Archives for October 2002

Today’s Washington Post quotes Fred von Lohmann of the EFF as saying that putting Hollywood in charge of technological progress would be like “putting the dinosaurs in charge of evolution.”

The Post article also includes this artfully constructed paragraph:

Hollywood wants to add a “digital flag,” or identifier, to coming digital television broadcasts, that would hamper copying. But Intel Corp., Philips Electronics NV and other hardware companies have balked at building anti-copying measures into their devices.

As I have written previously, digital TV standards already include a digital “broadcast flag.” What Intel, Philips, and others object to is not the broadcast flag itself, but restrictive regulation of their technologies. The article doesn’t quite say that the companies are objecting to the inclusion of a broadcast flag but the text is constructed in a way that probably leaves some readers with the wrong impression.

Some people have interpreted my previous posting, “The Fallacy of the Almost-General-Purpose Computer” as saying that the U.S. government views general-purpose computers as a threat. That’s not quite what I meant to say. What I meant to say was that in Washington law/policy/lobbyist circles, the proposition that general-purpose computers might be too dangerous is now (apparently) being taken seriously.

It’s almost always a mistake to talk about “the U.S. government” as having any particular view, as though the government were a monolithic entity that had a unitary viewpoint or a single coherent plan. Any organization so large necessarily will have multiple viewpoints jostling for influence, and its left hand will not know what its right hand is doing. This is especially true for the U.S. government, which was designed to include multiple competing voices, and not to centralize power in any one place.

I was at a conference in Washington, DC on Friday and Saturday. Participants included some people who are reasonably plugged in to the Washington political process. I was stunned to hear one of these folks sum up the Washington conventional wisdom like this:

“The political dialog today is that the general purpose computer is a threat, not only to copyright but to our entire future.”

(It’s worth noting that he was repeating the views of others rather than offering his own opinion – and that he had a general-purpose computer open on the table in front of him as he said this!)

If I could take just one concept from computer science and magically implant it into the heads of everybody in Washington – I mean really implant it, so that they understood the idea and its importance in the same way that computer scientists do – it would be the role of the general-purpose computer. I would want them to understand, most of all, why there is no such thing as an almost-general-purpose computer.

If you’re designing a computer, you have two choices. Either you make a general-purpose computer that can do everything that every other computer can do; or you make a special-purpose device that can do only an infinitesimally small fraction of all the interesting computations one might want to do. There’s no in-between.

I can tell you that this is true. And I can assure you that every well-educated computer scientist knows why it is true. But what I don’t know how to do – at least not yet – is to give a simple, non-technical explanation for it. If anybody has a hint about how to do this, please, please let me know.