wonder if routing algorithms themselves aren't contributing to the problem.
BGP and the intra-domain routing protocols assume there is at most one correct route from a given source address to a given destination address. That assumption could give rise to unnecessary congestion. For example, suppose the source wants to use bandwith of 100 units and the destination is capable of keeping up. But between them there are two routers, in parallel, each of which can supply only 50 units. If there's exactly one path, source and dest can't talk any faster than 50 units because everything has to go through one of the two routers. (There are mechanisms to share bandwith in some situations, like the simple parallel routers one I described, but they dont' work for arbitrarily complex routing topologies across multiple BGP domains.)
It's possible, though, to imagine a network that routes in such a way that data could use both routers. For instance, in circuit switched networks the preestablished path tends to hang around even as the current "best" route changes, so in the earlier example two 50 unit connections between source and dest might end up being spread across both routers.
Rather than taking the congestion as a given, and figuring out work-arounds, I wonder if someone's done some research into why it exists and whether it's due to hot spots forming in the traffic flow.
Right, so let's put this in context. Here we're talking about whether or not Brazil's law allowing it to grab Google's logs is or is not consistent with freedom.
If you're going to say it's not because it violates an inalienable or natural right, I'd like to know how you arrive at that conclusion. Remember, in 1789 the "inalienable" right to liberty didn't apply to you if you happened to be a slave, and it kept not applying until 1865 or so, at which time we amended the Constitution (i.e. applied a democratic process) to make it explicit. The same situation happened with sufferage (see Amendments XV and XIX ). That suggests to me that whether or not a right is alienable or natural is up to the society that acts to enforce, or not enforce, the right. Maybe inalienable and natural rights exist somewhere as a Platonic ideal, but on the ground it's not going to do you a lot of good when the plantation master says "get to work."
Another problem with hanging your hat on inalienable or natural rights in this case is you may wind up having to justify an inalienable right to privacy. While one might exist, it doesn't seem to be in the list that, for instance, the founders of the American Republic used when they wrote the Constitution or Bill of Rights.
Yes, it is possible for a democracy to terminate itself by voting in an autocracy. Democracy isn't perfect. It's just hard to come up with good alternatives because the alternative systems tend to drift out of touch with the people over time, and then you start getting tea dumped in Boston Harbor because the people don't feel like they have a voice--remember "no taxation without representation"?
In this particular case, we have what, as far as I know, is a functioning representative democracy that has made a policy choice for itself. I tend to give that policy choice a lot of weight, at least to the extent they really are a functioning democracy. I might have chosen differently, but I don't live there and I don't know the other tradeoffs they've made.
Your first example, amending the Constitution, is an example of a democratic process: the Bill of Rights gains its legitimacy from a majority, or supermajority, of the electorate.
I have trouble buying the assertion that an individual can make the decision for situations where "a society recognizes that some things are none of its business" (emphasis added). I believe a society requires at least two individuals. Under the process as you've expressed it, those two individuals can radically disagree, yet you've said "society" recognizes that some things are none of its business.
I suggest that the recognition you want requires some enforcement mechanism to make it apply to society as a whole. Otherwise, you as an individual might decide one way, but the individuals in the Secret Police might decide the other, leaving you with very little freedom in reality. So the question becomes how much of society you want to involve in that decision. A democratic process, such as the one you mentioned, involves enough of the population to give it some legitimacy. It's tough to come up with a non-democratic process that does the same. So maybe democracy and freedom are not the same, but they're intimately related.
At least according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil#Government_and _Politics, Brazil is a democracy. This is a choice the people of Brazil made about how they choose to run their society, so not quite the same as the situation in China where the political system raises questions--at least in my mind--about how more than a small set of the population feels about it.
I wouldn't be the least surprised to find out that, if a data cable crosses through a country's territory, that country can follow its own laws on whether or not it can tap the cable, unless its signed a treaty to the contrary. By analogy, it should also be able to follow its own laws on whether to tap the contents of disks located within its jurisdiction. If true, Europeans, for example, may wish to compare U.S. to European privacy laws and think about where the companies they use store their data.
There is de facto legitimization of hacking in some countries, just as there's de facto legitimization of other activities that neighboring countries might consider crimes or civilly punishable activities. For example, a U.S. company that exceeds the Kyoto protocol's emission caps is not liable, nor can the U.S. apply its laws regarding nuclear proliferation to A. Q. Kahn, despite the fact that both activities affect neighboring countries. Whether the activity is punishable in the neighbor country depends on whether there are extradition treaties, "special rendition"-type activities, and the vagaries of international law.
As for the issue some other posters have raised of Google logging all this stuff, one answer is to use one of Google's competitors, avoid Gmail (or any other web-based mail, for that matter), and use anonymizer services when running searches.
There is much sound and fury but little hard information.
OK, first, does anyone have a link to the actual, honest-to-goodness legal agreement between players and the folks who run EVE? (Not the web use agreement, the player's one.) I'd like to see what steps, if any, EVE takes to discourage exchanges between in-game money and real money. If in-game money and real money are freely exchangeable, then in-game money represents real wealth, and arranging a ponzi scheme there seems at first glance analogous to arranging a ponzi scheme using stock certificates, endorsed checks, or promissory notes: none of them are cash, but all are convertible to cash at some conversion rate.
The second interesting question that comes up is whether players in the game gain a property interest in their in-game possessions by virtue of the time they spend developing them. That would be an interesting question to research further. For instance, you write a piece of code, you gain a property interest in that code (specifically, a copyright, at least in the U.S.), but that's at least partly driven by specific laws. I have no idea what happens in the game world.
The third interesting question is how you even communicate the idea of an MMORPG to, say, nine Supreme Court justices in a way that won't make them roll their eyes.
I promised myself I'd spend a few hours screwing around in the workshop instead of screwing around at the keyboard, but this is too juicy a topic to pass up.
As I understand it, copyright (and DRM, which is--or at least began as--a way to enforce copyright) is supposed to handle the problem that it's really expensive up front to create the work and really cheap to copy it. Economically, copyright makes the copying part more expensive for everyone who isn't the author. For simplicity, I'm going to assume DRM equals copyright. (I know, it doesn't. The places in which DRM restrictions exceed copyright I'll leave for someone else. Copyright is also enforceable without DRM, but it's harder and more expensive to do.) So, let's assume a world where copying is cheap for everyone, regardless of whether or not they're the author. That world suggests two broad classes of solutions: (1) reduce the author's sunk cost to create the work, or (2) recover the sunk cost by charging for something other than copies of the work.
For books and some other forms of media, one time-honored way to reduce sunk cost is to publish in serial form. That's basically how Dickens did a lot of his stuff and how web comics do it today. If we assume the author can recover some non-zero amount either through sales of copies, such as to early purchasers, or by selling something else like advertising, serial publication reduces the author's commitment before any money starts coming in. The other classic approach is to work on commission for a wealthy patron who, essentially, pays the entire sunk cost in exchange for the right to dictate enough of the work's content to satisfy some need like advertising, ego, or a specific piece of enterprise software.
I think there's a lot of potential for interesting new business models in the second class, charging for something other than copies. People have mentioned selling the author's time. Variations on that theme include selling admission to live performances, accepting comissions to customize an existing work (where that can be done more cheaply than creating a new one and the author's style is distinctive enough that someone else can't easily replicate it), or offering support contracts. Other possiblities include selling fame, such as autographing (for a nominal fee, the author will sign your name and a brief message on the work with the author's private key) or selling knowledge (where the work required a lot of research, or producing it involved unusual experiences, the author could go on a speaking tour.)
Two final thoughts. First, if we're talking video games, it sounds like either publishing in serial form or in-game advertising are the most likely models. And second, if you think this problem is headache-inducing now, think forward to when have desktop fabbers and people are swapping design files of household goods, fashion items, and machine parts.
I think "nuance can be important" is the most inciteful sentence I've read in this whole discussion. I agree. In fact, in Supreme Court opinions, I think nuance is vital. In 50 years, a single sentence in a footnote may be the most widely quoted part of an opinion.
First of all, as others have pointed out, the Fifth Amendment does not allow the government to take private property for private use at all. When taking private property for public use, it must sometimes compensate the owner.
Past public use cases Court mention in the opinion:
Berman v. Parker (1954) The Court upheld a Washington DC law that allowed the government to condemn and take private lands in blighted areas, compensate the owners, and then lease or sell the land to potential developers. The Court held that renovating a slum was not a "private purpose" under the Takings Clause.
Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff (1984) In Hawaii, a small number of landowners owned almost all the land. Almost everyone else was renting. The Court upheld a Hawaii law that let long-term tenants ask a state authority to condemn the land they lived on, compensate the owner, and then sell the land to the tenant. Again, the Court held that this process was "public use" under the Takings Clause.
At first blush, it looks like the ruling in Kelo v. New London, that the government can condemn and take houses in a non-blighted area, compensate the owners, and give them to a developer for redevelopment in an attempt to rejuvinate the town, doesn't seem to be much of an extension of the other two cases.
On the other hand, I get the feeling there's some maneuvering going on, here. Notice in Hawaii Housing Authority how a very similar interpretation of public use allowed the government redistributed large concentrations of property to "the little guy," the same one who lost in this case. Also, keep in mind that property doesn't just mean land: shares of corporate stock are also property. Property rights include things like how you're allowed to use land, too.
On the third hand (the Vorlon hand?) the Court's willingness to defer to the legislature seems to give governments a lot of power. I haven't decided yet whether that's good or bad. The answer may wind up going pretty deeply into why a society chooses to enforce property rights in the first place, and who would be likely to have that power if the government didn't.
I've had a day to think about it a bit more, and came up with what might be a half-baked idea, but what the heck - I figured I'd throw it out and see what becomes of it.
I think the real reason computers are a pain to use is the paradigm we use when designing user interfaces: today's user interfaces are about telling the computer how you want it to do something, not what you want it to do, but most users are interested in results, not the process of getting those results.
In The Beginning, computers didn't have a lot of power, so the user interface meant you had to tell it how to get from point A to point B in excruciating detail. We wound up with systems like Unix's command line shell, which gives you a small number of commands and the means to pipe the output from one to the input of the next until you build a composite command that does what you want - but to build that command you have to tell the computer what to do at each step in between. If the end result you want is "get rid of all the files belonging to the user named 'Joe'", what you have to tell the computer is "list all the files, pipe that result into a filter that looks for 'Joe' and rearranges the output a bit (awk or perl), pipe those results into a command executor (xargs), and pipe that output into the command that removes files."
Windowed interfaces are largely more of the same - if you want to get rid of all the files belonging to Joe, you would go about executing a sequence of commands using the mouse: open a folder, sort by user, select a block of files, and drag to the trash can. It's essentially the same thing you did with Unix, just expressed a bit differently. In both cases, you're still telling the computer how to get to what you want, not what you want itself.
I'm beginning to think that the real trick to getting computers that are easy to use is to shift paradigms - to begin thinking in terms of an interface where you tell the computer what you want and it figures out how to get there, as opposed to the more familiar concept of stringing together primitive commands.
What would such an interface look like? It would have to have a large input vocabulary, so you could express all the possible goals you might be interested in - which probably rules out point and click. Beyond that, I suspect it starts looking more like AI than anything else, or at least like a system with a very large rules base and a pretty fancy abstraction system.
It would make a very interesting research project for someone to create such a system that takes typed natural language commands from the keyboard and translates to Unix shell commands.
Another thing "mere mortals" want is an all-graphics interface; everything point and click.
I disagree here. I suspect what "mere mortals" want is a tool, as opposed to today's scaled-down mainframes. It's been very instructive watching my father use my computer, and having to explain what a window is, what a scroll thumb is, the fact that page-up and page-down keys exist and what they do, and how to use a word processor. (Ever tried to explain the margin feature that manages indentation on most word processors? How about auto-numbering? I finally switched him to a word processor with fewer features because they kept getting in the way of his getting things done.) A windowed interface is intuitive for me, but I grew up on computers. He didn't.
I'd argue that what "mere mortals" want is to get a job done, and any interface that does that for them is what they're looking for. For instance, the interface my father would really like to have is a secretary. He'd like to be able to say to the computer "take this hand-written note and get it to Joe", which the computer should interpret as "turn on the scanner, scan this piece of paper, perform OCR, ask me about anything that looks misspelled, out of context, or just plain wierd, perform the corrections, figure out how best to reach Joe - fax, email, whatever - and get this message to him." Sorting through a file structure to find a file is a distraction for him, and having to configure a PPP auto-dialer is right out. The closest thing I've seen that even tries to approach this level of usability is MIT's Oxygen project.
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wonder if routing algorithms themselves aren't contributing to the problem.
BGP and the intra-domain routing protocols assume there is at most one correct route from a given source address to a given destination address. That assumption could give rise to unnecessary congestion. For example, suppose the source wants to use bandwith of 100 units and the destination is capable of keeping up. But between them there are two routers, in parallel, each of which can supply only 50 units. If there's exactly one path, source and dest can't talk any faster than 50 units because everything has to go through one of the two routers. (There are mechanisms to share bandwith in some situations, like the simple parallel routers one I described, but they dont' work for arbitrarily complex routing topologies across multiple BGP domains.)
It's possible, though, to imagine a network that routes in such a way that data could use both routers. For instance, in circuit switched networks the preestablished path tends to hang around even as the current "best" route changes, so in the earlier example two 50 unit connections between source and dest might end up being spread across both routers.
Rather than taking the congestion as a given, and figuring out work-arounds, I wonder if someone's done some research into why it exists and whether it's due to hot spots forming in the traffic flow.
Right, so let's put this in context. Here we're talking about whether or not Brazil's law allowing it to grab Google's logs is or is not consistent with freedom.
If you're going to say it's not because it violates an inalienable or natural right, I'd like to know how you arrive at that conclusion. Remember, in 1789 the "inalienable" right to liberty didn't apply to you if you happened to be a slave, and it kept not applying until 1865 or so, at which time we amended the Constitution (i.e. applied a democratic process) to make it explicit. The same situation happened with sufferage (see Amendments XV and XIX ). That suggests to me that whether or not a right is alienable or natural is up to the society that acts to enforce, or not enforce, the right. Maybe inalienable and natural rights exist somewhere as a Platonic ideal, but on the ground it's not going to do you a lot of good when the plantation master says "get to work."
Another problem with hanging your hat on inalienable or natural rights in this case is you may wind up having to justify an inalienable right to privacy. While one might exist, it doesn't seem to be in the list that, for instance, the founders of the American Republic used when they wrote the Constitution or Bill of Rights.
Yes, it is possible for a democracy to terminate itself by voting in an autocracy. Democracy isn't perfect. It's just hard to come up with good alternatives because the alternative systems tend to drift out of touch with the people over time, and then you start getting tea dumped in Boston Harbor because the people don't feel like they have a voice--remember "no taxation without representation"?
In this particular case, we have what, as far as I know, is a functioning representative democracy that has made a policy choice for itself. I tend to give that policy choice a lot of weight, at least to the extent they really are a functioning democracy. I might have chosen differently, but I don't live there and I don't know the other tradeoffs they've made.
Your first example, amending the Constitution, is an example of a democratic process: the Bill of Rights gains its legitimacy from a majority, or supermajority, of the electorate.
I have trouble buying the assertion that an individual can make the decision for situations where "a society recognizes that some things are none of its business" (emphasis added). I believe a society requires at least two individuals. Under the process as you've expressed it, those two individuals can radically disagree, yet you've said "society" recognizes that some things are none of its business.
I suggest that the recognition you want requires some enforcement mechanism to make it apply to society as a whole. Otherwise, you as an individual might decide one way, but the individuals in the Secret Police might decide the other, leaving you with very little freedom in reality. So the question becomes how much of society you want to involve in that decision. A democratic process, such as the one you mentioned, involves enough of the population to give it some legitimacy. It's tough to come up with a non-democratic process that does the same. So maybe democracy and freedom are not the same, but they're intimately related.
Freedom is when a society recognizes that some things are none of its business
Who gets to decide which things are none of society's business, and what makes that decision legitimate?
At least according to http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Brazil#Government_and _Politics, Brazil is a democracy. This is a choice the people of Brazil made about how they choose to run their society, so not quite the same as the situation in China where the political system raises questions--at least in my mind--about how more than a small set of the population feels about it.
I wouldn't be the least surprised to find out that, if a data cable crosses through a country's territory, that country can follow its own laws on whether or not it can tap the cable, unless its signed a treaty to the contrary. By analogy, it should also be able to follow its own laws on whether to tap the contents of disks located within its jurisdiction. If true, Europeans, for example, may wish to compare U.S. to European privacy laws and think about where the companies they use store their data.
There is de facto legitimization of hacking in some countries, just as there's de facto legitimization of other activities that neighboring countries might consider crimes or civilly punishable activities. For example, a U.S. company that exceeds the Kyoto protocol's emission caps is not liable, nor can the U.S. apply its laws regarding nuclear proliferation to A. Q. Kahn, despite the fact that both activities affect neighboring countries. Whether the activity is punishable in the neighbor country depends on whether there are extradition treaties, "special rendition"-type activities, and the vagaries of international law.
As for the issue some other posters have raised of Google logging all this stuff, one answer is to use one of Google's competitors, avoid Gmail (or any other web-based mail, for that matter), and use anonymizer services when running searches.
There is much sound and fury but little hard information.
OK, first, does anyone have a link to the actual, honest-to-goodness legal agreement between players and the folks who run EVE? (Not the web use agreement, the player's one.) I'd like to see what steps, if any, EVE takes to discourage exchanges between in-game money and real money. If in-game money and real money are freely exchangeable, then in-game money represents real wealth, and arranging a ponzi scheme there seems at first glance analogous to arranging a ponzi scheme using stock certificates, endorsed checks, or promissory notes: none of them are cash, but all are convertible to cash at some conversion rate.
The second interesting question that comes up is whether players in the game gain a property interest in their in-game possessions by virtue of the time they spend developing them. That would be an interesting question to research further. For instance, you write a piece of code, you gain a property interest in that code (specifically, a copyright, at least in the U.S.), but that's at least partly driven by specific laws. I have no idea what happens in the game world.
The third interesting question is how you even communicate the idea of an MMORPG to, say, nine Supreme Court justices in a way that won't make them roll their eyes.
I promised myself I'd spend a few hours screwing around in the workshop instead of screwing around at the keyboard, but this is too juicy a topic to pass up.
As I understand it, copyright (and DRM, which is--or at least began as--a way to enforce copyright) is supposed to handle the problem that it's really expensive up front to create the work and really cheap to copy it. Economically, copyright makes the copying part more expensive for everyone who isn't the author. For simplicity, I'm going to assume DRM equals copyright. (I know, it doesn't. The places in which DRM restrictions exceed copyright I'll leave for someone else. Copyright is also enforceable without DRM, but it's harder and more expensive to do.) So, let's assume a world where copying is cheap for everyone, regardless of whether or not they're the author. That world suggests two broad classes of solutions: (1) reduce the author's sunk cost to create the work, or (2) recover the sunk cost by charging for something other than copies of the work.
For books and some other forms of media, one time-honored way to reduce sunk cost is to publish in serial form. That's basically how Dickens did a lot of his stuff and how web comics do it today. If we assume the author can recover some non-zero amount either through sales of copies, such as to early purchasers, or by selling something else like advertising, serial publication reduces the author's commitment before any money starts coming in. The other classic approach is to work on commission for a wealthy patron who, essentially, pays the entire sunk cost in exchange for the right to dictate enough of the work's content to satisfy some need like advertising, ego, or a specific piece of enterprise software.
I think there's a lot of potential for interesting new business models in the second class, charging for something other than copies. People have mentioned selling the author's time. Variations on that theme include selling admission to live performances, accepting comissions to customize an existing work (where that can be done more cheaply than creating a new one and the author's style is distinctive enough that someone else can't easily replicate it), or offering support contracts. Other possiblities include selling fame, such as autographing (for a nominal fee, the author will sign your name and a brief message on the work with the author's private key) or selling knowledge (where the work required a lot of research, or producing it involved unusual experiences, the author could go on a speaking tour.)
Two final thoughts. First, if we're talking video games, it sounds like either publishing in serial form or in-game advertising are the most likely models. And second, if you think this problem is headache-inducing now, think forward to when have desktop fabbers and people are swapping design files of household goods, fashion items, and machine parts.
Oops. Make that "insightful." Thanks.
I think "nuance can be important" is the most inciteful sentence I've read in this whole discussion. I agree. In fact, in Supreme Court opinions, I think nuance is vital. In 50 years, a single sentence in a footnote may be the most widely quoted part of an opinion.
First of all, as others have pointed out, the Fifth Amendment does not allow the government to take private property for private use at all. When taking private property for public use, it must sometimes compensate the owner.
Past public use cases Court mention in the opinion:
Berman v. Parker (1954) The Court upheld a Washington DC law that allowed the government to condemn and take private lands in blighted areas, compensate the owners, and then lease or sell the land to potential developers. The Court held that renovating a slum was not a "private purpose" under the Takings Clause.
Hawaii Housing Authority v. Midkiff (1984) In Hawaii, a small number of landowners owned almost all the land. Almost everyone else was renting. The Court upheld a Hawaii law that let long-term tenants ask a state authority to condemn the land they lived on, compensate the owner, and then sell the land to the tenant. Again, the Court held that this process was "public use" under the Takings Clause.
At first blush, it looks like the ruling in Kelo v. New London, that the government can condemn and take houses in a non-blighted area, compensate the owners, and give them to a developer for redevelopment in an attempt to rejuvinate the town, doesn't seem to be much of an extension of the other two cases.
On the other hand, I get the feeling there's some maneuvering going on, here. Notice in Hawaii Housing Authority how a very similar interpretation of public use allowed the government redistributed large concentrations of property to "the little guy," the same one who lost in this case. Also, keep in mind that property doesn't just mean land: shares of corporate stock are also property. Property rights include things like how you're allowed to use land, too.
On the third hand (the Vorlon hand?) the Court's willingness to defer to the legislature seems to give governments a lot of power. I haven't decided yet whether that's good or bad. The answer may wind up going pretty deeply into why a society chooses to enforce property rights in the first place, and who would be likely to have that power if the government didn't.
I think the real reason computers are a pain to use is the paradigm we use when designing user interfaces: today's user interfaces are about telling the computer how you want it to do something, not what you want it to do, but most users are interested in results, not the process of getting those results.
In The Beginning, computers didn't have a lot of power, so the user interface meant you had to tell it how to get from point A to point B in excruciating detail. We wound up with systems like Unix's command line shell, which gives you a small number of commands and the means to pipe the output from one to the input of the next until you build a composite command that does what you want - but to build that command you have to tell the computer what to do at each step in between. If the end result you want is "get rid of all the files belonging to the user named 'Joe'", what you have to tell the computer is "list all the files, pipe that result into a filter that looks for 'Joe' and rearranges the output a bit (awk or perl), pipe those results into a command executor (xargs), and pipe that output into the command that removes files."
Windowed interfaces are largely more of the same - if you want to get rid of all the files belonging to Joe, you would go about executing a sequence of commands using the mouse: open a folder, sort by user, select a block of files, and drag to the trash can. It's essentially the same thing you did with Unix, just expressed a bit differently. In both cases, you're still telling the computer how to get to what you want, not what you want itself.
I'm beginning to think that the real trick to getting computers that are easy to use is to shift paradigms - to begin thinking in terms of an interface where you tell the computer what you want and it figures out how to get there, as opposed to the more familiar concept of stringing together primitive commands.
What would such an interface look like? It would have to have a large input vocabulary, so you could express all the possible goals you might be interested in - which probably rules out point and click. Beyond that, I suspect it starts looking more like AI than anything else, or at least like a system with a very large rules base and a pretty fancy abstraction system.
It would make a very interesting research project for someone to create such a system that takes typed natural language commands from the keyboard and translates to Unix shell commands.
I found out about Oxygen through Scientific American. Here's a link to the online summary: http://www.sciam.com/1999/0899issue/0899quicksumma ry.html . The actual issue has quite a bit of info. Here's another link, this one to the MIT web site: http://www.lcs.mit.edu/news/releases/oxygen040799 .
I agree with you here.
Another thing "mere mortals" want is an all-graphics interface; everything point and click.
I disagree here. I suspect what "mere mortals" want is a tool, as opposed to today's scaled-down mainframes. It's been very instructive watching my father use my computer, and having to explain what a window is, what a scroll thumb is, the fact that page-up and page-down keys exist and what they do, and how to use a word processor. (Ever tried to explain the margin feature that manages indentation on most word processors? How about auto-numbering? I finally switched him to a word processor with fewer features because they kept getting in the way of his getting things done.) A windowed interface is intuitive for me, but I grew up on computers. He didn't.
I'd argue that what "mere mortals" want is to get a job done, and any interface that does that for them is what they're looking for. For instance, the interface my father would really like to have is a secretary. He'd like to be able to say to the computer "take this hand-written note and get it to Joe", which the computer should interpret as "turn on the scanner, scan this piece of paper, perform OCR, ask me about anything that looks misspelled, out of context, or just plain wierd, perform the corrections, figure out how best to reach Joe - fax, email, whatever - and get this message to him." Sorting through a file structure to find a file is a distraction for him, and having to configure a PPP auto-dialer is right out. The closest thing I've seen that even tries to approach this level of usability is MIT's Oxygen project.