Geek stuff – Page 150 – a sibilant intake of breath

Public service announcement

Windows users should be aware that several companies are now making music CDs that actively sabotage your computer: both by preventing it from being able to make mp3s and by installing trojan horse software that monitors and manipulates what you can do. Sony Music is among those companies. Luckily, you can get around most of it by disabling the autorun feature in Windows XP.

During the next few years, in all kinds of areas, we need to deal with the issue of intellectual property. We need to decide when countries can violate the patents of drug firms, either due to short term emergencies like an avian flu or long term ones like AIDS, We need to decide what fair use means, with regards to copyrighted materials, in an age where copying and distribution has become so much easier. We need to decide what to do about patents, which have the serious potential to be exploited and hamper both innovation and the public welfare, while confering underserved monopolies on those who hold them.

Whatever the answers to these questions are, and some of them are really very tricky, I don’t think they can legitimately involve the kind of backhanded dealing described in the first paragraph here. I don’t buy music from the iTunes music store, for the simple reason that I have no reason to believe I will still be able to use that music five years from now, or on a different computer or device. The nature of ownership, when it comes to things like software and music, is becoming ephemeral and uncertain – except for those people who have illegal copies that evade these feeble protections anyhow. I remember how, with my legitimately bought copy of Half Life 2, I needed to muck around for hours with registration, web updates, and a little Steam applet that seriously restricts how and when you can use the software which you bought. My friends who downloaded it from one or another peer-to-peer service just played.

An afternoon game

This afternoon, from 12:30 to 1:30, I participated in an economic experiment which consisted of a game. Within the game, there were three groups of five. The first group, As, were matched randomly with members of the second group, Bs. Each of these players started with 35 tokens, each worth 1/5th of a Pound. There was a third group, Cs, who got 25 tokens.

The game was only played once (ie. not iterated).

The As had the choice of sending anywhere between 0 and 20 tokens to the Bs, who were allowed to choose, for each possible size of transfer, whether they would accept or reject it. If the B accepted, the A got 50-X tokens, where X was the size of the transfer. (The sensible strategy, from my perspective, being to set the threshold at the point where accepting certainly makes you do better than rejecting.) The B, in this case, would get 30+X. If the B rejected, the B would keep 35 tokens and the A would lose one. For each A-B pair where a transfer took place, all Cs lost one token. Cs did not make any choices over the course of the game.

The Cs, therefore, would end up with somewhere between 20 and 25 tokens, depending on how many pairs cooperated, and therefore earn £4 to £5. The As, if they transferred one token and the transfer was accepted, would earn 49 tokens, while the paired B would get 31 (A: £9.80, B: £6.20). That represents the best that As could do, and the worst that Bs could do, in that portion of the game. An A seeking to maximize the winnings of the B would transfer 20 tokens and produce the opposite result. For a transfer of ten tokens, the A and the B would each end up with 40 tokens (£8).

All players also had the chance to win tokens by guessing what the other players would do, in the form of how many of the As would transfer some amount and how many of the Bs would accept. Getting one right earned you 50p and getting both right earned you £1. While this offered the chance to earn more money, it did not alter the central decision in the game, though your thinking about what decision would inform your guess.

My thinking was that, firstly, every A would make a transfer because the worst they could do is lose four tokens and they could gain as many as 19. Additionally, each B would accept a transfer, for precisely the same reason. Moreover, it would be awfully boring to sit in a room for an hour listening to rules and then not actually play the game in an active way.

I was an A, one of the two actively deciding groups. I decided to transfer 7 tokens, one above the minimum amount where the payoff to the B of accepting exceeded the amount that would be had from rejecting. For a B, accepting 7 tokens means earning £7.40, while rejecting it would mean getting £7. That said, for the B to accept costs all five Cs one token each, for a total loss among the Cs of £1. For the A, transferring seven tokens means getting £8.60 if the transfer is accepted and £6.80 if it is rejected (which would be against the interest of the B, provided they don’t care about the Cs).

In the end, I won £7.30, which means that my offer was rejected but that I guessed properly that the four other As would all make an offer. In addition to the £7.30, I got £3 just for playing.

The outcome of my section of the game, therefore, left me with £6.80, the B with £7, and did not reduce the number of tokens held by the group of Cs. Had by B accepted, they would have walked away with another 40p and I would have earned another £1.60. Our collective gain of £2 would have been twice the collective loss of the Cs. I suppose either concern for the Cs or the fact that I would earn more from the transaction caused them to reject my strategy of the minimum offer for clear mutual gain.

Caffeine considerations

In the past nineteen days, I have consumed fewer than five cups of coffee. Contrast that, for a moment, with life in Vancouver. During the fiscal year from April 1st until my departure on September 21st, I spent $204.88 at Starbucks alone: nearly 26% of my spending on all foodstuffs. During that period, I consumed 37 Venti dark roast beverages (approx. 275mg of caffeine each) and 24 quadruple iced espressos (approx. 140mg of caffeine). While the caffeine figures on that site may be way off (Starbucks doesn’t seem to publish their own), it is nonetheless illustrative. During the complete fiscal year of 2004, I spent $284.94 at Starbucks: 11% of the total spending on food. That includes six pounds of Sulawesi roast, 10 quadruple espressos, and 42 Venti dark roasts. Margaret and I have resolved to try to find a reasonably high quality, reasonably low cost coffee shop somewhere in Oxford.

Visiting Staples today was quite shocking. There are no floor staff at all, only surly, disinterested cashiers who will happily charge you four times what binders and notebooks cost in Canada but will not even point you in the direction of four-hole punches. Even with the mean British income, people here are getting seriously overcharged for software and electronics. I wonder if this derives from a lack of competition, from people simply expecting to pay so much, or from some other factor. While paper and binders can’t be easily brought over from North America, due to differing standards, I shall endeavour to secure everything else possible from back home. On the positive side, I now have a neat row of binders with all the papers that were previously strewn around my room secured inside.

My plan to get cheap Sainsbury’s sandwiches for dinner was scuppered by them closing hours before I expected. Them and most everyone else. I therefore spent an hour and a half wandering central Oxford in search of somewhere other than a sit-down restaurant that had something edible and vegetarian. I wandered around Gloucester Green (which isn’t) and then past Nuffield to the area near the train station. In the end, I paid rather too much for cheese pizza and a Coke. I need to remember that Sunday evening is not the time to find yourself without cheese and bagels at home.

With the relevant libraries closed and a brain no longer particularly up to the task of scouring e-journals, I think I will spend the rest of tonight reading Hedley Bull’s The Anarchical Society. It’s not particularly relevant to my paper, but my supervisor did work with Bull, it’s considered a pretty central text in the discipline, and it’s the most interesting thing I have at hand. From the little I know about Bull’s work, I think his conception of nation states existing in a society, despite the strictly anarchical character of world politics, is a highly useful one. It’s an important work of the so-called British school of international relations, which I’ve made a conscious and costly choice to study within.

My thinking with regards to the guilt essay has developed to the point that I have a strategy for tackling it. That strategy has been refined through discussion with Sarah. Describing the difficulties involved, I will develop or expound some kind of meaningful criterion for war guilt on the part of states. I would prefer to define it in a way that doesn’t hinge upon the intentions of individual decision makers, given how hard they are to evaluate. While I find it a strong contendor, the international legal definition seems to hinge primarily upon the matter of aggression, which can, itself, be a tricky thing to define. I will then evaluate in a less-than-exhaustive way whether Germany and Austria-Hungary met whatever criterion I posit, stressing again that it will be just one possibility among many. Finally, I will describe how it was the fact that they lost the war that led to any kind of guilt criterion being applied to those two states. Satisfying some war guilt standard is neither necessary nor sufficient to cause a state to be treated as guilty. Losing the war seems to be necessary, and may be sufficient. Trachtenberg’s comment, at the end of his chapter on WWI, that our historical judgments on the origin of the conflict are reflective of the political exigencies of the moment is helpful, in this regard.

There are counters to that kind of claim. For instance, Iraq certainly won the initial war against Kuwait when the Iraqi leadership chose to invade it, yet it was widely seem as the guilty party in the instigation of the war. Is the subsequent American-led expulsion of Iraqi forces from Kuwait a necessary part of that determination? Had the Soviet Union won the war in Afghanistan, would it not be seen as aggression on their part?

There are thus two separate disputes involved in the paper: one about the reality of what took place historically (who said what when, etc) and one about the moral framework through which we choose to evaluate it. Personally, I find the second question to be much more interesting since it at least attempts to generate a test to which all cases can be subjected. Those who see history as predominantly useful as a guide to future behaviour would agree.

The writing of this essay really makes me wish I had some of the materials that I left in Vancouver. In particular, the texts, readings, and notes from my international law course with ITG and the international law seminar with Byers would be helpful. In addition, the numerous texts that formed the basis for my twentieth century history class with Gossen would be valuable. I am sure all of the books in question could be had in one library or another, but having texts which are already familiar (and have the vital passages identified and marked) would be a good head start.

Luckily, Natasha – one of my fellow residents in Wadham – lent me Christine Gray’s book International Law and the use of Force and Thomas Franck’s excellent book Recourse to Force: State Action Against Threats and Armed Attacks. They are both books that I read last year and which I know hold useful information on the question of legitimate and illegitimate war. International law is difficult but fascinating; I wish I knew a lot more about it. Towards the aim of the essay, the Bull book is also less peripheral than I expected. I should like to finish the first 200 pages or so tonight, though it will remain to be seen if I can manage it.

rebus sic stantibus: Things standing thus; provided that conditions have not changed; spec. in International Law the principle that a treaty lapses when conditions are substantially different from those which obtained when it was concluded. Contrast with pacta sunt servanda.

PS. Do people find daily postings worthwhile? I use them partly as a mechanism for ordering and distilling my own thoughts, and I recognize that people may find that appallingly tedious. Writing things down like, say, the definitions of tricky words, is the only way I can overcome the limitations of my memory.

PPS. In consideration of Sarah’s suggestion that we go to Tallinn in December, I’ve been looking at ticket prices from EasyJet. It seems that if we fly from London and book early, we could get round trip tickets for under £100.