Defense Articles

When Is Open Really Open? Dept.: I noticed a recent announcement by AOL discussing its VoIP initiative, which uses the ubiquitous SIP (Session Initiation Protocol). In the announcement, AOL did some ranting about the importance of open standards. I laughed.

Almost everyone who has failed to develop anything on their own seems to pursue so-called open standards in a vain attempt to get market share. The problem with SIP is that it has never been shown in the field to be as good (or as popular) as the proprietary Skype protocol, which people have flocked to. There isn’t even a handle on the total Skype population anymore. Back in May, Skype was signing up 500,000 users a day. Sixty million users is a low number I’ve heard.
Open standards should never be confused with standards. And open standards should, above all, never be confused with open source. Generally speaking, a standard is ultimately determined by the users. The popularity of Windows makes it a standard. Standards do not have to be ultrapopular, but they have to have some pickup. SIP has some, but Skype is a quantum leap ahead. SIP is open, while Skype is not. With emerging technologies, closed standards generally do better in the market than open standards—at first. If they reach critical mass on a high level (Windows, Skype), they linger for a long time before they are unseated, if they ever are unseated. Some once-hot standards such as GIF get replaced by superior (price-performance) alternatives. This will eventually happen with MP3, for example. The whole process is vague and poorly understood. Entire books have been written trying to explain it.
So what is open about an “open” standard? It’s not a secret. Nothing is hidden from view, which is not the case with Skype and Windows. But open does not necessarily mean free. Nor does it necessarily mean free with open source. Obligations may be attached. When you want something for free—meaning no fees or licenses to use it—then you look for the word “free.” Simple, eh? As in “free software.”

I guess this is just a long-winded way of saying that the once-heralded SIP is not cutting it—yet. People are voting for Skype with their usage patterns. Ahem.

Is It Just Because They Are Getting Killed by Samsung? Dept.: I was in Korea visiting Samsung in 1993 when the company was a world-beater in making cheap CRT monitors. The company was starting to toy with LCD technology and had a few amusing 4-inch panels to show. Nobody in the world could have guessed that within ten years or so it would dominate the LCD business, and that one of its main competitors would be another Korean company, LG Electronics. What were the Japanese doing during this ramp-up? Did they not notice what was going on?

They notice now. So most of the alternative display technologies have gravitated to Japan in the grim hope that the Japanese can recover their lost dominance. The latest scheme is the SED— Surface-conduction Electron-emitter Display —which is similar to the FED, or field-emission display. SEDs are essentially flat CRTs with the electron gun positioned right behind the phosphor so it can light it up without scanning. Besides the flat-panel aspect, a supposed huge advantage to these devices is that they are said to be cheaper to operate and have the life expectancy of a CRT when compared with plasma screens, and also with backlit LCDs that use fluorescent tubes.

At the age of 82, Hyde leaves behind an impressive legacy as one of the GOP’s greatest debaters and legislative champions. “You can spend a lifetime in politics and encounter only a few people of Henry’s caliber,” said Vice President Cheney in September, at a tribute in Washington. “He’s the rare member who can bring the House to silence merely by stepping to the well. When Henry Hyde begins to speak, you don’t want to miss a word. You know you’re going to hear something persuasive and moving, historically literate, intellectually honest.” On December 5, the entire House honored Hyde by naming a room in the Capitol after him.

Born in Chicago in 1924, Hyde grew up in an Irish-Catholic family that went to Mass on Sundays and voted for New Deal Democrats on Election Day. After serving in the Navy during World War II, he finished his undergraduate degree at Georgetown and returned to Chicago for law school at Loyola. The Cold War was heating up, and Hyde began to move away from his political roots. “To me, Republicans were a bunch of bankers, bloated bondholders, and economic royalists,” he says. “At Georgetown, however, I had become concerned about Communism–and I found the response of the Democrats to be woefully inadequate. They were too close to the far left. My God, Henry Wallace was actually the vice president!”
While Hyde attended law school, the typographers at the Chicago Sun-Times went on strike. “They needed proofreaders and I got hired,” he says. “I was a scab. I wish I could attribute it to high principle, but it was for the paycheck.”

One of his tasks at the paper was to proofread Eleanor Roosevelt’s column. “I remember how she attacked Elizabeth Bentley,” says Hyde, referring to the Communist-party defector who exposed Soviet espionage in the United States and became despised for it by many liberals. In a column released in August 1948, Mrs. Roosevelt condemned “the fantastic story of this evidently neurotic lady”–a line that Hyde can still repeat, almost verbatim. “This definitely pushed me toward the Republican party,” he says.

Hyde voted for Eisenhower twice, but he waited until the late 1950s before registering with the GOP. “There weren’t many of us in Chicago–it was ‘we few, we happy few.’” He ran for Congress in 1962 and lost, though the margin of defeat was much smaller than he and other Republicans had expected. Four years later, he ran for the state legislature and won. He eventually rose to majority leader. He says that one of the proudest accomplishments of his entire career came in Springfield, when he passed a bill requiring government officials to place public money in interest-bearing accounts.

Around this time, Hyde first came into contact with the issue that would define his career more than any other: abortion. “A colleague asked me to co-sponsor a bill to liberalize the Illinois abortion law,” he says. “I had never really thought about abortion, so I read the bill and read a book: The Vanishing Right to Live, by Charlie Rice. I became convinced that abortion was an evil.” Hyde helped beat back the legislation he had been asked to support.

Even then, he had no idea what role the issue would play in his life. He won election to Congress in 1974, the year after the Supreme Court handed down its Roe v. Wade decision. “When I got to Washington, there was absolutely nothing happening on the abortion front,” he says.

That soon changed. One day during his first term, Hyde was standing in the rear of the House chamber. “I was leaning against the rail and probably smoking a cigar, which was allowed back then.” Rep. Robert Bauman, a prominent pro-life Republican from Maryland, told Hyde about a measure to pay for abortions through Medicaid. “He wanted to make an effort to take it out,” says Hyde. “I told him to go ahead. But then he said I should do it because he was a known quantity and the other side wouldn’t see it coming from me.” On a piece of paper, they scribbled an amendment to prohibit the funding. Hyde took the lead in offering and debating it. The proposal united both pro-lifers and small-government conservatives. “To my surprise, it passed,” says Hyde. “We proved something that day: There was a pro-life majority in the House and it just needed to be activated.”

AN ENDURING AMENDMENT

This was the birth of the Hyde Amendment. There were legal and legislative challenges, but it has remained in place ever since–and it is without question the most consequential piece of pro-life legislation ever passed by Congress. “By fairly conservative estimate, in the 30 years that it has been in effect, the Hyde Amendment has saved over 1 million human lives,” says Douglas Johnson of the National Right to Life Committee. The year before the Hyde Amendment, federal funds paid for some 300,000 abortions. Afterward, this figure dropped essentially to zero. The only major revision to the law came in 1993, when Congress added rape and incest exceptions to the life-of-the-mother clause that had been in place from the start.

I was pondering this and wondered how and when the U.S. (and Japan, to a lesser extent) lost control of these incredible technologies to the point where Taiwan is a major player. When I first visited Taiwan back in 1988, the executives I spoke with would generalize that Taiwan and China were not keen on precision engineering . It was a cultural thing. The Taiwanese had become the dominant force in the world for injection-molded plastic and, as far as I can tell, still dominate in that technology. Now this. What changed?

Meanwhile, Back to the HD Wars Dept. : Toshiba says it has developed an ultrathin rewritable HD DVD drive that would work in low-profile laptops. Furthermore, it supports dual-layer rewrite and write-only discs, so you can jam 30 gigabytes of data onto a single disc.
The Limits of Utilization Conundrum Dept. : Okay, enough already with the storage capacity of HD DVD. I’m looking around my office and all I see are disk drives. There must be 4 terabytes of total capacity within 50 feet of where I am writing these words. Even with my prodigious ability to pump out RAW photo files, I couldn’t fill a terabyte drive even if I wanted to. I might shoot 30 gigs of photos per year. These columns chew up about 30KB each, and the 5,000 I’ve written so far don’t come close to a gig. Add multimedia, MP3, and other files and I’m at the limit of what I can archive . No matter how hard I try, all this content just doesn’t add up to a terabyte.

Anyway, though I don’t want to sound like Bill Gates, who once said that 640KB of main memory ought to be enough for anyone, let me just say that a terabyte ought to be enough for anyone —for years to come. (Note the insurance phrase.) I think that technology shifts should be driven by what is possible for people to utilize and not by what is possible to manufacture.

Actually, this utilization question has lurked since the beginning of the personal computer roller-coaster ride in the 1970s, when a 5MB hard drive was more than anyone needed . Pundits assumed that utilization limitations were always looming but have never been a real factor. Like a sick variation on Parkinson’s law—work expands to fill the time available—you can always say that the amount of data stored will always match the amount of capacity available. Or that the amount of processing power utilized matches the amount of processing power available. But if you want to be really accurate, you can just substitute the word “wasted” for “utilized.” Thus the amount of drive space wasted will always be equal to the amount of capacity available.

But even with waste, will the needs of the user eventually peak ? “I don’t need all this capacity and power!” This has always been a subtle fear plaguing the industry.

In fact, utilization limitations must become a factor someday, because like everything else, no growth curves go to infinity . The same holds true for people’s utilization needs on the Net. On my blog, for example, the large databases are on the remote server. They’re not local. My personal utilization has been shifted to a more centralized place.

Despite the best efforts of the hard drive industry to force us up toward eventually storing petabytes of information on the desktop, we are going to find it personally impossible even if we get into illegally trading huge music and multimedia archives. Thus, we may soon see the final long-predicted shift from rotating media to silicon storage of data, with its improved performance. You can already get some decent-capacity silicon drives for a reasonable premium over hard drives. Predicting the demise of hard drive technology sounds like lunacy, so let me temper it with a very conservative time frame: By 2020, no personal computer will utilize a hard drive .

New York University law professor Yochai Benkler has argued that open source works because programming is a “granular” task–the job of coding a massive piece of software can be broken into many small pieces–and because the Internet allows the rapid collating and peer filtering of work done by thousands of dispersed individuals. Traditional programming requires a few coders to commit a lot of time and effort, for which they will reasonably expect to be paid. When the software’s source code is freely available, however, the big job can be done in small increments by a large pool of volunteers. The results are filtered for quality the same way, with superior pieces of coding copied and spread through the population.

Distributed journalism works similarly. Different lines of inquiry will occur to different people, who bring different kinds of knowledge to bear on the same topic. The ability to concatenate that information online–particularly via those motley commentary sites and open diaries called blogs–makes the information discovered by each available to all.
To see the process in action, consider the case of John R. Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, which argues that concealed-carry gun laws reduce crime. In 1999 the sociologist Otis Dudley Duncan questioned Lott’s claim that “if national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.”

The major research on defensive gun use, Duncan objected, had shown firing rates ranging from 21 percent to over 6o percent. Lott replied that “national surveys” actually referred to his own heretofore unknown survey of 2,424 households. When Duncan pressed him for the survey data, Lott demurred, saying a hard drive crash had destroyed his data set and the original tally sheets had been lost. In fact, there seemed to be no record at all of the study, nor could Lott recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Some people began to suspect the study, which is tangential to Lott’s conclusions in More Guns, didn’t exist.

The controversy moved to an e-mail list for academics interested in gun issues. There it brewed until January 10,2003, when it was discovered and linked to by blogger Marie Gryphon. Dozens of blogs picked up the story, and Tim Lambert, one of Lott’s leading critics on the e-list, setup a weblog of his own.

Within weeks, articles on the controversy appeared in The Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, and other major outlets. Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren, who played a leading role in investigating both Lott and the disgraced gun historian Michael Bellesiles, notes that “at the parallel stage of the investigation into Bellesiles, he was getting a prize for his work.”

Why did the Lott story break so quickly? Part of the difference relates to how the two scandals were investigated. The initial heavy lifting in the Bellesiles case was done by amateur historian Clayton Cramer, later joined by Lindgren, who tried with little immediate success to interest professional historians in the problems he found with Bellesiles’ research. Only when a few committed investigators had uncovered clear proof of malfeasance did the wheels of the academy begin to turn. At that point, the mainstream media took notice.

With Lott, most of the information bloggers had when the story first leaked, including extensive interviews with many of the principals, was again owed to Lindgren’s efforts. Once it was released into the blogosphere, however, reporters could find it quickly on blogs. At the same time, the investigation became an open source affair.

The first round of dispersed investigation came when a Minnesota attorney named David Gross came forward to say he had been the subject of a survey that sounded like Lott’s. The Washington Times ran a brief story implying that the question about Lott’s survey was now closed.

But bloggers were more skeptical: Gross turned out to be a gun rights activist himself, with the group Concealed Carry Reform, NOW! Historian Thomas Spencer unearthed a letter to the Minneapolis Star Tribune in which Gross wrote that gun control advocates “dance on the graves of the innocent victims and glory in their spilled blood.” Another blogger, the pseudonymous Atrios, found news reports recounting how Gross had taken over the names of several gun control groups that had neglected to renew their corporate status with the state.

New York University law professor Yochai Benkler has argued that open source works because programming is a “granular” task–the job of coding a massive piece of software can be broken into many small pieces–and because the Internet allows the rapid collating and peer filtering of work done by thousands of dispersed individuals. Traditional programming requires a few coders to commit a lot of time and effort, for which they will reasonably expect to be paid. When the software’s source code is freely available, however, the big job can be done in small increments by a large pool of volunteers. The results are filtered for quality the same way, with superior pieces of coding copied and spread through the population.

Distributed journalism works similarly. Different lines of inquiry will occur to different people, who bring different kinds of knowledge to bear on the same topic. The ability to concatenate that information online–particularly via those motley commentary sites and open diaries called blogs–makes the information discovered by each available to all.
To see the process in action, consider the case of John R. Lott, author of More Guns, Less Crime, which argues that concealed-carry gun laws reduce crime. In 1999 the sociologist Otis Dudley Duncan questioned Lott’s claim that “if national surveys are correct, 98 percent of the time that people use guns defensively, they merely have to brandish a weapon to break off an attack.”

The major research on defensive gun use, Duncan objected, had shown firing rates ranging from 21 percent to over 6o percent. Lott replied that “national surveys” actually referred to his own heretofore unknown survey of 2,424 households. When Duncan pressed him for the survey data, Lott demurred, saying a hard drive crash had destroyed his data set and the original tally sheets had been lost. In fact, there seemed to be no record at all of the study, nor could Lott recall the names of any of the students who he said had worked on it. Some people began to suspect the study, which is tangential to Lott’s conclusions in More Guns, didn’t exist.

The controversy moved to an e-mail list for academics interested in gun issues. There it brewed until January 10,2003, when it was discovered and linked to by blogger Marie Gryphon. Dozens of blogs picked up the story, and Tim Lambert, one of Lott’s leading critics on the e-list, setup a weblog of his own.

Within weeks, articles on the controversy appeared in The Washington Post, U.S. News and World Report, and other major outlets. Northwestern University law professor James Lindgren, who played a leading role in investigating both Lott and the disgraced gun historian Michael Bellesiles, notes that “at the parallel stage of the investigation into Bellesiles, he was getting a prize for his work.”

Why did the Lott story break so quickly? Part of the difference relates to how the two scandals were investigated. The initial heavy lifting in the Bellesiles case was done by amateur historian Clayton Cramer, later joined by Lindgren, who tried with little immediate success to interest professional historians in the problems he found with Bellesiles’ research. Only when a few committed investigators had uncovered clear proof of malfeasance did the wheels of the academy begin to turn. At that point, the mainstream media took notice.

With Lott, most of the information bloggers had when the story first leaked, including extensive interviews with many of the principals, was again owed to Lindgren’s efforts. Once it was released into the blogosphere, however, reporters could find it quickly on blogs. At the same time, the investigation became an open source affair.

The first round of dispersed investigation came when a Minnesota attorney named David Gross came forward to say he had been the subject of a survey that sounded like Lott’s. The Washington Times ran a brief story implying that the question about Lott’s survey was now closed.

But bloggers were more skeptical: Gross turned out to be a gun rights activist himself, with the group Concealed Carry Reform, NOW! Historian Thomas Spencer unearthed a letter to the Minneapolis Star Tribune in which Gross wrote that gun control advocates “dance on the graves of the innocent victims and glory in their spilled blood.” Another blogger, the pseudonymous Atrios, found news reports recounting how Gross had taken over the names of several gun control groups that had neglected to renew their corporate status with the state.

A pilot program that features warning felons before their release from prison and probationers about gun possession has slashed the recidivism rate in Chicago.

Although the testing so far involves only a few felons and has been in effect for only two years, five-times fewer felons warned about the restriction on gun possession committed new crimes compared to felons who did not receive the warning.

The Illinois Department of Corrections, the Cook County Adult Probation Office, the Chicago Police Department, the Cook County prosecutor, the U.S. Bureau of Alcohol, Tobacco, Firearms and Explosives and the U.S. Attorney’s Office in Chicago conduct the gun-possession alert as part of a Project Safe Neighborhoods (PSN) program.
The state selected felons at random to attend the gun-alert meetings so that there was no specific profile that might skew the program.

The federal, state and local law enforcement officials meet with the probationers for at least an hour and discuss gun-possession laws and how prosecutors determine the charges to be placed when police arrest a felon with a gun.

The sessions also include personal history accounts from other felons that have been convicted of gun-possession.

The U.S. Attorney’s Office for the Northern District of Illinois began the program in January 2003.

Of the felons receiving the warnings, only 3 percent have been arrested for new offenses compared to 22 percent for felons from the same areas that did not attend the gun-alert sessions.
The U.S. Attorney’s Office said the effect on the behavior of probationers and parolees came as a surprise because of the high level of compliance attained so far.

University of Chicago Law Professor Tracey Meares and doctoral candidate Andrew Papachristos conducted research for a PSF study that found the unexpected results of the gun-warning sessions.

The study found that the homicide rate dropped 40 percent in the gun-alert communities since the forums began in January 2003-the largest decline for any high-crime district in Chicago.

Another contributing factor to the homicide decline is the Chicago Police Department’s aggressive campaigns against street gangs over the same period.

The department has assigned Targeted Response Units and installed street surveillance cameras in high-crime areas. Outreach programs such as one called CeaseFire that sends ex-felons into the streets to talk to juveniles and young offenders are also at work in the same communities.

But the unique element in the arrest rate was the contrast between offenders that attended the PSN warning sessions and those that did not receive the alert.

Although law enforcement in Chicago has engaged in a public advertising campaign to warn about gun possession, the sessions held directly with probationers appear to have improved the results.