Actually, a commons, as studied extensively after TOTC was written, can be owned by a family, a village, a neighborhood, or a nation. The important point is the change that occurs when N users become N+1, and the commons cannot sustain itself.
With spammers, N becomes N+1,000,000. One spammer uses up the resources of a thousand non-spammers without paying for it. Again, the shoplifting analogy: all the costs of shoplifting are internalized at some point, *but not by the person doing the shoplifting.*
Its a bit like saying that shoplifters pay because stores factor in the cost of shoplifting. Its the whole point of externalities: sure, someone pays, but it isn't the people who receive the benefits.
A good set of essays on the costs of spam, and possible non-law-based solutions, can be found here. A list of costs is found in 7. Why spam is evil.
It is any area which for N users is a 'public good,' i.e. multiple people can consume that good (air quality, a park, a nice view) without diminishing the availability of that good to others. However, at N+1 each user's use starts diminishing the quality of that area. The ownership of the commons is an orthogonal issue.
With payments and spam, there are significant externalities- costs which don't go to the people benefiting. With newspapers most costs are internalized. With spam, most costs are externalities. If a factory is spewing its waste directly into a river, the fact that it pays its workers doesn't mean it is paying for that pollution. Spammers pay for their connectivity (although many scammer spammers do not- they use stolen credit cards), but the don't pay for the costs of floods of bounces, etc.
Not all "BAD MEATS" [Bothersome Ads, Datamining, Mass Email And Telecommunications Spam], a.k.a. "RANCID" [Really ANnoying Classes of Inbox Data], are "Spam." We've got to conceptually separate them out into well-defined categories, as fighting the many kinds of BAD MEATS requires a variety of weapons and strategies. Treat them all like spam and we'll build a lovely Maginot Line of anti-Spam measures.
Spam: Bulk email from a stranger. Solved mostly with technology and a little bit by laws. By emphasizing method (bulk), not content, we can use technology to block spam and courts are likely to uphold our rights to do so. Blocks or bans on content (1), non-bulk email (2), or email from a pre-existing business relationship (3) are likely to fail and could make the problem much worse.
Non-bulk email, or email from entities who aren't strangers: not spam, however annoying. Generally solved with boycotts, public ridicule, and questions about ethics "Would you accept 'technically I didn't lie' from an employee? Then why should we the public accept it?" (As for 'friendly' email, replies of "By forwarding this email to me you give me permission to think you're an idiot. There is no virus. Timmy hates postcards. You can't send angelic blessings as an attachment, and if I wanted that joke I'd go to rec.humor.funny-the-1st-time-20-repetitions-ago." might work.)
Laws: Even on spam not a good idea- ineffective at best. Dishonest spam & spammers (forged headers, etc.) don't care about existing US laws- they break laws on contracts ('no spamming' ISP contracts), theft (stolen credit cards to pay for accounts), identity fraud, spam (California requires "ADV," in the subject line...), and more already. And domestic laws can't stop a fundamentally international problem. Even worse, if US laws only ban dishonest spam then honest (think DMA) spam is legitimized. And banning commercial speech alone won't make it because of the Constitution. It protects commercial speech much more than some people might think. Thus, it is bad to focus on...
(1) Content: Political or religious messages can still be spam, and any speech, commercial or not, has to be really, really bad before the Supreme Court will even start to think about unprotecting it. You'd have to prove Spam-speech is equivalent to "'fire!' in a crowded theater" or "riot right now" speech. Unlikely. Instead, focus on...
(2) "Bulk" because bulk is what causes damage. One bounced email: no problem. 100,000: big problem. Courts are likely to find that individually written emails, however annoying, aren't going to cause the damages of bulk - people just can't write that many in a day. Courts won't like punishing a person who wrote one letter ("Hi, I saw an article about you, you might be interested in my software..." is an unsolicited commercial email. Laws that ban it won't last very long.). "Bulk" makes a better brightline. If a spammer is caught breaking an ISP's contract, and claims the emails weren't bulk, easy perjury... Judge: "4 emails with boilerplate text after the first sentence. This isn't bulk?" Exceptionally stupid Spammer: "No."
(3) "From a stranger" for two reasons. One- its easier to prove that bulk email from strangers is inherently a burden. Email from all 200 businesses and 10 candidates you do know: irritating but not impossible to deal with, maybe not worth curbing speech. Email from all 29.9998 million businesses and ten thousand candidates you don't know (opt-outable or not): impossible. Two- if you voluntarily gave your email address out, courts might rule that caveat emptor trumps "punish them because their email annoys me."
...doesn't mean it won't hurt the field. Standard our "tragedy of the commons (TOTC)" reference. Spammers already overgraze the email commons, but somehow these guys think that because political spam is a different beast, it will all work out. No! Political spam uses the same resources and clogs the same inboxes as the (currently) more common commercial email. This is one reason why I believe method, not content, should define spam(1).
Specific problems I see in their article:
False analogy to radio, TV, and newspapers: with them I receive the benefit (content) along with some cost to me (time or page space devoted to ads), but *all costs are accounted for by someone- they are internalized* The paper/station charges what they need to run their business. With spam the spammers creates costs that they don't have to pay.
in other words Radio/TV/newspaper ads are *solicited.* They have large sales departments seeking advertisers.
Tying / making equivalent "internet" to "email" in leveling the playing field: anyone can have a web site, and you don't need too much money to have a nice one. This doesn't mean you should spam people to get them to go to your website. If I can't afford a billboard it doesn't mean I get to spray paint my message in grafitti just to "level the field."
They want the results you only get from opt-in lists without requiring opt-in lists: if you don't use opt-in lists you don't know your email is going to the right groups, or even to the right state (or country). Without opt-in, how will you keep email from the thousands of elections happening each year from clogging inboxes?
a "recipient can choose to...unsubscribe": Again, they're forgetting that the email field is already muddy from plain ol' cow spam. We the people already know you cannot trust unsubscribe links within email. "We're different, trust us" doesn't work- within a few weeks regular scammer spammers will fake the exact same disclaimers.
Thinking that antispammers were overreacting: again, TOTC- we've already seen spam ruin usenet and half-ruin our email boxes. We have to start early to keep the first political spams from becoming a giant herd.
(1)My definition: bulk email from a stranger. This definition catches damaging email, although not all annoying email. I think definitions that include content (i.e. "commercial" alone is bad), non-bulk email, or email from a pre-existing business relationship aren't good because laws based on them won't be upheld.
The XXAA are never going to sue posterboys. They aren't going to sue "accredited and licenced cryptographers" (to paraphrase what the 2600 judge implied 2600 was not). They aren't going to sue Science and Nature to remove peer-reviewed articles. The XXAA aren't idiots (with respect to legal threats) and are never going to give the EFF a case that the EFF could easily win.
But the people the XXAA won't sue aren't the people the EFF exists to help. They started off helping a gaming BBS, not Atari (and in the big picture let the gov't understand that seizing an email BBS is just as bad as seizing an entire post office). They helped Bernstein (led to a better environment for hundreds of US encryption companies: if you work for one, make sure your company has donated). Not that they aren't helping professors, but it is more likely to be students who get thrown into jail.
I don't think it is "fear-mongering" to let people know what the XXAA *can* do, even if the XXAA won't do it for pragmatic reasons. Especially as each case brought by the XXAA changes the standard for who should worry-- they sue the least sympathetic groups first, and then work their way up. Perhaps the EFF needs to be more explicit: "Hey audience, if it is *possible* for sympathetic professors and researchers to be threatened, then it is *really likely* that you who don't have the same sympathy-factor (and access to teams of lawyers) will get hammered. "
Or $1.20 per hour of commercials (not the show) that the station gets paid by the advertisers for each viewer. My time is worth more than 2 cents a minute: I'm willing to pay that penny for each commercial I don't have to watch. The TV industry will have to learn to adapt, rather than force me to watch dreck for pennies. This essay by Brad Templeton (of the EFF) covers some possible business models TV could take.
Some reactions to cryonics reminds me of reactions to proposals to cut back residency hours for new doctors. Years after research found that sleep deprivation is the same as being drunk, residents were still expected to put in 36 hour shifts and 100 hour workweeks. Sure, there can be benefits to practicing medicine as a tired zombie, same as it could be good to practice while drunk, but *I* as a patient and relative of patients don't want the costs.
"Dammit! We had to suffer, let them suffer too" seemed to be the reaction from older generations of doctors. Some anti-cryonics people seem to be saying the same thing "We had to accept death, we had to suffer, no one gets to try to skip it." But why should death after after 80 years (121 the longest provable lifespan) be acceptable? We are starting to know about how lifespan works, why not try to extend it? In the past, when death after a few decades was inevitable, societies needed to come up with rules and ideas that kept people from wigging out over death. But you don't need the exact same rules if death doesn't have to happen in the same way.
Maybe 50 years ago it was noble to teach a young child to accept their upcoming death by leukemia. Nowadays that would be considered almost child-abuse, because childhood leukemia has a 95%+ cure rate. I think it is terrible when a child suffers through years of chemo and cancer treatment only to die- I see little that is noble about it. but I see little that is noble about death for anyone, and I don't believe we should give in just because "thats the way it always was." Living to 80 would look good to people who could only expect 40 years, and I wouldn't have wanted my ancestors to say "we only got 40 years, why should you have more?" Why shouldn't I think that 160 is a fine goal for next generations of people?
And I doubt future generations of people will resent the frozen few to the point of refusing to treat them. Why? For the same reasons we today don't resent our "past generations" from getting heart transplants or stroke treatments. In part it might be pragmatic- refuse treatment for the elderly and you might not get treatment yourself- but I think mostly it is because we want to be kind. We don't tell people- "hey, you're eighty now, that's all you get, you have to die." I don't know that future people will say to the cryonically suspended "you lived 40 or 80 years, thats all you'll get."
Telomeres were just discovered in the past decades, and I'm sure that plenty of biotech companies are working on them. If they haven't figured them out in another 30 years, then I'd worry.
one answer is to get one stem cell to work, and regrow most cells. Then all you need to worry about is the 100 billion brain cells with their 10,000 connections/neuron network.
Cryonics is paid with a life insurance policy and a yearly fee, so just cutting back on coffee (regular joe instead of a FrappoMochoCappaChaio) will pay for it. You don't have to "squander" much to get an extra $2/day. While I'm not one myself (yet), the Alcor people I know seem to be enjoying life as much as everyone else. They tend to treat it as a long term form of insurance- keep the payments up and keep an eye on the company to ensure it stays in business. You likely have home and car insurance. Does this mean you are terribly afraid of automobile accidents or house fires?
Civilization would have to fall far for liquid nitrogen production to fail- you don't need electricity to keep the dewars cold, you just need to top them off each week.
The oldest of them are hitting college this year or last year: the first birth from a previously frozen embryo happened in 1984. So, we can freeze and bring back at least a few cells without water cracking them. Not the same thing as 70 trillion cells (100 billion of which containing intricate connections i.e. neurons), but its a start.
I know from personal experience and from web sites on reading speeds (an anecdote and a reference to the web: my post has twice the truth!) that electronic reading is 20%+ slower than paper reading. Not so bad if you're reading a short story in 25 minutes instead of 20. Very bad if you have 5 books to get through before you can write your essay on comparative corn-god legends.
But I guess if you're a student you can get used to it- just sleep less. Once you've hit the age where all-nighters aren't possible anymore (not without getting a bad cold the next day), the all electronic office proposals can be a horror. I've met several Sun employees who still shudder at the virtual desk idea: same problems as the parent poster said. And it isn't just engineers who need to have multiple projects visible at the same time and/or overnight without having to clear their desk.
The EFF has a long history of being ahead of the curve on tech/legal issues, including ongoing DMCA cases. They took the 2600 case on principle, even though I'm sure they'd have prefered a more obviously sympathetic character who'd win the Supreme Court's hearts. But of course the RIMPAA isn't going to voluntarily give the anti-DMCA a posterboy. The EFF also dropped that particular case, and I'm sure they didn't like to admit they couldn't win that one. They chose to lose that battle (an expensive battle) to make it easier to win the larger war.
For the sake of the EFF I'm very glad that the ACLU is taking up this cause. The EFF has only so much money- far fewer people donate than you think- and money is their limiting resource: if they had more, they could take on more cases. Even with their limited budget (much, much smaller than the ACLU's) they fought the DMCA. Now they can move funds to equally important technology cases without fear that the DMCA is legally unopposed. Being ahead of the curve is expensive: you don't get the same sympathy donations from the general public. I've written it before: join the EFF so they'll be there (on principle *and* with enough funds) for You.
No, I think far more important would be an introduction term that allowed me to immediately know if a person uses or cares about the term "GNU/Linux" vs "Linux." I've never seen a fight over flirting, I have seen fights and a near-breakup over why "G/L" is the ethical phrase.
But why should marital status be known right away? This implies that some people cannot have a non-sexual conversation unless it is explicitly forbidden. And what to do about the polyamourous?
You have read Douglas Hofstadter's A Person Paper on Purity in Language? Cured my thinking that the issue didn't matter. Although in today's economy I wouldn't necessarily mind a title which let potential employers know I'm available. We just need a race-neutral word. Hi, I'm Nrs. Geekotourist!
The EFF is a form of insurance- we all would be a lot worse off without the work they've been doing for the past 12 years. You can look at all the cases they're working on now. They can't win all their cases, but with them around we won't automatically lose. But it can only happen if they have money- court cases are expensive and necessary. For this we need to join / donate.
I've been to many of their events and know people there: the EFF isn't rolling in money- quite the opposite. It really is a non-profit, and money is their limiting factor: more money = more cases they could take. Far fewer people donate than you'd think, including people who have directly benefited from their work (if you're at a US internet security or encryption company that hasn't donated, try to change that!). They try to be at or ahead of the curve on tech issues, and this means that its harder to get the grandparent sympathy donation(2). And their main donation source- us, the techie crowd- just hasn't been doing to well lately. Unfortunately the number of cases the EFF should fight doesn't go down in an economic downturn, its probably the opposite: Congress is chumming for dollars with Disney / MPAA more than ever.
(1) in the economics sense
(2) If the EFF was a medical nonprofit, they wouldn't be the ones with the big-eyed sick children, they'd be the ones worrying about prions 20 years ago. Harder to explain, but often more important.
EFF took the case even without a posterchild
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2600 Drops DeCSS Appeal
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· Score: 4, Insightful
I think its another point of evidence that the EFF goes on principle, not popularity. When you're dealing with judges who are more used to typewriters and record players, you'd rather have defendants that the judges won't start off being biased against. But its unlikely the RIAA / MPAA will give them one, and the EFF tried hard with what they had. Thanks to both the EFF and 2600 for both fighting this fight and for knowing that this wasn't the one to take to the SCOTUS.
I'll bet that when the XXAA starts suing individuals, they'll have done background checks to ensure the defendants are as unsympathetic as possible.
Microsoft builds in deliberate gaps and then hopes no one thinks to break through the thin screen covering that gap: in housing design, that'd be called a Window.
So if an exploit results from using a pre-designed gap, as compared to actually breaking through what was supposed to be good security, call it a security window.
Looks like the EFF fought hard to get in and stay in the meeting process. It really seems as if the industry group didn't think that anyone else should have a say in this issue, even though it significantly affects fair use (and not to mention the millions of current HDTV owners being sent up that stinky creek). From the EFF's abstract of their well-written comments on the final report:
We hope that readers of the Co-Chair's Report will find in this briefing, compelling evidence of the dangers presented by the BPDG recommendations and will recognize them as the self-interested aspirations of a small, partisan group seeking to write an anti-competitive law that protects its commercial interests at the public's expense.
The BPDG "process" has been rife with acrimony, arbitrariness and confusion, to an extent that cannot be fully ascribed to mere haste. EFF believes that the failings of the BPDG process stem directly from BPDG's efforts to cloak a inter-industry horse-trading exercise in the trappings of a public undertaking, with nominal participation from all "affected industries." In reality, the representatives were hand-picked by the conveners of the BPDG to minimize any dissent, as is evidenced by the high degree of similarity between the original proposal brought to the group by its conveners and the final report that the co-chairs unilaterally present herein as the group's findings.[bold added by gt]
Throughout the process, the absence of any formal charter or process afforded the co-chairs the opportunity to manipulate the rules of the group to suit their true purpose while maintaining its illusory openness, as when the scope of the group's discussions was summarily expanded to encompass all unauthorized redistribution of feature films, as opposed to unauthorized redistribution over the Internet.
I hope that Sun tries out an experiment in potential productivity loss before implementing this:
Take a group of engineers / analysts / documentation people
find some measure of productivity and satisfaction for that group.
Then mix them in with sales / support people, where random loud phone calls and talking interruptions are the rule
see what this does to the first groups' productivity...
I'd bet heavily that productivity (i.e. ability to find bugs, model a market, write a well crafted paragraph) goes down. Not hideously down, just enough to make great programmers merely good, and good programmers seek other employment.
Mixing phone people with keyboard people isn't nice. It makes the phone people feel guilty and rude, if they know the programmers, etc. are trying to meet deadlines. (And people who listen to their 19 voicemail messages by speakerphone: Dante has a 6th circle reservation just for you. It involves Muzak and a pair of 20 billion watt speakers, so Don't Do It. Thanks.) It makes the programmers jumpy- you never know when a beautiful train of thought and logic gets derailed on the "RING, RING...Hi! Glad you got Back to me on those trade show booth color quotes! Teal? Lets talk Blue!Blue Blue Blah Blah..." the next cubicle over. I've been in this situation, and it hurts.
And it ignores that paper is still a useful office object- crisp clear text that can be stared at for more than 1/2 hour without your eyes going numb, easy to spread out and cover with sticky notes...but no, you'll have to clean it up and put it away each night, regardless of sudden deadlines.
I'll bet even more heavily that they did only a Benefit estimate, not a Cost-Benefit estimate, when they came up with that $150 million figure. I doubt they'll study it at all.
Well, as Neal so aptly wrote (but darnitall he was making fun of them at the time, it wasn't supposed to be emulated):
" So Y.T.'s mom has clacked up the stairs in her black pumps and gone into her office, actually a large room with computer workstations placed across it in a grid... So no more partitions. Just workstations and chairs. Not even any desktops. Desktops encourage the use of paper, which is archaic and reflects inadequate team spirit. What is so special about your work that you have to write it down on a piece of paper that only you get to see? That you have to lock it away inside a desk? When you're working for [Future Sun]... You do your work on the computer. The computer keeps a copy of everything, so that if you get sick or something, it's all there where your co-workers and supervisors can get access to it... And there's the question of interchangeability. [Future Sun] workers, like military people, are intended to be interchangeable parts. What happens if your workstation should break down? You're going to sit there and twiddle your thumbs until it gets fixed? No siree, you're going to move to a spare workstation... you don't have that flexibility if you've got half a ton of personal stuff cached inside of a desk, strewn around a desktop..." (Snow Crash, 93 paperback, pg 281)
Wow. I had thought that Hollings bill was their "extreme" ("Mommy, I Wanna pony! Wanna pony! Wanna pony!) and they'll compromise from there ("Can I have a puppy?'). Nope. Obviously they think that they can out-psych us, and I worry it could be true. ("Mommy, wanna recreate a T-Rex! T-Rex! T-Rex! Can I have a horse?"). My predictions:
First, they'll float out a few more extreme positions, each one further out.
Then, they'll be "willing to take into consideration" the "moderate" positions of their own organizations
meanwhile, they'll accuse us of hysteria, and because we'll be reacting to the worst of their proposals, now dropped, we will look that way. If you've ever seen a sociopath in action, you'll recognize this behavior- they'll threaten horrible things in private, getting the victim stressed and off-balance, and then in public they look calm and collected and the victim sounds crazy.
And most importantly, they've made everyone accept their key argument:That they have a right to do this in the first place: No. They don't. That is for *We the People* to decide. It is one industry saying to another: "We'll tax you 100%! Ok, we'll tax you 75%! Ok, 40% is the last offer, and it is a good one, OK?" But industries don't get to tax other industries in the first place!
So the real question is, are they filtering on method or on content? i.e. are sites with plenty of pictures forbidden regardless of content, or is it all sites about sex, regardless of whether or not the site has pictures or just text? What about searches using google? Will they prevent you from reading cached versions of adult content? What if it only looks like adult content?
If you felt it- you know that feeling you had at the 14th second, as you were starting to wonder if this was a big one, thinking about those 32 remaining (or at least ambulatory) survivors of the 60 second long 1906 quake (estimated 8.3), and then it stopped... the Sharks game wasn't even interrupted. But we know that sometime over the next 30 years, it'll start up the same, and then get worse.
So, just as daylight savings time supposedly reminds us to change our smoke detector batteries (because otherwise that annoying 'low battery' beeping always start at 4am), tiny earthquakes remind us about our earthquake kits and preparation. Includes...
3+ days of food, water, clothing, tools (ability to turn off the gas if needed) flashlights etc etc.
especially if you're female: comfortable clothing in your car, with a good change of shoes (vs hiking in high heels)
knowing where your important papers and backup disks are (some sites advise having copies in a bag you can grab on the way out), and having copies in a safe / safety deposit box.
cell phone always charged and gas tank always at least 1/2 full
Because cumulative knowledge and a searchable database are the only ways to fight this- the BSA otherwise has all the power.
It is an extremely one sided system- as they unethically designed it to be (1). As many have pointed out, the system is set up to make you feel you cannot possibly fight it, given the unacceptable risk if you lose.(2) However, if you can find other cases where people have fought, and you see how they did it, you might have hope.
People need to know how bad it is for schools. Example: Slashdot on Microsoft / BSA vs the LA School District, (3) where "hundreds" of unlicensed copies were found. the threat was $150,000 fine for each copy of a $100 per license product. ($100 at best. 1/3 was MSDOS, and schools get very good rates). They "negotiate" down to a $300,000 total fine, and the school district probably felt very grateful for this kindness of the BSA.
This is a 150,000% fine negotiated down to a 1,000% fine. (or 1,500x down to 10x). How does the BSA get to levy fines so out of proportion to actual damages? Yes, illegal copies are a crime (as is speeding), but the LAUSD wasn't running a mass piracy operation. Assuming that "hundreds" = 500 copies found, then the LAUSD had found roughly 1 copy per school, or 1 copy per 120 employees. The BSA got to treat the LAUSD as if it had found widespread felonious behavior rather than a few years worth of a few people deliberately or mistakenly making copies. No proof of bad intentions needed.
Extraordinary fines should require extraordinary proof, but instead the BSA has you do all the work, and even if you are entirely innocent you can still get hit. Unless a mistake can cause extraordinary harm, you don't usually get to treat mistakes like a felony! What makes the BSA so special? They get to threaten fines in line with fines for damage to life and health. Is software piracy that much worse than discharging toxic substances into waterways (max fine $125,000)? Misbranding a drug in interstate commerce (max fine $100,000)? Violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (the fine listed in Section 3571 (d) is "not more than the greater of twice the gross gain or twice the gross loss" caused by the conduct...)?
The LAUSD is not a happy ending story- but this current story might be. A collection of all cases like it would be useful for anyone just receiving a dreadful BSA / Microsoft letter. The site should be part of a high-Google-rank site, so that it is easy to find (for non-technical folks). The database should also have easy to find links to all user groups, by geographical areas, so that anyone can quickly get advice / quotes / support.
(1) Because a good ethical system (think Categorical Imperative) includes consistency in applying rules. The BSA would never accept their rules applied to themselves: imagine a Software Consulting Association sending audit letters out checking for late payments to consultants. If you've paid a consultant more than 30 days late, you get fined 150,000% of the daily rate.
(2) You'll fight a traffic ticket because you can afford to lose. What if the original ticket was $100,000, with a "negotiated" fine of $1,000? This is extortion, not a negotiation- you'll accept whatever the court says. Not to mention if *you* had to show that you didn't speed, even a little bit, and lack of evidence = proof of guilt. And it took a minimum of 5 days in court and they get to dismantle your car and replace equipment to test its maximum speed! That is what these audits are: time consuming and they can place programs on your system.
Spammers simply try variants of names...
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The Story of "Nadine"
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· Score: 3, Interesting
IHDAOS (I have done analysis of spam)
It is very likely not the ISP- the money they spend on help-desk complaint people would outweigh the cents received from a spammer.
Spammers will make up lists of names. If you are a john smith, you will get spam. period. Because their lists will have john.smith@X, johnsmith@, jsmith@, johns@... they take lists of the most common names and put together all possible variants. I've seen many cases where they forgot to BCC the list... "asmith, bsmith, csmith...aasmith, absmith..."
Unless your friend's email address is unguessable. Then its likely someone cracked into their system and got the list. Selling it? they'd have to be desparate idiots.
A bit of a long-time peeve of mine is ignorance during reviews. How many times have you seen a review of an item (book, movie) with obvious SF elements compared to "Jules Verne, HG Wells, and Ray Bradbury"? Not because it has much resemblance to any one of these, but because those were the only SFish authors the reviewer was exposed to in high school.
It is a proud and defiant ignorance allowed because the audience doesn't know better- they don't know of the SF books beyond the "Sword of Han Solo" serials on the NYTimes lists. The same reviewers would never review a modern comedy as "the tradition of Mark Twain and Charlie Chaplin" or a mystery as "part of the long history from Poe to Doyle." i.e. if it is another genre they'll have at least a basic knowledge of it: for example, that westerns went from simple ("Indians bad") to complex, and that other countries (Japan, Italy) are part of cowboy movie history. They'll know that Elvis isn't modern rock and Martha Graham isn't cutting edge dance. But with SF they'll use 40 year old movies as their example (in turn based on 60 year old stories/ideas, as SF movies tend to be far behind the literature) without embarrassment.
So what- let them be ignorant, some could say. But when reviewers don't know about or ignore modern SF, it hurts more than some thin-skinned fandom:
It lets the modern non-SF author get away with slumming or borrowing. Authors need (and the good ones want) to be held to a higher standard.
It prevents the SF authors from getting credit as the people who originated or built up a concept.
It keeps the reader from finding out about the history and authors who've done a concept. The reader doesn't get a "if you like Z, you might also like X and Y, who started it..."
It lets the reviewers get away with sloppy work.
So I'll be happy to see (what I assume are at least good sellers) books like Dozois' Best SF Stories of the Year and more showing up. Reviewers will have to first account for the writers like Ian McDonald, the rapidly approaching (and hope he pulls it off) Singularity Charlie Stross, and just intensely good Greg Egan, before they blow off SF as spaceship-westerns.
In general, if complaints about a study/ article / book include "misquoting," you can verify if the complaints are true. Good authors don't misquote, instead they give an accurate quote and then demonstrate why the quote is wrong.
I haven't read the book, and only a few of the reviews in Scientific American / other mags, but now I'll have to find the time. Of all the accusations, the one of misquoting is the worse one. Anyone can be bad at science or statistics and write about it- peer review will reveal the weaknesses and a good scientist will admit their mistake and go on. But misquotes makes someone else look bad- you've tied them to a strawman and they have to prove they aren't the strawman's maker while simultaneously demolishing it. You're forcing them to look defensive, even though, in fact, they have no reason to be defensive, because the misquote isn't their real argument.
A good review of quotations and misquotations used in arguments is in the proposed talk.origins (creation evolution) Misquotations FAQ.
Slashdot Mirror
With spammers, N becomes N+1,000,000. One spammer uses up the resources of a thousand non-spammers without paying for it. Again, the shoplifting analogy: all the costs of shoplifting are internalized at some point, *but not by the person doing the shoplifting.*
A good set of essays on the costs of spam, and possible non-law-based solutions, can be found here. A list of costs is found in 7. Why spam is evil.
With payments and spam, there are significant externalities- costs which don't go to the people benefiting. With newspapers most costs are internalized. With spam, most costs are externalities. If a factory is spewing its waste directly into a river, the fact that it pays its workers doesn't mean it is paying for that pollution. Spammers pay for their connectivity (although many scammer spammers do not- they use stolen credit cards), but the don't pay for the costs of floods of bounces, etc.
Spam: Bulk email from a stranger. Solved mostly with technology and a little bit by laws. By emphasizing method (bulk), not content, we can use technology to block spam and courts are likely to uphold our rights to do so. Blocks or bans on content (1), non-bulk email (2), or email from a pre-existing business relationship (3) are likely to fail and could make the problem much worse.
Non-bulk email, or email from entities who aren't strangers: not spam, however annoying. Generally solved with boycotts, public ridicule, and questions about ethics "Would you accept 'technically I didn't lie' from an employee? Then why should we the public accept it?" (As for 'friendly' email, replies of "By forwarding this email to me you give me permission to think you're an idiot. There is no virus. Timmy hates postcards. You can't send angelic blessings as an attachment, and if I wanted that joke I'd go to rec.humor.funny-the-1st-time-20-repetitions-ago." might work.)
Laws: Even on spam not a good idea- ineffective at best. Dishonest spam & spammers (forged headers, etc.) don't care about existing US laws- they break laws on contracts ('no spamming' ISP contracts), theft (stolen credit cards to pay for accounts), identity fraud, spam (California requires "ADV," in the subject line...), and more already. And domestic laws can't stop a fundamentally international problem. Even worse, if US laws only ban dishonest spam then honest (think DMA) spam is legitimized. And banning commercial speech alone won't make it because of the Constitution. It protects commercial speech much more than some people might think. Thus, it is bad to focus on...
(1) Content: Political or religious messages can still be spam, and any speech, commercial or not, has to be really, really bad before the Supreme Court will even start to think about unprotecting it. You'd have to prove Spam-speech is equivalent to "'fire!' in a crowded theater" or "riot right now" speech. Unlikely. Instead, focus on...
(2) "Bulk" because bulk is what causes damage. One bounced email: no problem. 100,000: big problem. Courts are likely to find that individually written emails, however annoying, aren't going to cause the damages of bulk - people just can't write that many in a day. Courts won't like punishing a person who wrote one letter ("Hi, I saw an article about you, you might be interested in my software..." is an unsolicited commercial email. Laws that ban it won't last very long.). "Bulk" makes a better brightline. If a spammer is caught breaking an ISP's contract, and claims the emails weren't bulk, easy perjury... Judge: "4 emails with boilerplate text after the first sentence. This isn't bulk?" Exceptionally stupid Spammer: "No."
(3) "From a stranger" for two reasons. One- its easier to prove that bulk email from strangers is inherently a burden. Email from all 200 businesses and 10 candidates you do know: irritating but not impossible to deal with, maybe not worth curbing speech. Email from all 29.9998 million businesses and ten thousand candidates you don't know (opt-outable or not): impossible. Two- if you voluntarily gave your email address out, courts might rule that caveat emptor trumps "punish them because their email annoys me."
Specific problems I see in their article:
(1)My definition: bulk email from a stranger. This definition catches damaging email, although not all annoying email. I think definitions that include content (i.e. "commercial" alone is bad), non-bulk email, or email from a pre-existing business relationship aren't good because laws based on them won't be upheld.
But the people the XXAA won't sue aren't the people the EFF exists to help. They started off helping a gaming BBS, not Atari (and in the big picture let the gov't understand that seizing an email BBS is just as bad as seizing an entire post office). They helped Bernstein (led to a better environment for hundreds of US encryption companies: if you work for one, make sure your company has donated). Not that they aren't helping professors, but it is more likely to be students who get thrown into jail.
I don't think it is "fear-mongering" to let people know what the XXAA *can* do, even if the XXAA won't do it for pragmatic reasons. Especially as each case brought by the XXAA changes the standard for who should worry-- they sue the least sympathetic groups first, and then work their way up. Perhaps the EFF needs to be more explicit: "Hey audience, if it is *possible* for sympathetic professors and researchers to be threatened, then it is *really likely* that you who don't have the same sympathy-factor (and access to teams of lawyers) will get hammered. "
Or $1.20 per hour of commercials (not the show) that the station gets paid by the advertisers for each viewer. My time is worth more than 2 cents a minute: I'm willing to pay that penny for each commercial I don't have to watch. The TV industry will have to learn to adapt, rather than force me to watch dreck for pennies. This essay by Brad Templeton (of the EFF) covers some possible business models TV could take.
"Dammit! We had to suffer, let them suffer too" seemed to be the reaction from older generations of doctors. Some anti-cryonics people seem to be saying the same thing "We had to accept death, we had to suffer, no one gets to try to skip it." But why should death after after 80 years (121 the longest provable lifespan) be acceptable? We are starting to know about how lifespan works, why not try to extend it? In the past, when death after a few decades was inevitable, societies needed to come up with rules and ideas that kept people from wigging out over death. But you don't need the exact same rules if death doesn't have to happen in the same way.
Maybe 50 years ago it was noble to teach a young child to accept their upcoming death by leukemia. Nowadays that would be considered almost child-abuse, because childhood leukemia has a 95%+ cure rate. I think it is terrible when a child suffers through years of chemo and cancer treatment only to die- I see little that is noble about it. but I see little that is noble about death for anyone, and I don't believe we should give in just because "thats the way it always was." Living to 80 would look good to people who could only expect 40 years, and I wouldn't have wanted my ancestors to say "we only got 40 years, why should you have more?" Why shouldn't I think that 160 is a fine goal for next generations of people?
And I doubt future generations of people will resent the frozen few to the point of refusing to treat them. Why? For the same reasons we today don't resent our "past generations" from getting heart transplants or stroke treatments. In part it might be pragmatic- refuse treatment for the elderly and you might not get treatment yourself- but I think mostly it is because we want to be kind. We don't tell people- "hey, you're eighty now, that's all you get, you have to die." I don't know that future people will say to the cryonically suspended "you lived 40 or 80 years, thats all you'll get."
Civilization would have to fall far for liquid nitrogen production to fail- you don't need electricity to keep the dewars cold, you just need to top them off each week.
The oldest of them are hitting college this year or last year: the first birth from a previously frozen embryo happened in 1984. So, we can freeze and bring back at least a few cells without water cracking them. Not the same thing as 70 trillion cells (100 billion of which containing intricate connections i.e. neurons), but its a start.
But I guess if you're a student you can get used to it- just sleep less. Once you've hit the age where all-nighters aren't possible anymore (not without getting a bad cold the next day), the all electronic office proposals can be a horror. I've met several Sun employees who still shudder at the virtual desk idea: same problems as the parent poster said. And it isn't just engineers who need to have multiple projects visible at the same time and/or overnight without having to clear their desk.
For the sake of the EFF I'm very glad that the ACLU is taking up this cause. The EFF has only so much money- far fewer people donate than you think- and money is their limiting resource: if they had more, they could take on more cases. Even with their limited budget (much, much smaller than the ACLU's) they fought the DMCA. Now they can move funds to equally important technology cases without fear that the DMCA is legally unopposed. Being ahead of the curve is expensive: you don't get the same sympathy donations from the general public. I've written it before: join the EFF so they'll be there (on principle *and* with enough funds) for You.
But why should marital status be known right away? This implies that some people cannot have a non-sexual conversation unless it is explicitly forbidden. And what to do about the polyamourous?
You have read Douglas Hofstadter's A Person Paper on Purity in Language? Cured my thinking that the issue didn't matter. Although in today's economy I wouldn't necessarily mind a title which let potential employers know I'm available. We just need a race-neutral word. Hi, I'm Nrs. Geekotourist!
I've been to many of their events and know people there: the EFF isn't rolling in money- quite the opposite. It really is a non-profit, and money is their limiting factor: more money = more cases they could take. Far fewer people donate than you'd think, including people who have directly benefited from their work (if you're at a US internet security or encryption company that hasn't donated, try to change that!). They try to be at or ahead of the curve on tech issues, and this means that its harder to get the grandparent sympathy donation(2). And their main donation source- us, the techie crowd- just hasn't been doing to well lately. Unfortunately the number of cases the EFF should fight doesn't go down in an economic downturn, its probably the opposite: Congress is chumming for dollars with Disney / MPAA more than ever.
(1) in the economics sense
(2) If the EFF was a medical nonprofit, they wouldn't be the ones with the big-eyed sick children, they'd be the ones worrying about prions 20 years ago. Harder to explain, but often more important.
I'll bet that when the XXAA starts suing individuals, they'll have done background checks to ensure the defendants are as unsympathetic as possible.
Microsoft builds in deliberate gaps and then hopes no one thinks to break through the thin screen covering that gap: in housing design, that'd be called a Window.
So if an exploit results from using a pre-designed gap, as compared to actually breaking through what was supposed to be good security, call it a security window.
I'd bet heavily that productivity (i.e. ability to find bugs, model a market, write a well crafted paragraph) goes down. Not hideously down, just enough to make great programmers merely good, and good programmers seek other employment.
Mixing phone people with keyboard people isn't nice. It makes the phone people feel guilty and rude, if they know the programmers, etc. are trying to meet deadlines. (And people who listen to their 19 voicemail messages by speakerphone: Dante has a 6th circle reservation just for you. It involves Muzak and a pair of 20 billion watt speakers, so Don't Do It. Thanks.) It makes the programmers jumpy- you never know when a beautiful train of thought and logic gets derailed on the "RING, RING...Hi! Glad you got Back to me on those trade show booth color quotes! Teal? Lets talk Blue!Blue Blue Blah Blah..." the next cubicle over. I've been in this situation, and it hurts.
And it ignores that paper is still a useful office object- crisp clear text that can be stared at for more than 1/2 hour without your eyes going numb, easy to spread out and cover with sticky notes...but no, you'll have to clean it up and put it away each night, regardless of sudden deadlines.
I'll bet even more heavily that they did only a Benefit estimate, not a Cost-Benefit estimate, when they came up with that $150 million figure. I doubt they'll study it at all.
Well, as Neal so aptly wrote (but darnitall he was making fun of them at the time, it wasn't supposed to be emulated):
So, just as daylight savings time supposedly reminds us to change our smoke detector batteries (because otherwise that annoying 'low battery' beeping always start at 4am), tiny earthquakes remind us about our earthquake kits and preparation. Includes...
And unless you live in Scottsdale, AZ, don't feel smug about the safety of your own location- St. Louis has had an 8.0, and New York State has seen 6.0's.
It is an extremely one sided system- as they unethically designed it to be (1). As many have pointed out, the system is set up to make you feel you cannot possibly fight it, given the unacceptable risk if you lose.(2) However, if you can find other cases where people have fought, and you see how they did it, you might have hope.
People need to know how bad it is for schools. Example: Slashdot on Microsoft / BSA vs the LA School District, (3) where "hundreds" of unlicensed copies were found. the threat was $150,000 fine for each copy of a $100 per license product. ($100 at best. 1/3 was MSDOS, and schools get very good rates). They "negotiate" down to a $300,000 total fine, and the school district probably felt very grateful for this kindness of the BSA.
This is a 150,000% fine negotiated down to a 1,000% fine. (or 1,500x down to 10x). How does the BSA get to levy fines so out of proportion to actual damages? Yes, illegal copies are a crime (as is speeding), but the LAUSD wasn't running a mass piracy operation. Assuming that "hundreds" = 500 copies found, then the LAUSD had found roughly 1 copy per school, or 1 copy per 120 employees. The BSA got to treat the LAUSD as if it had found widespread felonious behavior rather than a few years worth of a few people deliberately or mistakenly making copies. No proof of bad intentions needed.
Extraordinary fines should require extraordinary proof, but instead the BSA has you do all the work, and even if you are entirely innocent you can still get hit. Unless a mistake can cause extraordinary harm, you don't usually get to treat mistakes like a felony! What makes the BSA so special? They get to threaten fines in line with fines for damage to life and health. Is software piracy that much worse than discharging toxic substances into waterways (max fine $125,000)? Misbranding a drug in interstate commerce (max fine $100,000)? Violating the Sherman Antitrust Act (the fine listed in Section 3571 (d) is "not more than the greater of twice the gross gain or twice the gross loss" caused by the conduct...)?
The LAUSD is not a happy ending story- but this current story might be. A collection of all cases like it would be useful for anyone just receiving a dreadful BSA / Microsoft letter. The site should be part of a high-Google-rank site, so that it is easy to find (for non-technical folks). The database should also have easy to find links to all user groups, by geographical areas, so that anyone can quickly get advice / quotes / support.
(1) Because a good ethical system (think Categorical Imperative) includes consistency in applying rules. The BSA would never accept their rules applied to themselves: imagine a Software Consulting Association sending audit letters out checking for late payments to consultants. If you've paid a consultant more than 30 days late, you get fined 150,000% of the daily rate.
(2) You'll fight a traffic ticket because you can afford to lose. What if the original ticket was $100,000, with a "negotiated" fine of $1,000? This is extortion, not a negotiation- you'll accept whatever the court says. Not to mention if *you* had to show that you didn't speed, even a little bit, and lack of evidence = proof of guilt. And it took a minimum of 5 days in court and they get to dismantle your car and replace equipment to test its maximum speed! That is what these audits are: time consuming and they can place programs on your system.
(3) Also see Inside the BSA (2/02)
IHDAOS (I have done analysis of spam)
It is very likely not the ISP- the money they spend on help-desk complaint people would outweigh the cents received from a spammer.
Spammers will make up lists of names. If you are a john smith, you will get spam. period. Because their lists will have john.smith@X, johnsmith@, jsmith@, johns@... they take lists of the most common names and put together all possible variants. I've seen many cases where they forgot to BCC the list... "asmith, bsmith, csmith...aasmith, absmith..."
Unless your friend's email address is unguessable. Then its likely someone cracked into their system and got the list. Selling it? they'd have to be desparate idiots.
It is a proud and defiant ignorance allowed because the audience doesn't know better- they don't know of the SF books beyond the "Sword of Han Solo" serials on the NYTimes lists. The same reviewers would never review a modern comedy as "the tradition of Mark Twain and Charlie Chaplin" or a mystery as "part of the long history from Poe to Doyle." i.e. if it is another genre they'll have at least a basic knowledge of it: for example, that westerns went from simple ("Indians bad") to complex, and that other countries (Japan, Italy) are part of cowboy movie history. They'll know that Elvis isn't modern rock and Martha Graham isn't cutting edge dance. But with SF they'll use 40 year old movies as their example (in turn based on 60 year old stories/ideas, as SF movies tend to be far behind the literature) without embarrassment.
So what- let them be ignorant, some could say. But when reviewers don't know about or ignore modern SF, it hurts more than some thin-skinned fandom:
So I'll be happy to see (what I assume are at least good sellers) books like Dozois' Best SF Stories of the Year and more showing up. Reviewers will have to first account for the writers like Ian McDonald, the rapidly approaching (and hope he pulls it off) Singularity Charlie Stross, and just intensely good Greg Egan, before they blow off SF as spaceship-westerns.
I haven't read the book, and only a few of the reviews in Scientific American / other mags, but now I'll have to find the time. Of all the accusations, the one of misquoting is the worse one. Anyone can be bad at science or statistics and write about it- peer review will reveal the weaknesses and a good scientist will admit their mistake and go on. But misquotes makes someone else look bad- you've tied them to a strawman and they have to prove they aren't the strawman's maker while simultaneously demolishing it. You're forcing them to look defensive, even though, in fact, they have no reason to be defensive, because the misquote isn't their real argument.
A good review of quotations and misquotations used in arguments is in the proposed talk.origins (creation evolution) Misquotations FAQ.