taint.org: Justin Mason’s Weblog

I’m taking a week off to go hiking in some of the amazing back country that California has to offer. Assuming I don’t get eaten by a bear, I’ll see you all around Sep 6….

Tags: bear, country, hiking, sep, week

Patents: Børsen: Bill Gates threatened to kill 800 Danish jobs if Denmark opposed software patent directive:

Danish financial newspaper Børsen reports that Microsoft founder Bill Gates threatened the Danish government in connection with software patents. According to the article, Gates told Rasmussen and two Danish ministers in November that he would kill all 800 jobs in Navision, a Danish company acquired by Microsoft in 2002, unless the EU were to quickly decide to legalize software patents through a directive. Denmark is a country with only 5 million inhabitants and a relatively small high-tech sector to which the loss of 800 jobs would have significant implications.

Lovely — a blunt blackmail attempt. The article goes on:

It would not be the first threat of its kind. A group of large corporations including Philips is reported to have previously threatened European governments to outsource all of their European software development jobs to low-wage countries unless the EU were to allow patents on software through the directive that is currently being worked on.

In January, leading Polish daily Gazeta Wyborcza reported on a letter addressed by the Polish subsidiaries of Siemens, Nokia, Philips, Ericsson and Alcatel to Poland’s prime minister Marek Belka … it is said to have indicated that the respective companies would reconsider making investments in Poland if the Polish government upheld its resistance to the legalization of software patents in the EU.

Again, note the FUD-busting on this point. I notice that Florian Mueller of NoSoftwarePatents.comhas a a good one-liner response along the same lines — ‘The country in which you develop a technology has nothing to do with where you can take out patents.’ He goes on:

If they move jobs to Asia, they won’t get a single additional patent, neither in Asia nor in Europe. If you warn politicians of consequences that are directly related to a legislative issue, that’s acceptable. If you threaten with causing damage that has no factual connection whatsoever, then it’s blackmail. Plain and simple.

Tags: article, brsen, country, directive, government, microsoft, newspaper, patent, patents, philips, software

Spam: The EFF are a great organisation — damn, I even helped set up an organisation based on its goals in Ireland, back in the day! But this white paper is shockingly clueless.

(Note: this posting has been updated. Original left intact, but there’s an update below worth noting.)

For example:

Spam Assassin, a popular program that does ad hoc pattern matching, assigns ‘points’ to various features of an email to determine whether it is spam. … One of the major problems with this system is that messages from certain countries — like China, for example — can be blocked purely on the basis of where they come from and what language they’re in. The implications for free speech here are very troubling indeed: … thus anti-spam technology unintentionally works as a political censorship mechanism.

SpamAssassin does not give points for country of origin, or language the message arrives in, unless the user explicitly either (a) adds rules from an external source, or (b) modifies the ‘ok_languages’ setting in their configuration, from the default, to specify that they do not want to receive messages in particular languages. No country- or language-blocking happens by default. This is by design.

It’s a shame that the authors felt the need to outright fabricate a danger, here.

The white paper features more broad generalisations about ’spam filters’, mostly using unsubstantiated friend-of-a-friend stories, without detailed data. And I do know that there have been cases of MoveOn.org, at least, being a source of UBE, in the past — so it’s not valid to claim that this is all a ‘free speech’ issue; political UBE is still spam.

They need to realise there’s a lot of very smart, very reasonable anti-spammers out there, and most of us agree with the rest of their goals, except for their spam position. This is hurting them.

Still, it appears they’re finally getting a clue about requiring subscription requests be confirmed using closed-loop opt-in, so that’s good. More political newsletters, and political campaigns, need to get this clue — just because it’s political speech does not mean it’s not spam. (I have several thousand political spams in my spam folder — most from that German anti-immigration virus from earlier this year.)

Note that Rod is unsure if they’re practicing what they preach…

Update: Annalee Newitz has been in touch, and pointed out that the white paper in fact says ‘mails … can be blocked’, rather than ‘are blocked’ based on country of origin. In other words, it’s purely a matter of this being possible, rather than the default, and that administrators apply these customisations.

In addition, she notes that the conclusions recommend that ISPs and administrators of spam blocking systems allow end users to control their own filtering settings, saying ‘If a user wants to block all mail from China, great. If a sysadmin does it for a bunch of users without permission, then that is a problem in our opinion.’

So I agree with that. Misdirected outrage hereby turned off ;)

(Mind you, I still think they need to work more with the reasonable anti-spammers… and fix that unconfirmed sign-up that Rod mentioned, if it’s really still unconfirmed!)

Tags: country, default, eff, example, language, organisation, paper, source, spam, speech

Patents: The pro-swpat lobby like to claim that software patenting will benefit EU-based SMEs and the economy, instead of benefitting large, US-based companies.

It’s pretty trivial to show this up, however. Here’s the figures, based on FFII’s stats on EPO software patent applications by country of applicant (current as of 2003/11/15):

So, a whopping 46.84% of the patent applications on file with the European Patent Office were registered by US companies, not local inventors; and only 24.38% of the patent applications were from EU-based companies.

Tags: applicant, country, economy, epo, eu-based, lobby, patent, patents, smes, software, us-based

Politics: Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand — where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy — up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.

Under the headline ‘Whose country is it anyway?’ Peters’s leaflet rails against Asian immigrants, falsely claiming that hundreds of thousands are coming to New Zealand and blaming them for, among other things, traffic problems in Auckland. These immigrants are, according to Peters, simultaneously poor enough to be leeches on the welfare system, and rich enough to drive up the cost of housing.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as a piece of desperate populism. But, unlike the Australian One Nation party, New Zealand First is not a collapsing political joke: it is the third-biggest party in Wellington’s parliament, and until 1999 Mr Peters was the country’s deputy prime minister. Barring an electoral miracle, the opposition National party will have to take them on as coalition partners if it is ever to win another election.

‘Traffic problems in Auckland’? WTF? (found via Danny Yee)

Computing: Amazing. via GirlHacker, it turns out that a teapot has long been used as a demonstration of complex computer graphics techiques — with it’s curved surfaces, hidden surfaces and the like (don’t ask me, I’m no graphics guru). If you were around for the early 3-D graphics days, you’ve almost definitely seen the teapot.

Well, it turns out there was a real teapot. Here’s the history.

A related image is that of ‘Lenna’, a standard test image used when testing image compression schemes, which features a woman giving the viewer a rather saucy come-hither look. It turns out she was a Swedish model, who posed for Playboy in 1972, and that picture was scanned by an (unauthorized) researcher at USC. Piracy!

Playboy later threatened to prosecute over the unauthorized use, but by now has recognised the unique history this now has, and has relented. Cool.

Tags: beauty, country, image, lest, making, party, playboy, politics, population, teapot, traffic

Lest we get carried away with the beauty, grooviness and coolness-in-general of New Zealand — where 1 in 160 of the population was involved in the making of the LoTR trilogy — up pops this story. It seems racism and xenophobia is finally arriving on the shores of Aotearoa.

Under the headline ‘Whose country is it anyway?’ Peters’s leaflet rails against Asian immigrants, falsely claiming that hundreds of thousands are coming to New Zealand and blaming them for, among other things, traffic problems in Auckland. These immigrants are, according to Peters, simultaneously poor enough to be leeches on the welfare system, and rich enough to drive up the cost of housing.

It would be easy to dismiss all this as a piece of desperate populism. But, unlike the Australian One Nation party, New Zealand First is not a collapsing political joke: it is the third-biggest party in Wellington’s parliament, and until 1999 Mr Peters was the country’s deputy prime minister. Barring an electoral miracle, the opposition National party will have to take them on as coalition partners if it is ever to win another election.

‘Traffic problems in Auckland’? WTF? (found via Danny Yee)

Computing: Amazing. via GirlHacker, it turns out that a teapot has long been used as a demonstration of complex computer graphics techiques — with it’s curved surfaces, hidden surfaces and the like (don’t ask me, I’m no graphics guru). If you were around for the early 3-D graphics days, you’ve almost definitely seen the teapot.

Well, it turns out there was a real teapot. Here’s the history.

A related image is that of ‘Lenna’, a standard test image used when testing image compression schemes, which features a woman giving the viewer a rather saucy come-hither look. It turns out she was a Swedish model, who posed for Playboy in 1972, and that picture was scanned by an (unauthorized) researcher at USC. Piracy!

Playboy later threatened to prosecute over the unauthorized use, but by now has recognised the unique history this now has, and has relented. Cool.

Tags: beauty, country, image, lest, making, party, playboy, population, teapot, traffic

Patents: The Washington Post gets it. ‘The country “needs to revamp not just the patent system, but the entire system of intellectual property law,” said Andrew S. Grove, chairman of Intel Corp. “It needs to redefine it for an era that is the information age as compared to the industrial age.”‘

BTW, one thing people say is that software patents are fine, as long as the technique is novel and new. What that misses is that novel, new techniques quickly become commonplace and standard infrastructure; consider image/audio/video compression, general compression techniques, cryptography, and so on. Those were all high-tech, super-complex schemes 5 years ago. Nowadays, we have JPEG, gzip, openssl, ssh, and all these other standard tools that are just part and parcel of our basic infrastructure. In software, ‘new and novel’ becomes ’standard infrastructure’ remarkably quickly, and that’s what’s driving software innovation.

Tags: age, compression, country, infrastructure, novel, patent, patents, post, software, system, washington

Net: So it seems Kerry Packer has announced a Netflix-like service in Australia, Homescreen.

In essence, you pay a flat fee per month, log on to a website, select a whole batch of DVDs, and they post the first 3 out to you. You can keep them as long as you like, then post them back in pre-paid envelopes; once they arrive at the nearest depot, they post out the next 3 on your list.

This works very well — in the form of Netflix at least. I can vouch for the coolness of this; pretty much everyone I know who has a DVD player has joined Netflix. It’s just great having 3 DVDs on-hand for whenever you feel like watching one.

Of course, it requires that the serivce have a decent selection of goods, including some good ‘classics’. From the sounds of things, Homescreen may be failing on this point.

Also, it requires a reliable postal service. But if they can do it in the US, they can certainly do it in Australia or any European country ;)

And I’d bet Ireland has a whole huge DVD-player installed base, given the oft-quoted factoid that there are more PlayStations per capita in Ireland than any other country outside of Japan.

Irish entrepreneurs — get cracking! ;)

Tags: country, dvds, essence, homescreen, kerry, net, netflix, netflix-like, packer, post, service

Environment: The Irish Times reports:

The State is facing a waste crisis that is threatening to bury the country, according to the Minister for the Environment, Mr Cullen. He said yesterday every person in this State was now producing 700 kg of household and commercial waste a year.

‘That is three times more than they do in the Netherlands. If this continues, the figure will rise to two tonnes per person by 2015,’ he said.

Landfills in six out of 10 regions in the country had less than three years capacity left, yet people were producing enough waste to cover every single town in Ireland. ‘We have to change. Doing nothing is not an option,’ Mr Cullen said.

Well, duh. So what have they done? They’ve setup a website, raceagainstwaste.com, with a page on recycling replete with techie details of how recycling works, then suggesting such gems as ‘if they do not already run one, suggest to your local authority that it considers starting a plastics recycling scheme.’

Brilliant. I’m sure they’ll listen. Nice delegation, Mr Cullen!

In the meantime, apparently 92.2% of the ‘waste stream’ is sent to landfills instead of recycling.

I’m not just knocking here — the amazing thing about recycling is that it’s been done right elsewhere. All this wheel-reinvention is totally superfluous. Here’s the details on Victoria, Australia’s kerbside recycling system; it’s pretty simple.

Each household gets 1 large basin-type plastic tray thing, in which you can put washed, unsealed, recyclable plastic containers. You tie up bundles of recyclable paper into another pile when you leave out the rubbish. And finally, you get a wheelie bin for the rest; stuff that really is rubbish. The bin guys then keep the 3 types of rubbish separate when they pick it up.

Yes, it takes a little bit of time to wash the plastic containers and tie up the paper into bundles. But nobody minds; they’re doing the right thing! It’s a hell of a lot better than chucking the lot into a single container and hoping that some expensive machine at the far end can sort it all out again.

It’s also better than the current Irish and US systems, where we’re expected to bring certain kinds of trash to a centralized drop-off point ourselves. First off, this is very impractical unless you’ve got a car to do it in — and sufficient motivation to do so; and secondly, the bulkiest rubbish — packaging, paper and plastic — is not included, just glass.

Tags: bin, country, environment, household, paper, person, plastic, recycling, state, thing, waste

Back from a great week-and-a-half in Ireland. Lots of fun (and Guinness) was had, Luke and Lean were successfully married, Ireland is officially the most beautiful country in the world, weather was amazing, got to meet up with virtually everyone, and I’m now back at the computer catching up.

Of course, some git has joe-jobbed both myself and a mailing list I’m on, so there’s thousands of bounce messages as a result and the server is slow as a wet week. Argh. But at least the SoBig onslaught has died down a bit.

Interestingly, I reported some spam to SpamCop a week or two before the joe-job. I wonder if the two really are connected — ie. report spam, and the spammers will decode the listwashing tokens from their mails, figure out your email address, and add you to their ‘enemies list’?

This is the first time I’ve reported spam to SpamCop in a long time, and the first joe-job I’ve been victim of. It seems like more than a coincidence, IMO.

Tags: country, everyone, fun, guinness, spam, spamcop, time, weather, week, world

Heads up for all the businesses out there sending mail to European customers — the EU E-Privacy Directive is now coming into force. Italy is the latest country to implement it; so businesses mailing Italian customers or prospects may wish to make sure that they abide by these rules:

• Companies may send direct marketing email only to customers and subscribers who have given their prior consent to receiving such, either by subscribing explicitly or by providing their details during a prior transaction, such as a purchase.

• Forged headers and other means of disguising or concealing the sender’s identity is illegal.

• All messages must bear opt-out details as well.

• Apparently, in the Italian rendition, senders may also ‘collect’ addresses but must immediately give the user a clear opportunity to opt-out at that point — but as far as I know this isn’t in the core EU directive.

Similar laws will be coming in all over Europe, so USian senders should really pay attention: opt-in — it’s not just a good idea, it’s the law (in Europe at least ;).

Malware: It sounds like SoBig.F is about to call home for new code (scroll down to ‘Downloading Functionality’). This is not good. :( Block port 8998/udp.

SoBig.F, the assorted bounce messages from forged SoBig.F mails, the assorted replies from autoresponders and list admin software from forged SoBig.F mails, and (of all things) user complaints about the forged mails (argh! surely they know they’re forgeries by now!) are really driving me up the wall. As I check my mail, there’s at least 400 of these messages this morning alone.

IP: Lessig lays into USPTO director: ‘If Lois Boland said this, then she should be asked to resign.’ … ‘That someone who doesn’t understand them is at a high level of this government just shows how extreme IP policy in America has become.’

Tags: country, directive, email, force, heads, mail, marketing, rivacy, sobig, user

Guardian: Now which way back to the car?: ‘From Exmoor to the Yorkshire Dales and the Scottish borders, naked ramblers are being spotted up and down the country. What’s going on?’

Tags: car, country, dales, exmoor, guardian, scottish, way, yorkshire

Caelen and Barbara’s travelogue from Luang Prabang just fills me with reminiscence for Laos — I’d go back in a shot, it’s an amazing country (well, for tourists at least, not sure about the folks living there).

Also interesting to see that Caelen went for some minor surgery while in Bangkok. Great idea — 150 bucks is a hell of a lot cheaper than you’d get it pretty much anywhere else, and the Bangkok hospitals that cater for tourists are, by all accounts, super-swanky. Great idea!

Tags: caelen, country, hell, idea, luang, prabang, reminiscence, shot, surgery, travelogue

A classic Ali G moment, via Maureen Dowd in the New York Times (username: sitescooper/sitescooper):

• YOUNG MAN: How does you make countries do stuff you want?
• MR. BAKER: Well, the way you deal with countries on foreign policy issues . . . is you deal with carrots and sticks.
• YOUNG MAN: But what country is gonna want carrots, even if it’s like a million tons of carrots that you’re giving over there—-
• MR. BAKER: Well, carrots — I’m not using the term literally. You might send foreign aid — money, money.
• YOUNG MAN: Well, money’s better than carrots. Even if a country love carrots and that is, like, their favorite national food, if they get given them—-
• MR. BAKER: Well, don’t get hung up on carrots. That’s just a figure of speech.
• YOUNG MAN: So would you ever send carrots? You know, is there any situation—-
• MR. BAKER: No, no.
• YOUNG MAN: What about if there was a famine?
• MR. BAKER: Carrots, themselves? No.

Beautiful.

Initially, there were a lot of media reports in the UK and Ireland, about how negatively it was taken in the US; this interview with the director reckons that was rubbish put about by UK media:

‘I’ve got a theory about this: In Britain, we’re no longer world leaders in anything. … Yet the one thing we still maintain, and cling on to jealously, is that we’ve got the best sense of humour in the world. So we don’t like the idea that people in other countries get our sense of humour. We prefer to cling to the idea that our comedy is too sophisticated for the Americans And yet the truth is rather different. If you look at sitcoms, with a couple of exceptions, all the best ones come from America, like Friends, Frasier, Seinfeld and so on.’

‘I actually think Americans get the undertones of satire almost better than the British. It can’t be coincidence that the best comedies on our TV are all imported from America.’

But then even the bad reviews never said that Ali G was too sophisticated, complaining instead that the satire wasn’t subtle enough. Maybe the Americans are the more comedy-literate, after all.

Tags: ali, baker, country, humour, idea, money, satire, sense, sitescooper, world

You just can’t get away from ‘em. Irish bars, I mean.

‘The first public house in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban has opened - and it’s Irish. The Irish Club opened on a secluded side street in the centre of Kabul last month - on St Patrick’s Day.’ …

‘There are Afghan staff, of course, but they have all been given Irish names - Kevin, Jimmy, Michael, George - ‘to protect them from possible retaliation’ …

Fazel Ahmed Manawi, the deputy supreme court justice, said any Muslims found drinking at the Irish Club will be punished. ‘We have got a lot of foreigners living in our country and unfortunately, this is a necessary thing for them,’ he said.’ (Full story)

Date: Fri, 18 Apr 2003 09:36:01 +0100
From: Joe McNally (spam-protected)
To: Yahoogroups Forteana (spam-protected)
Subject: Afghanistan - no end to the horror in sight

http://www.irishnews.com/access/daily/current.asp?SID=431306

Out with the Taliban, in with the craic

THE first public house in Afghanistan since the fall of the Taliban has opened - and it’s Irish.

In Taliban times, a fully stocked Irish pub serving whiskey and cold beer in the heart of the ultra-Islamic country’s capital would have been unimaginable.

It still is for many Afghans, but the Kabul night-spot has been a life-saver for many expatriates working in the city.

The Irish Club opened on a secluded side street in the centre of Kabul last month - on St Patrick’s Day.

There is no sign, and not even a number on the door, but in a country where terrorists are still a real threat, that is exactly the way the Irish owner Sean Martin McQuade wants it.

“We wanted to keep a low profile, so we didn’t advertise whatsoever,” he said.

“But people know where to find us. News travels fast by word of mouth.”

In a mock Tudor-style house behind the blank outer wall, immaculate Afghan waiters in black trousers, white shirts and black bow ties serve up beer for £1.25 and cocktails for £1.90.

Customers - mostly aid workers, diplomats and journalists - crowd around a wooden bar topped off with green marble imported from Ireland.

Afghan carpets are strewn about the floor. Posters for Guinness are tacked all over the walls. Small lanterns - handy during the sporadic power cuts - are placed on every table.

“We are the first people to stick our necks out and say this can be a cosmopolitan city,” Mr McQuade, who has worked as an engineer in Afghanistan for the last 11 years, said.

He insisted that he had gone out of his way not to offend anyone and had sought the approval of a neighbourhood mullah to open the bar. In return, he promised to help rebuild the pot-holed road in front of the club and to help relocate an adjacent school to a bigger, better site.

The bar is officially licensed by the state to sell alcohol - but only to foreigners. An Afghan bouncer keeps locals out, checking IDs and making sure patrons sign in.

There are Afghan staff, of course, but they have all been given Irish names - Kevin, Jimmy, Michael, George - “to protect them from possible retaliation”.

The Taliban may no longer be in power, but Muslim conservatives continue to hold sway in Afghanistan.

Fazel Ahmed Manawi, the deputy supreme court justice, said any Muslims found drinking at the Irish Club will be punished.

“We have got a lot of foreigners living in our country and unfortunately, this is a necessary thing for them,” he said.

« Back – Joe McNally :: Flaneur at Large :: http://www.flaneur.org.uk

Tags: centre, club, country, day, fall, house, irish, side, street, taliban

The mother of all package tours: With the world expecting an attack on Iraq any time now, no one in their right mind would take a holiday there - would they? You’d be suprised, says Johann Hari (Guardian).

A fascinating article, from so many angles — First, the tourists:

I met Julie and Phil. They seemed an almost comically suburban couple: polite, a little posh, all golf jumpers and floral smocks. But then Phil mentioned that his last holiday had been to North Korea. “Yeah, I’ve been twice since they opened the borders to tourists. I’m a bit of a celebrity there now. People come up to me in the streets and say, ‘Why have you come to our country twice?’.” …

Then there was Hannah. How to explain her? A frightfully well-spoken Englishwoman in her early 50s. When we first met, she dispensed with the small talk to say: “I think Saddam is a great man and the USA is a great big global bully. My theory is that he should be given Kuwait. It’s perfectly logical if you look at the map.” “I think he’s rather handsome too,” she went on. “Every woman does really. I’d rather like to inspect his weapon of mass destruction myself.”

And the politics:

Talking politics in Iraq is like a magic-eye picture, where you have to let your brain go out of focus, not your eyes. One very distinguished old man in a Mosul souk welcomed me warmly and told me how much he had loved visiting London in the 1970s. After much oblique prodding, he said warmly, “I admire British democracy and freedom.” He held my gaze. “I very much admire them.”

… As we wandered around, looking at the grim exhibits, one of the soldiers on duty guarding the museum told me that three of his brothers died in that war. Everybody in the country lost somebody - yet it is almost impossible to get anybody to talk about it. They speak in a small number of bloodless stock-phrases.

After more than 10 such encounters, it suddenly hit me that the people of Iraq are not even allowed to grieve their huge numbers of dead in their own way. They are permitted only a regulation measure of state-approved grief, which must be expressed in Saddam’s language: that of martyrdom and heroism, rather than wailing agony about the futility of a war which slaughtered more than a million people yet left the borders unchanged and achieved nothing.

Thanks to Ben Walsh for the forwardy goodness.

Tags: admire, attack, country, holiday, man, mind, mother, package, time, world

things are getting scary. Two stories of note:

Guardian: US plans military rule and occupation of Iraq.

The US has plans to establish an American-led military administration in Iraq, similar to the postwar occupation of Germany and Japan, which could last for several years after the fall of Saddam Hussein, it emerged yesterday.

The occupation of the country would need an estimated 75,000 troops, at an annual cost of up to $16bn, and would almost certainly include British and other allied soldiers. It would be run by a senior American officer, perhaps General Tommy Franks, who would lead the assault on Iraq, and whose role would be modelled on that of General Douglas MacArthur in postwar Japan. ….

The Iraqi project, outlined by Mr Bush’s senior adviser on the Middle East, Zalmay Khalilzad, would involve running the entire country until a democratic Iraqi government was deemed ready.

New Yorker:

The vision laid out in the Bush document is a vision of what used to be called, when we believed it to be the Soviet ambition, world domination. It’s a vision of a world in which it is American policy to prevent the emergence of any rival power, whatever it stands for — a world policed and controlled by American military might.

This goes much further than the notion of America as the policeman of the world. It’s the notion of America as both the policeman and the legislator of the world, and it’s where the Bush vision goes seriously, even chillingly, wrong. A police force had better be embedded in and guided by a structure of law and consent. There’s a name for the kind of regime in which the cops rule, answering only to themselves. It’s called a police state.

Worth quoting this snippet too:

For example, as a way of enhancing “national security,” it promises to press “other countries” to adopt “lower marginal tax rates” and “pro-growth legal and regulatory policies” — your doctor’s names for tax cuts for the rich and environmental laxity. And it exalts economic relationships as more fundamental than political and social ones (a mental habit that orthodox conservative ideologues share with their orthodox Marxist counterparts), as in this passage praising free trade as a “moral principle”: “If you can make something that others value, you should be able to sell it to them. If others make something that you value, you should be able to buy it. This is real freedom, the freedom for a person — or a nation — to make a living.” (As distinct, presumably, from the secondary, not quite real freedoms of thought, conscience, and expression.)

Tags: country, note, notion, occupation, police, policeman, rule, tax, vision, world