human-nets@ucbvax.ARPA (10/24/84)
From: Charles McGrew (The Moderator) <Human-Nets-Request@Rutgers>
HUMAN-NETS Digest Tuesday, 23 Oct 1984 Volume 7 : Issue 65
Today's Topics:
Query - Cancelling Electronic Mail,
Response to Query - Internet Size,
Computer Networks - BoA Homebanking (2 msgs),
Computers and People - Electronic Democracy (5 msgs)
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Date: Mon 22 Oct 84 01:43:22-PDT
From: Mark Crispin <MRC@SU-SCORE.ARPA>
Subject: cancelling electronic mail
Here's a topic for conversation: cancelling electronic mail.
Should users of an email system be allowed to cancel pending
electronic mail messages that they sent? If so, why? If not, why
not?
My personal belief as the developer of a major mailsystem is that
users should not be allowed to cancel their pending messages. The
postal system disallows this, and for good reason (other than the
obvious practical ones). I feel that the possibility of message
cancellation will only lead to more irresponsibility in electronic
mail sending. People should be aware that once they say "send this
message" it is out of their control, and should always carefully
consider the consequences of their actions.
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Date: Sun, 21 Oct 84 05:18:55 cdt
From: decvax!genrad!harvard!uwvax!geowhiz!karsh@uwvax.ARPA
To: uwvax!harvard!wjh12!genrad!decvax!ucbvax!human-nets
Subject: Re: HUMAN-NETS Digest V7 #58
In reply to Andy Beals comment that there are 100k users of the nets
and thats 1/2 the country. The population of the US is over 200
million.
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Date: Sun, 21 Oct 84 05:18:48 cdt
From: decvax!genrad!harvard!uwvax!geowhiz!karsh@uwvax.ARPA
To: uwvax!harvard!wjh12!genrad!decvax!ucbvax!human-nets
Subject: Re: HUMAN-NETS Digest V7 #57
In-reply-to: your article <2446@ucbvax.ARPA>
I guess that there probably has already been too much discussion of
the union-homework issue already, but I just wanted to make one point:
Unions are supposed to protect labor. Software designers are
normally considered management. I see no problem with management
working at home. God knows they have always had to work at home, even
before computers. But I see big problems of exploitation of workers
when they do piecework at home.
Unions have their place. Does anybody think its a good idea to go
back to the days of non-unionized worker exploitation? Hasn't anybody
read Upton Sinclair's "The Jungle", or similar works from the
pre-union days.
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Date: Mon 22 Oct 84 01:38:58-PDT
From: Mark Crispin <MRC@SU-SCORE.ARPA>
Subject: Bank of America Homebanking
I've been a user of Homebanking for almost a year now, and I think it
is fantastic. As I do a great many financial transactions, I am
almost at the point where I am recovering the $8/month service charge
in the postage I save (yes, that would be 32 electronic checks/month).
There are rumors that soon you'll be able to add arbitrary payees
(e.g. your landlord) so there would be virtually no reason to use
paper checks at all.
There is another VERY valuable thing about Homebanking payments as
opposed to ordinary checks. In your monthly statement, instead of
saying "check number 249 for $49.59" it would say "payment to PG&E for
$49.59". It makes recordkeeping MUCH more unified.
I also save, on the average, about 10 trips to the ATM/month whose
purpose was solely to do balance inquiries or to make credit card
payments.
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Date: 22 Oct 84 2333 PDT
From: Robert Maas <REM@SU-AI.ARPA>
Subject: BofA homebanking
Perhaps BofA needs to modularized their software into a layered design
where the user interface is clearly separate from the data-access and
security innerds. They can provide a direct interface (JSYS/UUO/SVC
etc.) for various kinds of locally-provided user interfaces, as well
as a network protocol for user interfaces on remote computers to
access the database. They can experiment with several designs of
local interface while permitting hackers (expert&original computer
programmers) to develop their own user interfaces on their home or
small-business computers and perhaps eventually provide a value-added
service (split the profit with BofA).
But I doubt BofA would do this kind of thing in the near future.
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Date: 20 Oct 84 16:54:12 EDT
From: DIETZ@RUTGERS.ARPA
Subject: Electronic Democracy
I discussed the electronic proxy idea some months ago on POLI-SCI.
Buying proxy's votes: sure, why note? In fact, i'd expect the proxies
to charge for the service they provide, and you'd be able to switch
proxies at any time. A proxy who voted against his customers intent
would quickly go out of business. The problem with the current system
is that I can't switch proxies, so if he's bought by someone else, I'm
screwed.
Steps to electronic democracy: Once personal computers are
sufficiently abundant and networked I'd expect some enterprising
congressman to announce that he'd poll his constituents to decide how
to vote on all important issues. This could be very popular with the
voters. If this system catches on the elected representatives will
serve only to introduce bills, not vote on them. If people don't want
to be bothered to vote on everything congress does they could send
their congressman a multiple choice summary of their politcal
position, or use a proxy. The important thing to realize is this
system could be adopted with no constitutional amendments (the
compliance of individual congressmen would have to be voluntary).
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Date: Sat, 20 Oct 1984 17:07 EDT
From: ASP%MIT-OZ@MIT-MC.ARPA
To: "Ralph W. Hyre Jr." <RALPHW@MIT-XX.ARPA>
Subject: Electronic Democracy proposal (V7 #62)
As far as writing your Congressman for 'free' goes, how about going
one further and letting everyone read his mail? This would allow
interested parties to debate (?) each other in the poor
Representative's inbox, promote some free exchange of ideas among his
constituency, and generally stir things up. (It might be worth
implementing some kind of screening system so that some PAC doesn't
flood the medium with 200,000 identical "I'm against postage stamps
and I vote" messages, but this shouldn't be too hard for the
message-processor to deal with.)
In some ways this isn't all that different from the idea of a
discussion group that includes a huge part of the American people, the
principal distinction being that the system is divided up into 435
geographical regions, but it seems that this division would make it a
bit more realizable.
--Jim
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Date: Sat, 20 Oct 84 18:36:54 PDT
From: David Booth <booth@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA>
Subject: Electronic Democracy -- Proxies vs. representatives
Re: People might become proxies just for the money
Proxies should be paid based on how many people they represented, but
not necessarily proportionately. There should probably be a ceiling,
or the pay should taper off at the top.
Proxies who represented many people should be paid enough to live
comfortably. Otherwise, only the rich could afford to be proxies,
since being a proxy would involve significant time spent researching
issues and voting.
Re: Proxies acting in their own interest -- not their
constituents'
This is similar to the problem we currently have with representatives,
but there are some important differences. For one, once elected,
we're stuck with representatives. There's no way we can revoke our
votes, as many people probably wished during Nixon's Watergate months.
Second, with a proxy system, if we felt particularly strongly about an
upcoming issue, we could bypass the proxy and vote ourselves. Third,
we would have a much wider range of possible proxies than we do of
representatives.
-- David Booth
{sdcrdcf,ihnp4,trwspp,ucbvax}!ucla-cs!booth booth@ucla-locus.ARPA
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Date: Sat, 20 Oct 84 22:04:53 pdt
From: wildbill@Berkeley (William J. Laubenheimer)
Subject: Re: HUMAN-NETS Digest V7 #62
> From: David Booth <booth@UCLA-LOCUS.ARPA>
> Could the members of the house and senate also be eliminated? How
> could bills be introduced without them? Could the PRESIDENT be
> eliminated?
Let's try this on for size: A couple of Warsaw Pact tank divisions
cross the East German and Czechoslovakian borders, headed for the
Rhine valley. Moscow posts a message on the GovNet for all the
proxies, saying,
From: kremvax!ivan
Subject: Invasion of Germany
We are currently engaged in the process of assisting our
brothers in Marxism-Leninism of the German Democratic Republic
in reclaiming their rightful territory from the capitalist
imperialists of the so-called Federal Republic of Germany. We
request that you not interfere with this action.
After three days of arguing between the "Nuke the d*** Russkies out of
existence" and the "Let'em have Germany, they're just a bunch of
Nazis" factions, a consensus is hammered out and the Army is allowed
to begin their counterforce operation. Of course, by this time a
tactical nuke has taken out Wiesbaden, most of the smaller bases have
been overrun and captured, and the President of Germany lives in
Berlin.
-----
The point of all this is that there are some decisions that just can't
wait. Frequently these are also among the touchiest decisions. In the
interest of getting these decisions made, the size of the body making
the decision should be small; it's a lot easier to get 5 people to
agree on something than 435 or several thousand. So you'd better have
a committee of proxies in charge of the armed forces. But I thought
the whole point of this was that the proxies were distinguishable only
by the number of people they represent. Say you only have one proxy
deciding what you do with the armed forces. What do you call him?
Commander-in-Chief? I call him the President.
I think it makes sense to have one person whom we trust to make the
tough decisions the world forces upon us in a way which, if not the
way we would make those decisions ourselves, is at least not grossly
unacceptable to us. Often, doing anything is far more productive than
doing nothing, which seems to be exactly what this system is oriented
towards: a very small number of excellent decisions, arrived at after
a great deal of time.
Bill Laubenheimer
UC-Berkeley Computer Science
ucbvax!wildbill
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Date: Sun 21 Oct 84 14:28:19-PDT
From: Richard Treitel <TREITEL@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: Re: HUMAN-NETS Digest V7 #63
Re: proxies, and "money is power"
I don't like the idea of proxies being instantly recallable: all it
takes is one nasty rumour, started by some enemy, and an otherwise
good and useful representative can lose most of their power in a day
or two (or, be forced to waste most of their time responding to such
rumours). I'm also uneasy about starting on a small scale: I don't
think such ideas would necessarily scale well from local, presumably
fairly homogeneous, communities up to national level. However, these
are implementation problems; I'm in favour of some proxy-like system,
but let me point out to you that the PAC stuff as currently organised
has some merits. You can decide how strongly you wish to support each
PAC (within legal limits, which are more generous than I would want to
spend on politics), withdraw your support at will (but they get a
chance to present their case each time they ask you for money), and
even support two PACs which might have opposite views on a small
subset of issues. The main problem is you have to have money. Well,
the Feds could provide "politics stamps" or something, redeemable only
by registered PACs to whom the owner gave the stamp. Hmmmm ...
- Richard
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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