Irreal

See the afterward below for the latest information on this.

Over at The Volokh Conspiracy, a group blog by conservative lawyers, Stewart Baker writes that Republicans are repudiating 40 years of tougher copyright laws. If that’s true it can only be good news for sanity and common sense. But what evidence is there for this change of heart?

Baker points to a Republican Study Committee Policy Brief that discusses the problems with current copyright law and recommends some solutions. The report is an interesting read. It first explores three widely held beliefs about copyright, all of which are false:

1. The purpose of copyright is to compensate the creator of the content.
2. Copyright is free market capitalism at work.
3. Copyright, as currently constituted, leads to the greatest amount of innovation and productivity.

Next, the report lists some of the distorting effects of copyright law. Irreal readers will be familiar with these but it’s nice to see that politicos are coming to recognize them as well.

Finally, the report discusses some reforms:

1. Rewriting of the statutory damages laws to be proportionate and sensible.
2. Expanded fair use.
3. Punishment of false copyright claims.
4. Limitation of copyright terms and the creation of disincentives for renewal.

Regardless of your political persuasion, you will, I think, find this brief compelling. Definitely worth your time.

Afterward

I wrote this on Saturday. By the end of the day the brief had already been withdrawn¹. Techdirt (and lots of others) are reporting that Paul Teller, the RSC executive director, has released a memo withdrawing the brief and claiming that it was published “without adequate review.” Techdirt finds that claim silly. They say that everything posted on the RSC website goes through the same full review. What really happened here, they say, is that big media went ballistic and the RSC caved. I really don’t understand this. It’s not like big media is suddenly going to start supporting Republicans.

I held off publishing in the hopes that sanity would reassert itself at the RSC but I guess that’s not happening. I’ll leave the political analysis to others but I don’t see how the Republicans gain by looking like craven toadies for big media. I sure see a lot of ways they get hurt though. The original document is still worth a read; you can find a copy of it here.

David C. Zentgraf over at Kunststube.net has a useful post about character encodings, Unicode, and UTF-X. The post is entitled What Every Programmer Absolutely, Positively Needs To Know About Encodings And Character Sets To Work With Text, which is a pretty good summary of its content. I’m confident that almost all Irreal readers will already know this material but if you’re confused about the difference between Unicode and UTF-8 or some other UTF encoding then you may find this post enlightening. Similarly, if you have non-technical friends who want a succinct explanation of why they’re getting a stream of gibberish characters in their browser this may be a good resource.

I’ve written a couple of times about the demise of cursive handwriting. Its proponents’ arguments have pretty much been reduced to (1) it is the apotheosis of all that is good and holy in written communication and (2) if we don’t learn to write in cursive, we won’t be able to read cursive. If you’re like me, you won’t find either of those arguments compelling.

Recently, I came across a column in The Washington Post Magazine by Gene Weingarten entitled Cursive, Foiled Again in which, with tongue firmly in cheek, he talks about cursive handwriting and how young people simply aren’t learning it. What struck me was the ages of the “young people.” I had imagined that today’s elementary school children weren’t learning cursive but Weingarten relates how neither a 28 year old colleague nor his son, also 28, had been taught cursive. Surprised by this, Weingarten checked and discovered that schools have been deemphasizing cursive for the last 20 years. Of course that will vary by state and school district but the trajectory is clear.

Weingarten’s column is amusing and worth a read. I especially like that he confirms my suspicion that the real reason the traditionalists maintain their death grip on cursive is, to quote Weingarten,

Why shouldn’t kids today have to suffer through learning cursive the
way we did, and from the same idiot book, which seemed to have been
designed by 19th-century French fops with perfumed doilies in their
sleeves.

Yes. I remember those books. Whether or not they were written by French authors, I recall that even as a third grader I found them annoying.

I am more than ever convinced that cursive—and probably all handwriting—is in a death spiral. It won’t bother me but there seems to be a lot of people for whom it appears to be the apocalypse.

Ron Hilton over at Absolutely No Machete Juggling has an excellent post on the traveling salesman problem. Hilton explains that when people say the traveling salesman problem is NP Complete they are almost always wrong. Almost because there are two formulations of the problem but only one of them is NP Complete and it’s not the formulation that everyone associates with the problem.

You can follow the link for the details but what I found especially interesting in the post was his explanation of the meanings of NP, NP Complete, and NP Hard. It’s one of the best explanations that I’ve seen. The short summary is

but be sure to read Hilton’s more complete explanation. He also has a nice Venn diagram that shows how the three properties relate to each other.

You often see problems described as NP or NP Complete so if you have any doubt as to what that means, spend a couple of minutes on this post. It will be worth your while.