Behemoth

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, behemoths are gigantic intelligent dinosaurs related to sauropods. Unlike most sauropod who walk on their fingertips, behemoths are knuckle-walkers and can also walk on two legs, allowing them to carry and operate tools with their hands. The behemoth on the right in our illustration is a chimera with extra skin armor, insect-like appendages and batteries of some kind of openings on it's shoulders.

In real life, sauropods were long-necked, long-tailed dinosaurs and included the biggest land animals that have ever lived, like Diplodocus and Brachiosaurus. In recent years we have learned a lot about the skin of sauropods. Except for the feathered dinosaurs, it appears that all dinosaurs were covered in small non-overlapping scales like the skin of a turtle or gila monster. Some sauropods had armored scales like a crocodile. Elongated dorsal scales in some sauropod skin impressions inspired the row of spikes running down the back of our fictional behemoth (only in the male of the species.)

More pictures and information about behemoths...

Aeolyte

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, aeolytes are enormous flying birds. The ability to fly makes aeolytes valuable as messengers. Male aeolytes have more flamboyant coloring than the females. Aeolyte speech sounds like low, hoarse bird noises.

Lighter than most intelligent species but large enough to limit maneuverability while flying, aeolytes can weild a relatively large weapon with either of their powerful talons while flying or hopping on one leg.

More pictures and information about aeolytes...

Cheap, Green Freedom

The Avtomat Kalashnikova model 1947 assault rifle, better known as the AK-47, is simple, inexpensive to manufacture and easy to maintain. It can be used in arctic conditions, dragged through mud, sand and dust and still fire without jamming. A fusion of best designs adapted to mass manufacturing and close combat, the Soviet Union exported massive numbers of these weapons - at cost or even free of charge - to arm revolutionary forces around the world struggling to liberate their nations. The image of the AK-47 is featured on the flag of Mozambique and the coat of arms of Zimbabwe and East Timor.

The XO-1 is a small laptop manufactured by Quanta and distributed to schools - mostly in developing countries - by the One Laptop Per Child (OLPC) association. The XO-1 is designed to be inexpensive, energy efficient and easy to maintain. A new display technology makes the XO-1 screen readable in direct sunlight and does away the toxic mercury backlight required by today's laptops. The XO-1 is ruggedly designed for use in hot, humid and dusty environments which would severely damage an ordinary laptop. OLPC with assistance from governments and schools distributes these machines "To provide children around the world with new opportunities to explore, experiment and express themselves."

Read the full article on Google Documents.

The Way We Live Now

According to the Electronic Frontier Foundation, eBay seller Troy Augusto is being sued by Universal Music Group (UMG) for reselling promotional CDs which the music company gave away to create advertising "buzz". The CDs are labeled "Promotional Use Only, Not for Resale", but according to the "first sale" doctrine in copyright law, once a copyright holder sells or gives away a CD, the recipient can resell it without further permission.

At first the lawsuit seems to be a basic copyright question that could be applied to offline stores or even books. But second-hand music stores have resold promotional CDs for years without being sued. Troy Augusto was targeted because he set up his shop online. When the recording industry goes after it's own customers we are sometimes shocked into focusing on the drama and miss the ethical issues, but in this case the target is a business following widely-accepted business practice. Reselling of music copies - promotional or otherwise - does not directly profit recording companies so this case reminds us that copyright policies should also protect stakeholders other than authors and publishers.

But this case introduces a much broader issue of technology ethics: to what degree can entities that generate culture also generate law? Are shrink-wrap and click-through "end-user license agreements" (EULAs) on software and services legally binding contracts? Does writing "not for resale" on a CD change a gift into a loan? The current trend is for judges and lawmakers to support industry practices, but if courts enforce any rules publishers invent, then the publishers are writing the law and the courts are simply instruments of enforcement. Recently deployed "Digital Rights Management" (DRM) technologies go a step further and actually enforce these "laws" in ways that a typical user will not know how to circumvent, even if they have a legal right to do so. The example of the "not for resale" sticker on a few free CDs may seem trivial, but the potential to embed "rights management" rules into physical goods, electronic transactions and documents, and project them everywhere in both the physical and digital worlds raises serious questions about how power should be shared in society.

There are alternatives to a culture dominated by control-obsessed organizations which write draconian laws in their own interests. Governments could agree to a more limited (and arguably more traditional) interpretation of copyright, trademark and patent law instead of the fuzzy and ever expanding extensions to these laws now called "intellectual property". The original US copyright law, intended to encourage publication in the public interest, limited copyright to 14 years plus one optional 14 year renewal. Patent law, intended to encourage the development of new industrial applications of technology, could be interpreted to require both a more substantial physical component and more originality than patents which are primarily about software algorithms, business practices, or genes found in nature. Trademarks protect the consumer from deceptive labeling, so they should and do operate differently from copyright or patents.

Instead of lobbying for changes in international law which may take a very long time, businesses might adopt commons-based production models such as open-source software, perhaps using the power to create their own laws to establish a "free trade area" where culture can be produced and traded without excessive barriers. In the virtual economy of Second Life, for example, users are allowed to sell content which cannot be copied or which cannot be resold, but not content which can be neither copied nor resold. Such cultural commons initiated by businesses and grassroots movements are growing, but governments may be more naturally inclined to respond to the interests of the "squeaky wheels": entrenched interests clamoring for more aggressive protection of their self-written laws. A two-pronged approach may be necessary: developing open markets with flexibility and rules that protect all stakeholders while steering traditional legal systems in a direction that protects this type of innovation.

Computer Ethics Changes Everything

James H. Moor, What is Computer Ethics? Metaphilosophy, October 1985, Vol. 16 No. 4, pp. 266-275

Moor defines computer ethics “as the analysis of the nature and social impact of computer technology and the corresponding formulation and justification of policies for the ethical use of such technology.” He argues that computer ethics should be a special field of study, involving general ethics and science as well as problems specific to the domain of computer technology.

Moor points out that computers are revolutionary in the sense that they have “logical malleability”: the data in a computer can be used to represent any symbol. This allows computers to become part of any activity, and when computers become an essential part of that activity, the ethical issues surrounding the activity itself have to be reexamined – not just the usefulness of computers in that activity. Moor also cites invisible abuse (unauthorized access and malicious software) invisible programming values (assumptions in the software that bias the system’s behavior) and invisible complex calculations (computer activity which cannot be completely observed and understood by humans) to support the need for the special study of computer ethics.

David S. Touretzky, Free Speech Rights for Programmers, Communications of the ACM, August 2001, Vol. 44 No. 8, pp. 23-25

Touretzky argues that software is free speech which should be protected, making the DMCA provisions He focuses on the DeCSS case in which the judge decided that code is speech but that compilable and executable code are more dangerous than protected speech. Touretzky is particularly concerned that the DMCA and this ruling are interfering with the publishing of computer science research.

Touretzky supports his argument with the testimony he gave in the courtroom: There is no clear distinction between discussing an algorithm and distributing software that implements the algorithm. Although Touretzky provided numerous examples blurring the distinction, the judge still ruled on the basis of a distinction between functional software and protected speech.

Response

Moor’s two lines of argument – that any activity changed by computer technology needs to be reexamined, and that invisibility creates new ethical issues – represent two different attitudes toward computer ethics that are now very common.

Invisibility concerns are more easy for the general public to understand because they involve clear bad guys: untrustworthy voting machines, biased search engines, viruses, spyware, phishing and so forth. These problems get lots of press, but the existence of botnets suggests the response has been inadequate. (Botnets are remote-controlled networks of hijacked computers owned by unsuspecting victims, often sold or rented for nefarious purposes on the black market. This represents a convergence of both invisible complexity and invisible abuse.) Techniques exist to control malicious software and to enforce accountability in computerized activities such as accounting, but they don’t get used.

Touretzky’s paper is an example of the more abstract justification for the study of computer ethics: computers force us to re-examine activities. This is difficult to communicate, but it is more likely to result in meaningful action than popular concern about invisible enemies inside the machine. The invisibility problem is a bit like Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, penned when industrial technology was still a frightening power only beginning to transform human lives. The real computer revolution, however is more like the later industrial revolution of Charles Dickens where the ethical issues are not the problems of technology changing human lives but problems of human lives which have already been changed by technology.

The Meat Bull

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game a Minotaur is a large, intelligent, carnivorous theropod dinosaur related to Tyrannosaurus. Minotaurs are covered in simple fur-like feathers, and have a pair of large curved horns sprouting from over each eye. Minotaurs have short but well-developed and relatively dextrous forearms with three-fingered hands. These hands can be used to hold weapons, but the leverage to swing the weapon comes from the Minotaur's powerful legs and body.

Minotaurs prefer long, pole-arm weapons, which they can hold in the middle allowing them to strike with both ends. The following picture shows a minotaur with an unusual short-handled sword and lamellar armor. This Minotaur is creeping along in a low crouch actually walking on it's heels, but minotaurs normally walk on their toes like other theropods.

Long horns is very unusual for a predator. The idea of a horned theropod comes from a real-life dinosaur called Carnotaurus, which has large horns over each eye (but much shorter horns than the Squawk Minotaur.) Older Minotaur drawings have straighter horns and a combination of a feathery mane with patterns of scales found in Carnotaurus skin impressions.

The Manticore Corps

In the Squawk Role-Playing Game, Manticores are intelligent ceratopsian dinosaurs. While most ceratopsians, like Psittacosaurus and Triceratops are stocky quadrupeds, Manticores are gracile bipeds with long limbs and very long tails. Manticores lack the long horns of some of the larger ceratopsians, and they have a proportionally longer neck shield than any other ceratopsian.
Manticore legs are adapted for running, with only three toes on each foot. The hands are four-fingered manipulators with opposable inner and outer digits. The long tail is a specialized weapon with the tip partially fused into a hard, sharp weapon.
The manticore idea is based on creature ideas from RPGs we made before Squawk. Manticores weren't always dinosaurs (and they weren't always called manticores - the original name was unpronounceable by humans.) The beak is a recent addition to make manticores more like their ceratopsian cousins. As the picture above shows, we have been toying with the idea of giving manticores elongated protective scales.