Implementing move in terms of copy mostly works, so it seems like the obvious choice, but it runs into problems when someone is editing a file that someone else is moving. Two different things go wrong depending on who commits their changes first.

Mover submits first

The editor syncs and discovers that the file has been deleted. Generally there is no indication of where the file moved, so the editor has to look through that file’s history for a likely copy operation to find out where to make their changes. Then they have to manually merge their edits into that new file since the RCS has no idea that the file was logically moved.

Editor submits first

This is even worse since the RCS may not even consider a delete on top of an edit a conflict. It’s very easy to lose the last couple of edits to the moved file. Even if the mover notices, it’s painful to manually merge those edits into their copy, and the RCS winds up thinking they made the changes.

Implementing copy in terms of move is impossible (just ask a quantum physicist), but who copies code anyway? We branch repositories, but that can be handled as its own operation (and clearly was in Perforce, given the name of the copy command). Maybe we don’t need copy at all. I mainly use copy for splitting a file in half. I want to retain the version control history from the original file in both halves, so I copy one to the other and then delete large chunks from both. The inverse of this, joining two files into one, isn’t supported by any RCS I know of. So instead of implementing copy as a primitive, I think that split and join deserve to be primitives. As a bonus, you can implement both copy and move in terms of split.

What information do you need to do split right? When you split a source file A into target files B and C (split(A=>B,C)) (where B or C may ==A), each line from A may go to B, C, or both. Then most of the time, you’ll make some edits to both new files. We need an algorithm to guess the split and edits from the contents of A, B, and C, but I haven’t written it. I’m not sure whether “neither” should be a possible destination for a line from A: clearly you do sometimes delete a line in a split, but the goal here is to make it easy to merge edits of those deleted lines, and to do that, it probably helps to have them assigned to one or both of the new files. Merging an edit with a split looks easy: apply an edit line-wise to the file(s) now containing that line. An edit that crosses a “boundary”—somewhere the split changes targets—should probably be considered a conflict.

A move is implemented as a split with all lines going to one target, with the empty target/source deleted. A copy is implemented as a split with all lines going to both targets. A nice side-effect of this definition is that an edit is merged with a copy by applying it to both copies, not just the original as perforce does.

I use join(A,B=>C) much less often than split, but I think it’s necessary in order to roll back splits. It needs to assign a destination in C to every line in A and B. Edits to A and B are then applied to the appropriate location in C. Again, the trick will be in the algorithm to derive a join from three files.

Essential:

• Text messaging
• Internet
• Easy-to-access vibrate mode
• Ability to edit numbers, names, tags, etc.
• Dictionary-based input mode so I only need to hit each key once.
  • Should add names in my phonebook to this dictionary, especially when I’m looking for a number.
  • Should be the default input mode on all screens but allow me to switch out of it.
• Alarm clock
• Voice mail

Wanted:

• Let me program it.
• Transfer data to/from computer or my next phone
• Configurable defaults for all settings
• Guarantees on service quality

Eh:

• Camera
• Lots of ringtones

The campaign seems to be doing things right, printing their ads with eco-friendly inks on recycled paper, and building a website full of discussion forums rather than just top-down propaganda. It’s wholistic, like any real sustainability initiative has to be, and it focuses on suggesting things to do, rather than not to do. Now all that remains is for the people to make it our own by participating.

Public funding for campaigns is a really good idea, which has been working in Maine and Arizona since 2000 and several other states more recently. I’ll try to counter some of the more popular objections:

I don’t want my tax money going to some slimy politician.

Slimy politicians are selected by our electoral system. In order to run for office, you have to be able to convince people, in particular wealthy people, to give you money. That in itself takes an unusual personality. Then those people tend to call in favors once you’re elected. Even if you started with high ideals, the realities of running a campaign tend to squash them. By funding campaigns, we can encourage better candidates to run in the first place, and perhaps rehabilitate some of the existing ones.

I don’t want my tax money going to politicians I disagree with.

Look at how large corporations do this. They give to both sides of most races so that whoever gets elected owes them favors. Wouldn’t you rather elected officials owe favors to you rather than to big money?

There are better uses for this money.

Direct corporate subsidies in California cost roughly $3 billion each year. Funding all campaigns costs about $200 million. Now, not all subsidies are wasteful, but when the recipients have been funding campaigns for many years, it’s safe to assume that some are. If even 10% of subsidies are wasteful, publicly funded campaigns pay for themselves. That doesn’t even consider the less obvious manipulations of our laws made possible by the legalized bribes we call campaign donations.

There’s just too much money in politics.

Well, yes, but the laws we’ve passed to try to limit spending have either not worked or been unconstitutional limits on speech. It seems that campaign spending is just destined to go up. So we need to work to limit the damage caused by that spending, or even make it beneficial by helping candidates communicate their positions.

And yet instead of letting the bill take its natural course through the legislature and only bring it to the people when it was obvious the legislature was too corrupt to pass it, the CNA impulsively decided to bring it to the people now, without bringing the other sympathetic parties on board. This lost the vote of the teachers’ union and everyone who dislikes the initiative system on principle. On top of that, they added clauses to the bill that serve only to punish corporations. Yes, big business has hurt the state, and may in fact deserve to be punished. But we also need their help to rebuild our society, and pursuing a war between progressives and businessmen helps nobody. By adding punitive language to what should have been just a Clean Elections act, the CNA lost the potential support of moderate businesses and most of the Republican party.

Getting California to adopt clean elections would have been an uphill struggle in any case. There was no reason to make it even harder by alienating many of the potential supporters, especially when clean elections themselves might help enact some of the more overreaching parts of Prop. 89 a few years later. The CNA should be ashamed of having jeopardized this essential measure.

I still think Prop. 89 is worth voting for, despite its flaws. The unfairness to corporations can be fixed over the next few years, despite requiring yet another election to confirm the changes, and clean elections will reduce corruption and help citizens begin to feel like they have a voice again. That whole “voice” thing is actually the best reason to vote for this, over almost any objections. Our democracy only stands a chance if individuals know they can overcome entrenched interests in our society.

The people I talked to were overwhelmingly opposed to 85, as you would expect in SF, but the voter lists we had were pruned to just women Democrats and a few “other”s, so I suspect we got a biased picture. The whole process was geared toward turning out the base, rather than opening any sort of dialog or changing minds. Now, maybe abortion is too polarized an issue to try to change minds on, but parental notification seems like enough of a wedge issue that we should be seeking out those on the fence.

The governor’s debate was extremely interesting politically. I disagree with most of the issues the Governator has pushed, with the significant exception of the recent CO₂ emissions law. And yet I disagree more with Angelides’ apparent philosophy toward politics. Several times, Schwarzenegger mentioned the idea of giving back to society. And when asked, “What’s the one thing you regret doing in office?”, Angelides weaseled out by complaining about deficit spending, which I would be surprised if he had any authority over. Schwarzenegger’s answer wasn’t perfect — he admitted a mistake in strategy rather than a mistake on an issue — but he said he’d learned that he needs to work to bring people together instead of trying to go over their heads.

So, we need to escape from partisan politics and convince people again of the importance of giving back to their communities. But we also need to fix the important particulars. In this election, it seems that I have to choose between the two and, right now, I’m leaning toward the larger goals over the particulars.

In the sciences (though not in fields like medicine, technology, and law, of which the principal raison d’être is an external social need), the formation of specialized journals, the foundation of specialists’ societies, and the claim for a special place in the curriculum have usually been associated with a group’s first reception of a single paradigm. At least this was the case between the time, a century and a half ago, when the institutional pattern of scientific specialization first developed and the very recent time when the paraphernalia of specialization acquired a prestige of their own.

Thomas Kuhn, The Structure of Scientific Revolutions, page 19

Part of this book’s claim is that it’s not falsifiability that makes something science. While so far Kuhn hasn’t mentioned them, creationists are actually right when they say that evolution is not falsifiable, because “normal” scientific work is the process of tweaking the theory to make it fit the world, not testing a theory with an eye to throwing it out if it doesn’t fit. If a theory doesn’t fit the world, scientists still won’t give it up until another theory comes along to replace it. And yet creationism can’t claim to be the successor to evolution because it doesn’t provide a foundation for future scientific work. To be scientific, a theory has to propose useful experiments or studies that can elaborate the theory, and I’ve never seen any kind of creationism do that.

“Free speech” areas, currently legal under the doctrine of time, place, and manner restrictions.

Ostensibly, these are designed to prevent people from disrupting other people’s speeches and activities. Yet even standing next to the primary focus of an event, I never had the right to disrupt that event (directly at least: the ideas in my speech may be arbitrarily disrupting) with my right to speak. There was no need to ban all speech in certain places in order to prevent that. In practice, these separate-but-equal “speech quarantine” areas are used to shove officially unpopular speech into the background, while discriminating in favor of speech endorsed by those in power. Those whose speech is favored by the state get to use its resources to project their message, while those whose speech is disfavored aren’t even allowed to be seen.

Speech in “private” places.

Malls have significantly replaced the public square as the centers of American community life. Yet they currently may forbid any political speech within their property. This, of course, leaves political speech with no effective place to live. The malls argue that since they own the property, they have the right to determine what goes on within it, and this would be a perfectly reasonable argument, were they just a private area. Yet the civil rights movement set the precedent that a business open to the public must obey a higher standard than, say, a private office. This should extend not just to the people but also to the activities allowed inside. Of course, the diners favored for the civil rights movement’s sit-ins are too small to allow public speech without disrupting the primary business of the place. But any place, like a mall, or some bookstores and coffee shops, which is intended as a public forum, must allow all speech in that area, not just that speech deemed acceptable to the management.

Finally, advertisements.

Commercials are a more subtle issue because they’re never exactly open to the public; they’re merely a way to pay for the ability to speak to large numbers of people at once. But, once the basic exchange of money for speech has been established, it must be executed without any more discrimination about the content of the ads than is allowed in government-owned places. If a car company can pay $100,000 to tell me to buy a car, Adbusters must be able to pay $100,000 to tell me not to buy a car. Station owners argue that allowing certain content in their commercials will drive off other advertisers. This argument should be disregarded for two reasons: First, the government created these profits in the first place by establishing the monopolies over broadcasting. Second, the right of a human being to speak, and thereby effect change, trumps any claim of a corporation to make money.

The freedom of speech has been slowly taken away in recent history by both the gradual reduction in public space and apparently minor procedural restrictions like speech quarantine areas. It’s time to reverse that decline and take back our right to be audible.

Remember, remember the fifth of November
The gunpowder treason and plot.
I see no reason why gunpowder treason
Should ever be forgot.

People should not be afraid of their governments, governments should be afraid of their people. — V for Vendetta

Go see it. And if you happen to know anyone who isn’t convinced that we must be ever vigilant against governments trying to take away our essential Liberty, in return for a little temporary safety, take them too.

In other news, Johari and Nohari are pretty clever.

Edit: We’ve broken up, amicably.