Sheridan: Con-Law

COMPUTER FEDERALISM

In discussing Conlaw with students I argue that it is the operating system of the nation, as the nation and all of its political subdivisions must function in accord with it, otherwise, if counter, a government act must be declared null-and-void as unconstitutional.

The same is true of a computer in which an operating system controls the functioning of all of the applications systems such as your word processor, spreadsheet, and communications programs.

Until recently, as I understand it, the operating system has been built into the core of the main chip.  Either that or the ability of the chip to run the downloaded software serving as the operating system has been built into the chip.  Either way, let's call what's built into the chip the operating system.

What happens when computing-needs exceed the ability of the main chip to handle the load?  You could try to hook up two or more computers in tandem, or in parallel, as they say.  The search for extra-terrestrial intelligence (SETI) in which the researchers borrow computing time from individual computers around the world is an example.

Or you could put two cores on one chip.  Dual-core technology, they call this.

Now they're putting many more than two cores per central processing chip.  Of course this means trying to control them all at once.  Who, or what, is going to do this?

Humans are not unfamiliar with harnessing multiple horses pulling one load, are we?  We can point to the stage-coach driver holding the reins of six white horses coming 'round the mountain, singing as she comes.  Twenty-mule team borax was controlled by one teamster.

The United States consists of 50 states, each a political subdivision of the whole.  President George W. Bush, described today by Senate Majority Leader Harry Reid (D-NV) as our worst president ever, rides herd on the bunch, headed off the cliff, while each is running in parallel under its own state government.  This power sharing arrangement is called "federalism," as in confederation, a group of political units each having a certain amount of autonomy but agreeing to work together for overall common ends.

Computer scientist, meet Mr. Teamster and Mr. Federalist, and welcome to constitutional law.

It seems as though a constitutional convention for chip architects may now be in order.  How about at Independence Hall in Philadelphia?

The article appearing today in the S.F. Chronicle (sfgate.com) by Jordan Robertson, Associated Press technology writer, datelined San Jose, describing the need of multiple power centers to work together under an overall contol arrangement appears below.

HACKERS WANTED

I've been teaching that the Constitution is our National Operating System for some time now.  All our applications systems such as tort law, contracts, criminal law and procedure, etc., must conform to it.

Here's an example of someone taking it literally.  Jennifer Grannick of Wired news and Stanford's Cyberlaw project notes the essential principles required to run a computer operating system, notes the comparison to Con-law, and argues that we need more hackers to probe the bugs.  Good job!

TODAY'S VERSION

The Constitution is our national operating system.  It's in beta right now.  Every once in awhile we give it a tweak.

We've had a few major revisions.  There was the addition of the Bill of Rights, then the Civil War when the damn thing crashed, and then we got it up and running again with a few new patches, 13, 14, & 15.  This time we built equality into the OS.

In 1937 we made some major changes that you'd have to be a student of Con-law, probably, to be aware of, unless your study of history has caught you up to speed.

That was when, among other things, the Supreme Court decided no longer to act as an over-ride or  Super-legislature to acts of elected congressional and state legislatures no matter what they did as long as they could've believed that the measure wasn't totally crazy, meaning attempting to accomplish a legitimate goal in a totally counter-productive way.  Like a state trying to increase truck safety on the highways by imposing safety regulations that had the practical effect of making trucks drive longer distances in order to avoid having to drive through that state.  Mud-flaps was the issue.  Truckers would have to stop and change mud-flaps before entering State X.  Since truck safety is measured by the ratio of accidents per mile traveled, increasing driving distances worked against safety, not in favor of it.

Joichi Ito is a Japanese-American businessman whose parents who emigrated to the U.S. in 1967, 21 years after the defeat of Japan in WWII.  He's often asked about how he and other Japanese feel about the war.  His bottom line is that for better or worse, 60 years after Hiroshima "we dwell more on the future than the past."

"For my generation," he writes in an Op-Ed in the NYT today, "the Hiroshima and Nagasaki bombings now represent the the equivalent of a cultural "game over" or "reset" button."  This weekend was the 60th anniversary of the U.S. dropping of the atom bomb on Hiroshima and it's been in the news.

One way of looking at our invasion of Iraq is that by removing Saddam Hussein, we decided to press that country's reset button.  We backed by an international coalition to lend legitimacy in a world that often is less than that.

The result is that there's a constitutional convention occurring in Iraq. 

They're trying to come up with a new national operating system, following the crash.

Good luck.