According to Doc Searls a few days ago, this is Winer’s Law:
“It’s even worse than it appears.”
To which Doc appends the Corollary:
“It’s more complicated than it appears.”
This appeals to me intensely; my students will attest, as with one voice, that I say this all the time. Now I have back-up from the Senior Editor of Linux Journal, which is worth a lot more than their hoary old professor’s word. (I don’t have a stand when it comes to the historical specifics to which Doc is pointing, save to observe what a sorry mess we humans get into when we start deciding whom it’s necessary to kill.)
Last week, I submitted for verification the proposal that “The capacity of protectors to protect will always lag behind the capacity of disruptors to disrupt,” an entropic law of hacking/cracking. Since no one has pointed out that someone else said this first, I hereby lay claim to it as “AKMA’s way of saying something that a bunch of smart people knew all along, but none bothered to say it that way,” which will be my memetic ticket to information immortality. Whee!
Posted by AKMA at December 29, 2002 11:56 PM | TrackBackMine would be "Where is it again?"
Posted by: gary turner at December 30, 2002 02:15 PMI suppose I could look it up, but I _think_ the definitive statement on complexity goes to noted sf author (now deceased) Poul Anderson, who offered: "I have never seen a problem, no matter how complex, that when looked at the right way, did not become a thousand times more complicated."
Another favorite "law" discovered by an sf writer, also now deceased, is Sturgeon's Law: "90% of everything is crap."
Posted by: dave rogers at December 30, 2002 07:17 PMAh... One of my favorite "laws" is "No easy way"--posted on a plaque on a noted pastor's desk.
Posted by: Dave Rogers (C&E) at December 30, 2002 08:15 PM