human-nets@ucbvax.ARPA (11/09/84)
From: Charles McGrew (The Moderator) <Human-Nets-Request@Rutgers>
HUMAN-NETS Digest Thursday, 8 Nov 1984 Volume 7 : Issue 72
Today's Topics:
Computers and the Law - Computers go to college &
Lockpick and Piracy,
Computers in the Media - Hackers Vote!,
Computers and Health - VDT Sickness,
Computers and People - Direct Satellite Broadcasting &
Research for DoD,
Computer Networks - Cancelling Email,
Information - Seminar Announcement
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Date: 3 Nov 84 12:18:08 EST
From: Mel <Pleasant@RUTGERS.ARPA>
Subject: Computers go to college
The following article appeared in New Jersey's Newark Star Ledger on
Saturday, November 3rd:
* * * * * * *
When Gov. Thomas Kean submits his budget for the 1986-87
fiscal year, it is likely to contain funding to implement a
requirement that all new students to the state-run colleges
and Rutgers University must own a personal computer.
The Department of Higher Education already is exploring ways
in which to provide financial help to prospective students
who could not otherwise afford to purchase a microcomputer,
which, depending upon capacity and sophistication, can cost
between $1,000 and $5,000 for models that might meet approved
standards.
Equally important, a department memorandum anticipates the
development of new courses required by advances in
"information technologies," and proposes that all disciplines
from the arts and sciences be required to seek appropriate
incorporation of computers.
Let's face it. Society, is hard-pressed to deal with today's
information explosion. The computer is responsible for the
proliferation of available data, analysis and explanatory
matter. And it is the device which makes the profusion of
information manageable.
Students would be grievously disadvantaged in their quest for
education if they did not have the computer at their
fingertips. This is so because only the computer is able to
expedite the orderly retrieval of relevant information from
the data banks.
New Jersey education officials are among the first to
acknowledge the value of the computer as an essential tool
for college students by moving to require ownership by all
undergraduates, and unless other states begin to play
catch-up, New Jersey will be first in implementing the
requirement.
Two privately operated institutions, Drew University at
Madison and Stevens Institute of Technology at Hoboken,
already insist that their students own a computer. Adding
the state colleges and Rutgers University is in keeping with
Gov. Thomas Kean's efforts to upgrade education and, as an
additional benefit, will bolster New Jersey's claim to
leadership among the states in the high-technology
sweepstakes.
* * * * * * *
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Date: Tuesday, 6 Nov 1984 22:33:33-PST
From: goutal%parrot.DEC@decwrl.ARPA
To: self%parrot.DEC@decwrl.ARPA
Subject: Boebert's lawyer-friend's RFC
Well, I didn't see the option I'd like in the five extant options. I
would like a guarantee that I will be able to use a purchased piece of
software indefinitely and without interruption. I envision this as
being provided by the vendor according to the following rules:
I should pay full price for an original copy and the license to use
it. I should pay only for media and shipping for backup copies. I
should pay nothing for replacement copies -- not even shipping. (If
purchased at a local dealer, replace "shipping" with "markup".)
Basic mechanism is that every purchase includes a license, which I
fill out and send in. Duplicate licences cost nothing, or money back.
Thus, if I buy multiple copies initially, when I send in my licenses,
I get back the difference between purchase (or list) price and (media
cost + shipping). If I turn in my licenses to the dealer at the time
of sale (instead of mailing them in), I get the additional copies at
discount. If order a backup copy from the factory at a later date,
they will know that I have (or have not!) a license for its use, and I
will get my backup copy at the cost of media + shipping.
If I need a replacement, I need only surrender the defective copy. It
should be pretty obvious if it's an original or a rip-off. (Ignore
for the moment the notion of exact forgeries -- solutions are pretty
obvious.) If I bought the software on high-reliability media in the
first place, I get the replacement totally free; otherwise I may have
to pay a nominal handling charge, or media, or shipping, or some
combination thereof -- it's up to me (the market) how much I am
willing to pay for totally guaranteed media, and how much I'm willing
to pay for warrantee replacement copies.
Under such a system, there should be no need for Locksmith et al. Are
lock-picking tools illegal? If so, then we could ban Locksmith-type
packages on the same grounds. (Actually, it would probably still be
okay to use them if you were a registered software locksmith -- i.e.
someone registered/certified to bail out people whose media died.)
If Locksmith-type packages were banned from general use, the market
(vendors + buyers) could determine the details (incl. $$$) of the
general scheme described above.
-- Kenn Goutal
------------------------------
From: pur-ee!malcolm@Berkeley (Malcolm Slaney)
Date: 7 Nov 1984 0144-EST (Wednesday)
Subject: Media and the Hackers
Tonight on CBS's coverage of the national election results Diane
Sawyer made an interesting comment. After listing a number of
statistics about how the various voting blocks voted she said there
was one more small but interesting statistic.
CBS broke the vote down by those that owned or used computers (there
was a two to one margin) and concluded that the "hackers have spoken."
While I wouldn't call all people that own computers hackers, it is
nice to see the media not thinking of hackers as crooks.
Malcolm
------------------------------
Date: Fri, 2 Nov 84 12:35:49 EST
From: Brint <abc@BRL-TGR.ARPA>
Subject: VDT Sickness
I wonder if some of it isn't plain old "stress." Many VDT workers are
working to production quotas; claims examiners for Blue Cross and Blue
Shield come to mind. The VDT, being something of a novel phenomenon
even yet, may become the focus for something which has always been
there -- the stress of having to produce according to a tight
schedule.
Brint
------------------------------
Date: Tue 6 Nov 84 23:41:53-PST
From: Tom Dietterich <DIETTERICH@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: Re: cultural domination by TV (FLAME)
I can understand the concerns of those who fear the destruction of
their culture through television. I intend to postpone as long as
possible the exposure of my children to US commercial TV. I want my
kids to learn to read, write, think, and speak before they become
couch potatoes. Most programming on US commercial TV is a threat to
western culture.
--Tom
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Date: Tue, 6-Nov-84 22:56:01 PST
From: Lauren Weinstein <vortex!lauren@RAND-UNIX.ARPA>
Subject: direct satellite broadcasting
I have some difficulty understanding how this issue can be more, in
reality, than a paper tiger at this time. There are several points to
consider:
1) Many of the cultural areas that would be the most likely
to be targeted for direct broadcast satellite (DBS) transmissions
have very few television sets per capita, making this a
very expensive and ineffective method of disseminating information
to these areas.
2) Most current technology DBS systems require specialized
equipment (small dish antennas) and thus cannot be received on
the sort of television equipment that would be widely
available in *any* country.
3) Even if a DBS scheme that *could* broadcast to "standard"
television receivers without additional equipment *could* be
developed, such broadcasts could be trivially jammed by local
broadcast facilities at relatively low cost.
--Lauren--
------------------------------
Date: Wed 7 Nov 84 10:10:01-PST
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: Zauderer's DoD/CS Request
Three points about DoD-related CS research:
1) It is not in the interests of this nation to fall behind
the current state of technology.
2) Whether current technology is used for military purposes
is a political decision, and depends very little on what
the current technology is.
3) Much of the DoD's present research is aimed at achieving
military objectives without nuclear weapons (and possibly
without great loss of life). If the politicians insist
on having military objectives, at least this is the better
approach.
-- Ken Laws
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Date: Tue 6 Nov 84 23:58:10-PST
From: Mark Crispin <MRC@SU-SCORE.ARPA>
Subject: cancelling electronic mail
For the information of those readers who are not familiar
with TOPS-20's mailsystem, MM, I should document its delivery
characteristics. MM does not deliver mail itself; rather, it
queues the message to a system daemon. There is a "wakeup"
scheme by which the daemon, MMailr, has its incoming queue
request stream woken up. Because this stream does not attempt
network deliveries, it runs very quickly. It is not uncommon to
have a copy-to-self delivered before you get the next command
prompt in MM! There is also a once-only queue for network
deliveries which occasionally gets backlogged, but generally runs
through quite fast.
The overall result of all this is that it is virtually
impossible to do anything to cancel local delivery; it happens
too fast. Only if the recipient is over disk allocation would
the delivery be prevented. Network delivery can also happen
quite quickly too. In general, if the delivery agent has
reasonably high performance, cancelling mail is at best a chancy
proposition.
Additionally, many "please cancel" types of requests have
been for messages which made it off-site. The validation problem
where the sender is on one system and the queued message is on
another is quite hairy.
I firmly believe that the solution is for mail composition
agents to be less aggressive in sending messages without warning
-- that is an ergonomics issue -- and for human users to be more
thoughtful in sending their mail. The profession as a whole has
to grow up.
------------------------------
Date: 5 November 1984 20:40-EST
From: Steven A. Swernofsky <SASW @ MIT-MC>
Subject: [Henry: Seminar announcement]
From: <Henry at MIT-OZ>
Subject: Seminar announcement
There's More to Menu Systems Than Meets the Screen
Henry Lieberman
Thursday, 8 November, 1 PM
AI Playroom, 8th Floor, 545 Tech Sq., Cambridge
Love playing with those fancy menu-and-graphics systems, but afraid to
program one yourself? Are you scared of mice? Feel constrained by
TV:CONSTRAINT-FRAME-WITH-SHARED-IO-BUFFER?
Everyone agrees using these systems is fun, but programming them isn't
as much fun as it should be. Systems like the Lisp Machine provide
powerful graphics primitives and compute power, but the casual
applications designer who desires a simple, straighforward menu
interface is often stymied by the difficulty of mastering the details
of window specification, multiple processes, interpreting mouse input,
etc.
We present a kit for building simple interactive menu-based graphical
applications, called EZWin. Many such applications can be
conveniently described as generalized editors for sets of graphical
objects. An individual application is described simply by creating an
object to represent the application itself, objects to represent each
important kind of graphical object, and an object representing each
command.
The kit provides many common services needed by these systems. A
unique interaction style is established which is insensitive to
whether commands are chosen before or after their arguments.
Interactive type-checking of arguments to commands removes a common
source of frustrating errors. The system handles mouse sensitivity,
managing the selection of commands and arguments with the mouse
according to the current context.
The concepts will be illustrated with a description of how to
implement a simple diagramming system using EZWin.
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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