Breaking news

It was brought to my attention recently by reputable sources that the recent announcement of increased usage in recent years produced an internal firestorm within Mozilla. Key figures raised alarm that some of the tech press had interpreted the blog post as a sign that Thunderbird was not, in fact, dead. As a result, they asked Thunderbird community members to make corrections to emphasize that Mozilla was trying to kill Thunderbird.

The primary fear, it seems, is that knowledge that the largest open-source email client was still receiving regular updates would impel its userbase to agitate for increased funding and maintenance of the client to help forestall potential threats to the open nature of email as well as to innovate in the space of providing usable and private communication channels. Such funding, however, would be an unaffordable luxury and would only distract Mozilla from its central goal of building developer productivity tooling. Persistent rumors that Mozilla would be willing to fund Thunderbird were it renamed Firefox Email were finally addressed with the comment, "such a renaming would violate our current policy that all projects be named Persona."

Hate speech? Really?

One of my goals in life is to participate in a true political debate. Not a shouting match, but a true debate where both sides argue their points reasonably and, crucially, are open to the fact that they may be holding the wrong ideas and willing to change their beliefs. The Internet, allowing for an easy way to facilitate discussions across a very large, very diverse group of participants ought to have made this easier; alas, it seems that the past few years has only increased the vitriol and spitting bile in these shouting matches.

When I read news articles, sometimes I think "this sounds thought-provoking", and I turn to the online comments to see if it started one. Almost invariably, most of the comments turn out to be rants that are only distantly germane to the article (e.g., any article on the Middle East sets off a firestorm with ... well, you can guess; any article on Ron Paul sets off commenters screaming about how he's being "ignored" by the media, etc.). Sometimes, the ones I think are most thought-provoking have no comments (typically any article that mentions Africa). Go figure.

It is also surprising how many people you think ought to know better end up doing nothing but shouting. I went to a well-regarded selective-admissions public high school (the mean score for the standard college-admissions test in the US is not far from perfect) (and no, I did not get a perfect score on said test), but when we had a sponsored debate between the Democratic and Republican groups in our school, it still devolved into a (literal) shouting match.

Which brings me, in a roundabout manner, to the true topic of this post. Apparently, there is a firestorm currently brewing over a post on planet.mozilla.org that dealt with a political topic of current interest to some people. I discovered, years ago, that you catch a lot more flak if you write a post that goes to an aggregator that people disagree with than if you write one they agree with (I explained why I did not like the results of the 2008 presidential election, and caught more flak than the few posts earlier celebrating those results). I don't mind political discussion—indeed, as I described earlier, I'd love one. But I can understand why people might not like sensitive political topics being collected on a site which can be interpreted as official Mozilla policy.

However, there is one thing I don't like about it. Some people have taken it upon themselves to call the viewpoint presented as hate speech. I don't know what hate speech is exactly, but I don't think it should ever exist, no matter what one defines. That is because terming something as hate speech is an attempt to avoid discussing it: it is a way to say "that statement is so wrong I am not going to bother to refute it", or, equivalently, "I am so right that any opposition to my idea cannot be rationally argued." It is at best an insult to one's opponent and at worst an admission of outright arrogance.

Even worse, I think, are people who want to outlaw hate speech. Speech is, fundamentally, a reflection of one's belief. Attempting to outlaw the utterance of specific beliefs is nothing more than trying to outlaw those beliefs in the first place. Sure, some of them are injurious insults (such as those who deny that the Holocaust happened), but there is, to me, a steep slippery slope you start out on. Why outlaw denials of the Holocaust but not also outlaw denials of other historical religiously-motivated genocides? Hell, why stop there? We could outlaw any false statement: think how much more rational our discussions would be if people didn't state such lies as "Sharia law is invading the US legal system" or "the New Deal did nothing to bring us out of the Great Depression." Wait, maybe that's why.

I remember, when doing a project for a US Government class that involved redebating several key cases on freedom speech, that I found a Supreme Court decision which mentioned something to the effect of "Free speech is at its best when it causes discomfort" (I cannot find the exact quote right now, sadly enough). At that moment, I think, I solidified my stance on free speech to the following: all speech ought to be free, no matter how insulting, radical, or slanderous it may be. It may be that your speech causes injurious actions, but it's only the intent and the action that matters (e.g., falsely yelling "Fire!" in a crowded theater is grounds for manslaughter, but because the action was intended to create a stampede, not because you actually said "Fire"). Attempting to censor others' opinions—whether through legal means, or through attempts to shame them by calling their words "hate speech"—is not an action I can support.

And if you disagree with me, feel free to try to discuss it with me. Who knows, I may just change my mind.

Visualization toolkits suck

This is a rant in prelude to a blog post I expect to make tomorrow morning (or later today, depending on your current timezone). As someone who is mildly interested in data, I spend a fair amount of time thinking up things that would be interesting to just see dumped out visually. And I'm not particularly interested in small datasets: one of my smaller datasets I've been playing with is "every symbol in libxul.so"; one of my larger datasets is "every news message posted to Usenet this year, excluding binaries" (note: this is 13 GiB worth of data, and that's not 100% complete).

So while I have a fair amount of data, what I need is a simple way to visualize it. If what I have is a simple bar chart or scatter plot, it's possible to put it in Excel or LibreOffice... only to watch those programs choke on a mere few thousand data points (inputting a 120K file caused LibreOffice to hang for about 5 minutes to produce the scatter plot). But spreadsheet programs clearly lack the power for serious visualization information; the most glaring chart they lack is the box-and-whiskers plot. Of course, if the data I'm looking at isn't simple 1D or 2D data, then what I really need won't be satiable with them anyways.

I also need to visualize large tree data, typically in a tree map. Since the code for making squarified tree maps is more than I care to do for a simple vis project, I'd rather just use a simple toolkit. But which to use? Java-based toolkits (i.e., prefuse) require me to sit down and make a full-fledged application for what should be a quick data visualization, and I don't know any Flash to be able to use Flash toolkits (i.e., flare). For JavaScript, I've tried the JavaScript InfoVis Toolkit, Google's toolkit, and protovis, all without much luck. JIT and protovis both require too much baggage for a simple "what does this data look like", and Google's API is too inflexible to do anything more than "ooh, pretty treemap". Hence why my previous foray into an application for viewing code coverage used a Java applet: it was the only thing I could get working.

What I want is a toolkit that gracefully supports large datasets, allows me to easily drop data in and play with views (preferably one that doesn't try to dynamically change the display based on partial options reconfiguration like most office suites attempt), supports a variety of datasets, and has a fine-grained level of customizability. Kind of like SpotFire or Tableau, just a tad bit more in my price range. Ideally, it would also be easy to put on the web, too, although supporting crappy old IE versions isn't a major feature I need. Is that really too much to ask for?

My other life

I have just opened up a new blog covering those topics that are not oriented towards my work with Mozilla or other similar technically-oriented projects.

Why I bemoan Tuesday

On Tuesday, November 4, the United States held its presidential and congressional elections. As I am sure most of my readers know by now, the outcome was to elect the Democratic nominee, Obama, as well as increase Democratic gains in the House and Senate (although probably not filibuster-proof). To many, this news was greeted with elation; I do not count myself as one of those people. Let me explain why.

First and foremost, I dislike the results because the United States missed out on an opportune time to make up for its polarization. A Republican presidential victory would leave the government divided, a prospect I feel would be ideal for the government. In lieu of a true multiparty system, we have two major parties who will, by necessary of definition, tend to stake opposite sides of issues and, furthermore, stake them at opposite ends of the spectrum. Giving the entire government solely to one party—actually more, giving it to one with strong enough majorities to evade some mild dissenters—would have the effect of hindering debate.

During the Constitutional Convention, one issue that the drafters considered was the tyranny of the majority. One of the Federalist papers, No. 10, dealt with this topic, mostly by the argument that a larger region would have more diverse parties. However, the two-party system (among other factors) tends to dilute the power of size; another mechanism should be present.

This second mechanism is the tortuous process of law creation. A common criticism of Congress is that it is slow to act. Yet why should lack of speed of action be a bad thing? If one wishes to expedite a bill, one has to cut something out. Almost all of the time it takes to pass a bill is spent on debate. So improving Congress's reaction time would mean that one has to debate less and therefore rely on the bill being correct as it is. We don't regret any rushed actions, do we?

A divided government would force moderation as the Democrats would not have enough votes to override a Republican veto, so a bill would have to amenable to both (and therefore moderate in effect) to pass. With a Democratic president, the extreme positions could show up in laws more easily without general discourse. The large gains in Congress give the Democrats more ability to cut off dissent; thankfully, though, the Senate looks to not be filibuster-proof.

I have discussed enough on the theory of divided government; I also support the Republican candidate on several issues. On social issues I vary between whether or not I agree with McCain, but I do not base my decision on these. Chiefly this is because I think the president has no real power to enforce these opinions on a national level or even be able to have one of these opinions enter into law.

The primary issues I concern myself are more economic in nature. I am an ardent supporter of free trades and no economic subsidies (especially agricultural ones). In terms of policies such as energy, I opine that the government should not favor one alternative over another in terms of, say, research funding, as history has shown the government to be bad at picking winners.

A more generalized position I hold is that I am not in favor of socializing certain fields. One such field is health care; the issue I have here is not one of universal versus non-universal health care but one of privatized versus socialized health care. I am skeptical of claims that socialized (as opposed to privatized) health care would control costs or make health care more efficient. All studies I have seen compare across countries without accounting for factors that would vary between countries.

Another problem with socialization is that government needs restraint. Historically, governments have shown much delight in stealing from funds to pay for general costs, such as Argentina's pension system. Indeed, the United States is quite guilty of this, as our budgetary deficits are partially ameliorated by taking funds from the Social Security Trust.

The final issue I am concerned about is that of regulation. The recent economic and financial crisis has renewed a call for increased regulation. Lack of regulation played little part in the causes of this crisis. In fact, the entire mess started with the mortgage industry, which is the most regulated financial industry. Similarly, calls for caps on executive wages and windfall taxes have increased, both of which are known to discourage innovation. Note how many major oil producers with nationalized oil companies (like Venezuela) are facing problems maintaining output.

On all of this issues, Obama's policies are in clash with my views. He has called to renegotiate NAFTA, create a single-payer health system, enact windfall taxes, and, naturally, called McCain out on supporting deregulation. At least McCain is candid that the economy is his weak point.

And, most importantly of all, he would likely be able to rush his ideas to completion with less discussion. Oh well, we won't get another National Recovery Administration… I hope.

Politics and civility

There is one rule in particular I try to keep: to read over everything I get fully and carefully. With three email addresses (comprising a half-dozen mailing lists) I regularly check, two daily newspapers, one weekly news magazine, eleven newsgroups of varying daily post rates, and too many RSS feeds to even count anymore, this is a rule I break more often than I would like, despite spending well over an hour each day doing so. The frequency of my blog posting is proof enough of this—I would like to post once every two days, a feat which I have already given up on doing.

To make a long story short, this cutting back of in-depth reading has impacted one of the blogs I read, the Fact Checker for the Washington Post. I mostly skim the article and focus more on the comments these days. And similar to how I transitioned my reading of this blog over its lifetime, the comments have transitioned. Crucially, they have gotten worse as time continues.

It used to be that the comments were thoughtful and pointed out some of the factual errors. Now, the comments have turned nasty, with obvious political slants coming out. In the most recent posting (discussing the Republican candidates' repositioning on major issues), the first comment was a strong anti-Republican that didn't really relate to the article. Fourth was another slamming comment, again irrelevant. Same with the 8th, 11th, 19th, 20th, 21st, and around a third of the comments in general. How many of the rest were the thoughtful, reasoned responses I saw at the beginning? A handful, although many were in response to the fringish comments earlier posted.

After shaking my head at this, I turn to one of my newsgroups, sci.math. Recently, a poster by the alias of JSH posted some stuff. This poster is not particularly well-liked in this newsgroup for an aura of doing shoddy mathematics, inflating claims, and ignoring objections. I am not sufficiently well-versed in the relevant fields to know the correctness of his mathematics (they look suspect to me, but that doesn't count for much), but I do know that his refusal to attempt to factor an RSA number with his factoring algorithm casts suspicion on its correctness, and that he also did not reply to some of my requests for clarification.

With respect to this poster, I once awaited his posts, not because I was fascinated in the mathematics, but because they usually had some measure of debate to go with them. I found the posts on his return disappointing for a similar reason that I was irritated at the comments on the earlier blog. These debates had grown uninteresting. JSH was pontificating without responding, and other people just vehemently skewered him without remorse, as if their entire lives revolved around insulting him as much as possible.

Which brings me, albeit in a roundabout manner (an endemic problem of mine), to my point. It seems that the world at large has grown unable to speak civilly. I have always tried to keep my postings as civil as possible, but it seems that in many replies I look at, the poster made no such attempt. The most egregious violation of civility is in the political arena. Take a group of Democrats with only moderately-held beliefs and a group of Republicans with similarly moderately-held beliefs, and the resulting confrontation will shortly become a physical one without outside intervention. It seems to me that something about politics today has driven people to untenable extremes and is in part the cause of the lack of compromise in today's political world. I just can't see something like the Compromise of 1850 (which staved the American Civil War off for a decade) happening today...