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 ---------------------------------------------------------------------- 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. * * * * * * * ------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------ 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 ------------------------------ 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. ------------------------------ End of HUMAN-NETS Digest ************************