human-nets@ucbvax.ARPA (11/10/84)
From: Charles McGrew (The Moderator) <Human-Nets-Request@Rutgers>
HUMAN-NETS Digest Friday, 9 Nov 1984 Volume 7 : Issue 74
Today's Topics:
Computers and the Law - Copyrights and Piracy (3 msgs),
Coputers and People - Research and the DoD (2 msgs) &
Direct Satellite Broadcasting (2 msgs) &
Unions,
Computer Networks - Cancelling E-mail,
Computers and Health - VDT-disease,
Information - Expert Systems Symposium
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Date: 9 November 1984 02:55-EST
From: Jerry E. Pournelle <POURNE @ MIT-MC>
Subject: copyright laws
To: Haas @ UTAH-20
I have a more compelling argument: I know where they are keeping
about $100 K worth of rare books under inadequate security; it
would be no trick at all to steal them, sell for $75K (for quick
turnover) and buy the software...
Date: Sun 4 Nov 84 20:38:16-MST
From: The alleged mind of Walt <Haas at UTAH-20.ARPA>
To: HUMAN-NETS
Re: copyright laws
One friend of mine is planning to purchase a personal computer,
and we were discussing what kind. I was advocating a certain
system based on its technical merits, but she had a compelling
argument in favor of another system: She knew where she could copy
$20k worth of software free.
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Date: 9 November 1984 02:56-EST
From: Jerry E. Pournelle <POURNE @ MIT-MC>
Subject: more copyright
To: TREITEL @ SUMEX-AIM
Cc: bmg @ MIT-XX, boebert @ HI-MULTICS, asp @ MIT-OZ
all impractical and unenforcable.
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Date: Fri, 9 Nov 84 13:37 CST
From: Boebert@HI-MULTICS.ARPA
Subject: Boebert's lawyer friend's RFC
Boebert does not have, and never has had, a lawyer friend. The RFC
came from elsewhere.
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Date: 9 Nov 1984 0002-PST
From: Rem@IMSSS
Subject: Military-related work?
I see two problems with working for possibly-military research at a
university or elsewhere:
(1) if the work is obviously useful primarily for conducting war, for
example if you are working directly on a weapons system;
(2) if the work is classified secret either before or after the work
is done, so that you cannot publish it, so that even though it may
have both military and commercial/personal use, it cannot be used
for anything except military because of its classification.
The solution is to not work on anything that is obviously a military
application, and to insist from the employer the right to publish. To
make sure the employer doesn't change the rules after you've done the
work, make copies of all the results and distribute them to other
people whom you trust so there's no way to call them all back later.
When working for a private company there's a problem with (2) that in
general good new work constitutes trade secrets, which you can't
publish or distrubute to non-employees. In such cases, instead of
insisting on publishing, make sure the work is actually used in some
commercial device that isn't sold exclusively to the military.
------------------------------
From: ihnp4!utzoo!henry@Berkeley
Date: 8 Nov 84 23:33:36 CST (Thu)
Subject: Re: Research for DoD -- A Moral Problem?
It seems to me that this is the wrong question. The question is not
who's funding the research, but what the research is about. Whether
your work will be used for what you consider immoral purposes is not
really a question of who pays the bills. If something looks useful
to DoD, they will use it regardless of who funded it.
Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology
{allegra,ihnp4,linus,decvax}!utzoo!henry
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Date: Thursday, 8 Nov 1984 07:18:51-PST
From: redford%doctor.DEC@decwrl.ARPA
Subject: re: cultural domination
We've already seen one case of Western cultural domination having
a harmful effect in the Nestle baby formula scandal. African mothers
were so taken by Nestle's advertising that they gave up breast feeding
their infants and fed them formula instead. Since the formula was
often diluted and in unsanitized bottles, this caused a lot of health
problems. After years of pressure and boycotts from various groups,
Nestle finally withdrew their advertising campaigns. The whole point
of advertising is to manipulate people's buying habits. It's as
direct a form of cultural domination that you can find, and in this
case it caused some harm.
Nevertheless, I support the right of the United States Information
Agency (USIA) to broadcast news to other countries. The reason is
that there is a difference between news and propaganda (advertising is
commercial propaganda). Real news is as objective as possible. There
may be biases in it, but they are not deliberately introduced.
Propaganda is deliberately slanted towards one point of view.
Negative events are ignored, positive ones are played up, and opinions
are presented as facts. Its producers do not want to give their
audience an accurate view of the world; they want to present one
favorable to their cause.
Small countries are right to be wary of propaganda, because it is
a form of political manipulation. It's as if foreign agents were
going among their people whispering things in their ears. News, on
the other hand, is only feared by dictators. Only governments that
are afraid of letting their people know the truth are afraid of
genuine news programs. To the extent that the USIA is dispensing news
and not what the US (or Reagan) want people to hear, it is doing a
service to these countries.
It is also doing a service to America. If the USIA broadcasts
come to be seen as propaganda rather than truth, then its listeners
will not trust them. Eventually they will not trust anything that the
US says or does. Our best policy is to tell the unvarnished truth
both about what we do and what other countries do. If we are so
dubious of our own policies that we think they need to be warped for
foreign consumption, then we should improve the policies, not warp the
news. Politicizing the USIA would lead to both its exclusion from
many countries and to a drop in its effectiveness.
John Redford
DEC-Hudson
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Date: 9 November 1984 02:38-EST
From: Jerry E. Pournelle <POURNE @ MIT-MC>
Subject: direct satellite broadcasting
To: vortex!lauren @ RAND-UNIX
lauren, you are trying to inject rationality and sanity into a highly
emotional debate. Shame on you.
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Date: 09 Nov 84 09:37:56 UT (Fri)
Subject: Unions..
From: Nkb%maths.nott.ac.uk@ucl-cs.arpa
As you may have seen on your news, over here we're having a few
problems of our own with labour unions - particularly the Miners. With
reference to the message about unions dominating their membership -
quote from the BBC 9 o'clock news last night (Thurs), from a striking
miner outside another mining branch headquarters as a vote over
whether or not to go back to work was been taken: "I'm quite happy for
them to vote over whether or not to strike - that's democracy isn't
it? As long as they vote to stay out." Democracy it isn't - whether or
not you agree with the principle of the strike, its difficult to
justify the intimidation of those who don't. Personally I couldn't
believe my ears.
(By the way, the vote was to stay out, by a 9 vote majority -
with 69 [I think] working miners abstaining - possibly from fear of
harrasment by the large contingent of working miners who turned out to
'persuade' the voters to stay on strike)
Neil.
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Date: Thu 8 Nov 84 03:13:14-EST
From: Michael Rubin <RUBIN@COLUMBIA-20.ARPA>
Subject: cancelling electronic mail: human factors
A lot of mail-that-needs-to-be-canceled seems to be misdirected
replies (e.g. to an entire newsgroup instead of an individual
posting, or vice versa). Some of these might disappear if mail
programs actually told you where the reply was going before they sent
it. (MRC, if you're listening -- would that be an easy patch to MM?)
Similarly, some mail programs encourage sending half-finished messages
because the "finish entering message and send immediately" command is
easy to type by accident (ESC in Twenex BBOARD used to do this, and
^X^S in EMACS-under-MM still does).
Yesterday at the Sun Users' Group meeting in Boston, somebody from
{CMU? Purdue? not sure} talked about an experimental mail program
called Dragon Mail that knew about things like running conversations,
so it could separate messages into logical groups and show you which
messages had already been answered by somebody else. He claimed this
avoided the problem of replying to the first message in your mailbox
only to find that it was immediately followed by 27 answering messages
which changed the topic completely. Unfortunately it speaks only to
other Dragon Mail's (it adds Internet headers for net mailing only,
and removes them again at the other end)... foo!
In other words, much of this cancelling problem is the fault of user
interface brain-damage, not facilities lacking in the postal system.
(BTW, is there a reasonable UNIX mail program anywhere? Vax and Sun
users here are forwarding their mail to their -20 accounts because
they refuse to put up with mail(1)'s stupidity.)
------------------------------
Date: 8 Nov 1984 2317-PST
From: Rem@IMSSS
Subject: VDT-disease differences between terminals
I started having neck cramps/stiffness about the time my Beehive 3a
stopped working and I had to switch to a borrowed Datamedia Elite
2500. I suspect the problem is jitter due to different power supply in
video or different phosphor, or more lines per screen (24 now,
formerly 20) causing stress trying to differentiate the many close
lines or follow them from margin to margin. The problem in industry
with "VDT disease" may be that there are such differences between
terminals and the industry has opted for the bad version in many
cases. Perhaps with terminal emulators put between the terminals and
the machines, so that any kind of physical terminal can look like any
other kind of terminal to the operating system, it would be easy to
substitute various kinds of physical terminals and see if employees
have less "VDT disease" with kinds/brands other than what they
presently use?
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Date: 5 Nov 1984 14:17:36 EST (Monday)
From: Marshall Abrams <abrams@mitre>
Subject: Call for papers: Expert Systems Symposium
To: add1:@mitre
Call for Papers
Expert Systems in Government Conference
October 23-25, 1985
THE CONFERENCE objective is to allow the developers and implementers
of expert systems in goverenment agencies to exchange information and
ideas first hand for the purpose of improving the quality of existing
and future expert systems in the government sector. Artificial
Intelligence (AI) has recently been maturing so rapidly that interest
in each of its various facets, e.g., robotics, vision, natural
language, supercomputing, and expert systems, has acquired an
increasing following and cadre of practitioners.
PAPERS are solicited which discuss the subject of the conference.
Original research, analysis and approaches for defining expert
systems issues and problems such as those identified in the
anticipated session topics, methodological approaches for analyzing
the scope and nature of expert system issues, and potential
solutions are of particular interest. Completed papers are to be no
longer than 20 pages including graphics and are due 1 May 1985.
Four copies of papers are to be sent to:
Dr. Kamal Karna, Program Chairman
MITRE Corporation W852
1820 Dolley Madison Boulevard
McLean, Virginia 22102
Phone (703) 883-5866
ARPANET: Karna @ Mitre
Notification of acceptance and manuscript preparation instructions
will be provided by 20 May 1985.
THE CONFERENCE is sponsored by the IEEE Computer Society and The
MITRE Corporation in cooperation with The Association for Computing
Machinery, The american Association for Artificial Intelligence and
The American Institute of Aeronautics and Astronautics National
Capital Section. This conference will offer high quality technical
exchange and published proceedings.
It will be held at Tyson's Westpark Hotel, Tysons Corner, McLean,
VA, suburban Washington, D.C.
TOPICS OF INTEREST
The topics of interest include the expert systems in the following
applications domains (but are not limited to):
1. Professional: Accounting, Consulting, Engineering,
Finance, Instruction, Law, Marketing,
Management, Medicine
Systems, Intelligent DBMS
2. Office Automation: Text Understanding, Intelligent
3. Command & Control: Intelligence Analysis, Planning,
Targeting, Communications, Air Traffic
Control
4. Exploration: Space, Prospecting, Mineral, Oil
Archeology
5. Weapon Systems: Adaptive Control, Electronic Warfare,
Star Wars, Target Identification
6. System Engineering: Requirements, Preliminary Design,
Critical Design, Testing, and QA
7. Equipment: Design Monitoring, Control, Diagnosis,
Maintenance, Repair, Instruction
8. Project Management: Planning, Scheduling, Control
9. Flexible Automation: Factory and Plan Automation
10. Software: Automatic Programming, Specifications,
Design, Production, Maintenance and
Verification and Validation
11. Architecture: Single, Multiple, Distributed Problem
Solving Tools
12. Imagery: Photo Interpretation, Mapping, etc.
13. Education: Concept Formation, Tutoring, Testing,
Diagnosis, Learning
14. Entertainment and Intelligent Games, Investment and
Expert Advice Giving: Finances, Retirement, Purchasing,
Shopping, Intelligent Information
Retrieval
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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