human-nets@ucbvax.ARPA (11/30/84)
From: Charles McGrew (The Moderator) <Human-Nets-Request@Rutgers>
HUMAN-NETS Digest Thursday, 29 Nov 1984 Volume 7 : Issue 78
Today's Topics:
Query - Assoc. for Women in Computing?,
Responses to Queries - Working at Home (2 msgs) &
Are books obsolete/Compact Disks (4 msgs),
Computers and People - USIA Satellite Broadcasting,
Computers and Security - Credit Card Fraud (2 msgs),
Computer Networks- Cancelling Group Email,
Computers and The Law - Unions and Choices
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Date: 26 Nov 1984 10:19-PST
Subject: AFWC?
From: Helaine R. Fehling <HFehling@USC-ECLC>
Does anyone have information regarding the Association For Women in
Computing? Please respond to me directly, as I'm not on this list.
Thanks
Helaine Fehling (HFehling@USC-ECLC.arpa)
------------------------------
Date: 23 November 1984 05:24-EST
From: Jerry E. Pournelle <POURNE @ MIT-MC>
Subject: "still more `n the unions"
To: reynolds @ AMES-NAS
I had never heard that it was against the rules; at Aerospace
Corp it was against rules to work on classified material at
home, but we were pretty well expected to take other stuff home.
jep
------------------------------
Date: Tue, 27 Nov 84 22:59 CST
From: RSaunders@HI-MULTICS.ARPA
Subject: Working at home
I am not a NASA employee, but to reply to Don Reynolds I would like to
relate Honeywell's version of the policy.
People are supposed to relax at home, not do work. Similarly people
are supposed to take vacation days and not work on them either.
The reason for this is that you get burned out if you work 60 hour
weeks for years at a time. Even work-aholics can get burnt out, and
burnt out employees that know a lot about how we do business are hard
to replace. Second reason, we bid government contracts based on
actual results of previous contracts. If you do lots of work at home,
and don't record it, you mess up the records and cause us to underbid
future work, impacting our profitability.
These two reasons lead to a policy where you can work at home or at
the beach as long as you get your work done and accurately report your
time. I suspect that NASA is opting for the simpler approach of
keeping track of when you are at work, as opposed to working at the
beach, and equates time at work to time working by ordering you not to
work anywhere else.
Randy Saunders
------------------------------
Date: 23 November 1984 05:23-EST
From: Jerry E. Pournelle <POURNE @ MIT-MC>
Subject: Are books obsolete?
To: DIETZ @ RUTGERS
your numbers are off although your ideas are right. I have just
done my Popular Computing column on this.
it is: 500 megabytes of data; access time 1/2 second average and
1 second maximum; can combine movies, animation, voice and
sound, programs, and written data. Cost of disk, you supply
tape of data to go on it, $5.00 in quantity 10,000. The Library
Of The Month club is here.
It is: all the text in the Britannica on one disk if you
ognore illustrations; or one volume on each disk if all
illustrations are to be included (with some to spare).
There is also a write once disk that YOU may write to;
cost of disk $60, cost of drive under $1,000 available this
summer.
The micro revolution moves on...
jerry pournelle
------------------------------
Date: 27 Nov 84 14:35:47 EST
From: DIETZ@RUTGERS.ARPA
Subject: More info. on Compact Disks
New Scientist (11/15/84, page 27) has a news item on compact disks.
3M has purchased a CD manufacturing facility from Philips and will
install it in Wisconsin. The plant will begin making CD ROMs in
March, 1985, and will be the largest such facility in the western
world.
Polygram, partly owned by Philips, plans to introduce CD's with
compressed sound, sotring 22 hours of low quality mono (vs. 74 minutes
of high quality stereo on current CD's). About half the storage will
be used for audio, the rest for control, teletext or simple pictures.
3M's CD ROM has a 600 megabyte capacity, divided into 99 sections,
each of which is further subdivided into 99 subsections. Seek time is
1 second.
------------------------------
From: Mike Meyer <mtxinu!ea!mwm@Berkeley>
Date: 27 Nov 1984 15:29-CST (Tuesday)
Subject: CD-ROM
Sony & Phillips (the developers of the Compact Disk) have agreed on a
data format for CD. You get one side, which will hold ~550 MBytes
after formatting (lots of error correction info. I've seen 1.6 Gig
estimates for an unformatted CD). I'm not sure if you could use both
sides of one for data, but don't expect it to happen.
The current CDs are read-only (hence CD-ROM), with some write-once
systems available. Supposedly, read/write CD type devices will be
available by the end of the decade.
<mike
------------------------------
Date: 28 Nov 84 16:39:03 EST
From: DIETZ@RUTGERS.ARPA
Subject: Sony CD ROM player
The Nov. 26 issue of Electronic News has a short article on the Sony
CD ROM player. It stores 540 MB and costs $300 in OEM quantities
(10000 to 15000). Disk manufacturing costs $170/disk in quantities of
100, dropping to $5/disk in quantities of 10,000. Sony will make the
disks in Terre Haute, Indiana, starting in early 1985. Average data
transfer rate for the disks is 150K bytes per second, and block to
block access time is 50 ms.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 23 Nov 84 14:55:10 EST
From: Brint <abc@BRL-TGR.ARPA>
Subject: USIA
The argument about whether USIA should engage in direct broadcast
by satellite misses the point. Those who find the jingoism of current
officials distasteful (and I'm sympathetic) should seek avenues to
modify the image being put forth by USIA. But to deny USIA the
opportunity to tell our story on an equal technological footing with
countries who follow other idologies is foolish. Certainly, even the
most liberal among us would rather have Ronald Regan than Constantin
Cherenko describing life in the United States!
Brint
------------------------------
Date: Fri 23 Nov 84 10:59:34-EST
From: Larry Seiler <Seiler@MIT-XX.ARPA>
Subject: Don't give your credit card number to strangers?
To: rem@MIT-MC.ARPA
There are many problems involving money transactions that computer
people understand, because to make our computers work, we had to find
solutions to them. Security of data is one. Receiving confirmation
that something has happened is another. Imagine if distributed
resources on computers were treated like checks: you give a command to
copy a file over the network and your terminal locks up for 5 days.
Then, if at the end of 5 days there is no message that it failed, the
system informs you that the file copy must have succeeded. Hmm,
that's much like electronic mail works right now. Guess we'd better
fix that.
Larry Seiler
------------------------------
Date: 27 Nov 1984 11:37:22-EST
From: york at scrc-vixen at mit-mc
Subject: credit card fraud
To: rem@mc@mit-mc
Date: 21 Nov 1984 1223-PST
From: Rem@IMSSS
Subject: Security of physical & electronic
According to a TV news story today, criminals can forge credit
cards from just the info on the carbons that are thrown away when a
purchase is made in a store. The story gave the advice that you
should never give your credit card number to a stranger. Well it
seems to me this advice means you can't ever use your credit card.
There is a lot of this sort of advice going around. It is
important to remember that you ARE NOT RESPONSIBLE for
unauthorized uses of your credit card. If someone uses your
credit card account number to order 10,000 Ronco
in-the-shell egg scramblers and the merchant accepts the
order, you do not have to pay any of the charged amount or
any penalties. The problem is between your bank and the
merchant. This places the financial motivation to improve
credit card security where it will do the most good. Of
course, there is a cost to society in that everyone pays
higher prices due to theft losses, but the individual does
not directly bear the brunt of these losses.
------------------------------
Date: Fri 23 Nov 84 14:48:28-EST
From: Larry Seiler <Seiler@MIT-XX.ARPA>
Subject: Cancelling Email - a 3 dimensional problem
There are (at least) three separate concerns to address when
considering cancelling electrinic mail. Two of the issues, technical
feasability and privacy protection, have been discussed widely. I
will only add that on many systems it is already possible to find out
when a user last logged in (and where), when mail was last read, and
whether mail is pending (and from whom) through standard utilities
such as finger and whois. So privacy is part of a much larger issue
than cancelling Email and should be discussed separately.
The third issue comes up when messages are sent to a group of users as
part of a distributed discussion such as this one. Recently on
info-micro, there has been a spate of messages arguing for and against
points made in a message that I have never seen. Apparently, it was
sent on uucp and (a week after the replies started coming in) hasn't
found its way onto the arpanet yet. If it ever comes, maybe I'll
figure how the whole silly argument got started by mentally inserting
the message in its proper position. But what if the message was
cancelled? Don't I have a right to see it, since other people in the
discussion have seen it and replied to it?
On the other hand, I recently sent a message to Human-Nets and later
asked the moderator not to publish it, on the grounds that other
people have already made all the points I was trying to make (and
better than me). This worked; you aren't going to see the message.
In this case, mail cancellation does not disrupt the human-nets
descussion, since no one received the message.
I feel that it is good to be able to cancel messages, on the grounds
that computers should help people to correct their mistakes, instead
of being unforgiving. How far a message should be allowed to go
before being cancelled is largely a technical issue. But if a message
is sent to several recipients and later cancelled, I think that in
those cases where the message was not caught in time, those recipients
should get a second message informing them that the first was
cancelled. So, if you send a message and decide to cancel it quickly
enough, nobody sees it. If some people do get the message, then they
also receive a retraction notice, so they know the author didn't mean
for the message to get through and that not everyone may have seen it.
Since I am talking about Email, one last point. How about putting a
true "registered letter" mode into mailers? The way this would work
is that I get a return message when the original message is
"delivered" to the recipient. "Delivery" could mean either that the
recipient has touched the message in some way, or that the message had
been placed in a local mail file somewhere. Both definitions have
their uses, although the former is harder to implement. I think
anyone who has sent an important message though multiple hosts, only
to find out a week later that some gateway is down and it has finally
been dequeued and returned, would agree that this would be a nice
feature to have.
Larry Seiler
------------------------------
From: ihnp4!utzoo!henry@Berkeley
Date: 21 Nov 84 00:19:55 CST (Wed)
Subject: more on unions
> ... If you think that
> people who are abused are accomplices by allowing it to happen, then
> you should cheer unions, which are victims banding together to stop
> abuse. ...
On the whole I agree with you, but for one significant error: the verb
in the last clause should be "were", not "are". The big problem with
unions is the destructive effects they have on an industry *after* the
abuses have been corrected.
>From another author:
> It seems to me that preventing your workers from becoming unable to
> work because of a disease would cause a rise in productivity, more
> than "corresponding" to a process which costs "a couple of
> bucks"....
But why bother? When the workers get sick, just fire them and hire
new ones. That's the way things work in unskilled jobs when there is
a labor surplus and no external restraints. The simplest way to keep
productivity high in a worker-hostile environment is a steady stream
of fresh workers.
> All union "achievements" I've heard off are such that the answer to
> some of the above questions would make them look like not-so-great
> achievements after all. ...
While there is no doubt that unions have destroyed entire industries
with their greed and callousness, it is also true that they have ended
major abuses resulting from the greed and callousness of management.
The problem is how to get the beneficial effects without the negative
side effects. Some sort of "sunset law" for unions might be useful; I
would conjecture that any specific union generally accomplishes most
of its desirable effects relatively early in its history.
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 23 Nov 84 15:57:32 -0200
From: eyal%wisdom.BITNET@Berkeley (Eyal mozes)
To: Haas@utah-20.ARPA
Subject: Re: unions for the underprivileged
> so as far as I can see pumping a small amount of water next to
> the drill would have been pretty trivial. there was a large pool of
> cheap labor available, plus intense competition between mines, which
> gave an incentive to cut costs any way possible.
> One way to cut costs is, of course, to force somebody else to pay
> them, and the owners did exactly that by giving the miners minimal
> protection against silicosis.
a) Aren't you contradicting yourself? If pumping the water was
'pretty trivial', how could avoiding it help to cut costs?
b) If there was a large pool of cheap labor available, then making it
less cheap (which is exactly what MESA did) had to result in part of
it remaining unused - i.e., in unemployment for thousands of miners.
Which takes us back to my first message - unions can only benefit some
workers at the expense of others.
> The first mining unions were
> attacked by the local militia and had their leaders executed.
If this is true, then the solution is neither MESA nor union laws; The
simple solution, and the only way to protect everybody's rights, was
to enforce the laws forbiding violence on either side, without any
special legal priviledges to the unions. This is still the solution
today. The unions, of course, never liked this solution.
> One thing interesting to speculate on, for the future of my local
> society: When the miners started to unionize, they were a motely
> crew of different nationalities and ethnic groups. They had a
> strong economic incentive to band together, and I suspect that
> learning to do this set much of the tone of our social tradition of
> getting along with various groups. Now that the economic incentive
> is reduced, I wonder if we will continue to value this, or will we
> end up Balkanized?
Here, you're completely wrong. A capitalistic society
gives people a strong incentive to get along with each other,
since they need each other as workers, customers, etc. ( The
economist Thomas Sowell devoted several of his books to this
phenomenon). In a mixed economy, however, with many laws
(including union laws) giving special priviledges to some at
the expense of others, people come to regard each other as a
threat (look, for example, at the way immigrants are regarded
in the U.S.A. today). So if you want to avoid balkanization,
one step in the right way would be repealing the union laws.
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 23 Nov 84 14:49:01 EST
From: Brint <abc@BRL-TGR.ARPA>
Subject: Choices
The notion that factory workers, for example, had a plethora of
choices in employment during pre-union days in the U.S. sounds like
history the way someone wishes it were. I never learned about
employers, in that era, competing for employees by offering them
better packages. Unless I'm severely misguided, it seems that long
hours, low pay, no fringes, and firing without just cause were more
prevalent before than after unions. I wonder if those who argue
otherwise can cite references?
Brint
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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