So here I present its boiled down essence, in the form of an imaginary dialog. It follows the same order as the original post, so if you want the details on any of these points, please look over there before arguing with them.

The Arguments

Marriage is about providing a stable environment to bring up a family.

In that case, we’d better ban marriage between couples who are celibate, infertile, or just happily childless.

An opposite-sex marriage benefits from the complementarity of the sexes.

I’m sure some do, but is that really the most fundamental thing which makes for a successful marriage?

Parliament has never tried to enact a definition of marriage before.

Just because they never have, doesn’t mean they never can; just like they could define “theft” in the 1960s.

Wouldn’t the UK be breaking with international agreement on the definition of marriage?

The UK would be joining Argentina, Belguim, Canada, Iceland, the Netherlands, Norway, Portugal, South Africa, Spain, and Sweden, who have already introduced same-sex marriages. The American and French presidents support similar moves.

But there’s a universally accepted basic definition of marriage, right?

Well… apart from the historical and geographical technicalities, such as polygamy, dowries, arranged marriages, wildly divergent views of divorce…

Is this another move to disestablish the Church of England?

Marriages held in a registry office are already explicitly prohibited from including any religious element, so
the battle to keep all marriages Christian was lost long ago.

This will open the door to other kinds of marriage, like incest…

Hm, there’s some interesting discussions to be had there (if you don’t panic).

…or polygamy…

Yeah, that’s another interesting idea. Although it could get a little complicated.

…or marrying your dog!

OK, now you’re taking it too far; dogs can’t even voluntarily enter a legal contract!

Legalising gay marriage would to teenagers being taught about eating shit as a sexual fetish!

Wait … what!? Is this some kind of satire? Have I been trolled?

Same-sex relationships are just different to marriages, so Civil Partnerships are the right answer.

Marriages between 20-year-olds are pretty different to marriages between 80-year-olds. How many different labels do we need?

But what’s the big deal? A Civil Partnership is the same as a marriage, just, well, not a marriage!

If it is equal, it is a marriage; if it is not a marriage, it is not equal.

Who Opposes It?

Obviously these are dangerously generalised, but I think there are four kinds of people arguing against gay marriage:

1. Homophobes – think that homosexuality is just plain wrong
2. Homosceptics – don’t believe that homosexuality is as “real” or “valid” as heterosexuality
3. Homonimbyists – fine with homosexuality, as long as it’s Over There Somewhere
4. Homodiscombobulated – just find it all a bit icky, and frankly get a bit confused

The End

(OK, just over 500 words. That’s as short as you’re going to get folks!)

A Thought Experiment

When I was first thinking about this, I came up with what I thought was the killer answer to the whole debate, in the form of a simple thought experiment. I realise now that that was a touch optimistic, but I want to start off with that thought experiment anyway.

Let’s imagine a couple, call them Adam and Eve. Adam and Eve want to get married. Here are a few facts about them and their relationship:

• Neither Adam nor Eve is a member of any faith. Nor were either of them brought up in any religious tradition. They are looking for a civil marriage, not a religious ceremony.
• Eve is a high-earning professional software programmer. Adam has never had a high-paying or satisfying career, and currently volunteers in a charity shop so he’s not waiting at home all day for Eve to get back from work.
• For reasons we will leave private, Eve is medically unable to bear children. They have discussed adoption, but neither is particularly fond of children, and Eve worries that she would not be able to divide her passion between her work, Adam, and a child.
• Eve’s parents aren’t terribly keen on Adam, and may not attend the wedding, although they will of course be invited. Adam’s parents, on the other hand, are happy he has found someone he wants to spend his life with.
• They have their differences, and their arguments, but believe that they are better off together than apart, and want to publically commit to staying together whatever and whoever comes along.

Can you think of any reason, based on the above, that Adam and Eve should not be allowed to marry? I certainly can’t.

Now, re-read the above sentences, but every time you see “Eve”, replace it with “Steve”, and every instance of “she”, “her”, etc with “he”, “his”, etc. What has changed? Is there now any reason that Adam and Steve should not be allowed to marry?

Before I begin…

Before I start deconstructing his arguments, I should say that I have a great respect for the Archbishop of York, and while I thought from the edited Guardian version of his piece that it lacked his usual open-mindedness, the full piece is an honest and humble attempt to express his beliefs. His final paragraph is, I think, sincere and admirable:

I write as a seeker after truth and understanding, so please be patient with me, because God has not finished with me yet. And I will try to be patient with the many of you who wrote to me.
I am a follower of Jesus Christ, still seeking understanding.

The other thing I want to mention here, so I don’t have to link to it every time, is the government’s consultation paper on their proposed changes to the law. Since the consultation is now closed, the original location of this document is no longer available, so I have saved a copy of the document for reference [warning: PDF file]. It’s actually very accessible, if slightly repetitive in its thoroughness, and explains a lot of the reasoning behind the government’s stance, including pre-empting some of the points I’m going to cover below.

Child-bearing and child-rearing

Possibly the easiest argument to dismiss when discussing the legalisation of same-sex marriage is the idea that marriage is necessarily about providing a stable foundation for a family. Let us ignore, for the moment, the thorny question of whether a same-sex couple can provide such a stable foundation, and concentrate instead on opposite-sex couples who can’t, or don’t want to, start a family.

There are many reasons a marriage might not lead to a family: a medical condition or accident may have led to infertility; age or a pre-existing medical condition might mean that one or both parents expect to die before children are fully grown; and some people simply do not consider themselves suitable parents.

If you consider the primary meaning of marriage to be child-bearing or child-rearing, you must logically object to the marriage of couples in these situations. The law, however, does not restrict such couples from marrying. No test of fertility or parental competence is required for a marriage licence, and to my knowledge a third party cannot challenge a marriage’s validity based on non-consummation.

As such, arguments that same sex couples cannot biologically produce children, or should not raise them, are irrelevant to any debate on the legal definition of marriage.

Complementarity of the sexes

A subtler argument put forward in the Archbishop’s article is that marriage recognises “the complementarity of the sexes”. The implication being that men and women are fundamentally and immutably different, and that a same-sex relationship can never contain the balance this difference provides to an opposite-sex relationship.

This is certainly a complex issue, and one which sociologists (and feminists) have spent considerable time discussing. However, it is far from clear to me that the difference between a man and a woman both born into the same middle-class 21st-Century southeast England culture is necessarily more fundamental than the difference between them and, say, an impoverished Nigerian farm labourer.

Can we really say that we are so sure that a combination of two genders is necessary and sufficient for a marriage to be “complementary” that we should make it a requirement under the law?

A universal definition

Many people, including Archbishop Sentamu, argue that the definition of marriage is “universal” and “absolute”, and that it is impossible to change its “essential nature”. In the Archbishop’s article, he backs this up with a statement that “No Act of Parliament touches upon a definition of marriage” – while statutes have adjusted the processes and limits of marriage (such as how closely related a couple can be) it “has always taken the essential nature of marriage as between a man and a woman as a ‘given’”. I am no legal expert, but this seems to me a basic misunderstanding of the English legal system: due to the long history of Common Law and Precedent supporting it, I gather that no statute specifically defines the offence of “murder” either (correct me if I’m wrong). Parliament could, nonetheless, create such a definition if it so wished, by following the appropriate processes, and the new definition would replace the old.

Another point raised in the same section is that of international agreement on the definition of marriage:

It should be noted that the definition of marriage has in fact, until very recently, traditionally been part of International Law, and not a matter only for domestic national law.

This has actually been anticipated in the government’s consultation paper in two ways. Firstly, under “consequential issues”, there is a discussion of the diplomatic efforts to increase recognition of same-sex relationships under whatever legislation they fall:

2.36 — International recognition:

Current position — overseas countries will not automatically recognise same-sex marriages
just as they do not automatically recognise civil partnerships. The Government would continue
working to increase international recognition of same-sex relationships whether that was civil
partnerships or civil marriages for same-sex couples.

Secondly, Annex A lists 10 countries which have introduced same-sex marriage, including some I didn’t expect, such as Sweden and Spain; a further two are listed as having adopted it in some areas but not nationally (the USA and Mexico); and more than 20 as having introduced some form of “same-sex union”. With the Presidents of both the USA and France recently voicing in public their support for same-sex marriage, the UK Government is hardly taking a bold unilateral step by considering this move.

Of course, the more general answer to the “universal definition” argument is simply to cite the variety of definitions of marriage recognised throughout history and around the world today. To pick a few random examples:

• polygamous marriages were the norm in the cultures of the Old Testament, and are still accepted in some Islamic cultures
• the notion of a wife as a chattel owned by her husband would previously have been taken for granted, but now seems abhorrent to many
• arranged marriages are commonplace in many Asian cultures
• and, contrarily, UK law allows for “no fault divorce”, a notion which many strict Christian interpretations would entirely reject

Antidisestablishmentarianism

The discussion of legal definitions is one of the few places in his article that Archbishop Sentamu specifically brings in religion, in this case mentioning the role of Anglican Canon as a basis of English Law. It is perhaps natural for him to feel pride at the central role played by the institution he represents, but to many non-Anglican citizens of the UK, it is less of a positive. Indeed, many would welcome the complete “disestablishment” of the Church, with its historical role acknowledged but no longer a governing force in modern law.

Reading the consultation document, I realised that it is precisely to avoid opening that particular can of worms that religious institutions are to be not just exempted from but actively banned from performing same-sex marriages:

For the Church of England, provided that the couple is eligible to get married, they have the
right to get married in their local parish church (or in a parish church with which they have a
connection).

In other words, the Church of England, because it is the established church, is obliged to allow marriages according to the eligibility agreed under law. By placing a ban on all religious ceremonies for same-sex marriages, the question of how this duty is squared with the right of religious groups not to recognise same-sex unions is neatly sidestepped.

Interestingly, although it acknowledges that there is no formal definition dividing civil and religious marriages under current legislation, the consultation document is able to list seven distinct ways in which a marriage can be conducted; briefly:

1. according to Church of England rites
2. according to Quaker tradition
3. according to Jewish tradition
4. through some other religious ceremony on registered religious premises
5. in a register office
6. on approved premises (e.g. a hotel)
7. ceremonies for the housebound or detained, and “death bed” marriages

These all have different regulations pertaining to how they are supervised and licenced; importantly, those marriages not conducted on religious premises are legally prohibited from including any religious element. As someone raised in a secular family, it seems obvious to me that a civil marriage is completely divorced (pardon the pun) from any religion, but many religious people seem to think any “marriage” is necessarily religious. So let me make it clear: regardless of the relationship between Church and State religious concerns already have no place in a civil marriage ceremony.

The slippery slope

As with a lot of political / social debates of this sort, one of the concerns often raised is that a change to the status quo might represent “a slippery slope” or “the thin end of the wedge”. In the case of same-sex marriage, the main suggestion is that this would open the door to legalisation of other kinds of marriage – incest, polygamy, marrying your dog, etc.

Marrying a dog would, presumably, require the dog to be a legal party to the marriage, and therefore pre-suppose granting legal rights to dogs similar to those of people, an issue somewhat larger than the definition of marriage.

As for incest and polygamy, there are actually some interesting debates to be had here, such as these I’ve seen on h2g2 over the years:

• If an incestuous relationship does not produce children, and is genuinely consensual, is there a problem?
• Is there a fundamental reason not to accept a marriage involving more than two partners?
• Or indeed should government have any role in defining / policing marriage at all?

I also love this wonderfully geeky mixture of philosophy and database design, dubbed “the y2gay problem” (and which incidentally includes the lovely phrase “antihomonuptial legislation”).

The point of all this being, if legalising same-sex marriage leads to open discussion of some of these questions, then bring it on. We don’t have to go further, if we decide as a society that it isn’t necessary or desirable.

Plain old homophobia

I’ve deliberately avoided the topic of homophobia in this article (as did John Sentamu in his) because there isn’t really much to say: people have a right to believe homosexuality is “wrong”, but society as a whole doesn’t have to be ruled by that opinion.

However, in discussing slippery slopes, I feel it would be remiss not to mention those who feel that allowing same-sex marriage would somehow encourage homosexuality in general. To take a particularly extreme example: on a blog called “Anglican Mainstream”, Lisa Nolland actually suggests that legalising gay marriage would lead to teenagers being taught about scatalogical fetishes – a leap of logic so astounding it’s hard to believe she is not a troll aiming for a reaction like this one (from Pink News).

Recognising difference

And so to the primary argument put forward by Archbishop Sentamu against same-sex marriage: that to do so would be to force two different situations into the same umbrella, whereas granting marriage-like rights to “Civil Partnerships” recognises those differences.

It is the model of the just society that responds intelligently to differences rather than treating everyone the same.

This is actually quite a tricky philosophical area: as with arguments over gender equality, or race relations, there is a risk of conflating “difference” with “discrimination”, and attempting to enforce some kind of homogeneity on society. As the old cliché goes “It’s Political Correctness Gone Mad!”

But for Civil Partnerships to be a necessary “recognition of difference”, there needs to be some truly fundamental difference between every same-sex relationship and every opposite-sex relationship. Otherwise, you could “recognise the difference” between men and women’s rights to work, or vote; or, as in 1960s America, “recognise the difference” between Negroes and Whites by giving them different lunch counters.

Obviously, we can tell the difference between a same-sex couple and an opposite-sex couple; the line is slightly easier to draw than between racial groups, but no easier than between men and women. But is this line so fundamental that we should actually encode it as a difference in law? Is it a greater difference than between a Christian marriage and an atheist one? Or than between a passionate marriage and a largely convenient one? Or than two people in their twenties and two people in their eighties – or, indeed, one of each?

That is, ultimately, a matter of opinion, but in my opinion, no such fundamental difference exists, so to claim that a Civil Partnership is “different from but equal to” a marriage is a nonsense: if it is equal, it is a marriage; if it is not a marriage, it is not equal.

Conclusion

If you’ve read this far, then thank you for sticking with me; if you’ve skimmed down to the bottom, sorry, no summary, I’m no good at being brief. What I will sign off with is what to me are the underlying views which lead people to adopt positions against same-sex marriage, however they justify that opposition:

1. They believe that homosexuality is fundamentally, morally, wrong. No logic can argue against this, only moral philosophy or theology. Society has to accept that such views exist, but we cannot restrict laws to only those which offend nobody’s morality.
2. They don’t really believe that homosexual feeling is real (or equal to heterosexual feeling). Some people (“homosceptics”?), while not condemning homosexuality, seem unable to overcome its “otherness”. Rather than a moral argument, it becomes one of subjectivity: how does a gay man “prove” that he is “really” experiencing same-sex love?
3. They’re fine with homosexuality, as long as it’s Over There Somewhere. The classic self-contradictory position people adopt when they don’t really want to face an issue. This is the kind of thinking that led to the US military’s “don’t ask, don’t tell” policy, and the notorious Section 28 which banned British schools from teaching about homosexuality. Perhaps we should call it “homonimbyism”.
4. They just find it all a bit icky. I think quite a large number of people fall into this group: they have no problem with homosexuality, and “hey, some of my best friends are gay!”, but somehow they don’t feel comfortable about it. Maybe they’re repressing homosexual feelings of their own; maybe they just find it hard to empathise because they have none at all. Their attempts to rationalise their feelings lead them to adopt stronger negative positions than they really believe in.

Obviously, the above is painted with very broad brush-strokes, but if you’re opposed to same-sex marriage, ask yourself, honestly, whether you fall into one of those four groups. I’m not saying your arguments are invalid if you do, just that they’ll be stronger if you’re honest with yourself about which argument you’re trying to win.

On which note, over to you: tell me in the comments if you agree or disagree — as long as you tell me why — and tell me what glaring omissions or logical errors let my argument down. :)

After an exhausting week’s reading, I found that I had reached half-way through the book, but only a week of action had taken place. Actually, that’s not quite true, as there’s plenty of words spent on background information, including one particularly awkward flashback to fill in the back-story of a newly introduced character. Not that the passage itself isn’t enjoyable, but since we don’t meet the character in the present tense until we know her entire history, it feels a bit like Stephenson is saying “oh, sorry, there’s something I meant to mention earlier; don’t worry, I’ll get back to the action in a minute, you’ll see”.

And in a sense, that is this book’s main flaw: there are simply too many stories and ideas crammed together, which might have been better left to stand on their own merits. The online world of T’Rain, for instance, is a brilliant piece of SF invention, and the politics surrounding it would have made an intriguing novel – but this is not that novel, so Stephenson hurriedly tidies the sub-plot away to make room for the real action.

And what action! I’ve never read a book involving so many guns (or at least, so many guns given such prominent and specific descriptions (Stephenson jokingly acknowledges one Deric Ruhl as “ballistics copy editor”), but nor have I read another book which concludes with a chase involving a woman being chased by a bunch of jihadists, being chased by an IT entrepreneur and a Chinese peasant, being chased by the rearguard of the jihadists, being chased by a secret service agent, being chased by a mountain lion. The action scenes, and the tangled webs which bring together its motley cast, are the real focus of this book, and they work brilliantly.

Apart from the sheer quantity of prose, there are other signs that this book is not as carefully edited as it could be. I read recently that Jasper Fforde uses the scrollbar and find facility on his word processor to check that he hasn’t left key concepts or characters unmentioned for too long; had Stephenson used the same technique, I wouldn’t have been nearly as lost when he suddenly reintroduced the nickname “Dodge” after consistently referring to the character as Richard for about 800 pages. A similar slip has a character recognised as “Olivia” after making great play, some 200 pages earlier, of her refusal to give out that name.

My final criticism would be that having introduced a deliberately diverse range of characters, thrown together by fate in the strangest combinations, Stephenson insists on arranging them neatly into romantic pairs. A bit of sexual tension, and some romantic motivation, help drive the story along, and maybe I’m just being cynical, but having nearly every character end up with a love interest seemed more unbelievable &emdash; and unnecesary &emdash; than all the other coincidences in the novel.

But these are minor niggles, and are almost forcibly overwhelmed by the twisting drama. If you start the book expecting a novel about near-future cyberspace politics, you’ll enjoy the first couple of hundred pages, then find yourself lost; if you expect an action-packed thriller, it will be the other way around. Maybe, if you’re a die-hard thriller reader, you’ll find it fails to live up to that genre. But maybe, like me, you’ll find it an immensely enjoyable romp, but reach the end feeling that the parts of the mixture are not quite blended.

In theory, this makes perfect sense, but in practice, it causes web developers like me a lot of pain, because nothing “permanent” is actually that permanent. I’m not saying no browser should ever cache a redirect, but I do have a few suggestions of ways they could be a little more helpful about it.

The Technology

Let’s be clear what we’re talking about – the HTTP/1.1 specification defines a class of status codes grouped as “Redirection” statuses, in the range 3xx. The main candidate for browser caching is status code 301, which the specification labels “Moved Permanently”. The specification specifically states that “this response is cacheable unless indicated otherwise” – that is, unless the response also includes headers specifically relating to cache control, a User Agent can assume that it’s OK to cache this response and not re-request the original URL. It doesn’t go into any more detail, and neither this nor the next sentence (about ”clients with link editing capabilities”) is couched in the standard RFC form of “User Agents MAY …” (let alone “SHOULD”), but the clear message is “this old URI is irrelevant, just use the new one”.

So, newer versions of Firefox, Chrome, and Internet Explorer have all started “obeying” this part of the standard, and opting to cache all HTTP 301 responses if not told otherwise.

The Problem

So, what’s the big problem? Well, the fact that a “resource has been assigned a new permanent URI” doesn’t mean that there won’t be some point in time where someone wants to use the old URI for something else. Worse, people have an unhelpful habit of changing their decisions later.

Consider this scenario:

1. A  company has a product called a “Thingummy™”, with a description at http://example.com/thingummy/
2. They decide that the name is too unwieldy, so re-brand it as “Widget™”. Knowing that cool URIs don’t change, the developers permanently redirect the old URL to the new page about the same product, at http://example.com/widget/ Old links remain valid, and direct customers to the information they were looking for.
3. A couple of years down the line, the company decides to boost sales by releasing a “classic” version of the Widget™ under the old Thingummy™ brand. They put up a new page at http://example.com/thingummy/ Sadly, some customers continue being redirected to http://example.com/widget/ by their browsers’ cache.
4. With Thingummies™ massively out-selling Widgets™, the company comes full circle, and abandons the new brand. The developers put in a redirect that permanently points http://example.com/widget/ back to http://example.com/thingummy/. At this point, all hell breaks loose. Well, maybe not, but customers trying to access the product page find mysterious messages on their screen about “infinite redirects”. Management are not impressed.

Escaping the Trap

The first hurdle for developers is that it’s not obvious what the hell is going on, even when they’re just testing out a few different URL schemes in their development copy. I think whatever unacceptable language this developer used on MozillaZine probably sums up the feeling most of us had when first encountering this invisible magic.

But even once you’ve figured it out, it’s not that obvious what to do about it – do you do a deep clean of the browser’s cache every time something’s not quite right? I see a sledgehammer approaching a nut. And if you’ve released your mistake to a non-technical user, perhaps on a preview version of the site, you’re going to have to talk them through this process as well.

Caching is a pain sometimes, but it’s been around for a long time, and we have UIs for dealing with it. The most common of these is the “hard refresh” – hold down Ctrl, or Shift, and hit the reload button or keyboard shortcut, and the cache is by-passed completely and content is reloaded. Brilliant. Oh, but it only reloads the page you’re looking at, not the URI you originally requested, so it’s useless for cached redirects.

→ Suggestion 3: Make a “hard refresh” request the original URI navigated to, not the one currently being viewed.

→ Filed as Mozilla Bugzilla RFE 696650

Doing the Right Thing

Apparently, what we’re all doing wrong, as developers, is not sending appropriate cache headers along with the 301 status code. If you’re writing, say, a PHP script, and using header('Location: foo'), you should probably be doing it in some kind of wrapper function, so you can make up your own default expiry, and make sure you send a whole bunch of control headers whenever you redirect.

But a lot of redirects are not written in a rich server-side scripting language, they use specific tools built into the web server, like Apache’s incredibly powerful mod_rewrite. I just checked, and there is no function in the latest version of mod_rewrite that lets you control caching, or send arbitrary HTTP headers, when it generates a 301 response. I’m sure there are ways of stringing together a whole bunch of Apache directives to achieve the desired effect, but it would take me a while to come up with the right combination, and it would look a mess.

→ Suggestion 4: Web server redirect functions, such as mod_rewrite, should build in control over caching headers.

→ Posted to Apache HTTPD dev list

Inconsistent Behaviour

Finally, let’s assume we’re using a tool for our redirects that lets us control the cache headers, and we don’t have any old immortal redirects to avoid infinite loops with. All is fine, and the browsers will do the right thing and save us some network traffic, right?

Well, according to this test result table from someone who is in favour of redirect caching, probably not. Like everything out there in web land, you have to deal with every browser handling things just a little bit differently. Combinations which should work might or might not actually be reliable across browsers.

Even client-side caching of standard resources is, as one comment I just came upon puts it “a bit of a black art”

→ Suggestion 5: Somebody needs to work out what the most common scenarios for redirect caching actually are, and how to achieve them.

Conclusion

My gut instinct the first, second, and twelfth times I ran up against redirect caching was that it was stupid, and the browser developers should take it out immediately. But I do see that it makes sense, and could save a lot of unnecessary network traffic and server load. So instead, all I ask is that people don’t brush the problems off with “oh, well, you should have known what permanent means”, and look at how to make redirect caching work in the real world.

When I was little, I used to like choosing things like digital watches, or my parents’ new fridge or washing machine. I would go round all the shops, making notes on the candidates to be bought – I found some of them when I was clearing out a cupboard recently. I think it was my attempt to introduce a kind of scientific order into the chaos that is modern shopping – I guess you could call it the “Money Supermarket” method.

My least favourite kind of shopping is shoe shopping, closely followed by clothes shopping, both of which utterly defy this “scientific” analysis – other than price, there aren’t any variables you can line up in a comparison grid. A pair of shoes either fits or not, as does a pair of trousers (judging by the stock in the shops, I must be the skinniest man in Eastbourne…); the rest is down to personal opinion – the problem being that my opinion when looking at a t-shirt in a shop is generally “oh, look, it’s a t-shirt”, which doesn’t get me very far.

I have managed by a series of flukes never to buy a mobile phone, and consequently baffle my friends by always having out-dated and under-powered phones; and what kind of a geek uses his netbook as his only PC for 7 months simply because he hasn’t got round to buying or building a replacement desktop? For one thing, there are simply too many variables to analyse, and I don’t have the enthusiasm I had when I was 13 to sit there tabulating them all. But on top of that, the sheer quantity of hype and advertising around mobile phones makes me want to run away – the very idea of walking into Phones4U gives me the shudders, such is the unintended effect of their relentless marketing.

I have a general theory that everything in life is ultimately about compromise (well, probably not quite everything; I’m willing to compromise on that point…), and modern shopping is no exception. Generally, unless you are the richest person in the world, you will not be able to order something tailor-made to your exact requirements; but (in the Western / Developed World at least) you’ll probably have a fair few options to choose from. But that means there’s going to be pros and cons to weigh up, and ultimately you have to decide which compromise you like best or hate least.

Trying to turn all that hype, and all those compromises into a quantifiable, logical system – which is, most of the time, how my mind works – is tiring, and ultimately futile: eventually, you just have to plump for something, and live with it. Which is why I still haven’t bought a smartphone.

And yet, some people seem to do their utmost to make all the hyperlinks in their documents entirely useless. Here are my Top 10 Things Not To Do with Links…

Cleggocracy

Firstly, let’s summarise this cartoon: “Cleggocracy” is depicted as a Frankenstein’s monster, with Cameron, Milliband, and someone I don’t recognise in the pocket of a giant Nick Clegg. The message is that if we say Yes to AV, you’ll get messy, unpopular, Lib Dem coalition governments; if we say No, our proud democratic traditions will survive, and next time we’ll be sensible and vote the Tories in properly. At least, I think that’s what it’s trying to say…

Student Fee Rises are Clegg’s Fault

This is what first caught my eye: among the discarded sheets of paper (why are they discarded and torn anyway?) representing the policies the “Cleggocracy” of AV will bring in is “More Student Fees Rises”. So, according to this cartoon a strong Tory government would not have raised fees – that’s Clegg’s fault for forcing a coalition on them, and something we can expect more of under AV. Correct me if I’m wrong, but isn’t that exactly the opposite of true?

Parliamentary Democracy requires a Strong Government

The next thing I found myself questioning was the gravestone, which is labelled “Parliamentary Democracy R.I.P. 2011″. Now, the rest of the cartoon appears to be arguing that what this country needs is a strong, Tory, government, and none of this namby-pamby coalition guff. So why is Parliamentary Democracy, which surely implies consensus and compromise, being mourned? Presumably, this has slipped in from a different cartoon, about the perils of electing a government by Proportional Representation – a very different question, and not one being asked by this referendum.

Ramsay Who?

The piece of paper that makes least sense to me is the one on the far right, which is headed “Ramsay MacDonald Supported AV, 1931 – THAT SAYS IT ALL!” Does it? Personally, I know nothing about Ramsay MacDonald, or the politics of 1931 – like most voters, I wasn’t born at the time – and I’m not sure I need or want to.

Of course, the cheap tit for tat response would be “Nick Griffin Opposes AV – That Says It All!”. Oh, and Mussolini made the trains run on time. Sorry, what were we talking about again?

Loathed Lib Dems

The Nick Clegg monster in the cartoon is holding a book titled “Policies the British People Loathe” – clearly everyone reading the cartoon is assumed to vote Tory, and loathe the Lib Dems. This leaflet was distributed in Eastbourne, which has indeed had Tory MPs for 98 of the last 100 years; and the County Council is under Conservative control.

But at the 2010 general election, the Lib Dem candidate took the seat, with 47% of the vote. And the Borough Council ward of Old Town, to which this leaflet was targeted, is currently represented entirely by Lib Dem councillors, and has been even under Conservative majorities. So who exactly are the staunch Tory-supporting Lib Dem-loathing voters being targeted here?

Can you have a Positive No Campaign?

This cartoon may not be as disingenuous as the notorious “vote no or the baby gets it” posters, but it doesn’t stand up to much scrutiny. In the software world, companies like Microsoft are often accused of using “FUD” to discredit their competitors – not outright lies, nothing that could easily be called libellous, but enough to spread Fear, Uncertainty, & Doubt. Notably, FUD works best if you are trying to maintain the status quo, as people’s natural fear of change acts in your favour. But it does rather suggest a lack of confidence in your own advantages.

So, philosophical question time: Is negative campaigning inevitable if you are campaigning for a No vote in a referendum?

PS: Somebody posted this cartoon of a filled-out AV ballot paper on Twitter. It makes no sense, because you don’t have to rank every candidate. So in reality, it would look more like this (with and without AV). Either the person that made that cartoon didn’t understand how AV works, or it’s more FUD.

So, it’s Goodbye Burgess Hill!

• Goodbye to the 07:57 Southern Service to London Victoria — and goodbye to the crowded 08:18 when I missed it!
• Goodbye to “the delayed 18:09 service” home, and the confusing service to Seaford, Eastbourne, and Ore
• Goodbye “customers for Glynde, Berwick, Cooksbridge, or Plumpton”, who weren’t always travelling in the correct part of the train.
• Goodbye to Wivelsfield station, and the steep walk into town.
• Goodbye to the young families of Noel Rise, who greeted me each morning — and who grew up before my eyes!
• Goodbye to the headless eagle, the milk depot, and the dewy spider-webs on the fence — but goodbye too to the constant digging of the road!
• Goodbye to the Martletts, and Market Place
• Goodbye to the sandwich shops, the greengrocer’s stall, and the 50p bookshop
• Goodbye to the Post Office, and churchyard
• Goodbye to the park, with its abstract modern sculpture, its muddy fields, and its basketball hoop
• Goodbye to the Railway, the Jacob’s, & the Potter’s
• Goodbye Disco Carpets, and hairdressers downstairs
• Goodbye to you all – maybe I’ll come and visit someday. But then again, maybe not. ;)

Good Riddance

The internet was originally designed to have an address for everything that was connected to it – if you ask a remote server for something, it sends the response back to your address; if you want to make something available, you advertise your address, and so on. But that didn’t scale very well, so a whole host of protocols and programs have sprung up for sharing one public address between maybe dozens of computers, and handling the connections going in and out. This is fiddly, and it could get even worse – the pessimists predict that instead of IPv6, we’ll end up with ISPs sharing IP adresses between multiple broadband connections, using yet more NAT. Not only will your Skype client be asking your router for a “pinhole” for incoming data, your router will have to ask your ISP for a pinhole through to the “real” internet.

Firewall on a Chip

So, giving everything an IPv6 address will make everything easier, right?

Well… it turns out, the very things that make NAT a nuisance have a rather handy side-effect: ne’er-do-wells can’t send random data to your laptop trying to hack in and steal that text file you store all your passwords in. Your router has to look at packets to determine which computer they’re for anyway, so it ends up acting like a simple firewall without really trying. And when we connect to a trusted network, we expect it to provide this basic insulation from the wider internet.

Wi-fi has already made this assumption out of date – devices like smartphones, netbooks, and tablets are more or less designed to connect to untrusted networks; even if you never use public hotspots, you don’t know how well the office network you’ve just borrowed the WPA key for is secured. So this is probably a good time to stop trusting routers to protect us.

The alternative is that every computer runs a “personal firewall” – a program that checks all traffic on the machine, both inbound and outbound. At the moment, this means an application you install, which clogs up your CPU and memory, slowing down your machine. So maybe the next generation of devices won’t just have a simple network controller, they’ll have a fully flexible Network Processing Unit (NPU) – a firewall on a chip, with its own memory, perhaps a bit of solid state storage for accumulated rules, and so on. The CPU won’t be taken up with traffic analysis; the OS authors won’t have to implement an entire firewall, just drivers for communicating with the NPU; and yet you’ll be carrying your own firewall whatever network you connect to.

Splinternet

Now if every device (eventually) has an NPU, what other assumptions can we challenge? First up is that other hallmark of the “trusted” network, the notion of “local” resources. In future, rather than relying on topology (“it’s on the same router therefore it’s local”) trust decisions will have to be made explicitly – the VPN will be more important than the LAN. If you bring your laptop to a meeting, you’ll only be granted access to the internet, and maybe to send jobs to a nearby printer; but you’ll still have access to your shared server back at HQ (if it’s not all “in the cloud” anyway). The devices in question will each have some authentication that knows whether you should be allowed in or not.

The key thing about this is that it is de-centralized – devices would be able to talk to each other in all sorts of ways, using central servers only as brokers for authentication. Devices could share – or even trade – spare resources such as bandwidth, or even CPU. A laptop in a neighbouring room might be able to access a wi-fi hotspot that’s out of your range, or be physically closer to a file server than you. (Just make sure you’re encrypting all your traffic – another job for the NPU perhaps?)

HTTP over BitTorrent

Now at this point anyone who actually knows how all this works will no doubt be champing at the bit to tell me why everything I’ve written is outrageous nonsense (and everyone else will have got bored and stopped reading), so I’ll just mention one last crazy idea.

Connecting your smartphone to your next-door neighbour’s laptop is all very well, but it’s hardly going to be a fast connection is it? On the other hand, what if you’re both trying to access the same content – wouldn’t it be great if you could somehow access each other’s cached data?

Obviously you’ve got to know that the data is kosher, but imagine an HTTP/2.0 response of “333 Use This P2P Hash”, or handing your browser a .torrent file. This wouldn’t have to be limited to huge files, either – the common resources of a website (JS, CSS, “chrome” images, etc) could be bundled up into one torrent, like the episodes of a series, for you to grab and extract what you need.

Maybe all this is a bit far-fetched, but unless people start working on this next generation of “super-distributed internet” soon, we’re going to be stuck in the “IPv6 is more pain than gain” loop for some time to come…

The Installer

The first screen of the Windows installer for OpenOffice.org asks a question which most users won’t know how to answer, and gives them the wrong default.

It asks the user where to unpack the temporary files needed by the installer – files which the user should never need to see – and defaults to unpacking them on the user’s desktop.

There are several things wrong with this dialog:

1. It doesn’t tell you why you’d ever change it. The way the dialog is worded, it sounds like the product itself will live in the selected location. But in actual fact, the only situations I can think of where you would need to change it are if you have limitted space on a particular disk partition, or an unusual permission setup. The default wording should reflect this:

   “The LibreOffice installer needs to unpack some temporary files to proceed. This will require roughly XMB of space. If the location shown below is not appropriate, please specify an alternative location.”

2. The desktop is not a temp folder. The “desktop cleanup wizard” is one of those bits of Windows that should never have been necessary, and it is abuses like this that mean it is. Quite simply, the default location for temporary installation files should be the temp directory provided by Windows.
3. More subtly, these files aren’t actually cleaned up. This is possibly the reason (or, excuse) for unpacking to the desktop rather than a temp folder: a successful installation of OpenOffice.org currently leaves a folder of unpacked installation files lying around, and it’s up to the user to notice and delete these. I can only imagine that there are some problems with the installation executable deleting itself, but surely a stub could be placed in the permanent install directory to clean up the files once everything else has finished?

The Help Assistant

The OpenOffice.org Help Assistant cunningly implements the least popular part of Microsoft’s infamous “Office Assistant” feature – the cutesy cartoon graphic that pops up while you’re working – without implementing its actual purpose – showing context-sensitive tips with a minimum of user interaction, and without using up too much screen space.

If the light-bulb graphic pops up while you’re typing in a Writer document, you know that the help system is trying to tell you something. But you know absolutely nothing else – there is no polite speech bubble, no hint if you mouse over the icon, nothing at all until you click the icon at which point a full-size help window appears (and, in my experience, appears slowly). This is, frankly, worse than useless.

The simplest solution to this, frankly, is just to remove the feature. But if they really want this feature, then there is a small change that would change it from completely pointless to actually quite helpful: show a one-line summary of what the tip is actually about, before you click the graphic!

Conditional Formatting in Spreadsheets

This one isn’t such a big deal, really, but it’s one of those little details that puts people off switching from, ahem, rival applications. It’s also one of those cases where a bit of pragmatism is required.

Basically, if you want to have the formatting of cells in a spreadsheet in OpenOffice.org, you have to specify a named style for each rule.

Now, don’t get me wrong, the style manager is one of the things I really like about OpenOffice.org when I’m working in Writer – to me, it makes all the difference between a “rich text editor” and a “word processor”, and is much better than the versions of MS Word I’ve used. I can also see the reasoning behind allowing any styling to be applied by the conditional formatting, and the interface makes it easy to add a new style if you need to.

But 99% of the time, people will want to change two aspects of the matched cells: the text colour and the background colour. This is all most spreadsheet applications allow you to change, but they allow you to change them really easily. So, I’m happy for a new style to be created behind the scenes, but can I please have two little boxes labelled “Text colour” and “Background colour”?

Yeah, I know…

It’s open source, I should

1. Check the issue tracker for previous discussion of these issues.
2. Download the source code and fix them myself.

But, y’know, I have to go and make some dinner now. Nobody’s perfect, eh?