepped their bounds. During the Reagan administration, the Heritage Foundation began urging repeal of the Foreign Intelligence Surveillance Act, which had been passed in 1978 as a result of the Church Committee’s findings.
The campaign stalled due in large part not to the hand wringing of civil libertarians but to the opposition of the intelligence community. “We hear people say we can’t get the surveillance we need or can’t meet the court’s standard,” said Edward O’Malley, who headed the FBI’s intelligence division under President Reagan. “That’s just not true. We have no problem getting the surveillance we need, and the court also has protected the rights of Americans, which is necessary. … We support this 100 percent.”
There were then, as there are now, exceptions on the right. The FISA law — now damned by conservatives as an impossibly burdensome, possibly even unconstitutional obstacle to legitimate executive surveillance — was opposed by the New York Times’s designated conservative columnist William Safire, who feared that it would “turn every telephone instrument in every home into a suspected household spy.”
Acknowledging conservatives “natural inclination to help the law,” Safire nevertheless urged that it be trumped by “a responsibility to protect the law-abiding individual from the power of government to intrude.” By then, however, he was probably in the minority among right wingers.
Jerry and Cord are weirdly bashful about tooting their own horns, but I’ve got no such reservations. I was honored to be the first-ever guest on Jerry Brito and Cord Blomquist’s critically-acclaimed In Conversation podcast. Check it out.
I want to associate myself with Adam’s excellent comments about Jonathan Zittrain’s book. I haven’t read the book yet, so I won’t try to comment on the specifics of Zittrain’s argument, but it strikes me that if Adam is summarizing the book fairly, ZIttrain’s thesis is strikingly similar to the thesis of Larry Lessig’s Code: The open Internet is great, but if we don’t take action soon it will turn into a bad, proprietary, corporatized network. I’ve been mildly surprised at how little comment there’s been on how spectacularly wrong Lessig’s specific predictions in Code turned out to be. Lessig was absolutely convinced that a system of robust user authentication would put an end to the Internet’s free-wheeling, decentralized nature. Not only has that not happened, but I suspect that few would seriously defend Lessig’s specific prediction will come to pass.
But while Lessig’s specific prediction turned out to be wrong, the general thrust of his argument—that open systems are unstable and will implode unless managed just right—is alive and well. I think that basic claim is still wrong. And I think it’s not a coincidence that these kinds of critiques often come from the left-hand side of the political spectrum (I don’t actually know Zittrain’s politics, but Lessig is certainly a leftie). It seems to me that left-of-center techies are in a bit of an awkward position because on the one hand they’ve fallen in love with the open, decentralized architecture that is epitomized by the Internet, but are predisposed to criticize the open, decentralized economic system called the free market. As a result, they wind up taking the somewhat incongruous stance that to preserve the decentralized nature of our technological systems, we need to have more centralization of our economic and political system. Zittrain’s choice of the Manhattan Project as a metaphor for the way to preserve the Internet’s openness is particularly striking, because of course the Manhattan Project was the absolute antithesis of the philosophy behind TCP/IP. It was a hierarchical, secret, centrally planned effort that left no room for dissent, diversity or public scrutiny.
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I always thought “rickrolling” was a stupid meme. So I’m happy to see it covered in the New York Times, a sure sign that the fad is on its way out. (And yes, that goes to the New York Times, not the stupid video)
This is a fascinating article about China’s censorship efforts. I thought this was a bit weird, though: “servers (short for file servers, which are essentially very large-capacity computers)” I don’t think “server” is short for anything. And I kind of thought the term had long since become common knowledge among the sort of folks who read The Atlantic.
I’m reading through the big patent reform bill that’s currently stuck in the Senate. One of the big changes in the legislation concerns the calculation of damages for patent infringement. It reads, in part:
Upon a determination by the court that the showings required under subparagraphs (A) and (B) have not been made, the court shall conduct an analysis to ensure that a reasonable royalty is applied only to the portion of the economic value of the infringing product or process properly attributable to the claimed invention’s specific contribution over the prior art. In the case of a combination invention whose elements are present individually in the prior art, the contribution over the prior art may include the value of the additional function resulting from the combination, as well as the enhanced value, if any, of some or all of the prior art elements as part of the combination, if the patentee demonstrates that value.
I think an economist would tell you that this is completely incoherent. The only way to objectively determine the “economic value” of something is by observing the price it fetches in the marketplace. (The financial markets are currently learning the dangers of trying to compute asset values a priori) If the thing you’re trying to value is similar enough to something that’s commonly bought and sold (say, if your house is similar to your neighbor’s house that just sold), you can use that to get a reasonably accurate estimate of the product’s value. Likewise, if I want to determine the “economic value” of the “specific contribution” of the LCD panel in my MacBook to the laptop’s overall value, I can see what LCD panels with similar characteristics were selling for at the time my laptop was manufactured.
But a patent is not a commodity. It’s not a component of a manufactured product. Rather, a patent is a legal entitlement to sue people who build certain kinds of devices or perform certain processes without the patent holder’s permission. There isn’t any objective answer to the question of how much of a products value is “properly attributable” to the fact that any given patent holder has agreed not to sue the manufacturer. Trying to apportion the value of a product among the patents that apply to it is a category error because a patent’s value in the market place is determined by the leverage the legal regime confers on patent holders. The greater the powers the law gives to patent holders, the larger the monopoly rents they can extract from manufacturers, and the more valuable the patent will be on the marketplace. So it’s completely circular for the law to ask what the “economic value” of a patent is, when the economic value of a patent was created by the legal system in the first place.
Of course, the fact that a legal requirement is incoherent doesn’t mean that judges won’t give it the old college try. No doubt, there will be plenty of “expert witnesses” who will come up with all manner of elaborate methodologies for determining the “economic value” of a patent’s “specific contribution” to a product. A a practical matter, judges will take the passage of this reform bill as a signal that recent patent damage awards have been too big, and will scale back the awards accordingly. That’s what the technology industry wants. From their perspective, it probably doesn’t matter if the requirement is coherent, as long as it gets them the result they’re looking for.
But if you care about the rule of law, it should trouble you that the rules are so incoherent. We should always be concerned when the legislature gives legal force to concepts (like “blight”) that lack a clear definition. The patent system is full of concepts like this, and I think that lack of clarity is a major cause of the problems we’ve been seeing in recent years.
This fall, I will almost certainly be going to grad school in computer science. My options are Rice (where I’d be working with Dan Wallach), Princeton (with Ed Felten), and CMU (with Jim Herbsleb). Felten and Wallach both do research on computer security, with an emphasis on e-voting. Herbsleb studies open source software from a software engineering and economics perspective. I’ve now had a chance to talk to all three of them, and all three of them sound like they’d be great fun to work with. All three of them are interested in the kind of interdisciplinary CS/public policy research I’m hoping to do, although Princeton’s IT Policy Center probably gives it an edge in that respect.
I’ve got a few more weeks to make my decision. If you’ve got first-hand experience with any of these CS programs and would be willing to share your thoughts, I’d love to hear from you: leex1008 (at) umn.edu.
Over at Business Week, I take the “con” side of the question: “When considering job applicants, prospective employers have no business poking around their profiles on social networking sites.” My conclusion:
the bottom line is that a public Facebook page is just that: public. People are responsible for what they post. It’s unreasonable to make personal information available to the whole world and not expect employers to look at it.
Facebook gives users the option of keeping their profiles private, and so does blogging software such as LiveJournal. Users should take advantage of these options for information they don’t want considered by potential employers. But if applicants choose to make information about themselves available to the world, they can hardly object when employers take that information into account in hiring decisions.
My worthy opponent, Greg Fish, seems to have interpreted the question in a slightly strange way. If the question had been “should employers take inaccurate or irrelevant information into account in hiring decisions,” I’d obviously agree with him. But the solution is to take online information with a grain of salt, not to avoid looking at it altogether.
The Technology Liberation Front is the tech policy blog dedicated to keeping politicians' hands off the 'net and everything else related to technology.