1. No Guarantees

Suppose you buy some new software, and it won’t install (Oblivion), does not work properly (SPSS), does not perform as advertised (MacSpeech Dictate), crashes constantly (Windows), suddenly corrupts its own files (Outlook) or breaks your other software (Symantec Security). Try bringing it back to the store for a refund. “Sorry Sir, we can’t issue a refund if the software’s been opened.” Giving you a replacement disc doesn’t work if it’s the software that’s broken.

2. Time Limits to Support

Where does Microsoft get off not supporting an operating system after a certain arbitrary date? They sure as hell don’t tell you this when you buy it in the first place. I’m not saying they should have to support old products forever – just that they should have to tell you how long the product will be supported when you buy it. And what if the upgrade is not technically superior to the previous version?

3. It just doesn’t work and they charge you to fix it.

Most modern software is absolute garbage. It simply does not do what it’s supposed to do. Software is full of bugs, features that are bugs in disguise, unnecessary complexity, poorly thought-out interactive mechanisms and crucial but missing functionality. Software companies fix the bare minimum, and then expect you to pay for the next version, which fixes SOME of the problems that never should have been there in the first place.

4. Nothing is Secure

Operating systems are to safes as leaky rafts are to nuclear submarines. All modern operating systems, for example, are so littered with holes that angsty teenagers can write viruses that end up costing software users millions of dollars. Most computer security is based on passwords, even though we know damn well that passwords don’t work.

Conclusion

Suppose we have a software company, say Ubersoft that makes some software, say “Doorways,” which I pay good money for. It turns out that Doorways doesn’t work very well, so I waste days of my life screwing around with it, trying to get it to work. Suppose they stop supporting it after a year, because they want me to upgrade. Suppose the “upgrade” barely even fixes half of the debilitating problems that made the original such a headache. Then suppose the system spontaneously corrupts all my family pictures and the videos of my kids, backups and all, and then, due to a well-known but unfixed security hole, someone is able to hack in, steal my identity, and subsequently make off with my life savings. If I sue the software company, I’ll get nothing.

Now suppose that instead of software, it was a new oven that had spontaneously caught fire, due to a known but unfixed electrical issue, and burned my house flat, wiping me out financially and destroying the same family heirlooms. The guys who made the oven would be on the hook for serious damages.

So why the hell aren’t the software companies responsible for the damage inflicted by their products?

Fuck ‘em. Power to the Pirate Bay.

Whether your country has a parliamentary democracy, Jeffersonian democracy, or any other system in which people elect lawmakers who control social structure through laws, your system of government is fundamentally broken. It’s time the legislative system was fixed. It’s time for Democracy 2.0.

Step 1: Qualified Decision Makers

In proposing a new system of government, I’m going to assume that decisions should be made by the people most qualified to make them. For instance, since you are the only expert in your happiness, what you do tonight (go to the movies, stay home and read, go for a walk, etc.) should be your choice. By the same reasoning, whether a country participates in a war should be decided by the military and foreign policy experts who know the most about the war in consultation with the economists, sociologists and psychologists best equipped to evaluate the potential effects at home.

While countries need a head of state (president, prime minister, etc.) for symbolic purposes, unless the head of state happens to be a qualified expert in any particular field, he or she would not be making many decisions. And you can forget about veto power.

Step 2: Accountability.

All people must be accountable for their actions. No exceptions. This has two implications:

1. If experts are continually wrong, they cease being experts and are no longer asked to participate in decision making. You cause an economic crisis, you no longer have input into economic policy.

2. As a participant in the design of public policy, if you lie to the people or intentionally make a self-serving and public-screwing decision, you go to jail. Do not pass go, do not collect $200. Those who abuse their power lose their power, and their freedom, and should think themselves lucky they’re not burned at the stake by the people they’ve screwed.

Step 3: Design, not dialogue

Ideally, in existing democracies, policy is result of a dialectic process in which the interests and values of all the stakeholders involved in a decision are balanced. When government debates intervening to save a failing business (like a financial institution, for example…) it weighs the interests of the business, its shareholders, it employees, it’s partners and it’s debtors against the interests of the public, special interest groups and government itself. This is bullshit. There is only one stakeholder: the people. Government exists to serve and protect the people. All other interests are irrelevant.

Instead of this inane balancing act, lawmaking must be viewed as a design process.

Step 4: Treat Laws like Software

When we start thinking of laws as socio-technical artifacts, like software, the enormous clusterfuck that is the legislative process comes into focus. First, there is the idiotic idea that laws should change slowly. If the world changes fast and the law changes slowly, laws quickly become out of sync and obsolete (see copyright legislation). Instead, the law has to quickly adapt to changing conditions, which means iterating rapidly. Put simply, all major laws should be revised every year by standing committees responsible for designing them. Second, there seems to be this other idea that laws should be intentionally vague. This is idi-fucking-otic. Intentionally leaving the law ambiguous to satisfy people with opposing value systems and maintain slack for judges is precisely what creates all the wrangling and theatrical shapeshifting that impedes all rational action in courtrooms. If the people trying to make a law don’t agree on anything, they are either the wrong people or there is insufficient evidence on which to base the law. If judges need ambiguity to apply the law, it means the law was poorly designed in the first place. Other ideas from software that should apply to law include:

Revision Control – You can then see who changed what and hold them accountable.

Unit Testing – the design of a law isn’t done until you know how to measure its performance.

Requirements Engineering – Laws need clear goals and requirements so that judges can justifiably act against the letter of the law to achieve the goals and requirements of the law, thus eliminating loopholes. This is far more sensible than making vague laws for lawyers can argue about until the end of time.

Formal Modeling – To further remove ambiguity and the need for interpretation, we can represent laws as formal models with well-defined semantics.

Constant User Feedback – the legal system needs and efficient mechanism by which lawyers, judges and regular people can point out flaws, limitations and deficiencies of existing laws, and have these incorporated into future iterations.

Step 5: Treat the Legal Landscape like the Writing of Star Trek

One of the troubles with Star Trek is that so many Star Trek TV shows, movies, books, cartoons, etc. have been made that the history, characters and technology has become inconsistent. Thus, after a fan consumes a certain amount of Trek media, things seem to go frustratingly haywire: the characters act out of character, prequels violate statements in sequels and for some reason everyone forgot how to turn the deflector dish into that big-jesus deus-ex-machina-canon they used to blow up the Borg last week the moment that episode ended.

The same thing happens in law: laws contradict each other, work to opposite purposes and generally create a conceptual minefield of loopholes, exceptions, conventions and other bullshit that gets in the way of fairness, justice and punishing evil motherfuckers. To prevent this, someone or some group must be in charge of maintaining legal consistency. Where two laws are inconsistent, the design committees of both laws must be brought together to resolve the conflict. Resolving each such conflict removes the need for adjudication and interpretation by judges. If the entire legal framework could be represented as formal models, each new iteration of a law could be automatically tested against the existing legal framework for consistency.

Step 6: Focus on Parsimony

One of the best points of Moore’s Utopia is that the law must be kept simple enough and short enough for everyone in the society to read and understand. Put another way, the societal value and fairness of laws drop dramatically when the laws of a country become so numerous that no one can know any of them. While I agree that allowing the defense from ignorance to count would undermine all laws (since everyone would just claim they didn’t know what they did was illegal at the beginning of every trial), the quid pro quo for this is that the law must be simple enough that everyone can know what is illegal. Therefore, the law must be dramatically simplified from its current Escher-esque clusterfuck. The value of any given clause must be weighed against the cost of increasing the complexity of the law.

Step 7: Unfuck the Political and Judicial Systems

Unfortunately, the legislative system is tightly coupled to the political and judicial systems, which are also horribly bullshitified. Therefore, the solutions I propose to the problems with legislation depend on different but equally revolutionary changes to the political and judicial systems. Stay tuned, I’ll be back with more of the War on Bullshit revolutionary manifesto in the New Year.

Related Posts:

Why The World is So Screwed Up
Top 10 Stupid Laws You’ll Find Almost Everywhere

Warnings

1. If you are a newbie, you may need help for this. A lot of things can go wrong, and this is not the most detailed how-to.
2. I have tested this on exactly 1 hardware setup: mine. I have an Intel-based Macbook connected via ethernet cable to a router. I am using a USB Logitech headset.
3. I admit, the resulting set up is a little buggy.

What you will need

1. OSx Leopard (this may work in other versions, but I have not tried it)
2. VMware Fusion (I use the full version, not the demo)
3. Windows XP installation disk
4. Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9 (Again, may work with other versions)
5. Win2VNC
6. At least one gig of RAM

Part one: installing Dragon

0. Turn off Time Machine (under system preferences –> Time Machine)
1. Install VMware Fusion (this should be pretty simple)
2. Create a Windows XP virtual machine inside VMware fusion, and install Windows XP in it. This should be pretty straightforward
3. When the installation is over, shut down the Windows XP OS, but don’t close VMware
4. go to Virtual Machine-> settings-> memory and set the memory allocated to the virtual machine to at least 512 MB. If you only have one gig of RAM, don’t go any higher.
5. Restart the Windows XP virtual machine
6. Plug in your headset. If it is a USB headset, it will show up at the bottom of the VMware window as a little USB connection symbol. Click on the symbol to assign the headset to the VMware window. When the symbol turns blue, the headset is connected.
7. Put the Dragon CD in the drive. (If you have the CD as an ISO, you can mount it in OS X and then access it from within the virtual machine, as long as it’s shared.)
8. double-click ISScript1050.MSI. you need to install this before you install Dragon. When it’s done,
9. double-click Dragon NaturallySpeaking 9.MSI (it took me a couple tries to install Dragon, as the installation crashed; however, it picked up where it left off and installed without issue the second time.)
10. go through the Dragon set up. If you have audio quality problems, and you have a USB microphone, make sure it’s plugged directly into the computer. Plugging a USB microphone into a USB hub can increase distortion. If you still have audio quality problems, look around the web for pointers. You’re not the first person, and you won’t be the last.
11. You’ll have to read at least one train story (I think) to get started.
12. Once Dragon is configured, open up WordPad and give it a whirl — if it doesn’t work within the virtual machine, it won’t work outside, so make sure you can dictate within VMware before going on.

Part two: dictating into OSx applications

1. In OSx, go to system preferences –> sharing, and turn on screen sharing
2. Click computer settings, and make sure both boxes are checked – don’t forget to enter a VNC password. Leave the screen sharing panel open
3. In VMware, click on the network icon on the bottom right-hand server, and select the bridge option. This connects your virtual machine directly to your home network, and is necessary to get into Win2VNC working.
4. Install Win2VNC.
5. Start Win2VNC, and copy the server info from the OSx Sharing Panel. Only enter the numbers. E.g., mine read vnc://192.168.0.52/, so I entered 192.168.0.52 into Win2VNC. Press enter
6. It should ask for a password. Enter the password you used in the os x sharing panel.
7. If it connects, a little symbol will appear in the task bar. You can change the settings of Win2VNC by right-clicking this symbol.
8. Start Dragon and turn the mic on (the virtual taskbar mic that is)
9. Move your mouse slowly to the right edge of the screen. When the mouse gets to the edge, it will jump to somewhere on the OS X screen (don’t run VMWare in fullscreen mode)
10. Open your favorite OSX editor and start talking.
11. Turn Time Machine back on, if you must.

Known Bugs

1. While using this setup, I find that the Apple VNC Server is very processor intensive, which I suspect indicates some kind of infinite loop going on.
2. Once you’ve started Win2VNC and moved your mouse back to OSx, you’ll have to disconnect the VNC client (by clicking the icon in the OSx menu bar) to get back to the VMWare window.

Conclusion

If you try this, please let me know (in the comments) how it goes. If you figure out what’s causing the above bugs, or how to fix it, by all means share it with the rest of us.

I dictated this entire tutorial into Camino using Dragon NaturallySpeaking configured as described. Good luck.

Here is the list they gave:

I’m not making any claims about the generalizability of this list. I’m just throwing it out there to let you know that maybe some of those popular lists floating about the web are not consistent with what one room full of presidents, CEOs and team leaders spent an hour and a half discussing.

1. One Way Contract

In common law systems, for a contract to be legally binding, both sides must provide “consideration.” When you buy an apple, you give money and you get an apple. The money and the apple are consideration. Many EULAs have a clause to the effect that the Software Provider can change the terms of the contract at any time, without notice. In other words, after you have agreed to the contract, the Provider can remove all of its obligations from the contract, and change your obligations to whatever it wants. I call this a one way contract because you are bound by the contract, but the Provider is not, because the Provider can just change it. This means the Provider has not given consideration, and the contract is invalid.

2. False Advertising

Often times, the advertising for a software packages makes promises that the software does not keep. Voice recognition software is a prime example. If you buy software that doesn’t work as promised, any contract you may have entered into is null and void. It’s like ordering a car off Ebay and finding out when you get it that it won’t start. If the ad said the car was in working order, the sale is invalid.

3. Agreement Unavailability

When you buy software at a store, you don’t see the agreement. Usually, you don’t see the agreement until you’ve opened the box and tried to install it. Some EULA’s say, if you don’t agree to this contract, return the software to the vendor for a full refund. Except, the vendor won’t take it back because it’s open. Does this make sense to anyone?

4. Adhesion Contracts

In some countries, such as the USA, a Contract of Adhesion or Standard Form Contract is a take-it-or-leave-it contract with no negotiation and unequal bargaining power between parties. If a term in an Adhesion Contract is outside the normal expectations of the weaker party, it is not enforceable. For instance, terms that say ‘the Provider is never liable for anything, ever,’ or ‘the Povider can change the terms of the contract whenever we damn-well please and to whatever our lawyers can dream up’ would be considered unreasonable and not enforceable.

5. Unconscionability

In same countries, a contract is unconscionable if the consideration from one side is so dismal as to make the contract unfair to one party. For instance, if you buy software that crashes every five minutes or produces the wrong outputs, it’s not worth the money you spent on it, and therefore the contract is unconscionable. Unconscionable contracts are not enforceable as-is and courts have a fair bit of leeway in dealing with them.

On Liability

In closing, not everyone can exempt themselves for the damage done by their crappy software. An open source programmer who makes no claims and takes no money for his or her work is perfectly safe in declaiming responsibility. Microsoft, Oracle, Cisco, IBM, etc. are not. The difference is in their advertising. Lying to customers about one’s products is generally illegal. If GE makes a hot water boiler that explodes and ruins someone’s basement, GE is responsible. Similarly, if Oracle claimed that its database software safeguards information, but an actual Oracle database spontaneously emptied itself, Oracle would be responsible: not because it broke the contract but because it lied in the advertising.

Now if everybody would please stop accepting these bullshit EULAs, we might foster some responsibility in the software community.