A lot of people — mostly non-Mormons — seem to think that the recent General Conference prayer given by a woman proves it’s only a matter of time before the Church starts ordaining women to the Priesthood. The most frequent comparison is to when the Church began giving the Priesthood to men who were not white; the claim is that just as that was inevitable, so is it inevitable that women will receive the Priesthood.

People that claim this are ignoring a rather fundamental doctrine of the Church. I’m going to quote from The Family: A Proclamation to the World:

ALL HUMAN BEINGS—male and female—are created in the image of God. Each is a beloved spirit son or daughter of heavenly parents, and, as such, each has a divine nature and destiny. Gender is an essential characteristic of individual premortal, mortal, and eternal identity and purpose.

(Emphasis mine.)

Thus far in all available scriptural records of which I am aware, God has not given the priesthood to a single woman.

Since we know gender is an essential characteristic of an individual’s eternal identity and purpose, while a person’s skin color is not, we must conclude that if God has only ever given the Priesthood to men, then the Priesthood has something to do with the male gender’s eternal identity and purpose.  I do not believe God does anything arbitrarily or without purpose.

If you think my reasoning is wrong, please explain why, and please provide scriptural support for your position

I recently read an opinion article on CNN.com by Jeremy Shane, and I had a few thoughts to share.  Shane basically says that it would be great if guns were smart enough to refuse to fire when they shouldn’t be fired (like at a group of children).

One of the things I’ve been training my brain to do, as part of my job as a software developer, is to figure out all the ways the code I write is broken or could be misused.  Is it possible for certain input to crash the system or cause other problems?  Can a malicious user use this to get information or access they should not have?

One of the other things I’ve been training my brain to do is to figure out if the code I’m writing is going to prevent users from doing something they should be able to do.  If I add this constraint, will I prevent users from using the service the way they’re used to using it?  Will I break something that used to work?  (This concept is called “backward compatibility”.)

This is what Jeremy Shane gets wrong.  He forgot to ask himself two questions: “What could possibly go wrong?” and, “Is this backward-compatible?”

For example, he wrote:

The root of the problem is that guns are “dumb.” Pull the trigger and they discharge bullets mindlessly, regardless of who is doing the aiming or where they are aimed. Guns should “know” not to fire in schools, churches, hospitals or malls. They should sense when they are being aimed at a child, or at a person when no other guns are nearby.

At face value, I agree that guns being “dumb” could be viewed as a problem.  There are plenty of situations in which it would be good to have a “smarter” gun.

But the purpose of a gun is to shoot things.  The last thing you want is a gun that can arbitrarily decide not to fire when you need it most.

The problem is that what Shane proposes is not backward-compatible.   If I carry a “smart” gun for self-defense, and I am in a mall when a guy comes in to shoot up the place carrying a “dumb” gun, my “smart” gun will refuse to fire, resulting in everyone present being killed to death with bullets.

Put another way, Shane’s idea only works if everyone turns in all their guns (including the criminals!) in exchange for “smart” guns.  I’ll let you guess what would happen if you tried to force people to do that.

Now, Shane tries to partially address the “what could possibly go wrong” question:

Building software into guns need not affect gun owners’ desire to protect their homes. Trigger control software could be relaxed when the gun is at home or in a car, while other safety features stay on to prevent accidental discharges. Guns used by the police would be exempt from such controls.

The problem is that this isn’t really a solution.  What happens if my “smart” gun can’t figure out whether it’s in my house or out on the street in front of my house?

What happens if I pull my gun on a mugger, but it has run out of batteries and so refuses to fire?

What happens when criminals simply start stealing the guns meant for law enforcement, just like they used to steal higher-capacity magazines meant for law enforcement when those were banned?

What happens when (not “if”) someone writes a hack that either disables the safety control software, or disables other people’s guns entirely?

If you read Shane’s article, you’re about to point out that he proposes a solution:

Couldn’t gun software be hacked? Perhaps, but the risk can be reduced by open-sourcing code, requiring software patch downloads, and notifying gun makers or law enforcement if software is disabled.

People don’t even keep their desktop computers up to date.  What makes Shane think that gun owners will keep their guns’ built-in computers up to date?

Shane does propose phasing in “smart” guns slowly… starting with what he calls “the most lethal assault rifles”.  The trouble is, that wouldn’t be the right place to start.

You see, yes, carbines (which I’m sure Shane would describe as “assault rifles”) are one of the most commonly sold guns in the country, but the vast majority of gun homicides are committed with handguns — and when I say “vast majority” I mean somewhere around 90%.

What I’m getting at is that I can’t take someone seriously when they claim they’re trying to stop gun homicide but they want to start with rifles.  If guns are the problem — and I don’t think they are — then the problem is handguns, not rifles.

I do like that Shane is trying to think of solutions to gun violence that do not involve unenforceable and counterproductive legislation.  But as with all solutions, we need to make sure we don’t rush into something without figuring out whether it will work.

Sorry, Shane, but your idea would only work in a world where there are no criminals in the first place.

Brooke wasn’t paying attention to what I was doing, so I managed to record her singing:

Azure was climbing around on top of me off-frame, so you get to listen to that too.

I’ve been thinking a lot about rating systems lately.

People like to categorize things in neat little boxes.  It helps us keep track of things, especially when there are a lot of them, or when they’re complicated.  When I was around 10 years old, I had a big plastic box full of Legos.  When I needed a particular piece, I would just rummage until I found it.

Eventually I accumulated enough Legos that keeping all of them in one homogenous container made it too difficult to find what I needed, so my mom got me one of those stacks of plastic drawers with wheels on the bottom so I could move it around.  I sorted Legos into various bins.  One drawer had the Lego people and their gear, one had various special bricks like antennae, one had transparent blocks like cockpit windows, and so on.

(more…)

Software patents are something of a sore spot for me, both as a software developer and as a generally intelligent human being.  I read an opinion article on Ars Technica several days ago on the subject, and they pointed out why the software patent system is fundamentally broken:

Nathan Myhrvold, the Microsoft veteran who founded the patent-trolling giant Intellectual Ventures, loves to complain about the “culture of intentionally infringing patents” in the software industry. “You have a set of people who are used to getting something for free,” he told Business Week in 2006.

[... In] demanding that this infringement stop, Myhrvold isn’t just declaring war on what he regards as Silicon Valley’s patent-hostile culture. He’s declaring war on the laws of mathematics. The legal research required for all software-producing firms to stop infringing patents would cost more than the entire revenue of the software industry. Firms infringe software patents because they don’t have any other choice.

(Emphasis added.)

I work for a company that builds services that can help organizations of every scale – from one-man startups to multi-billion-dollar corporations to scientific research labs — stop worrying about the complexities of managing their own infrastructure.  Basically, startups can get as much infrastructure as they need with no huge up-front investment, and large companies can get as much as they need without having to invest huge amounts of money in data centers and hardware maintenance.

Well that sounds great, you’re thinking, but how is this relevant to software patents?

Startups aren’t exactly swimming in money, so the software patent system gives startups two options:

1. Spend more than their entire budget just figuring out whether they need to pay someone else even more money.
2. Ignore the vast body of existing software patents and just deal with potential lawsuits if and when they come up.

Large companies generally don’t have this problem; they build portfolios of software patents, and cross-license their entire portfolios to their competitors, who return the favor, often with little or no money actually changing hands.  However, they aren’t completely immune; any random person with a software patent can sue large companies for infringement, sometimes winning huge settlements.

The reason this is relevant to my job is that I am building systems designed to help startups build what they want to build — but if software patents make startups seem too risky (who wants to do a ridiculous amount of patent research before you can try to start a business?), then a lot fewer people will be willing to take advantage of the stuff I do every day.

The software patent system is broken for other reasons, too, but money is something everyone can understand, and when not even the wealthy have enough money to follow the rules, something is fundamentally wrong with the system.