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<channel>
	<title>Armed and Dangerous</title>
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	<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org</link>
	<description>Sex, software, politics, and firearms. Life&#039;s simple pleasures...</description>
	<lastBuildDate>Sun, 19 May 2013 14:23:51 +0000</lastBuildDate>
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		<title>Adobe in cloud-cuckoo land</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4946</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4946#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 11 May 2013 14:52:58 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4946</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Congratulations, Adobe, on your impending move from selling Photoshop and other boring old standalone applications that people only had to pay for once to a &#8216;Creative Cloud&#8217; subscription service that will charge users by the month and hold their critical &#8230; <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4946">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Congratulations, Adobe, on your impending move from selling Photoshop and other boring old standalone applications that people only had to pay for once to a &#8216;Creative Cloud&#8217; subscription service that will charge users by the month and hold their critical data hostage against those bills. This bold move to extract more revenue from customers in exchange for new &#8216;services&#8217; that they neither want nor need puts you at the forefront of strategic thinking by proprietary software companies in the 21st century! </p>
<p>It&#8217;s genius, I say, genius. Well, except for the part where your customers are in <a href="http://www.wired.com/wiredenterprise/2013/05/adobe-creative-cloud-petition/">open revolt</a>, 5000 of them signing a petition and many others threatening to bail out to open-source competitors such as GIMP.</p>
<p><span id="more-4946"></span></p>
<p>Fifteen years ago I pointed out in <cite>The Cathedral and the Bazaar</cite> and it sequels that buying proprietary software puts you at the wrong end of a power relationship with its vendor. And that this relationship will almost always evolve in the direction of more control by the vendor, more rent extraction from your wallet, and harder lock-in. Adobe&#8217;s move illustrates this dynamic perfectly.</p>
<p>But the response from its customer base highlights something else that has happened in those 15 years; open-source applications like the GIMP, and the open-source operating systems they run on, actually offer users a practical way out of these increasingly abusive relationships. Adobe&#8217;s customers aren&#8217;t being shy about pointing this out, and the company is going to feel heat that it wouldn&#8217;t have before 1998. </p>
<p>It&#8217;s not clear which side will back down in this particular confrontation. But the underlying trend curves are obvious; even if Adobe wins this time, sooner or later the continuing increases in the rent Adobe needs to claw out of its customers are going to exceed the customers&#8217; transition costs to get out of Adobe&#8217;s jail.</p>
<p>The problem is fundamental; one-time purchase payments can&#8217;t cover unbounded downstream support and development costs. They can only even <em>appear</em> sufficient when your market is expanding rapidly and you can always use today&#8217;s new revenue to cover support costs from last year&#8217;s sales. This stops working when your markets near saturation; you have to somehow move customers to a subscription model to survive.</p>
<p>But doing that doesn&#8217;t solve an even more fundamental problem, which is that the stock market doesn&#8217;t actually reward constant returns any more; it wants an expectation of rising ones in order to beat the net-present-value discount curve.  Thus, in a near-saturated market, the amount of rent you extract per customer has to perpetually increase.</p>
<p>But what can&#8217;t go on forever won&#8217;t. Eventually you&#8217;ll have to squeeze your customers so hard that they bolt.  This may be happening to Adobe now, or it could take a few more turns of the screw.  But it <em>will</em> happen. And as with Adobe, so with all other proprietary software.</p>
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		<title>On the road, blogging limited</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4944</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4944#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 11 May 2013 13:39:56 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4944</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Blogging will be limited for the next week. I&#8217;ve received several requests for posts on a bunch of meaty topic, including (a) Adobe&#8217;s Creative Cloud move, (b) The Defence Distributed takedown notice, (b) the utility of power-projection navies, (d) current &#8230; <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4944">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Blogging will be limited for the next week.</p>
<p>I&#8217;ve received several requests for posts on a bunch of meaty topic, including (a) Adobe&#8217;s Creative Cloud move, (b) The Defence Distributed takedown notice, (b) the utility of power-projection navies, (d) current state of the terror war, and others.  I won&#8217;t get to all of these anytime soon, because I&#8217;m swamped with work and will be travelling today to an undisclosed city for a meeting I can&#8217;t talk about yet.</p>
<p>Sorry to go all international-man-of-nystery on everybody but all will be revealed later this year.  It will have been worth the wait.</p>
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		<title>Destroying the middle ground, redux</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4939</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4939#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sat, 04 May 2013 19:52:48 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4939</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[A few weeks ago I blogged an alternate-history story in which the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was abused and distorted in the same ways the Second Amendment has been in our history. The actual point of the essay, &#8230; <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4939">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>A few weeks ago I blogged an <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4912">alternate-history story</a> in which the First Amendment of the U.S. Constitution was abused and distorted in the same ways the Second Amendment has been in our history. The actual point of the essay, though, was not about either amendment; it was about how strategic deception by one side of a foundational political dispute can radicalize the other and effectively destroy the credibility of moderates as well.</p>
<p><span id="more-4939"></span></p>
<p>Now comes the news that the head of the Department of Homeland Security officially thanked the Governor of Missuri for <a href="http://www.redstate.com/dloesch/2013/05/01/breaking-docs-show-napolitano-thanked-missouri-governor-for-breaking-state-law/">violating state law</a> by illegally passing to the DHS Missouri&#8217;s list of concealed-carry permit holders. The Governor then lied about his actions.</p>
<p>The Feds, meanwhile, continue to illegally retain transfer records from federally licensed firearms dealers past the statutory time limit, among several other continuing violations of a 1986 law forbidding the establishment of a national gun registry.</p>
<p>The BATF also criminally violated its authorizing laws by transferring over 2000 firearms to Mexican drug gangs through illegal straw purchases (google &#8220;ATF gunwalking scandal&#8221;). Over 150 Mexican citizens and United States Border Patrol Agent Brian Terry were killed with these guns.</p>
<p>Meanwhile, following scandals about &#8220;drop guns&#8221; at the sites of police shootings, some big-city police forces (notably in LA and NYC) are strongly suspected of routinely using planted guns to frame suspects they can&#8217;t otherwise nail on firearms-possession charges.</p>
<p>Any trust that &#8220;gun control&#8221; will be administered with even minimal respect for civil rights is long gone, destroyed by the behavior of the enforcers themselves.</p>
<p>This is yet another way to destroy the middle.  Anti-firearms activists speak of &#8220;common-sense regulation&#8221;, knowing that the agencies enforcing these have engaged in a series of criminal conspiracies to evade and ignore safeguards against abuse of such regulations.  By doing so, they annihilate any trust firearms owners might have once felt that &#8220;common-sense regulation&#8221; is anything other than a prequel to those abuses.</p>
<p>In the absence of trust there can be no compromise.  This is how you radicalize gun owners into the Second-Amendment absolutists most of us are today.  After four decades of bad faith the only position left to us is &#8220;No more &#8216;gun-control&#8217; laws.  Ever.&#8221;</p>
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		<title>The true meaning of moral panics</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4934</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4934#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Thu, 02 May 2013 05:27:24 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4934</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[In my experience, moral panics are almost never about what they claim to be about. I am just (barely) old enough to remember the tail end of the period (around 1965) when conservative panic about drugs and rock music was &#8230; <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4934">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>In my experience, moral panics are almost never about what they claim to be about. I am just (barely) old enough to remember the tail end of the period (around 1965) when conservative panic about drugs and rock music was actually rooted in a not very-thinly-veiled fear of the corrupting influence of non-whites on pure American children. In retrospect it&#8217;s easy to understand as a reaction against the gradual breakdown of both legally enforced and de-facto racial segregation in the U.S.</p>
<p>But moral panics are by no means a monopoly of cultural conservatives.  These days the most virulent and bogus examples are as likely to arrive from the self-described &#8220;left&#8221; as the &#8220;right&#8221;.  When they do, they&#8217;re just as likely to be about something other than the ostensible subject.</p>
<p><span id="more-4934"></span></p>
<p>In <a href="http://brown-spectator.com/2013/04/lies-damn-lies-and-rape-statistics/">Lies, Damn Lies, and Rape Statistics</a> a college newspaper does a little digging through U.S. crime statistics and finds that the trendy &#8220;anti-rape&#8221; movement is exaggerating the rape risk of college women by <em>two full orders of magnitude</em> &#8211; as it concludes, &#8220;the &#8216;one in four&#8217; chant should be abandoned and replaced with the more appropriate, albeit less catchy, 1 in 400.&#8221;</p>
<p>What can explain such gross distortion?  I&#8217;ve looked into this issue myself and <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=3011">discovered a lot of flim-flam</a>.  Still, even the the best-case figures I arrived at apparently overestimated the actual risk on campuses by a factor of 50. (Barbarian zones &#8211; like, say, inner-city Detroit &#8211; might be a different story.)</p>
<p>If the rape panic runs parallel to the the now nearly forgotten drugs-and-rock panics of the 1950s and 1960s (and many others like them, before and after) we should expect it to actually be be rooted in an attempt to assert control of or cultural dominance over some threatening Other.  And there is indeed evidence that points in that direction.</p>
<p>Recently, Meg Lanker-Simmons, a left-wing activist at the University of Wyoming, <a href="http://www.campusreform.org/blog/?ID=4731">faked a rape threat</a>.  The agenda seemed obvious: smear Republicans, confirm feminist narratives about male hostility to &#8216;uppity&#8217; women, confirm women as morally superior creatures who rightfully dictate the content and style of male behavior.</p>
<p>This, together with the crazy inflation of rape statistics, suggests that the campus &#8220;anti-rape&#8221; movement has little or nothing to do with preventing rape.  It has become an instrument of the sort of political warfare in which truth is most likely to be the first casualty.</p>
<p>We&#8217;ve seen this sort of thing before, of course.  Playing the &#8220;racism&#8221; card has become such a cliche of left politics that even the reliably lefty Jon Stewart now spoofs it as overdone and busted. In that case the threatening Other is working-class white men, especially rural and most especially Southern, and the aim is clearly to prevent them from pushing back against the culture and politics of elite bicoastal left-liberals.</p>
<p>But there&#8217;s actually something a bit more puzzling about the campus-rape panic. College campuses are far from a threatening environment for feminists. Nowadays women outnumber men in every department outside STEM fields. At many colleges mandatory &#8216;sensitivity training&#8217; heavily privileges female and feminist perspectives. By federal encouragement, female students can now accuse men of rape and expect the claim to be evaluated under circumstances that deny the man any right to due process and the presumption of innocence.</p>
<p>On campus, the Other seems so thoroughly controlled that some academics now attribute declining male enrollments to an unwillingness to enter a hostile work environment.  What are women like Meg Lanker-Simmons really pushing against? What in their environment do they not already own?</p>
<p>I think the answer is&#8230;themselves. The increasing intensity level of the campus-rape panic seems well correlated with the erosion of college womens&#8217; position in sexual bargaining.</p>
<p>The key concept here is hypergamy: womens&#8217; wired-in desire to mate with men who are taller, smarter, richer, a little older, and higher-status than they are.  Hypergamy is at the core of the human female mating strategy in exactly the way that seeking physical attractiveness (signs of fitness to bear) is at the center of male strategy.</p>
<p>An increasing number of hypergamically-aspiring college women are competing for a decreasing pool of higher-status male peers. The consequences are well documented; in the &#8220;hookup&#8221; culture that now pervades many campuses, sex has become a woman&#8217;s opening bid rather than a prize men must compete strenuously to attain.  This was a more or less inevitable result once premarital sex stopped being strongly tabooed and the campus sex-ratio flipped over to majority female.</p>
<p>It is not surprising that women like Lanker-Simmons should resent this situation, because it&#8217;s almost exactly the reverse of the instinctively K-type mating strategy common to females in humans and most other mammalian species.  It&#8217;s sex on male r-type terms, and women have DNA going clear back to the Cretaceous that pushes against it.</p>
<p>(This logic also implies that today&#8217;s campuses should be among the last places to expect rapes rather than the first.  I&#8217;ll leave that demonstration as a very simple exercise for the reader.)</p>
<p>This Other, alas, will not be so easily banished.  To reverse the dynamic, one of the following things would have to happen:</p>
<p>(1) Premarital sex again becoming strongly enough tabooed that effectively all women <em>cannot</em> offer it as an opening bid. (It has to be effectively all; otherwise the defectors get a large enough advantage in competing for men to make the withholding strategy unstable for the rest.  We&#8217;ve seen this movie before.)</p>
<p>(2) Sex ratios on campus flip back to a large enough majority of males so that each woman has multiple hypergamic targets who must compete for her. Under these circumstances &#8220;not till we&#8217;re married&#8221; becomes viable again.</p>
<p>(3) Women as a group revert to having much less economic autonomy and social power than men &#8211; enough less, anyway, that almost <em>any</em> nominal SES peer or near-peer is a hypergamic target.  There&#8217;s a tradeoff between this and move 2; the fewer males there are in the nearly-peer population, the more status and autonomy women must implicitly sacrifice to have a constant number of eligible hypergamic targets.</p>
<p>I leave the reader to imagine the screams of rage that would issue from feminists if any of these were even seriously proposed, let alone attempted.  And I am not actually advocating any of them, just pointing out that women like Meg Lanker-Simmons are caught in a trap that has nothing to do with (mythically) rape-minded men and everything to do with the world easy contraception and feminist ideology have given us.</p>
<p>I think that underneath the obvious political maneuvering, screaming about a nonexistent rape pandemic is a displacement activity. Campus feminists do it because confronting their <em>actual</em> powerlessness and the jaws of the dilemma that created it would be too painful for them to face.</p>
<p>At bottom, the problem is that female hypergamic instinct and the ideology of sexual equality are inevitably in collision. (Men don&#8217;t have the symmetrical problem because their instinctive mating strategy is to just bang women who turn them on physically without regard for differential status.) Short of genetically re-engineering humans to change their mating instincts, there is probably no fix for this.</p>
<p>Of course the implications of this logic go way beyond college campuses.  It&#8217;s a fundamentally tragic situation and I don&#8217;t know what we as a culture or a species are going to do about it.</p>
<p>One thing I <em>am</em> sure of is that displaced moral panic and silly, counterfactual yabbering about &#8220;rape culture&#8221; will <em>not</em> solve the problem.  </p>
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		<title>Penguicon party 2013!</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4931</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4931#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 26 Apr 2013 14:11:37 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4931</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[My blogging will be light or nonexistent over the next week. I&#8217;m on the road in Michigan, at Penguicon; the Friends of Armed and Dangerous party will be here at 9:00 tonight. It really is the 21st century. Yesterday I &#8230; <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4931">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>My blogging will be light or nonexistent over the next week.  I&#8217;m on the road in Michigan, at Penguicon; the Friends of Armed and Dangerous party will be here at 9:00 tonight.</p>
<p>It really is the 21st century.  Yesterday I merged a bunch of patches, ran acceptance tests, and then polished and shipped a reposurgeon release &#8211; while in the passenger seat of a car tooling down I-80. The remarkable thing is that this no longer seems remarkable.</p>
<p>I discovered in the process that while i3 is the best thing since sliced bread on a 2560&#215;1440 display, a tiling window manager is pretty uncomfortable on a laptop-sized 1366&#215;768 display.  The problem is that even dividing the laptop screen only in half produces shell and Emacs windows that are narrower than their natural 80-column size rather than wider as on the larger display; one gets the text in email and source code wrapping unpleasantly. I&#8217;ve fallen back to XFCE for laptop use.</p>
<p>In two hours, Geeks With Guns.  Going to be a full day.</p>
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		<title>Iranian connection in the Boston bombing</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4927</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4927#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 19 Apr 2013 21:41:00 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4927</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the terrorist who died in a firefight with the Boston police with a kettle bomb strapped to him, had a YouTube page. Examining an image of it, I found an approving link to a movie titled &#8220;The Black &#8230; <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4927">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Tamerlan Tsarnaev, the terrorist who died in a firefight with the Boston police with a kettle bomb strapped to him, had a YouTube page.  Examining an image of it, I found an approving link to a movie titled &#8220;The Black Flags of Khorasan&#8221;.</p>
<p>Because, unlike the politically-correct idiots who infest our nation&#8217;s newsrooms, I&#8217;ve actually studied the history of Islam in some detail, that title had immediate resonance for me.  I thought I knew what it meant, and I googled.</p>
<p>What I found confirmed my hunch.  Not just that <a href="http://blackflags1.blogspot.com/">Black Flags from Khorasan</a> is a jihadist propaganda movie, but that it&#8217;s a jihadi movie of a particularly interesting kind &#8211; Mahdist, and almost certainly radical Shi&#8217;a.  Mahdism is present in Sunni but much less central, and in any case the region of Khorasan has been the heart country of Shi&#8217;a for nearly a thousand years.</p>
<p>Domestic terrorism, my ass. As usual, the mainstream media was slavering to pin this on some Richard-Jewell-like native-born conservative (bonus points if they get to say &#8220;Tea Party&#8221;).  As usual, it&#8217;s a jihadi atrocity in which fundamentalist Islam was causal.</p>
<p>But that film is a more specific clue.  If the investigators have even a microgram of brains, they&#8217;re looking for an Iranian connection now.</p>
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		<title>Building a better IRC client</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4922</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4922#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Tue, 16 Apr 2013 13:33:08 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4922</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I&#8217;ve been thinking about how to build a better IRC client recently. The proximate cause is that I switched to irssi from chatzilla recently. In most ways it&#8217;s better, but it has some annoying UI quirks. Thinking they&#8217;d be easy &#8230; <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4922">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I&#8217;ve been thinking about how to build a better IRC client recently.</p>
<p>The proximate cause is that I switched to irssi from chatzilla recently.  In most ways it&#8217;s better, but it has some annoying UI quirks.  Thinking they&#8217;d be easy to fix,  I dug into the codebase and discovered that it&#8217;s a nasty hairball. We&#8217;ve seen projects where a great deal of enthusiasm and overengineering resulted in code that is full of locally-clever bits but excessively difficult to modify or maintain as a whole; irssi is one of those.  Even its maintainers have mostly abandoned it; there hasn&#8217;t neen an actual release since 2010.</p>
<p>This is a shame, because despite its quirks it&#8217;s probably the best client going for serious IRC users. I say this because I&#8217;ve tried the other major contenders (chatzilla, BitchX, XChat, ircii) in the past.  None of them really match irsii&#8217;s feature set, which makes it particularly unfortunate that the codebase resembles a rubble pile.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m nor capable of stumbling over a situation like this without thinking about how to fix it. And yesterday&#8230;I had an insight.</p>
<p><span id="more-4922"></span> </p>
<p>Probably the single most annoying thing about today&#8217;s IRC clients is that if you don&#8217;t leave them on all the time you miss some of the channel traffic.  There&#8217;s no way to join a favorite channel and look at the traffic for the last half hour to get context that happened while you were gone, other than leaving your client actively watching it. And sometimes you don&#8217;t want a client distracting you with chat and urgent notifications.</p>
<p>So, I thought, OK, what if I built a client that logs all your IRC traffic for you? You&#8217;d still have the dropout problem, but at least it could always use the log to show you the last part of the conversation you were actually present for. Hm&#8230;but what about when you weren&#8217;t there?</p>
<p>That&#8217;s when I got it.  I realized that because people think of IRC clients as ways to watch network traffic, they build them all wrong.  Here&#8217;s how to do it right&#8230;</p>
<p>First, build a little client daemon whose job it is to watch channels for you and log their traffic, aggregating it into a message timeline that&#8217;s stored as a logfile on disk. The daemon gets started if it&#8217;s not already running, whenever you fire up your client.  But exiting the client doesn&#8217;t kill the daemon. If you really don&#8217;t want to miss anything, you launch the daemon from your login profile well before you start your client.</p>
<p>Your client is just a browser for the message timeline.  It doesn&#8217;t actually talk to IRC servers because it no longer has to.  When it wants to send traffic, or join a channel, or leave a channel, it ships a request to the daemon, which is managing all the actual server connections.  The response gets appended to the message timeline just like every other traffic and is then visible by the client.</p>
<p>Then I realized&#8230;I&#8217;ve already written this daemon!  Almost all of it, anyway. It&#8217;s <a href="http://www.catb.org/esr/irker/">irker</a>, my replacement for the defunct CIA service.  Add an option to log traffic.  Add options to set your nick and its nickserv password. Done!</p>
<p>Those features are in the irker repo now. Not released yet because the code for nickserv authentication is untested, but that&#8217;s a detail.  The point is that adding about 20 lines of trivial code has amped up irker so that it&#8217;s now a generic chat-logging back end that could be used by a whole family of IRC clients &#8211; every one of which could be functionally superior to what&#8217;s now out there.</p>
<p>To paraphrase XKCD: Code reuse.  It works, bitches!</p>
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		<title>Destroying the middle ground</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4912</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4912#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Mon, 15 Apr 2013 07:29:13 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4912</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[Here&#8217;s a thought experiment for you. Imagine yourself in an alternate United States where the First Amendment is not as a matter of settled law considered to bar Federal and State governments from almost all interference in free speech. This &#8230; <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4912">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>Here&#8217;s a thought experiment for you.  Imagine yourself in an alternate United States where the First Amendment is not as a matter of settled law considered to bar Federal and State governments from almost all interference in free speech. This is less unlikely than it might sound; the modern, rather absolutist interpretation of free-speech liberties did not take form until the early 20th century.</p>
<p>In this alternate America, there are many and bitter arguments about the extent of free-speech rights.  The ground of dispute is to what extent the instruments of political and cultural speech (printing presses, radios, telephones, copying machines, computers) should be regulated by government so that use of these instruments does not promote violence, assist criminal enterprises, and disrupt public order.</p>
<p>The weight of history and culture is largely on the pro-free-speech side &#8211; the Constitution does say &#8220;Congress shall make no law &#8230; prohibiting the free exercise thereof; or abridging the freedom of speech, or of the press&#8221;.  And until the late 1960s there is little actual attempt to control speech instruments.</p>
<p>Then, in 1968, after a series of horrific crimes and assassinations inspired by inflammatory anti-establishment political propaganda, some politicians, prominent celebrities, and public intellectuals launch a &#8220;speech control&#8221; movement. They wave away all comparisons to Nazi Germany and Soviet Russia, insisting that their goal is not totalitarian control but only the prevention of the most egregious abuses in the public square.</p>
<p><span id="more-4912"></span></p>
<p>So strong is public revulsion against the violence of 1968 that the first prohibition on speech instruments passes rapidly. The dissidents used slow, inexpensive hand-cranked mimeograph machines and hand presses to spread their poison; these &#8220;Saturday Night Specials&#8221; are banned. Slightly more capable printers still inexpensive enough to be owned by individual citizens are made subject to mandatory registration.</p>
<p>A few civil libertarians call out warnings but are dismissed as extremists and generally ignored.  Legitimate media and publishing corporations, assured by speech-control activists that their presses will not be affected by any measures the speech-control movement has in mind, raise little protest themselves.</p>
<p>Strangely, the ban on Saturday Night Specials fails to reduce the ills it was intended to address. Violent dissidents and criminals, it seems, find little difficulty in stealing typewriters, copiers, and more expensive printing equipment &#8211; none of it subject to registration.</p>
<p>The speech-control movement insists that stricter laws regulating speech instruments are the answer.  By about 1970 convicted felons are prohibited from owning typewriters.  A few years later all dealers in printing supplies, telephones, radios, and other communication equipment are required to have federal licenses as a condition of business, and are subject to government audits at any time.  The announced intention of these laws is to prevent dangerous speech instruments from falling into the hands of criminals and madmen.</p>
<p>In 1976 the National Writers&#8217; Association, previously a rather somnolent social club best known for sponsoring speed-typing contests, is taken over in a palace coup by a insurgent gang of pro-free-speech radicals. They display an unexpected flair for grass-roots organization, and within five years have developed a significant lobbying arm in Washington D.C.  They begin pushing back against speech-instrument restrictions.</p>
<p>But the speech-control movement seems to be winning most of the battles.  In 1986 ownership of automatic so-called &#8220;class 3&#8243; press equipment is banned except for federally-licensed individuals and corporations.  The media is flooded with academic studies purporting to show that illicit speech instruments cause crime and violence, though for some reason the researchers making these claims often refuse to publish their primary data sets.</p>
<p>In unguarded moments and friendly company the speech-control movement&#8217;s leadership describes its goal expansively as confiscation and bans on all speech instruments not under direct government control or licensing. For public consumption, however, they speak only of &#8220;common-sense regulation&#8221; &#8211; conveniently never quite achieved, and always requiring more restrictions designed to increase the costs and legal risks for individuals owning speech instruments.</p>
<p>Free-speech advocates begin referring to the speech-control movement&#8217;s tactics as &#8220;salami-slicing&#8221; &#8211; carving away rights one &#8220;reasonable&#8221; slice at a time until there is nothing left.  Document leaks from major speech-control lobbying organizations confirm that this is their strategy (they call it &#8220;incrementalism&#8221;), and that they intend to continue lying about their objectives in public until the goal is so nearly achieved that admitting the truth will no longer prevent final victory.</p>
<p>But much of the general public, the American moderate middle, takes the speech-control movement&#8217;s public rhetoric at face value.  Who can be against &#8220;reasonable restrictions&#8221; and &#8220;common-sense regulation&#8221;?  Especially when pundits assure them that free speech was never intended by the framers of the Constitution to be interpreted as an <em>individual</em> right, but as a collective right of the people to be exercised only as members of government-controlled or sponsored corporate bodies.</p>
<p>But by 1990 many individual private owners of telephones and computers, though themselves still almost untouched by the new laws, are nevertheless becoming suspicious of the speech-control movement and increasingly frustrated with the NWA&#8217;s sluggish and inadequate counters to it.  Awareness of the pattern of salami-slicing and strategic deception by the other side is spreading well beyond hard-core free-speech activists.</p>
<p>In 2001, an eminent historian named Prettyisland  publishes a book entitled &#8220;Printing America&#8221;. In it, he argues that pre-Civil war Americans never placed the high value on free speech and freedom of expression asserted in popular history, and that ownership of speech instruments was actually rare in the Revolutionary period. He is awarded a Bancroft Prize; his book receives glowing reviews in academia and all media outlets and is taken up as a major propaganda cudgel by the speech-control movement.  </p>
<p>Within 18 months dedicated free-speech activists led by an amateur scholar show that &#8220;Printing America&#8221; was a wholesale fraud.  The probate records Prettyisland claims to have examined never existed.  He has systematically misquoted and distorted his sources.  Shamefaced academics recant their support; his Bancroft Prize is revoked.  </p>
<p>The speech-control movement takes a major loss in its credibility, and free speech activists a corresponding gain.  Free-speech advocacy organizations more willing to confront their enemies than the NWA arise, and find increasing grassroots support &#8211; Printer Owners of America, Advocates for the First Amendment, Jews for the Preservation of Computer Ownership.</p>
<p>The members of these organizations know that many people advocating &#8220;reasonable restrictions&#8221; and advocating &#8220;common-sense regulation&#8221; are not actually seeking total bans and confiscation.  They&#8217;re honest dupes, believing ridiculous collective-rights theories because that&#8217;s what all the eminent people who gave Prettyisland&#8217;s book glowing reviews told them was true. They honestly believe that anyone who <em>doesn&#8217;t</em> support &#8220;common-sense regulation&#8221; is a dangerous, out-of-touch radical.</p>
<p>Free-speech advocates also know that some people speaking the same moderate-sounding language &#8211; including most of the leadership of the speech-control movement &#8211; are lying, and are using the people in the first group as cat&#8217;s paws for an agenda that can only honestly be described as the totalitarian suppression of free speech. </p>
<p>Increasingly, the difference between these groups becomes irrelevant. What has happened is that four decades of strategic deception by the leadership of the speech-control movement has destroyed the credibility of the honest middle.  Free-speech activists, unable to read minds, have to assume defensively that <em>everyone</em> using the moderate-middle language of &#8220;common-sense regulation&#8221; is lying to hide a creeping totalitarian agenda. </p>
<p>The moderate middle, unaware of how it has been used, doesn&#8217;t get any of this. All they hear is the yelling. They don&#8217;t understand why the free-speech activists react to their reasonable language with hatred and loathing.</p>
<p>The preceding was a work of fiction.  But I&#8217;d only have to change a dozen or so nouns and names and phrases to make it all true (some of the dates might be off a little).  I bet you can break the code, and if you are &#8220;moderate&#8221; you may find it explains a few things.  Have fun!</p>
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		<title>Thanks again to those of you who hit the tip jar</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4910</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4910#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Sun, 14 Apr 2013 06:58:12 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4910</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[This is a postscript to my saga of the graphics-card disaster. Thank you. everybody who occasionally drops money in my PayPal account. In the past it has bought test hardware for GPSD. This week I had enough in it to &#8230; <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4910">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>This is a postscript to my saga of the graphics-card disaster.  </p>
<p>Thank you. everybody who occasionally drops money in my PayPal account. In the past it has bought test hardware for GPSD.  This week I had enough in it to pay for the Radeon card, the one that actually works.</p>
<p>Your donations help me maintain software that serves a billion people every day. Thank you again.</p>
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		<title>The Agony, the Ectasy, the Dual Monitors</title>
		<link>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4905</link>
		<comments>http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4905#comments</comments>
		<pubDate>Fri, 12 Apr 2013 07:05:18 +0000</pubDate>
		<dc:creator>esr</dc:creator>
				<category><![CDATA[General]]></category>

		<guid isPermaLink="false">http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4905</guid>
		<description><![CDATA[I am composing this blog entry on the right-hand screen of a brand shiny new dual-monitor rig. That took me the best part of a week to get working. I am going to describe what I went through to get &#8230; <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4905">Continue reading <span class="meta-nav">&#8594;</span></a>]]></description>
			<content:encoded><![CDATA[<p>I am composing this blog entry on the right-hand screen of a brand shiny new dual-monitor rig.  That took me the best part of a week to get working.  I am going to describe what I went through to get here because I think it contains some useful tips and cautions for the unwary.</p>
<p><span id="more-4905"></span></p>
<p>I started thinking seriously about upgrading to dual monitors when A&#038;D regular Hedgemage turned me on to the i3 tiling window manager. The thing I like about tiling window managers is that your screen is nearly all working surface; this makes me a bit unlike many of their advocates, who seem more focused on interfaces that are entirely keyboard-driven and allow one to unplug one&#8217;s mouse.  The thing I like about i3 is that it seems to be the best in class for UI polish and documentation.  And one of the things told me was that i3 does multi-monitor very well.</p>
<p>So, Monday morning I went out and bought a twin of the Auria EQ276W flatscreen I already have.  I like this display a lot; it&#8217;s bright, crisp. and high-contrast.  HedgeMage had recommended a particular Radeon-7750-based card available from Newegg under the ungainly designation &#8220;VGA HIS|H775FS2G&#8221;, but I didn&#8217;t want to wait the two days for shipping so I asked the tech at my friendly local computer shop to recommend something. After googling for Linux compatibility I bought an nVidia GeForce GT640.</p>
<p>That was my first mistake.  And my most severe.  I&#8217;m going to explain how I screwed up so <em>you</em> won&#8217;t make the same error.</p>
<p>For years I&#8217;ve been listening to lots of people sing hosannahs about how much better the nVidia proprietary blobs are than their open-source competition &#8211; enough better that you shouldn&#8217;t really mind that they&#8217;re closed-source and taint your kernel. And so much easier to configure because of the nvidia-settings tool, and generally shiny.</p>
<p>So when the tech pushed an nVidia card at me and I had googled to find reports of Linux people using it, I thought &#8220;OK, how bad can it be?&#8221;.  He didn&#8217;t have any ATI dual-head cards.  I wanted instant gratification.  I didn&#8217;t listen to the well-honed instincts that said &#8220;closed source &#8211; do not trust&#8221;, in part because I like to think of myself as a reasonable guy rather than an ideologue and closed-source graphics drivers are <a href="http://esr.ibiblio.org/?p=4371">low on my harm scale</a>.  I took it.</p>
<p>Then I went home and descended into hell.</p>
<p>I&#8217;m still not certain I understand all the causal relationships among the symptoms I saw during the next three days.  There is <a href="https://plus.google.com/u/0/108967323530519754654/posts/MVMkhihKL5A">post and comments on G+</a> about these events; I won&#8217;t rehash them all here, but do look at the picture.</p>
<p>That bar-chart-like crud on the left-hand flatscreen?  For a day and a half I thought it was the result of some sort of configuration error, a mode mismatch or something. It had appeared right after I installed the GT640. I mean immediately on first powerup.</p>
<p>Then, after giving up in the GT640, because nothing I could do would make it do anything with the second head but echo the first, I dropped my single-head card back in.  And saw the same garbage.</p>
<p>From the timing, the least hypothesis is that the first time the GT640 powered up, it somehow <em>trashed my left-hand flatscreen</em>. How, I don&#8217;t know &#8211; overvoltage on some critical pin, maybe? Everything else, including my complete inability to get the setup to enter any dual-head mode over the next 36 hours no matter how ingeniously I poked at it with xrandr, follows logically.  I should have smelled a bigger rat when I noticed that xrandr wasn&#8217;t reporting a 2650&#215;1440 mode for one of the displays &#8211; I think after the left one got trashed it was reporting invalid <a href="http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Extended_display_identification_data">EDID</a> data.</p>
<p>But I kept assuming I was seeing a software-level problem that, given sufficient ingenuity, I could configure my way out of.  Until I dropped back to my single-head card and still saw the garbage.</p>
<p>Should I also mention that the much-vaunted nvidia-settings utility was completely useless?  It thought I wasn&#8217;t running the nVidia drivers and refused to do a damn thing. It has since been suggested that I <em>wasn&#8217;t</em> in fact running the nVidia drivers, but if that&#8217;s so it&#8217;s because nVidias own installation package didn&#8217;t push nouveau (the open-source driver) properly out of the way.  Either way, nVidia FAIL.</p>
<p>So, I ordered the Radeon card off Newegg (paying $20 for next-day shipping), got my monitor exchanged, got a refund on the never-to-be-sufficiently-damned GT640, and waited.</p>
<p>The combination of an unfried monitor and a graphics card that isn&#8217;t an insidiously destructive hell-bitch worked much better. But it still took a little hackery to get things really working. The major problem was that the combined pixel size of the two 2560&#215;1440 displays won&#8217;t fit in X&#8217;s default 2560&#215;2560 virtual screen size; this configuration needs a 2650*2&#215;1440*2 = 5120&#215;1440 virtual screen.</p>
<p>OK, so three questions immediately occur.  First, if X&#8217;s default virtual screen is going to be larger than 2560&#215;1440, why is it not 2x that size already? It&#8217;s not like 2560&#215;1440 displays are rare creatures any more.</p>
<p>Second, why doesn&#8217;t xrandr just set the virtual-screen size larger itself when it needs to?  It&#8217;s not like computing a bounding box for the layout is actually difficult.</p>
<p>Second, if there&#8217;s some bizarre but valid reason for xrandr not to do this, why doesn&#8217;t it have an option to let you force the virtual-screen size?</p>
<p>But no.  You have to edit your xorg.conf, or create a custom one, to up that size to the required value.  Here&#8217;s what I ended up with:</p>

<div class="wp_syntax"><div class="code"><pre class="c" style="font-family:monospace;"><span style="color: #339933;"># Config file for snark using a VGA HIS|H775FS2G and two Auria EQ276W</span>
<span style="color: #339933;"># displays.</span>
<span style="color: #339933;">#</span>
<span style="color: #339933;"># Unless the virtual screen size is increased, X cannot map both</span>
<span style="color: #339933;"># monitors onto screen 0. </span>
<span style="color: #339933;">#</span>
<span style="color: #339933;"># The card is dual-head.</span>
<span style="color: #339933;"># DFP1 goes out the card's DVI jack, DFP2 out the HDMI jack.</span>
<span style="color: #339933;">#</span>
&nbsp;
Section <span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Screen&quot;</span>
	Identifier	<span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Screen0&quot;</span>
	Device    	<span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Card0&quot;</span>
	SubSection <span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Display&quot;</span>
		Virtual		<span style="color: #0000dd;">5120</span> <span style="color: #0000dd;">1440</span>
	EndSubSection
EndSection
&nbsp;
Section <span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Monitor&quot;</span>
  Identifier     <span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Monitor0&quot;</span>
EndSection
&nbsp;
Section <span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Monitor&quot;</span>
  Identifier     <span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Monitor1&quot;</span>
  Option         <span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;RightOf&quot;</span> <span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Monitor0&quot;</span> 
EndSection
&nbsp;
Section <span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Device&quot;</span>
   Identifier   <span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Card0&quot;</span>
   Option	<span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Monitor-DFP2&quot;</span> <span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Monitor0&quot;</span> 
   Option       <span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Monitor-DFP1&quot;</span> <span style="color: #ff0000;">&quot;Monitor1&quot;</span> 
 EndSection</pre></div></div>

<p>That <em>finally</em> got things working the way I want them.  </p>
<p>What are our lessons for today, class?</p>
<p>Here&#8217;s the big one: I will never again install an nVidia card unless forced at gunpoint, and if that happens I will find a way to make my assailant <em>eat the fucking gun</em> afterwards.  I had lots better uses for 3.5 days than tearing my hair out over this.</p>
<p>When your instincts tell you not to trust closed source, <em>pay attention</em>.  Even if it means you don&#8217;t get instant gratification.</p>
<p>While X is 10,000% percent more autoconfiguring than it used to be, it still has embarrassing gaps.  The requirement that I manually adjust the virtual-screen size was <em>stupid</em>.</p>
<p>UPDATE: My friend Paula Matuszek rightly comments: &#8220;You missed a lesson: When you have a problem in a complex system, the <em>first</em> thing to do is check each component individually, in isolation from as much else as possible. Yes, even if they were working before.&#8221;</p>
<p>Now I must get back to doing real work.</p>
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