Human-Nets-Request%rutgers@brl-bmd.UUCP (08/06/83)
HUMAN-NETS Digest Saturday, 6 Aug 1983 Volume 6 : Issue 43
Today's Topics:
Computers and the Law - Information as Property,
Computers and People - The Worth of Technology (3 msgs) &
ICONS
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Date: 4 Aug 1983 13:16:17-EDT
From: csin!cjh@CCA-UNIX
Subject: Information as property, again.
A number of people have "written" asking about my posting on the
new Massachusetts law covering theft of information. I haven't had
anything more than I gave in the original posting, and I'm not in a
position to go digging for more; however, there was more in the BOSTON
GLOBE for 2 Aug 1983:
COMPUTER THEFT LAW GOES INTO EFFECT
(Associated Press)
As of yesterday, a new state law added "electronically processed or
stored data" to the legal definition of property, so stealing those
bits of electronic information is now a crime in Massachusetts.
The law also expands the definition of trade secrets in business to
include "anything tangible or electronically kept or stored" that
represents a secret commercial process or invention.
Previously, thefts could be prosecuted in Massachusetts only if the
target were a tangible object such as a blueprint, a payroll check or
a magnetic tape.
"Our intention and hope was to plug a gap in the existing law,"
said state rep. Paul White (D-Boston), the House chairman of the
Legislature's Joint Committee on Criminal Justice. "Massachusetts as a
high-tech state was dangerously exposed to misuse of computer
property."
The law is expected to have its greatest impact on banks and
insurance companies that store vast amounts of financial information
in computers as well as the growing number of high-technology
companies in Massachusetts that design computers and write programs.
During testimony on the bill this spring, witnesses told the
Legislature that theft of information through computers was a serious
and growing problem.
Sanford Sherizen ,who runs Data Security Systems of Natick [suburb
~13 miles from downtown Boston], described computer theft as "the
white-collar crime of the 1980's" but conceded that very little is
known about the extent of the problem.
Nationwide, the US Chamber of Commerce estimates that computer
theft involves the loss of at least $100 million annually.
More than a dozen other states have recently adopted similar laws
protecting data stored in computers and US Rep. Barney Frank (D-Mass)
has introduced a federal computer crime bill in Congress, but no
action has been taken yet.
Under the Massachusetts law, signed by Gov. Michael Dukakis on May
31, the section of the state code defining property in connection with
larceny now includes "electronically processed or stored data, either
tangible or intangible" as well as "data while in transit."
that's all, ffolks. . . .
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Date: 4 Aug 83 10:18-EST (Thu)
From: Steven Gutfreund <gutfreund%umass-cs@UDel-Relay>
Subject: A shitty perspective on life
RE: The body is merely a gene's tool for making more copies of the
gene.
I can't resist the following spoof of that theory a friend once told
me.
------
"From my perspective, one does not view the body as the gene's tool
but that of the asshole. Biologically/evolutionarily speaking, the
entire purpose of evolution has been to produce better shit makers and
better shit movers. The highest forms of life on this planet are those
best capable of producing and transporting excrement. The body is
merely the best way nature has found yet for taking in produce and
producing shit. "
-----
- Steven Gutfreund
Gutfreund.umass@udel-relay
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Date: 6 August 1983 06:24 EDT
From: Robert Elton Maas <REM @ MIT-MC>
Subject: A shitty perspective on life
Date: 4 Aug 83 10:18-EST (Thu)
From: Steven Gutfreund <gutfreund%umass-cs@UDel-Relay>
RE: The body is merely a gene's tool for making more copies of the
gene.
I can't resist the following spoof of that theory a friend once
told me. ... The body is merely the best way nature has found yet
for taking in produce and producing shit.
That's literally true except for one important and *CRUCIAL* aspect -
the body derives energy and materials for making more body and genes
from this produce. If the body merely converted product into excrement
without deriving useful energy, it wouldn't survive. Whereas plants
survive by converting sunlight into produce plus useful energy,
animals survive by converting produce into dung plus energy. Bacteria
survive by converting dung into methane plus energy.
If becoming "terminal men" makes us more effective at utilizing
produce to obtain biochemical energy and bodystuffs, for example by
giving us a group intelligence sufficient to design and build
interstellar ships for escaping the eventual burnout of our Sun and
moving instead to other places in the Universe, the *horay*, we're
smarter than those many creatures that are too dumb to realize the
Earth won't be habitable forever. -- I think it's virtually impossible
for a non-technological civilization to figure out the way stars work,
and realize the Sun will burn out someday, then to do something to
escape the fate of staying trapped on Earth to the fatal end. Thus
technology may very well make us the only species on this planet to
leave it by choice as free creatures (others may leave with us as
parasites cattle or collector-specimens, but all others will die here
on Earth). Thus technology will increase our eventual fate from
dead-on-Earth to live-in-space, which I consider a definite
improvement.
(For detailed discussions of this sort of stuff, see SPACE mailing
list for getting into space, ARMS-DISCUSSION for avoiding nuclear war
in the meantime. Re the above, I'm not trying to get into those
subjects here on HUMAN-NETS, I'm only answering a question that was
brought up here: If World-Net is supposed to be so wonderful, then
what about all the past technology, what has it done for us? Answer,
it's given us the ability to survive longer than 10,000,000,000 years
if we can just hold out the next 100 years.)
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Date: 5 Aug 1983 23:59:58-PDT
From: Robert P Cunningham <cunningh@Nosc>
Reply-to: cunningh@Nosc
Subject: Re: worth of technology?
Lewis Mumford wrote this in his 1934 book: "Technics and
Civilization":
"Here, beyond what apears at the moment of realization, is the
vital contribution of the machine. What matters the fact that the
ordinary workman has the equivalent of 240 slaves to help him, if the
master himself remains an imebecile, devouring the spurious news, the
false suggestions, the intellectual prejudices that play upon him in
the press and the school, giving vent in turn to tribal assertions and
primitive lusts under the impression that he is the final token of
progress and civilization. One does not make a child powerful by
placing a stick of dynamite in his hands: one only adds to the dangers
of his irresponsibility. Were mankind to remain children, they would
exercise more effective power by being reduced to using a lump of clay
and an old-fashioned modelling tool. But if the machine is one of the
aids man has created toward achieving further intellectual growth and
attaining maturity, if he treats this powerful automaton of his as a
challenge to his own development, if the exact arts fostered by the
machine have their own contribution to make to the mind, and are aids
in the orderly crystallization of experience, then these contributions
are vital ones indeed. The machine, which reached such overwhelming
dimensions in Western Civilization partly because it sprang out of a
disrupted and one-sided culture, nevertheless may help in enlarging
the provinces of culture itself and thereby in build- ing a greater
synthesis: in that case, it will carry an antidote to its own poison.
So let us consider the machine more closely as an instrument of
culture and examine the ways in which we have begun, during the last
century, to assimilate it.
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Date: Fri, 5 Aug 83 11:18 PDT
From: WILLIAMS.PA@PARC-MAXC.ARPA
Subject: Re: Icons and Direct Manipulation
In response to
Date: Thu 4 Aug 83 10:15:30-PDT
From: Ken Laws <Laws@SRI-AI.ARPA>
Subject: Icons and Direct Manipulation
WRONG! The smart machine paradigm (make the machine do more and more
of the work) is not the obvious way for people to get useful work out
of machines. I conjecture 2 principle arguments for this:
1. Opacity. As the machine takes on more and more of the work
its internal workings become successively more opaque to the user.
This is not a problem as long as the machine always does the right
thing. The difficulty comes when the machine does the wrong thing and
the user needs to recover. UNDO is not enough, the user needs to know
how to modify his request/command to achieve his/her purpose. As we
bring compuational machinery to succeedingly more complex tasks, we
find that ERROR RECOVERY becomes the central activity people perform
(Indeed, Lucy Suchman, a PARC anthropoligist, argues that 'management
of trouble' is most of what people do in the world). In some sense
the smart machine paradigm is a excuse for infinite research and a
ready account for any problems encountered with systems build under
its umbrella. The standard senario, the system fails in some pretty
awful ways, the builders say, "Aha, we need to make it smarter."
2. Goal uncertainty. In may circumstances the major problem
people are trying to solve in any situation is what they are trying to
achieve (for example in bringing a 'query' to a database, people often
times know only a very general goal, e.g. "I want to buy a car." "I
want to go to a restuarant." Imagine a smart machine (say a Natural
Language interface) what does the user do? Ask "What car should I
buy?" What is the correct machine response? BUY A FORD LTD STATION
WAGON ON SALE AT FRED'S WITH A/C, A/T, POWER STEERING, AND TWO TONED
DESIGNER COORDINATED BUCKET SEATS. or maybe I DON'T UNDERSTAND THAT
QUESTION. or HOW MUCH MONEY DO YOU HAVE? or what. [p.s. even the later
two options here are the opening ploys in a negotiation]) Most work
that people get done out of social systems (our principle case of
people trying to get work out an information processing system), is
achieved by negotiation. Even buying a hamburger at MacDonald's is a
complex negotiation (what if the burger will be late, what if you
didn't specify flavor of shake, what if this is your first time in
MacDonald's, what if you didn't mention needing an apple
fritter,...).
One final comment. Consider how you get an admistrative assistant to
do work for you. Consider how much of that activity is negotiation.
Mike Williams
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Date: Fri 5 Aug 83 10:47:08-PDT
From: Richard Treitel <TREITEL@SUMEX-AIM.ARPA>
Subject: Icons debate
Why in the world do we need icons of Rolodex files and other things
which are probably going to be obsolete before long anyway? Does the
gas pedal in your car have an icon of a horse on it?
My own view is that many of these icons are like Cobol syntax: they
conceal an enormous and probably unwarranted contempt for the
intelligence of managers, while actually attempting to restrain rather
than assist the exercise of that intelligence. However, I've never
used one of these systems ...
- Richard
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End of HUMAN-NETS Digest
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