.

A L S O__T O D A Y 21st Log Crackdown on classic arcade game lovers [ BRILLIANT CAREERS ] Of mice, men and machines By Andrew Leonard Doug Engelbart invented the mouse -- and much more. He still dreams of upgrading the human operating system [ NEWS ] A kinder, gentler lynch mob By Gary Kamiya The GOP confirms the most brain-dead radical stereotypes from the '60s (12/15/98) - - - - - - - - - - T A B L E__T A L K Should companies monitor their employees' Net usage? Debate why or why not in the Digital Culture area of Table Talk ___________________ Check out books on Microsoft at BarnesandNoble.com ___________________ R E C E N T L Y Internet censure-ship By Janelle Brown Can the Censure and Move On Web site make a difference? (12/14/98) Information theory and practice By Matthew DeBord Once, "information" didn't exist -- now it's everywhere. How'd that happen? (12/14/98) You've got sendmail By Andrew Leonard Eric Allman's free program makes sure your e-mail gets through. Now it's going commercial (12/11/98) The 21st Challenge No. 16 Results By Charlie Varon and Jim Rosenau Mystery misdirected e-mail (12/11/98) What does technology want? By R.U. Sirius Kevin Kelly talks about his "New Rules for the New Economy" (12/10/98) - - - - - - - - - - BROWSE THE 21ST LET'S GET THIS STRAIGHT ARCHIVES - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - S A L O N E M P O R I U M FREE! 12-ounce bag of Salon Blend with a purchase of $30 or more. While supplies last.

BILL GATES AND BILL CLINTON | PAGE 1, 2 - - - - - - - - - - In Lawyer World, language aspires to absolute precision: Words like "browser" and "perjury," phrases like "operating system" and "sexual relationship," must mean one, and only one, thing. Yet because words have grave consequences in Lawyer World -- say the wrong thing and you can end up in jail, your company can be broken up, your election can be overturned -- people are perpetually fighting over what they mean. Lawyer World demands that meanings be fixed and constant, yet it ensures that they will be perpetually contested. As a result, the place is tedious beyond imagining and frustratingly obtuse. But at best, its tedium and obtuseness serve a valuable end: Its processes require such formalities because they serve as a check against the arbitrariness of power and the abuse of law for corrupt or nakedly partisan ends. At the other end of the cosmos from Lawyer World there's a place we might call Common Sense World, where words mean, well, pretty much what everyone knows they mean. In Common Sense World, Gates has a monopoly because, gosh darn it, look around the courtroom -- do you see anyone who's not using a Windows computer? In Common Sense World, of course Clinton had a sexual relationship with Monica Lewinsky -- they don't call it oral sex for nothing. Americans and our politicians love to sneer at the sophistries of Lawyer World and embrace the down-to-earth populism of Common Sense World. Common Sense World is a great place to decide the outcome of elections, to choose whether to go to war or to resolve great national debates. Lawyer World is the appropriate place for deciding whether individuals are innocent or guilty, or businesses have broken the law. But we get into trouble when we apply the standards of one realm to the other. This is the great fallacy behind the drive to impeach Clinton: Its leaders keep unfairly hopscotching between Lawyer World and Common Sense World. They demand that Clinton drop his lawyers' guard, give in to common sense and admit that he lied; then they charge him with the highly technical crime of perjury, which by definition exists only in Lawyer World. In fact, of course, Clinton's disputed testimony took place entirely in Lawyer World -- operating in the Paula Jones case courtroom under a ludicrously detailed definition of "sexual relationship" that very plausibly gets him off the legal hook. Where Clinton plainly did lie was outside Lawyer World, on TV, wagging his finger and saying he "did not have sex with that woman." But the Republican Congress is gnashing its teeth because it cannot impeach a president for this common-sense offense. In fact, the only charges that the House Judiciary Committee dropped from its articles of impeachment on Saturday were those that related to Clinton's "false and misleading public statements for the purpose of deceiving the people of the United States." Impeachment is essentially a Lawyer World process -- and if lying to the public is by itself a "high crime or misdemeanor," then virtually everyone in Washington had better start preparing a defense. So Clinton's congressional foes have no choice but to go after the president using the Lawyer World concept of perjury, even though Lawyer World is where Clinton's defense is strongest. This is why the public isn't buying the impeachment process. The polls favoring censure aren't a sign of the electorate's boredom or disengagement or short attention span. They show that the public understands what Congress doesn't: Clinton's common-sense offense demands a common-sense penalty like censure, not the legal formalities of a full-blown trial in the Senate. The Justice Department's effort to prosecute Microsoft for antitrust violations faces a similar paradox. Microsoft's offenses lie in the realm of common sense, but the only remedies available derive from the Lawyer World rule book of antitrust law -- and antitrust law is a notoriously skimpy, ill-defined canon that often confounds both the lawyers and the common sense crowd. In Common Sense World, Gates has already condemned himself a million times over. He has appeared in one videotape excerpt after another at the Microsoft antitrust trial, professing a level of ignorance about his business that, if it were true, would have stockholders clamoring for his removal. Of course, Gates does know what goes on inside his company. But in his persnickety testimony he has taken avidly to the ways of Lawyer World. Maybe that's because he can afford the coaching of extremely high-priced lawyers. Or maybe it's because there's some subterranean kinship between the code of law and that of software. Each demand inhuman precision and are intolerant of procedural error. They are both realms in which language itself is functional and performative -- where words don't just mean things but actually do things. And both computers and legal cross-examination obey the principle of "garbage in, garbage out": Bad data and bad code lead to bad computing results, and imprecise questions allow witnesses to avoid providing real answers. Perhaps computers, with their strict parameters and binary logic, are the ideal inhabitants of Lawyer World: The words in programming languages always mean the same thing. In Lawyer World, just as Clinton has the right to evade his prosecutors through a poorly worded definition of "sexual relationship," Gates has the right to run rings around his questioners if their fuzzy use of the language of technology gives him an out. We non-lawyers may not like it, and we may think the worse of them for it. But if our society turns to the courts to resolve powerful conflicts, we shouldn't be surprised when the participants adopt the legal system's rules of engagement. I happen to believe that, on the one hand, Clinton's follies do not warrant impeachment, and on the other, Gates' competitive excesses do warrant antitrust action -- even though it's probably too slow and ineffectual a remedy for Microsoft's practices. But I don't hold either man's equivocations and hedgings under oath against them. If I were in their shoes, both hounded and defended by phalanxes of lawyers, I'd quibble over the meaning of "is" and dispute every comma as fiercely and annoyingly as they have. When in Lawyer World, you'd be stupid not to think and act like a lawyer yourself. And whatever else they may be, neither of the Bills is an idiot. SALON | Dec. 15, 1998 E-mail Scott Rosenberg.