Some really strange things get said on /. sometimes.
As I was originally starting to type this, there was an article (which I failed to record a link to and now can't be sure which it was) on Bitcoin being used in the black market for illicit drugs. Lots of people in that part of the conversation seem to want to make drugs generally legal in the US, and they cite the supposed failure of Prohibition.
(I thought I had blogged about the supposed failure of prohibition. Apparently not.
It did not fail, but we failed to do it wisely.
We should have specifically authorized the states and communities to prohibit and/or regulate intrastate commerce in alcohol and other substances with strong habit-forming properties and/or negative health consequences, and restricted the states from attempting to prohibit personal and private production and use of the same, except in cases where the production and/or use at private level presented legal issues in other areas. (Production facilities blowing up and/or threatening neighbor's property, health, etc. Also, allowing states and communities to attempt to deal with individuals who, when consuming or using such substances, would lose control and present a clear danger to others.)
And we should have authorized laws to be made regulating and/or prohibiting interstate commerce and transportation of such substances, particularly into states where such was regulated and/or prohibited.
This would have been in keeping with the spirit and letter of the Constitution.
Having failed to do that, we undid the prohibition amendment in a way that left us open to the FDA. That was a bigger failure than the way we originally did prohibition.)
Well, somebody brought up a concept that is apparently making the rounds in parts of Europe -- that tobacco is actually cheaper than euthanasia. Talk about false dilemma and strawman and, well, the whole basic gamut of false logic.
Dealing with the "problem" of an aging society by killing the old folks off with either explicit euthanasia or the
implicit use of vice is
just plain wrong on all levels.
Old people are valuable. For their experience, if nothing else. But for all sorts of other things, too.
If our economy does not allow us to recognize their value appropriately, then the economy is wrong. Fix the economy, don't fix the non-problem of a rising average age.
Saturday, October 20, 2012
Saturday, October 13, 2012
Go Fish -- ゴー・フィッシュ
This is the standard game, as I understand it. Some variations noted below.
僕の記憶による、通常のルールを説明してから、ほかのやり方についてもいくつか話します。
Object:
To collect pairs of cards by asking other players for cards that
match those in your hand.
目的： 自分の手札にあるカードに相当するカードを相手に頼んだりして、２枚ペア組んで集めていく。
Number
of players: Two to six.
プレーヤの人数： ２人～６人
Use: A standard deck of playing cards.
遊具： 普通のカードデッキ（トランプ）
Setup -- 用意 :
The dealer shuffles the deck and deals seven cards, face-down so that others can't see them, to each player. The remaining cards are placed in a draw pile where all the players can reach them. (You can call the draw pile the lake or the sea.)
カードをシャッフルして、七枚ずつ配ります。他のプレーヤにカードが見えないように、裏を表に配ります。残りのカードを山にして、プレーヤの皆さんの手の届ける位置に置きます。（この場合は、やまを「海」と言ってもいい。）
Each player looks for any pairs in his hand and places them face up in front of him.
プレーヤは皆、自分の手札に入っているカードの中からペアを探して、自分の前に置きます。
Basic play -- 基本的な遊び方 :
The player to the left of the dealer starts.
ディーラーの左のプレーヤから始まります。
On a players turn, he chooses a card in his hand and chooses another player to ask for its match.
そのプレーヤの番には手札のなかから一枚を選んで、相手の一人も選んで、選んだカードに相当するカードを頼みます。
そのプレーヤの番には手札のなかから一枚を選んで、相手の一人も選んで、選んだカードに相当するカードを頼みます。
If the other player has the match, he gives it to him. If not, he says, "Go fish." and the player whose turn it is draws a card from the draw pile.
頼まれたプレーヤにはそのカードを持っている場合は渡します。持っていない場合は、「ゴーフィッシュ」と言って、番になっているプレーヤは山から一枚を引きます。
頼まれたプレーヤにはそのカードを持っている場合は渡します。持っていない場合は、「ゴーフィッシュ」と言って、番になっているプレーヤは山から一枚を引きます。
If the player gets a match, whether by asking or by drawing, he places the pair in front of him. Further, if the match was the card asked for, whether by asking or by drawing, he may play again.
もらっても、引いてもペアを組めるなら、そのペアを自分の前に置きます。頼んだカードの場合は、もう一回できます。
If the player did not get a match, or got a match but not the card asked for, turn proceeds to the left.
ペア組めない場合、またはペア組めてもそれが頼んだカードではなかった場合、番が時計回りに次に進みます。
ペア組めない場合、またはペア組めてもそれが頼んだカードではなかった場合、番が時計回りに次に進みます。
The game ends when any one player has no cards left in his hand, to play.
プレーヤの内、誰一人も手札がなくなったところゲームが終わりです。
The player who has collected the most pairs wins.
ペアを多く組めた人が勝ち。
ペアを多く組めた人が勝ち。
(Four o'clock in the morning, variations will have to be done later.)
[Update: Example game play dialog here. JMR20150408]
not plugged in
(On the train home, last night:)
Of fifteen people near me, on the same seat or the one across from me, three people are not plugged in in any way. (I am plugged in, but not to the network, so maybe that's four.) By plugged in, I mean, earplugs inserted or cellphone or some other electronics out, and actively using the device.
One of the three is reading smartphone ads from docomo.
I am reminded of some science fiction scene in which everyone is plugged in to the indoctrination station.
Maybe Fahrenheit 451, but portable.
Of fifteen people near me, on the same seat or the one across from me, three people are not plugged in in any way. (I am plugged in, but not to the network, so maybe that's four.) By plugged in, I mean, earplugs inserted or cellphone or some other electronics out, and actively using the device.
One of the three is reading smartphone ads from docomo.
I am reminded of some science fiction scene in which everyone is plugged in to the indoctrination station.
Maybe Fahrenheit 451, but portable.
Saturday, September 29, 2012
Misinterpreting 1984, implications to security
(From a post of mine to a conversation in progress on /. .)
I think it was my junior year high school English teacher who pointed this out to me (and the rest of her class).
Now, whether Orwell was "right" or "wrong" is the wrong question. Whether our society is becoming "more" or "less" Orwellian is a red herring.
There is a part of our world which functions like this. It has always been this way, since Adam and Eve in the Garden, since Cain, since the Pharaohs, all the way down to the present. (Consider the nomer, "the father of lies".)
Now the lesson which we need to learn is that the Orwellian world mimics the real part of our world.
But we need to be careful how we understand this lesson, or we end up thinking the universe is out to get us.
Or we end up thinking that it's all right to lie, or that there is an establishment that preaches that it is all right to lie for some "greater good". (There are many such establishments, but that is also a red herring.)
The surrealism of youth is not evil. But we do leave it behind.
(There is no choice, even if we try to hang on to the glories of the past, time drags us with it.)
The conclusion of the novel does condemn those who use the instability of "facts" as an excuse to use factoids and factisms to their own gain. (To clarify, it is not the facts that change, it is our understanding of them.
Skipping a lot of literary analysis, pretty much, we will each one of us find ourselves having to face our own worst fears sometime in life. At least once, maybe more than once. (See Abraham, for instance.)
There is a reason that the world is surreal when we are young. Our lack of experience gives an edge to all our senses. But that edge is false.
No, it is not really false. It is just not perfectly true.
When we are young, the best understanding we can have is always going to more or less miss the true mark of reality. We do not have the experience to interpret our experiences properly.
This is a reverse vicious cycle, because we cannot understand without experience, and the only way to gain understanding is to get some experience, and, with the experience of things that are new to us, there must be some incompleteness in our understanding. Therefore, we shall make mistakes.
Which requires more experience, and more incomplete understanding, if we really want to understand things properly, a serious conundrum, but not evil. Incomplete understanding can lead us to complete understanding, if we will let it.
The mistakes leave us open to being judged by the society around us, both the outer societies and the hidden societies.
Because of the judgments of the hidden societies, we will be put on trial. We will be tested, whether we will be true to ourselves or not. And we will find that the real test is not in the events of the trial, but in what we do afterwards.
Winston and Julia find that their affair was an illusion. Of course it was. They also, in the immediate aftermath, find themselves thinking that they have betrayed each other. This is not unusual. When we betray ourselves, we necessarily betray those around us.
Self-betrayal is a common tool of terror politics and tyranny. Reinforcing the impression of self-betrayal by making the betrayal of others explicit is another tool of totalitarian society, as is pretense of rescue.
I would have preferred a preferred a stronger affirmation of the value of reality over surreality in the plot, but it would have been out of character for both Winston and Julia, also for Orwell, himself. It would also have made the novel less accessible, as literature.
But we see in the end that both Winston and Julia have grown up a little. They both understand that life is inherently insecure. And the novel leaves them contemplating whether to give in to the illusion of security provided by the self-deluded Big Brother organization, or to take the next step to real freedom.
They could consider continuing in clandestine activities precisely because they know that everything will be taken away, sooner or later.
Freedom is just another word for being able to behave as if one has nothing (left) to lose.
Real security is in having nothing to lose.
(From here, I'll have to sometime bridge from one linguistic context to another and pick up information systems security, but that will be in a different blog.)
Learn anything from 1984?
No, we didn't.
My high school English teacher had it pegged:
1984 was neither predictive nor prescriptive. It was descriptive.
An allegory for society as we know it, through a lens double-tinted ever-so-slightly to two extremes, to bring a known secret out in sharp relief.
1984 is the world as we know it, viewed through the glasses of someone who thinks he is smarter than the rest of us trying to see it from the eyes of the rest of us.
Which is why it gave me a headache to read.
Very instructive book. Too bad most people don't think far enough to see the real message.
Now, whether Orwell was "right" or "wrong" is the wrong question. Whether our society is becoming "more" or "less" Orwellian is a red herring.
There is a part of our world which functions like this. It has always been this way, since Adam and Eve in the Garden, since Cain, since the Pharaohs, all the way down to the present. (Consider the nomer, "the father of lies".)
Now the lesson which we need to learn is that the Orwellian world mimics the real part of our world.
But we need to be careful how we understand this lesson, or we end up thinking the universe is out to get us.
Or we end up thinking that it's all right to lie, or that there is an establishment that preaches that it is all right to lie for some "greater good". (There are many such establishments, but that is also a red herring.)
The surrealism of youth is not evil. But we do leave it behind.
(There is no choice, even if we try to hang on to the glories of the past, time drags us with it.)
The conclusion of the novel does condemn those who use the instability of "facts" as an excuse to use factoids and factisms to their own gain. (To clarify, it is not the facts that change, it is our understanding of them.
Skipping a lot of literary analysis, pretty much, we will each one of us find ourselves having to face our own worst fears sometime in life. At least once, maybe more than once. (See Abraham, for instance.)
There is a reason that the world is surreal when we are young. Our lack of experience gives an edge to all our senses. But that edge is false.
No, it is not really false. It is just not perfectly true.
When we are young, the best understanding we can have is always going to more or less miss the true mark of reality. We do not have the experience to interpret our experiences properly.
This is a reverse vicious cycle, because we cannot understand without experience, and the only way to gain understanding is to get some experience, and, with the experience of things that are new to us, there must be some incompleteness in our understanding. Therefore, we shall make mistakes.
Which requires more experience, and more incomplete understanding, if we really want to understand things properly, a serious conundrum, but not evil. Incomplete understanding can lead us to complete understanding, if we will let it.
The mistakes leave us open to being judged by the society around us, both the outer societies and the hidden societies.
Because of the judgments of the hidden societies, we will be put on trial. We will be tested, whether we will be true to ourselves or not. And we will find that the real test is not in the events of the trial, but in what we do afterwards.
Winston and Julia find that their affair was an illusion. Of course it was. They also, in the immediate aftermath, find themselves thinking that they have betrayed each other. This is not unusual. When we betray ourselves, we necessarily betray those around us.
Self-betrayal is a common tool of terror politics and tyranny. Reinforcing the impression of self-betrayal by making the betrayal of others explicit is another tool of totalitarian society, as is pretense of rescue.
I would have preferred a preferred a stronger affirmation of the value of reality over surreality in the plot, but it would have been out of character for both Winston and Julia, also for Orwell, himself. It would also have made the novel less accessible, as literature.
But we see in the end that both Winston and Julia have grown up a little. They both understand that life is inherently insecure. And the novel leaves them contemplating whether to give in to the illusion of security provided by the self-deluded Big Brother organization, or to take the next step to real freedom.
They could consider continuing in clandestine activities precisely because they know that everything will be taken away, sooner or later.
Freedom is just another word for being able to behave as if one has nothing (left) to lose.
Real security is in having nothing to lose.
(From here, I'll have to sometime bridge from one linguistic context to another and pick up information systems security, but that will be in a different blog.)
Monday, September 17, 2012
Superiority complex
I'm writing from first hand experience, here.
When you have had it beat into your head that you're not as good as other people, you tend to develop an inferiority complex.
You know better, you know that other people aren't really better than you. Better at some specific thing, but not better in the sense of class. You know you are good at some things. You know that there are some things you are better than many other people at.
But you've had it pounded painfully into your head that you are inherently no good. Inferior. And pain hurts. So you pretend that you are inferior.
But it doesn't settle well. So, you tend to start finding ways to assert your superiority, to counter balance.
This is where the superiority complex kicks in.
Superiority complex can be expressed in two general ways. (Often, both ways in the same person.)
One way is to start simply asserting oneself. This much is actually not inherently bad. But if it goes too far, it becomes overweening pride, which is obnoxious. but still not too bad. One might call this supremacy complex.
The other way is to start trying harder than before. This isn't bad, it's good. But then it may progress to insisting on trying harder than other people. Again, this much is not all that bad, even though some find it obnoxious. (That others confuse it with humility is also worth noting.) It is often called superman complex.
If supremacy complex goes too far, it tends to seek identity with similar people and asserting group supremacy. (Racism, nationalism, sexism, politicized religionism, etc.)
Some of my Mormon friends got dragged into this kind of thing. I managed to stay out of it, partly because I could recognize a spirit that conflicted with the tenets of service that we call core.
If a superman complex goes too far, on the other hand, it seems to avoid group identification. There is a sense of "I can go it alone." Or, at least, a sense that one should be able to go it alone. On the one hand, you're trying to help others, but on the other hand, you aren't letting others help you.
I did not avoid this one, but I am discovering that the superhuman complex also conflicts with gospel principles. Well, I've been fighting with myself over this for thirty years, actually, so I'm thinking it might have been something I brought with me from the spirit world, from before birth.
I've noticed that a lot of the conflicts we have in this world, courtroom battles, market battles, family/spousal feuds, gang/fan violence, outright wars, seem to have roots in superiority complex.
When you have had it beat into your head that you're not as good as other people, you tend to develop an inferiority complex.
You know better, you know that other people aren't really better than you. Better at some specific thing, but not better in the sense of class. You know you are good at some things. You know that there are some things you are better than many other people at.
But you've had it pounded painfully into your head that you are inherently no good. Inferior. And pain hurts. So you pretend that you are inferior.
But it doesn't settle well. So, you tend to start finding ways to assert your superiority, to counter balance.
This is where the superiority complex kicks in.
Superiority complex can be expressed in two general ways. (Often, both ways in the same person.)
One way is to start simply asserting oneself. This much is actually not inherently bad. But if it goes too far, it becomes overweening pride, which is obnoxious. but still not too bad. One might call this supremacy complex.
The other way is to start trying harder than before. This isn't bad, it's good. But then it may progress to insisting on trying harder than other people. Again, this much is not all that bad, even though some find it obnoxious. (That others confuse it with humility is also worth noting.) It is often called superman complex.
If supremacy complex goes too far, it tends to seek identity with similar people and asserting group supremacy. (Racism, nationalism, sexism, politicized religionism, etc.)
Some of my Mormon friends got dragged into this kind of thing. I managed to stay out of it, partly because I could recognize a spirit that conflicted with the tenets of service that we call core.
If a superman complex goes too far, on the other hand, it seems to avoid group identification. There is a sense of "I can go it alone." Or, at least, a sense that one should be able to go it alone. On the one hand, you're trying to help others, but on the other hand, you aren't letting others help you.
I did not avoid this one, but I am discovering that the superhuman complex also conflicts with gospel principles. Well, I've been fighting with myself over this for thirty years, actually, so I'm thinking it might have been something I brought with me from the spirit world, from before birth.
I've noticed that a lot of the conflicts we have in this world, courtroom battles, market battles, family/spousal feuds, gang/fan violence, outright wars, seem to have roots in superiority complex.
Saturday, August 25, 2012
Apple vs. Samsung: claiming IP territory
The verdict today before Koh in Apple vs. Samsung inspired me to blog, so I logged in.
And I noticed my last post about Japan and Korea having a disagreement about territory claimed in the sea between them -- a small island that, until we discovered there might be resources in the sea around it, was not worth the trouble to either of them to formally claim.
Claiming territory. That's what this is all about.
Until Apple made it cool, a pocketable computer serving as a portable phone just seemed like a geek toy. That was the best Microsoft could do with it, and it was the best anyone else seemed to be able to do with the idea. (It didn't help that Microsoft was trying to hold the market for ransom and force everyone to use their MSWindows CE/MSWindows Mobile. Microsoft simply has no cachet, except with a certain kind of business or tech geek.)
Undeveloped territory that suddenly gets attention, and everyone trying to crowd into it. Of course, with the free market, one company is not supposed to be able to control an entire sub-market, but, unfortunately, it seems like most companies seem to have the stupid idea that controlling the market is good for profits.
I guess one thing we need to fix before we fix the patent laws is the general lack of understanding of economics among the current crop of managers and board members.
Well, Apple isn't any different. So, when they entered the portable phone market, they wanted patents to club other companies with. Or maybe just to defend themselves. But they couldn't get real patents on core technology like the radio stuff, because they didn't have any real research going on there. I guess that's why they resorted to the biggest flim-flam since the original pyramid scheme, design patents.
Software patents are bad. You aren't supposed to be able to patent ideas. Well, what idiots thought design (art) patents would not be patents on ideas? I guess, because "every" other country (that doesn't understand freedom) has them, the US must have them, too.
Uhm, yeah. Anyway. The rectangle with rounded corners and a screen mostly filling one face had not been tried in the last couple of years of Microsoft's fumbling efforts.
Not that it wasn't obvious. It had shown up since the earliest attempts at envisioning a portable computing/communication device. Plenty of prior art. But Apple took out the design patents, since they are available in the US. Never mind that they were only incrementally, non-uniquely different from other designs. Shame on Apple, but they've been trying this since the first look-and-feel suits.
Shouldn't look-and-feel be trade dress?
And since when is trade dress anything like patent? It's supposed to prevent fraudulent marketing, not enable it. And why a cluttered screen with bog-stock icons in a bog-stock grid should be considered anything close to trade dress, much less subject to design patent, is beyond me.
Except, there it is: land grabs. Find any piece of ground that has not been claimed, and stick your flag in it, so you have more room to set up your armies on.
Free market competition is not supposed to be a substitute battlefield. Destroying people economically is socially destructive, whether you push them off their farmlands or push them out of their market. Competition is good, but not constant all-out wars.
So Apple used its cachet to make the obvious obvious in the market for portable communication devices, and the market took off. Was there anything special about what they did? Was it just Apple's cachet?
Well, especially compared to Microsoft's offerings, yeah, there was something special.
So what was it? And shouldn't Apple have the right to claim IP on it?
Well, first, let me ask you: Where did Apple's cachet come from?
No, cachet is not just magic that no one can understand. Until you understand cachet, you have no business claiming to be a free person.
Let's dig way back to the Apple II. What was it?
Everyone else was business as usual. The two Steves said, look at the power in this thing. Desktop calculators? With these CPUs, we can put power in the hands of the people.
Jobs had something a little more than that in mind, but he understood from the outset how benevolent tyrants establish charisma and then use that to establish power. He had some understanding of the necessity of the appearance of freedom in supporting any sort of political movement, and he understood that economics is politics.
Power to the people.
What, you thought the hippie movement was over? Just because empowering people the wrong way always works for a little while and then doesn't any more?
If you're confusing power to the people with the hippie movement, you're missing the point. Empowering people, especially people who have been dis-empowered by whatever systems and institutions have been established before, is exactly how the charisma is set up.
Empowering people tends to buy their loyalty. Establishes charisma. Builds cachet. (If this idea offends you, maybe you need to re-think your reasons for hanging around the water-cooler or reading blogs and such.)
So, power to the people. For a little while. Then the people with the charisma tend to get to thinking they know more than everyone else. The reality distortion field gets to the source of the field. Then they start abusing their cachet for power. (What happened to the power to the people thing?)
Prices go up. Tech doesn't move forward enough to justify prices. Products aren't competitive any more. And that's not really all that evil, but the fear of losing the cachet inspires attempts to shore it up with external forces. Like court action. Or back-room deals. Or fake standards constructed too early. Or outright sending thugs around when people don't do what you want them to.
Look at Gates and Co. Did the same thing. Power to the people, except in their case it was power to some of the ignored people with moderate amounts of money -- lower level managers. Sure, mice and UI windows were fun to play with, but it was the market for a machine that could do lots of calculations cheaply that was going begging.
And, of course, Gates and Co. followed the same curve once they got their hooks into the cheap OS market. They knew more about the market than their customers, and they knew they must have the right to charge for it.
Usually, this would be a recipe for disaster. But trying to catch up with the Mac slowed their control ambitions down, long enough that they could establish a near monopoly among lower-level management before they bared their fangs to the general public.
And, when they bared their fangs, surprise! Customers ran away.
No, Bill, Nathan, Steve B., et. al. When you know more than your customers, they have no obligation to agree with you. Not in a free world. Freedom to innovate is not just for you.
That's why everyone was biding their time, waiting for the next mini-Napoleon to arrive on the scene. That's why you had to resort to even back-room deals, fake standards, market dumping, and so many other anti-competitive tactics to stem the bleeding. At the time, patents were still not usable for this kind of strong-arming, so you weren't really focused on those. (Missed a move on this chess board, did you Bill?)
Then we had the return of Steve. (Jobs, that is.) (Didn't I see this somewhere in an apocalypse?)
He had learned some lessons out in the wilderness. He had become much better at listening to the customer.
And he had Power to the People, by means of Free Software.
Why Free Software?
Not because you (the customer) don't have to pay money.
Because you (the customer) are free to do what you want, if you're smart enough or have friends who are smart enough who will show you how. That's empowerment.
So, what he gave us was FreeBSD plus some stuff they learned while messing around with Linux and Mach, to make the almost open Darwin OS, and add some stuff they knew from the Mac to make the semi-open Aqua instead of X-11, and they had a new winner:
Mac OS X, brought to you by Darwin OS and Apple. (And the Apple Public License, which was almost free. Lots of freedom, to attract the customers. But Apple was busy behind the scenes, putting patents anywhere they thought a patent might fly. Claiming territory. Making sure the freedom to the people could be called back when strategically necessary.)
A little power to the people, and (relative to Microsoft's mess) much better security. And it could make much better use of the power of cutting-edge semiconductor than their old classic Mac OS.
Almost open. Almost free.
Shoot. MSDOS was almost open. So was MSWindows. Such systems are almost always almost open when the new Napoleon on the block is getting his start. It's a necessary part of the pattern.
One lesson Jobs learned was not to rest on his laurels. (It's not the right lesson, but he learned it.) So, before Mac OS X went stale, he started working on iOS.
And iOS was almost open, too. $99 a year for the developers' kit and almost anyone could add the application they wanted to it. And if you behaved yourself well, you could make apps for others, and Apple would let you in their walled-garden of an app(lication) store.
Yeah, not nearly as open as Mac OS X, but there actually is a point to it. Sort-of. We don't, as a culture, understand security well enough for real security to sell on the market, but there is a demand for it now. So policing the market for iPhone apps seemed to be the alternative expedient.
Nothing new here. History is repeating itself. Over and over and over and over and ...
But when the one-and-only walled garden is the only alternative, almost-open is no longer open. And the expedient is only excusable until it becomes a system. (Which is one of the security lessons we aren't learning.)
You don't continue building up the walls of the walled garden, and you don't try to shut off the outside world. That's the kind of knowing better than your customers that has always been destroying big companies a little at a time. (And Microsoft wasn't the first, of course.)
You enable the outside world, and you build bridges between that world and your walled garden, if you have to have a walled garden. That's what keeps your market healthy, active, vibrant. That's what keeps the money moving.
That is why Android is so big.
Not because anyone copied anyone. Round corners on a rectangle, common icons, and a cluttered (Ick! she called that design?) home screen do not constitute any meaningful technical contribution to the state of the art. Best common practices. Lowest common denominator, is what that is.
Android is so big because it's free. Just like we are supposed to be.
Apple, somehow you induced the Honorable Judge Koh to force the trial through on a torrid pace, so that you would just have time to strut your stuff, but Samsung would not have time to pick apart all your thinly-veiled conceits, presentations borrowed from the boardroom, which you so convincingly presented to shore up your improbable claims to "innovation", whatever that has to do with anything.
Samsung did have enough time to show the illogic in your arguments about the iPad being so wonderfully innovative. That's why the decision went their way on that one and not on the phones, where they didn't have time. (I think I would have focused on tablets, too, in their place, by the way.)
So you won one suit.
But you cannot patent cachet. You cannot use cachet to prevent the next guy from his turn for long. The moment you try controlling people's opinions instead of giving them reason to have favorable opinion, that's the moment you start destroying your cachet. It's like using your thermonuclear bombs in your own backyard.
If there had been more time for everyone, Apple's arguments would have all run out of steam, and Samsung's would not, because Samsung's arguments had substance. And pretty much everything would have gone against Apple in this trial, had Samsung been allowed to make all the arguments they were ready to make.
There once was a normal world in the US of the previous century, a "half hour of silence", if you will, in which this kind of self-defeating behavior on the part of a corporation was relatively quickly rewarded with the natural consequences. In such a world, Steve Jobs's alleged mission to Tim Cook might have been Steve making sure the behemoth he constructed undid itself when he was gone.
But that world was altered significantly when thoughts became patentable.
I don't know whether Apple will buy out Microsoft or vice-versa, but it will be because none of them can figure out a way to keep people buying their latest junk. Because they rely on "intellectual property" instead of on service.
I'm not sure whether Google and the Android sub-section of the communications industry will stay around to keep the facade of competition in place, or whether some Congress-person will find some convenient conceit to de-fang the anti-monopoly laws to allow the mergers.
Maybe the mergers into one company to replace Bell's monopoly will happen some other way, but they will happen. And I'm concerned that this time, the communications monopoly/bureaucracy will not be nearly as benign as in the days of Bell.
This whole case has turned Apple's history into yet another exercise in how to destroy freedoms, and how to destroy a market and one's own place in it.
I would like to hope that the honorable Judge Koh could re-consider the outcome, comparing the results relative to tablets and phones, and declare a mis-trial, ordering a new trial with plenty of time to let Samsung show the whole evidence letting Apple's brass display their corrupt point of view for exactly what it is. I would like to hope that a higher court would see through the mess clearly and declare a mis-trial, instructing the lower court to give the legal teams all the time they need to shoot themselves in the foot or not, as the case may be.
But the US, itself, is busy doing the same wrong things Apple has been doing. So it's not a big hope.
Real freedom is scary, because we can't give up the desire for something tangible to depend on.
We know this whole big rock we live on is in free-fall, orbiting around our Sun, but cannot see how our own economic existence is the same. We are all in economic free-fall most of the time.
Just imagine if someone who could do such a thing decided the Earth had to suddenly quit its free-fall.
Which is worse, free-fall, or the inevitable alternative -- the sudden smack when ballistic objects collide?
We don't need that kind of control, we don't really want it, if we can only believe in reality, and put the lust for power over other people behind us.
And that's what Free Software is really suppose to be all about.
And I noticed my last post about Japan and Korea having a disagreement about territory claimed in the sea between them -- a small island that, until we discovered there might be resources in the sea around it, was not worth the trouble to either of them to formally claim.
Claiming territory. That's what this is all about.
Until Apple made it cool, a pocketable computer serving as a portable phone just seemed like a geek toy. That was the best Microsoft could do with it, and it was the best anyone else seemed to be able to do with the idea. (It didn't help that Microsoft was trying to hold the market for ransom and force everyone to use their MSWindows CE/MSWindows Mobile. Microsoft simply has no cachet, except with a certain kind of business or tech geek.)
Undeveloped territory that suddenly gets attention, and everyone trying to crowd into it. Of course, with the free market, one company is not supposed to be able to control an entire sub-market, but, unfortunately, it seems like most companies seem to have the stupid idea that controlling the market is good for profits.
I guess one thing we need to fix before we fix the patent laws is the general lack of understanding of economics among the current crop of managers and board members.
Well, Apple isn't any different. So, when they entered the portable phone market, they wanted patents to club other companies with. Or maybe just to defend themselves. But they couldn't get real patents on core technology like the radio stuff, because they didn't have any real research going on there. I guess that's why they resorted to the biggest flim-flam since the original pyramid scheme, design patents.
Software patents are bad. You aren't supposed to be able to patent ideas. Well, what idiots thought design (art) patents would not be patents on ideas? I guess, because "every" other country (that doesn't understand freedom) has them, the US must have them, too.
Uhm, yeah. Anyway. The rectangle with rounded corners and a screen mostly filling one face had not been tried in the last couple of years of Microsoft's fumbling efforts.
Not that it wasn't obvious. It had shown up since the earliest attempts at envisioning a portable computing/communication device. Plenty of prior art. But Apple took out the design patents, since they are available in the US. Never mind that they were only incrementally, non-uniquely different from other designs. Shame on Apple, but they've been trying this since the first look-and-feel suits.
Shouldn't look-and-feel be trade dress?
And since when is trade dress anything like patent? It's supposed to prevent fraudulent marketing, not enable it. And why a cluttered screen with bog-stock icons in a bog-stock grid should be considered anything close to trade dress, much less subject to design patent, is beyond me.
Except, there it is: land grabs. Find any piece of ground that has not been claimed, and stick your flag in it, so you have more room to set up your armies on.
Free market competition is not supposed to be a substitute battlefield. Destroying people economically is socially destructive, whether you push them off their farmlands or push them out of their market. Competition is good, but not constant all-out wars.
So Apple used its cachet to make the obvious obvious in the market for portable communication devices, and the market took off. Was there anything special about what they did? Was it just Apple's cachet?
Well, especially compared to Microsoft's offerings, yeah, there was something special.
So what was it? And shouldn't Apple have the right to claim IP on it?
Well, first, let me ask you: Where did Apple's cachet come from?
No, cachet is not just magic that no one can understand. Until you understand cachet, you have no business claiming to be a free person.
Let's dig way back to the Apple II. What was it?
Everyone else was business as usual. The two Steves said, look at the power in this thing. Desktop calculators? With these CPUs, we can put power in the hands of the people.
Jobs had something a little more than that in mind, but he understood from the outset how benevolent tyrants establish charisma and then use that to establish power. He had some understanding of the necessity of the appearance of freedom in supporting any sort of political movement, and he understood that economics is politics.
Power to the people.
What, you thought the hippie movement was over? Just because empowering people the wrong way always works for a little while and then doesn't any more?
If you're confusing power to the people with the hippie movement, you're missing the point. Empowering people, especially people who have been dis-empowered by whatever systems and institutions have been established before, is exactly how the charisma is set up.
Empowering people tends to buy their loyalty. Establishes charisma. Builds cachet. (If this idea offends you, maybe you need to re-think your reasons for hanging around the water-cooler or reading blogs and such.)
So, power to the people. For a little while. Then the people with the charisma tend to get to thinking they know more than everyone else. The reality distortion field gets to the source of the field. Then they start abusing their cachet for power. (What happened to the power to the people thing?)
Prices go up. Tech doesn't move forward enough to justify prices. Products aren't competitive any more. And that's not really all that evil, but the fear of losing the cachet inspires attempts to shore it up with external forces. Like court action. Or back-room deals. Or fake standards constructed too early. Or outright sending thugs around when people don't do what you want them to.
Look at Gates and Co. Did the same thing. Power to the people, except in their case it was power to some of the ignored people with moderate amounts of money -- lower level managers. Sure, mice and UI windows were fun to play with, but it was the market for a machine that could do lots of calculations cheaply that was going begging.
And, of course, Gates and Co. followed the same curve once they got their hooks into the cheap OS market. They knew more about the market than their customers, and they knew they must have the right to charge for it.
Usually, this would be a recipe for disaster. But trying to catch up with the Mac slowed their control ambitions down, long enough that they could establish a near monopoly among lower-level management before they bared their fangs to the general public.
And, when they bared their fangs, surprise! Customers ran away.
No, Bill, Nathan, Steve B., et. al. When you know more than your customers, they have no obligation to agree with you. Not in a free world. Freedom to innovate is not just for you.
That's why everyone was biding their time, waiting for the next mini-Napoleon to arrive on the scene. That's why you had to resort to even back-room deals, fake standards, market dumping, and so many other anti-competitive tactics to stem the bleeding. At the time, patents were still not usable for this kind of strong-arming, so you weren't really focused on those. (Missed a move on this chess board, did you Bill?)
Then we had the return of Steve. (Jobs, that is.) (Didn't I see this somewhere in an apocalypse?)
He had learned some lessons out in the wilderness. He had become much better at listening to the customer.
And he had Power to the People, by means of Free Software.
Why Free Software?
Not because you (the customer) don't have to pay money.
Because you (the customer) are free to do what you want, if you're smart enough or have friends who are smart enough who will show you how. That's empowerment.
So, what he gave us was FreeBSD plus some stuff they learned while messing around with Linux and Mach, to make the almost open Darwin OS, and add some stuff they knew from the Mac to make the semi-open Aqua instead of X-11, and they had a new winner:
Mac OS X, brought to you by Darwin OS and Apple. (And the Apple Public License, which was almost free. Lots of freedom, to attract the customers. But Apple was busy behind the scenes, putting patents anywhere they thought a patent might fly. Claiming territory. Making sure the freedom to the people could be called back when strategically necessary.)
A little power to the people, and (relative to Microsoft's mess) much better security. And it could make much better use of the power of cutting-edge semiconductor than their old classic Mac OS.
Almost open. Almost free.
Shoot. MSDOS was almost open. So was MSWindows. Such systems are almost always almost open when the new Napoleon on the block is getting his start. It's a necessary part of the pattern.
One lesson Jobs learned was not to rest on his laurels. (It's not the right lesson, but he learned it.) So, before Mac OS X went stale, he started working on iOS.
And iOS was almost open, too. $99 a year for the developers' kit and almost anyone could add the application they wanted to it. And if you behaved yourself well, you could make apps for others, and Apple would let you in their walled-garden of an app(lication) store.
Yeah, not nearly as open as Mac OS X, but there actually is a point to it. Sort-of. We don't, as a culture, understand security well enough for real security to sell on the market, but there is a demand for it now. So policing the market for iPhone apps seemed to be the alternative expedient.
Nothing new here. History is repeating itself. Over and over and over and over and ...
But when the one-and-only walled garden is the only alternative, almost-open is no longer open. And the expedient is only excusable until it becomes a system. (Which is one of the security lessons we aren't learning.)
You don't continue building up the walls of the walled garden, and you don't try to shut off the outside world. That's the kind of knowing better than your customers that has always been destroying big companies a little at a time. (And Microsoft wasn't the first, of course.)
You enable the outside world, and you build bridges between that world and your walled garden, if you have to have a walled garden. That's what keeps your market healthy, active, vibrant. That's what keeps the money moving.
That is why Android is so big.
Not because anyone copied anyone. Round corners on a rectangle, common icons, and a cluttered (Ick! she called that design?) home screen do not constitute any meaningful technical contribution to the state of the art. Best common practices. Lowest common denominator, is what that is.
Android is so big because it's free. Just like we are supposed to be.
Apple, somehow you induced the Honorable Judge Koh to force the trial through on a torrid pace, so that you would just have time to strut your stuff, but Samsung would not have time to pick apart all your thinly-veiled conceits, presentations borrowed from the boardroom, which you so convincingly presented to shore up your improbable claims to "innovation", whatever that has to do with anything.
Samsung did have enough time to show the illogic in your arguments about the iPad being so wonderfully innovative. That's why the decision went their way on that one and not on the phones, where they didn't have time. (I think I would have focused on tablets, too, in their place, by the way.)
So you won one suit.
But you cannot patent cachet. You cannot use cachet to prevent the next guy from his turn for long. The moment you try controlling people's opinions instead of giving them reason to have favorable opinion, that's the moment you start destroying your cachet. It's like using your thermonuclear bombs in your own backyard.
If there had been more time for everyone, Apple's arguments would have all run out of steam, and Samsung's would not, because Samsung's arguments had substance. And pretty much everything would have gone against Apple in this trial, had Samsung been allowed to make all the arguments they were ready to make.
There once was a normal world in the US of the previous century, a "half hour of silence", if you will, in which this kind of self-defeating behavior on the part of a corporation was relatively quickly rewarded with the natural consequences. In such a world, Steve Jobs's alleged mission to Tim Cook might have been Steve making sure the behemoth he constructed undid itself when he was gone.
But that world was altered significantly when thoughts became patentable.
I don't know whether Apple will buy out Microsoft or vice-versa, but it will be because none of them can figure out a way to keep people buying their latest junk. Because they rely on "intellectual property" instead of on service.
I'm not sure whether Google and the Android sub-section of the communications industry will stay around to keep the facade of competition in place, or whether some Congress-person will find some convenient conceit to de-fang the anti-monopoly laws to allow the mergers.
Maybe the mergers into one company to replace Bell's monopoly will happen some other way, but they will happen. And I'm concerned that this time, the communications monopoly/bureaucracy will not be nearly as benign as in the days of Bell.
This whole case has turned Apple's history into yet another exercise in how to destroy freedoms, and how to destroy a market and one's own place in it.
I would like to hope that the honorable Judge Koh could re-consider the outcome, comparing the results relative to tablets and phones, and declare a mis-trial, ordering a new trial with plenty of time to let Samsung show the whole evidence letting Apple's brass display their corrupt point of view for exactly what it is. I would like to hope that a higher court would see through the mess clearly and declare a mis-trial, instructing the lower court to give the legal teams all the time they need to shoot themselves in the foot or not, as the case may be.
But the US, itself, is busy doing the same wrong things Apple has been doing. So it's not a big hope.
Real freedom is scary, because we can't give up the desire for something tangible to depend on.
We know this whole big rock we live on is in free-fall, orbiting around our Sun, but cannot see how our own economic existence is the same. We are all in economic free-fall most of the time.
Just imagine if someone who could do such a thing decided the Earth had to suddenly quit its free-fall.
Which is worse, free-fall, or the inevitable alternative -- the sudden smack when ballistic objects collide?
We don't need that kind of control, we don't really want it, if we can only believe in reality, and put the lust for power over other people behind us.
And that's what Free Software is really suppose to be all about.
Friday, August 17, 2012
claiming territory
The South Pole.
There is an international agreement not to attempt land grabs there for several reasons.
One, the scientific community led the way. (No one else was foolhardy or hardy enough. Really.) And they like their international cooperation. (And for good reason.)
Two, really. No one else. That is, no one single enterprise or any single country is going to be able to justify the resources for staking a claim there.
Thoughts -- If the global climate change turns the ice pack up there into climate water and deepens the oceans, should we forestall the landgrab by deciding ahead of time to move the displaced island nations to the land that would be exposed there?
(The idea should give us all pause about how willing we are to have to face such a question, and it would hardly seem fair to force millions of people who are acclimated to warm weather to adjust to the cold there.)
The Moon. (And, by extension, Mars.)
Again, there is an international agreement not to attempt land grabs.
Again, no single country really has the resources to permanently establish anything but scientific relics up there. Thinking carefully, unless we get some sudden advances in technology that far outstrip all the modern advances we've made in tech in the last 300 years, I'm not inclined to think we, as a race, have the tech to put any permanent settlements on the moon, period. This gravity well is really deep, and the problem of junk floating in the satellite regions of the earth is intractable.
The Liancourt Rocks.
No explicit international agreements, but those are seriously forbidding rocks. Neither of the two countries that have reasonable claim on them have been able to put a self-sustaining community on them over the last 1500 or so years.
My wife and kids were reading the newspaper yesterday, worrying about the possibility that those islands could spark a war. Also, there is the worry that there would be some who would question whether Japan could defend their claim under the current Japanese Constitution.
And there was the inevitable, "What could the Koreans be thinking?" from everyone but me, so I did some reading on the internet last night, to see if I could catch up.
Well, here is the history, as I understand it.
First, Ulleungdo. Used to be Usan-guk, a different country. Kim Isabu conquered it for Jijeung (of Silla, one of Korea's predecessors in interest) in about 500 AD. Goryeo assumed control of the island when he (they?) took over during the 900s.
Then the Korean government, because of some need to shore up its power during wars with Mongols and with Chinese factions, called all its people to the mainland. A hundred years or so passed.
Somewhere around the 1400s, Japanese fishermen started using it as a base of activities. After several decades, the Koreans returned while the Japanese fishermen were back home, and started settling back in. Diplomatic back and forth, and Toyotomi (am I getting this right?) in a move that was intended to be taken back after he conquered Korean on the road to conquering China, ceded the island to Korea. After getting spanked by the Korean navy, there was no room for further quibbling with Korea about Ulleungdo, and Korea was not silly enough to leave it uninhabited after.
Ulleungdo has a small neighboring island, now called Jukdo. Small, but the land is arable land, and you can build houses and other buildings on it without difficulty. It has been part of the community for a long time, people living on it, more-or-less self-sustaining. Maintaining a permanent settlement there is not a serious problem. Jukdo is just over a kilometer off the northern tip of Ulleungdo, to the east.
The Liancourt Rocks are known in modern Korea as Dokdo. Nearly a hundred kilometers to the south and east of Ulleungdo, I understand that they are visible from Ulleungdo when the weather is (very) clear. If I got the link right, you should be able to see that they are also about 180 km from the Oki Islands of Japan. In modern Japan, they are called Takeshima.
There are two islets. Together, they do not appear to have even half the surface area of Jukdo. It is mostly mountainous terrain, very steep. The land is sort of arable, has natural foliage and wildlife. But it is not the kind of place you could farm.
Korea sent a couple to live there in the 1940s. It is not sustainable, so they set up a support staff of 30 or more that cycles on and off the island, including policemen. Looking at the islands, I could well imagine that it would not have been possible to keep that couple living on those islands for very long prior to the invention of helicopters.
If you read a report in some part of Korean history about 20 families living on an island in this general area, not so very far to the north and east of Ulleungdo, you would not suspect it was these two islets. Unless, I suppose, there have been significant geological/ecological changes.
More police there than residents. Heh. The police and military are there for a reason, of course. Japan has continuously protested the Korean presence, and Korea does not trust Japan. (There was this war, you see.)
Japan, of course, wants to claim the islands in order to establish some bargaining power over the natural resources in the Japan Sea/East Sea.
But on what do they base their claims?
Well, you see, these islands have not been known by the same names throughout history. In fact, up until the late 1800s, there was a phantom island a bit north and east of Ulleungdo on many maps. (Apparently, British cartographers had at one point messed up the location of Ulleungdo.) This phantom island was shown about the same size as Ulleungdo, so, unless there have been some serious geographical changes, it could not have been a reference to Takeshima/Dokdo.
There are some historical references to the islands. Maybe. But it's hard to say for sure, because the Japanese have referred to Ulleungdo as Takeshima on occasion. And, it appears, have referred to the Liancourt Rocks as Matsushima.
Could the Koreans have been so sloppy? Well, yes. Some of the claims the material the Koreasn use to demonstrate their claim on Dokdo actually use the name Ulleungdo. Some others use the name, Usan or Usando, which has also been used for both Ulleungdo and Jukdo in the past. You can't depend on the name in the document.
If you read the historical reports available, interpreting by description more than by name, it appears that both Japanese and Korean fishers have used the islands as a base. Quite probably, I'm thinking, the "Japanese" pirates who plagued the costs of Korea and China for several hundred years from around the 1200s used the islands as bases, as well.
(Those pirates were initially primarily Japanese farmers and fishers having trouble making a living with all the feudalism going on at home, but after a few years, were mostly Chinese merchants trying to get around the draconian limits on commerce the Chinese government had put in place. Which latter fact did not deter China and Korea from using them as an excuse to attempt to invade Japan twice. Really large armies, Japan getting ready for the worst, and the typhoons hit. "Winds of the gods, again."
If you are wondering why the Japanese were so militant, you have to realize that they were on the receiving side, as well. Mongols and Koreans, then Chinese and Koreans. Sometimes you wonder how anyone in the far east ever had time to grow food.)
One Korean fisher who got blown off-course and went to ground on the Liancourt Rocks during the 1800s (if I recall correctly), then ended up somehow effectively captured by some Japanese, asserted that the Liancourt Rocks were Korean since a long time ago, and obtained unofficial recognition of his claim from some Japanese officials who weren't really sure what was being claimed. (It sounds like he got punished for it back home, too, but the suspended sentence was apparently meant to be a reward of sorts. Strange politics in Korea in the late 1800s.)
The one thing that is sure is that they were effectively uninhabited, and had been for a long time, when Japan was fighting the Russians in the late 1800s. Japan used the islets in some of their military activities in that war. After the war, when Japan was claiming Korea as a subject state, Japan decided it would be wise to annex the islands, and made claims to that effect.
Either the Koreans did not dispute the claims, or they did not feel they could at the time. (The emperor in exile apparently did, however, dispute the claims. And the de-facto government also disputed the claims eventually.)
By the way, many people in the far east view the Japanese involvement in World War II as simply an extension of the Japanese (supposed?) expansionism that the war with Russia was part of. That might help explain the distrust that remains in the air.
(All these wars. If you help someone attack someone else, why are you surprised when they attack back?)
So, when the boundaries were restored to pre-war boundaries by the treaties that ended WWII, Korea was hoping that pre-war meant a bit earlier in history than most westerners would consider.
Dokdo was restored to Korea in the first several drafts of the treaty ending the war in the far east, but not in the treaty which the combatants ultimately signed. (Korea was not a signing country.)
I think Judge Cookson's suggestion should be openly considered. (She was the judge that dismissed a lawsuit brought by a Korean against a Japanese elementary school in New Jersey for using a textbook that taught that Takeshima is Japanese territory.)
But then what? The islands are not really inhabitable without support costs that well exceed the real return value, if this thing ever were to get settled.
I don't think it's a good solution, but it should be floated because the whole flap is not about islands.
(Just like with the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. -- Had the devil of a time getting that link in Google maps. One island is blacked out in the satellite view. US Military? -- Oh, Sakhalin, too.)
It's all about the resources in the ocean. Which really should be shared by all the neighboring countries. Otherwise, there will be more wars.
(No links because you should look the facts up yourself. And don't just stop at wikipedia, because it has been thrashed back and forth by editors on both sides. It is presently a little too Korean-biased, in my thinking. Who knows about tomorrow? Anyway, if you don't read it for yourself, you won't understand how things could be open to so many different interpretations.)
There is an international agreement not to attempt land grabs there for several reasons.
One, the scientific community led the way. (No one else was foolhardy or hardy enough. Really.) And they like their international cooperation. (And for good reason.)
Two, really. No one else. That is, no one single enterprise or any single country is going to be able to justify the resources for staking a claim there.
Thoughts -- If the global climate change turns the ice pack up there into climate water and deepens the oceans, should we forestall the landgrab by deciding ahead of time to move the displaced island nations to the land that would be exposed there?
(The idea should give us all pause about how willing we are to have to face such a question, and it would hardly seem fair to force millions of people who are acclimated to warm weather to adjust to the cold there.)
The Moon. (And, by extension, Mars.)
Again, there is an international agreement not to attempt land grabs.
Again, no single country really has the resources to permanently establish anything but scientific relics up there. Thinking carefully, unless we get some sudden advances in technology that far outstrip all the modern advances we've made in tech in the last 300 years, I'm not inclined to think we, as a race, have the tech to put any permanent settlements on the moon, period. This gravity well is really deep, and the problem of junk floating in the satellite regions of the earth is intractable.
The Liancourt Rocks.
No explicit international agreements, but those are seriously forbidding rocks. Neither of the two countries that have reasonable claim on them have been able to put a self-sustaining community on them over the last 1500 or so years.
My wife and kids were reading the newspaper yesterday, worrying about the possibility that those islands could spark a war. Also, there is the worry that there would be some who would question whether Japan could defend their claim under the current Japanese Constitution.
And there was the inevitable, "What could the Koreans be thinking?" from everyone but me, so I did some reading on the internet last night, to see if I could catch up.
Well, here is the history, as I understand it.
First, Ulleungdo. Used to be Usan-guk, a different country. Kim Isabu conquered it for Jijeung (of Silla, one of Korea's predecessors in interest) in about 500 AD. Goryeo assumed control of the island when he (they?) took over during the 900s.
Then the Korean government, because of some need to shore up its power during wars with Mongols and with Chinese factions, called all its people to the mainland. A hundred years or so passed.
Somewhere around the 1400s, Japanese fishermen started using it as a base of activities. After several decades, the Koreans returned while the Japanese fishermen were back home, and started settling back in. Diplomatic back and forth, and Toyotomi (am I getting this right?) in a move that was intended to be taken back after he conquered Korean on the road to conquering China, ceded the island to Korea. After getting spanked by the Korean navy, there was no room for further quibbling with Korea about Ulleungdo, and Korea was not silly enough to leave it uninhabited after.
Ulleungdo has a small neighboring island, now called Jukdo. Small, but the land is arable land, and you can build houses and other buildings on it without difficulty. It has been part of the community for a long time, people living on it, more-or-less self-sustaining. Maintaining a permanent settlement there is not a serious problem. Jukdo is just over a kilometer off the northern tip of Ulleungdo, to the east.
The Liancourt Rocks are known in modern Korea as Dokdo. Nearly a hundred kilometers to the south and east of Ulleungdo, I understand that they are visible from Ulleungdo when the weather is (very) clear. If I got the link right, you should be able to see that they are also about 180 km from the Oki Islands of Japan. In modern Japan, they are called Takeshima.
There are two islets. Together, they do not appear to have even half the surface area of Jukdo. It is mostly mountainous terrain, very steep. The land is sort of arable, has natural foliage and wildlife. But it is not the kind of place you could farm.
Korea sent a couple to live there in the 1940s. It is not sustainable, so they set up a support staff of 30 or more that cycles on and off the island, including policemen. Looking at the islands, I could well imagine that it would not have been possible to keep that couple living on those islands for very long prior to the invention of helicopters.
If you read a report in some part of Korean history about 20 families living on an island in this general area, not so very far to the north and east of Ulleungdo, you would not suspect it was these two islets. Unless, I suppose, there have been significant geological/ecological changes.
More police there than residents. Heh. The police and military are there for a reason, of course. Japan has continuously protested the Korean presence, and Korea does not trust Japan. (There was this war, you see.)
Japan, of course, wants to claim the islands in order to establish some bargaining power over the natural resources in the Japan Sea/East Sea.
But on what do they base their claims?
Well, you see, these islands have not been known by the same names throughout history. In fact, up until the late 1800s, there was a phantom island a bit north and east of Ulleungdo on many maps. (Apparently, British cartographers had at one point messed up the location of Ulleungdo.) This phantom island was shown about the same size as Ulleungdo, so, unless there have been some serious geographical changes, it could not have been a reference to Takeshima/Dokdo.
There are some historical references to the islands. Maybe. But it's hard to say for sure, because the Japanese have referred to Ulleungdo as Takeshima on occasion. And, it appears, have referred to the Liancourt Rocks as Matsushima.
Could the Koreans have been so sloppy? Well, yes. Some of the claims the material the Koreasn use to demonstrate their claim on Dokdo actually use the name Ulleungdo. Some others use the name, Usan or Usando, which has also been used for both Ulleungdo and Jukdo in the past. You can't depend on the name in the document.
If you read the historical reports available, interpreting by description more than by name, it appears that both Japanese and Korean fishers have used the islands as a base. Quite probably, I'm thinking, the "Japanese" pirates who plagued the costs of Korea and China for several hundred years from around the 1200s used the islands as bases, as well.
(Those pirates were initially primarily Japanese farmers and fishers having trouble making a living with all the feudalism going on at home, but after a few years, were mostly Chinese merchants trying to get around the draconian limits on commerce the Chinese government had put in place. Which latter fact did not deter China and Korea from using them as an excuse to attempt to invade Japan twice. Really large armies, Japan getting ready for the worst, and the typhoons hit. "Winds of the gods, again."
If you are wondering why the Japanese were so militant, you have to realize that they were on the receiving side, as well. Mongols and Koreans, then Chinese and Koreans. Sometimes you wonder how anyone in the far east ever had time to grow food.)
One Korean fisher who got blown off-course and went to ground on the Liancourt Rocks during the 1800s (if I recall correctly), then ended up somehow effectively captured by some Japanese, asserted that the Liancourt Rocks were Korean since a long time ago, and obtained unofficial recognition of his claim from some Japanese officials who weren't really sure what was being claimed. (It sounds like he got punished for it back home, too, but the suspended sentence was apparently meant to be a reward of sorts. Strange politics in Korea in the late 1800s.)
The one thing that is sure is that they were effectively uninhabited, and had been for a long time, when Japan was fighting the Russians in the late 1800s. Japan used the islets in some of their military activities in that war. After the war, when Japan was claiming Korea as a subject state, Japan decided it would be wise to annex the islands, and made claims to that effect.
Either the Koreans did not dispute the claims, or they did not feel they could at the time. (The emperor in exile apparently did, however, dispute the claims. And the de-facto government also disputed the claims eventually.)
By the way, many people in the far east view the Japanese involvement in World War II as simply an extension of the Japanese (supposed?) expansionism that the war with Russia was part of. That might help explain the distrust that remains in the air.
(All these wars. If you help someone attack someone else, why are you surprised when they attack back?)
So, when the boundaries were restored to pre-war boundaries by the treaties that ended WWII, Korea was hoping that pre-war meant a bit earlier in history than most westerners would consider.
Dokdo was restored to Korea in the first several drafts of the treaty ending the war in the far east, but not in the treaty which the combatants ultimately signed. (Korea was not a signing country.)
I think Judge Cookson's suggestion should be openly considered. (She was the judge that dismissed a lawsuit brought by a Korean against a Japanese elementary school in New Jersey for using a textbook that taught that Takeshima is Japanese territory.)
One island each.
But then what? The islands are not really inhabitable without support costs that well exceed the real return value, if this thing ever were to get settled.
I don't think it's a good solution, but it should be floated because the whole flap is not about islands.
(Just like with the Senkaku/Diaoyu Islands. -- Had the devil of a time getting that link in Google maps. One island is blacked out in the satellite view. US Military? -- Oh, Sakhalin, too.)
It's all about the resources in the ocean. Which really should be shared by all the neighboring countries. Otherwise, there will be more wars.
(No links because you should look the facts up yourself. And don't just stop at wikipedia, because it has been thrashed back and forth by editors on both sides. It is presently a little too Korean-biased, in my thinking. Who knows about tomorrow? Anyway, if you don't read it for yourself, you won't understand how things could be open to so many different interpretations.)
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