Seebach Exhibit 7

Too beautiful.

Yahoo! is one of the companies who spams. They don't harvest addresses the convential way. What they do is, every so often, declare that "database errors" mean that they can no longer be entirely sure about their database records, and that the only thing they can do is... Mark everyone to receive everything. They have done this at least once, possibly twice.

Today's spam is particularly funny, though.

You received this email because the information for the account nospamever_assholes indicates that Yahoo! may contact you about building web sites for personal or professional use.

As you might guess, I indicated no such thing; rather, they changed my database settings, without my approval. In fact, to the best of my knowledge, that account was closed a long time ago, so it's not just an account that was opted out of spam, it's an account that isn't even still active.

The idea, of course, is that when too many people opt out of promotional mailings, it's no longer a viable business model. You have to start spamming them again, or the list isn't worth much... At the same time, they're migrating towards having "yahoo-inc.com" put in our site-wide spam filters.

As you might guess, there's an autoresponder with stuff about "how to unsubscribe". I doubt my message was read by a real human. I guess we'll find out.

Summary Judgment for the Plaintiff

I won my junk fax case against Mobile Cellular Unlimited on Monday.

Well, that was easy. No, there are no disputed facts. When asked about disputed material facts, Mr. Carlson (the Defendant's lawyer) brought up a couple of legal theories which might potentially be relevant to a determination of damages, but which were not relevant to the motion for judgment on liability only. So, summary judgment, for the plaintiff, with a hearing to be held to determine damages.

The judge (Hon. Tony Leung) made a comment. Well, he didn't make a comment; he read a selected paragraph from one of the filings in the case. That paragraph was from another case, in which the judge wrote:

Notwithstanding the foregoing decision, the court is troubled by the use of limitd judicial resources my litigious parties of delicate sensibilities who have made a crusade or a livelihood of minor nuisances common to our culture that most people would simply ignore.

I happen to agree with this. I think lawsuits suck. I wish Congress had found some other way to eliminate junk faxes. However, I am not convinced that it is reasonable to call junk faxes a "minor nuisance". Junk faxes are sent to thousands upon thousands of people. How much do they cost? They obviously cost more than spam does, and conventional wisdom holds that any spam which makes it to a person has a cost of about a dollar. Junk faxes tie up machines, consume toner, and cause people to miss legitimate faxes. While the damage done by any given fax may seem small, the aggregate damage of thousands, even millions, of faxes sent is huge.

It was with this in mind that Congress banned them. Junk faxes are not discouraged; they are prohibited. They are unequivocally banned. There is no excuse, no justification, no line of reasoning which permits them; they are simply not allowed. This step was taken because junk faxes were threatening to render faxes a dead medium, making it too expensive to even own a fax machine. This cost is borne by the recipients of junk faxes; the costs of sending faxes are minuscule (certainly under a penny per fax of real costs). So, for a typical run of twenty thousand faxes, the net cost to society is, perhaps, $25,000. The person paying for the fax run is probably paying $2,500. Who pays the other $22,500? Everyone else. Meanwhile, the entity sending the faxes pays perhaps $250. The fax blaster makes money hand over fist, and the advertiser gets an incredible bargain comparing his costs to the real cost of the fax run.

In a case like Seebach v. MCU, we're talking about 13 fax runs, with costs to them ranging from $2,500 to $5,000 each. They have said that this was very profitable, so they made more than that; enough more to make it seem like a good idea until the lawsuits came in. They have said that they stopped, not because of the law, but because of the lawsuit.

This enforcement action is the only way we can make them stop. Furthermore, even if the court awards the maximum damages available under law - $1,500 per fax, plus reasonable attorney's fees - MCU will still have a profit. Now, keep in mind that they were sued for this early in 2002. Most of the faxes I received were sent after they were first sued. That is to say, even if the court awards the maximum damages allowed by law, MCU will have made a conscious decision to break a law, knowing that the law was there, and they will show a profit for having made that decision.

This is why we also need to ask the court for an injunction.

Why not just ask for the injunction? Because we know MCU will disobey unambiguous laws if they think it's profitable. They have suspended faxing, but we have no reason to believe they won't start up again, unless it turns out to be less profitable than they thought it was.

MCU has made the argument that this is some kind of "windfall". Well, I have to admit, $19,500 does seem like a fairly large amount of money at first. This is a side-effect of the way Congress structured the law; the damages I collect are statutory damages, determined in advance to serve as a deterrent to faxers and an inducement to individuals to engage in enforcement actions. The government does not have the resources to enforce this law; scarce judicial resources are not as scarce as scarce FCC resources. And anyway, the courts are getting at least some money from filing fees.

However, there is a problem here; the intuitive sense of how much damage has been done to me comes up with a different answer than the sense of how much damage has been done to everyone else that MCU faxed.

The "windfall" argument relies on the answer to the question "how does the damage done to Peter Seebach amount to $19,500?" It ignores the question "what about the damage done to everybody else who hasn't got the time or resources to bring enforcement actions?" It is clear that we need to separate the question of how much money I am entitled to from the question of how much MCU should pay for flagrant violations of a law with statutory penalties. With this in mind, we have formed a plan; any damages awarded over the statutory minimum will be donated to charity. I'm currently favoring Mercy Corps, an exceptionally efficient charity (better than 90% of the money they get goes into doing their charitable work). I'm not really in this for money; I would like to be compensated for my time and effort, but the main thing I want is the thing Congress mandated in 1991; I want junk faxes stopped. That won't happen until companies like MCU, who have funded the junk fax industry. are convinced that it's not lucrative enough to justify breaking the law.

Sprint is totally and utterly incompetent.

So, the most stunning thing about this is the sheer bulk quantity of massive, total, incompetence. I can't imagine how they managed to end up with so many people with totally different claims.

I have been told, in the past week:

1. Of course you can use Vision phones as modems, but only with Windows.

2. You have to buy the cable at Radio Shack.

3. No Vision phones can support a serial cable. (The Treo can, apparently?)

4. No Vision phones come with USB cables. (The Treo does.)

5. The Treo 300 is a 2G device.

6. If you want to use a phone as a modem, there's no technical support, but you're allowed.

7. There's technical support, but you aren't supposed to do it.

8. Bandwith is charged at $0.02/kB for all Vision usage.

9. There are no additional charges on Vision usage.

10. Vision usage is charged $0.39/minute.

11. It is physically impossible for the computer to generate per-minute usage charges on a Vision phone.

12. You get $0.39/minute charges for dialing external systems from a Vision Phone, and can only connect at 14.4.

13. If you buy a Wireless Web plan, you don't get charged the $0.39/minute.

14. You can't buy a Wireless Web plan for a Vision phone.

15. You can buy a Wireless Web plan for a Vision phone, but only if you don't buy a Vision plan.

16. Bandwidth is free, but if you use more than X, you will be stopped.

17. Bandwidth is free up to some point, after which you have to pay extra.

18. You can't buy modem service plans for phones, because they're competing with the PC cards.

19. Only the PC cards work.

20. The Vision phones only work with Windows. The driver is proprietary.

21. The Vision phones work with everything. They use the standard USB modem driver.

21. There is no such thing as a USB serial port.

22. The Treo 600 isn't released yet.

23. The Treo 600 is sold out.

What appears to be actually true:

• The Treo 600 is available.
• The Treo 600 uses the same protocol as other Visor handhelds did for USB connectivity, but is not compatible with older HotSync software - you have to use a "current" palm desktop.
• The Treo 600, using notifymail's "wmodem", works just great as a modem.
• No one can tell me at all what my billing will look like.
• If I connect it to my laptop, I get a PPP connection, but I get asked for a name and password by the proxy server if I try to load a web page.

My guess is that this will be the name and password I found in System Preferences, and that I'll need to get the password from the Sprint service people, somehow, to get through the proxy server. I don't care that much, as long as I can get ssh working. :)

It seems to me that the PC card "wireless modem" devices are probably the root of the problem; in some way, they must be billed differently, and Sprint can't figure out a way to bill for data usage consistently.

This is an immense, painful, stupidity. I know a lot of people would LOVE to give them money for data access, and would be happy to agree to reasonable bandwidth usage caps. Verizon sells that service; $40/month gets you some number of MB of traffic, $80/month gets you more. Why can't Sprint sell this same service?

For the curious, the Treo 600 works fine with NetBSD, and works with Linux too. The Treo 300 does NOT work. I did need a very small patch to NetBSD; it took all of 10 minutes to do, and I've submitted the patch to the development team.

And, BTW, I've spent more than two hours today alone on hold with Sprint trying to get the non-answers and contradictions listed above. These people DESPERATELY need to get some basic training and accurate information out to the account reps. And they also need to figure out how, given a product people want badly, which they are ALREADY PROVIDING, to collect money. Idiots. They could probably charge $10/month or more extra for "use Vision with your laptop" and get paid, and that would certainly be enough to cover way more bandwidth than I actually need. (I used my old phone to dial up for maybe 15-20 hours in one week about twice a year; I don't want much more than that out of Vision.)

Understanding agnosticism

Thomas Henry Huxley coined the word "agnostic", describing it as follows:

Agnosticism, in fact, is not a creed, but a method, the essence of which lies in the rigorous application of a single principle. That principle is of great antiquity; it is as old as Socrates; as old as the writer who said, 'Try all things, hold fast by that which is good'; it is the foundation of the Reformation, which simply illustrated the axiom that every man should be able to give a reason for the faith that is in him, it is the great principle of Descartes; it is the fundamental axiom of modern science. Positively the principle may be expressed: In matters of the intellect, follow your reason as far as it will take you, without regard to any other consideration. And negatively: In matters of the intellect, do not pretend that conclusions are certain which are not demonstrated or demonstrable. That I take to be the agnostic faith, which if a man keep whole and undefiled, he shall not be ashamed to look the universe in the face, whatever the future may have in store for him.

It is widely assumed that this is incompatible with religious belief. Huxley himself made this assumption, however, it is not obvious at all. In fact, the "contradiction" stems from a hidden premise; that to believe something is to consider it certain. In fact, agnostic theism is perfectly reasonable; it is belief without the claims of certainty that are so popular in mainstream religions.

I've seen people argue at great length against this, but I think they do so mostly because it's unsporting for theists to admit to the possibility that they are in error; it spoils many of the arguments against religion which first crop up in gradeschool, and to people who have never found any of the good arguments, this makes it very hard to argue at all.

Another formal debate coming up.

Well, I'm a total sucker, so I'm arguing Problem of Evil. I'm arguing that it ends up not disproving anyone particularly interesting. My opponent is arguing that it does. Here's the debate thread. As of this writing, no posts yet. My opponent should have something up in the next couple of days, I'd guess, and I'll get back to him on it eventually.

In other news, I'm almost packed (after this post, I'll be putting my big shiny Kinesis keyboard back in the luggage for the trip home), and will be heading home tomorrow evening.

Rumor has it I will be seeing my cell phone junk faxers (the ones with whom my settlement fell through) in court on Monday. Whee.

Standardization

People wonder what standards committees are like.

Here's what it's like.

"If we make the abstract declarator grammar match the declarator grammar, we can postpone or avoid the debate about whether it actually makes a difference or not."

This is actually interesting. It's entirely possible that the C language spec mistakenly excludes the word 'restrict' from appearing in a context where it probably ought to be allowed. Maybe not. Do we want to try to figure out whether we need to make a change? Probably not. In this case, the change is probably cheap, and indeed, it would have been editorial had we caught it at the time.

Or, consider the question of what we mean when we refer to a "variable" in the C standard? Obviously, we mean a named object, or something. It's like porn; I'm not sure I could define it, but I know what it is when I see it.

This may sound trivial, but in the end, the entire internet, and the entire computer industry, depend on our ability to communicate what we mean when we say "this is a C compiler". It sounds like hyperbole, but it isn't. If you can't write programs in C, and expect them to compile with a "C compiler", how can you do anything?

It's a very arcane business. And it's weird having a room full of people who all laugh when someone says "well, we could just use static for that". But it's fun, and it's useful. My time and money are well-spent.

Formal debate over.

Well, my formal debate is over. It was fun. It pleases me to imagine that I did fairly well, but I can hardly be sure. Obviously, my arguments convince me.

Weird Stuff, Vol. 2: It's not that the faucet is in the wrong place, mind you.

It's not that the faucet is in the wrong place. It's just that the sink is too far forward.

I'm assuming that the hole in the counter was cut to fit an earlier fixture, and then the replacement fixture was the wrong size. I was in the same hotel previously, I think in 1999, and the sink didn't have this fascinating trait.

If you turn the water on full, it actually goes in the sink, but that's non-obvious, and not always convenient.

I really wonder what the person who installed this was thinking.

Manufactured culture

What would "aloha" mean if there were no tourists in Hawaii?

This is not an entirely trivial question. There's a feedback loop. Take any cultural practice. Now, clean it up and make it look neat for the tourists. Tell them all about it, to make it part of your distinctive atmosphere. Now... What happens over time? The simplifications, the overgeneralizations, all tend to become a little true. If there were no tourists, would luaus be nightly events with professional bands? How much did people say "aloha" and "mahalo" before they became words you told tourists about so they would understand the distinctive regional customs of Hawaii? There are people whose natural vocabulary does not include these words, who are told by their employers to use them in certain contexts. Are these contexts the ones that these words would have been used in before?

The luau that just happened outside had a caller. Did luaus have callers who told you when to applaud, cheer, or try to sing along before? It doesn't seem likely, but I'm not even sure anyone would remember now.

Heisenburg has implications for anthropologists, I guess.

I made it! No thanks to the TSA.

TSA. Transportation Safety Administration. Imagine people who have been tasked with making everyone feel safe. They can't do a damn thing about the real problem. This is partially because it's already been done; everyone knows that you don't cooperate with hijackers now. That solves it. If we'd known that, 9-11 would have been the day a few people got killed - maybe even one whole plane.

Instead, they focus on stupid stuff. I mean stupid. I don't mean a little questionable. I don't mean non-obvious. I mean stupid.

They informed me that a "2 phillips screwdriver bit was not allowed to be in my unchecked baggage. This is stupid.

What's really scary is the massive, widespread, total incompetence.

Person #1: You have to take this to the business desk and mail it to yourself.
Person #2: The business desk isn't open. Just have the airline hold it for you.
Person #3: The airline can't hold it, sorry.
Person #4: Just have them give you a box and send it as a second piece of checked baggage.
Person #5: Sure, here's a box. We're not responsible if it's damaged. (To understand the hilarity of this, try to understand that we're talking about a small and mostly indestructible plastic case holding a couple of small bits of high quality steel.)
Person #6: Oh, no, they're not supposed to have given you a box. I guess it's nice that they did, but it's against policy.

I don't think more than two of these people can have been correct. Certainly, the policy is all random. They do all sorts of things which are well past "stupid" into "imbecilic". Because of the guy with the shoe bombs, they metal-detect shoes. Were the bombs metallic? No. But they metal-detect shoes. And then they make you take them off, and they metal-detect your feet, in case you have a DEADLY REPLACEMENT ANKLE!

Furthermore, the chances are that more people will die of disease spread by their requirement that you pace back and forth through the security area with no shoes (after standing in line and working up a good sweat) than will be saved by the hypothetical one-in-a-billion possibility that any of this will catch someone.

They're very aggressive about checking ID. The people who did 9-11? They had ID. This wouldn't even have slowed them down.

They finally relented and said you could bring nail clippers, given that you could BUY THEM INSIDE THE AIRPORT.

But they still sell wine and alcohol in glass bottles. On the plane. And give you tin cans.

A tin can is a hell of a lot more dangerous than my #2 Philips bit. Crinkle it until it cracks, tear carefully, and you have an edge you can cut yourself with.

Idiocy.

It's all about trying to make us feel good. Frankly, I felt better when I could kiss my wife goodbye before I got on the plane, and when I could make it through the airport at 5AM in under an hour. I was no more in danger then than I am today. Indeed, today, I'm in a great deal more danger, because if someone *does* get a weapon onto an airplane, he's gonna be the only guy with a weapon.

I'd rather we all have our pocket knives, and spent those billions of dollars on something productive. Between the cost of uniformed goons and the huge time-wastage... Wow.

Finally, there's one other issue: There is no appeal. There is no authority, no chain of command, no anything. Any TSA agent can do anything. There's no one to complain to, no one to ask about detailed policy. The policy about screwdriver tips was not in evidence anywhere in the airport that I looked, and I did spend some time looking. It's a violation of law to "interfere" with the TSA. These people have a great deal of power, because they can deny you the ability to travel, and there are NO checks and balances.

I just wonder what happens if my wallet gets stolen while I'm in Hawaii. How am I supposed to get home? I only have one photo ID. I can't get a new one here, either.

Competent people would have thought of this and posted a clear policy. We don't have competent people; we have Big Government at it's monumentally inefficient finest.

Special thanks to the nameless United clerk who, policy or no, let me check my screwdriver bits as baggage. Special non-thanks to the United people who said they couldn't just hold it for me for a week. And special recognition of the total ego-involvement of the TSA person who, when I asked about a rule, said "You're not security, we are." That rule, to them, justifies everything. This makes them dangerous in a once-free society.

Packed!

Packing has gotten less stressful over the years. The secret? A carefully-maintained list. If you have the list, and modify it every time you miss something, you gradually develop a very complete list. Perhaps too complete. My computer backpack is 20 pounds, not including my monster laptop. My suitcase doesn't bear thinking about. But, of course, it is unthinkable that I should be away from home and not have audio and video cables handy in case I... Hmmm. Well, I can't think of a use for them now, but maybe something will come to mind. I've stopped bringing the SCSI adapter, but I do have just about everything else. Two keyboards, trackball, movies, floppy adapter, blank CD's, books...

I'm a pack rat, and there is nothing so pathetic as a travelling pack rat.

Next post will likely be from sunny Hawaii.

Tragically, I hate going to Hawaii

I think this will be my third trip to Hawaii. I still don't like it. I don't know why; I'm sure it's a wonderful place. I think it has to do with travel time; it takes most of a day to get from here to there. This has gotten worse with the flood of totally irrelevant airline "security" measures.

But hey, it's a chance to work on C standardization, which is fun. There's a chance that Little Swimmer will be born (and thus probably named) by the time I get back, in which case, I'll never see Dave and Jordan again. Which is not so nice.

I had an interesting experience tonight. When I stopped by the corner grocery to pick up a bag of peanuts -- priced at $1.99 -- the clerk quoted me $32.77. The cash register, of course, said $1.99. The credit card got charged $1.99. Very good deadpan humor. The world needs more humor.

Formal debate!

I'm in a formal debate.

It's not televised, it's not live, it's just a couple of guys exchanging written arguments back and forth. I just submitted my first response, although (as of this writing) the moderators haven't put it up yet.

There's a peanut gallery (a thread, separate from the debate, for people to post comments in). If you're interested at all in philosophy or religion, it might be a fun debate. Until the debate is over, I'm refraining from specific comments outside the debate itself, but I think it looks like it'll be fun to watch. Recommended!

I was 0wn3d by a small child.

So, I was at Best Buy, with my friend Kevin, and I saw a GameCube running a shiny new game called "Soul Calibur 2". So I went and poked a few buttons to see what it looked like. Beautiful.

So this kid walked up to me and showed me how to play it.

I am so depressed. I used to be sort of okay at fight games. Now? I'm too slow. Too slow by far. I couldn't even see what he was doing. He seems to have all the special moves (of which there are a number) memorized for each of the characters in the game (of which there are quite a number). I was happy when I got to the point where I could remember that Chun Li kicked a lot if you tapped the kick button repeatedly.

I sort of wonder. Could I be good at this? Is this old age making me slow, or is it lack of practice, what with me actually having to work for a living? How on earth does the kid have time for this? When I went to try Wario World on the other demo GameCube, how did he know all the secret stuff in that, too?

I may no longer be able to compete effectively at video games. My sole consolation is that my wife isn't much faster than me.

I think I'll probably buy Soul Calibur, when it gets cheaper. It looks like fun, only I wish it had a setting to play at something under half speed. But it's a beautiful game.

I can't play 'em any more, but I still like watching 'em.

I forgot to mention...

I am nature's Friend To Opportunistic Lung Bacteria. About half the time when I get a cold, I get a nasty bacterial lung crud immediately afterwards. I forgot to mention this, I guess.

In other news, I have found a delightful board game. It's called Wise & Otherwise, and it's a game of the "try to come up with something believable" category. In this one, the topic is old sayings. The cards that come with the game have a list of the beginnings of old sayings - things like "The man who has boots..." - and players try to come up with sayings of their own.

Overall rating: Absolutely wonderful.

Specifics: This game is massively overproduced. The "board" is essentially unnecessary; it's just a scoring system. You might as well keep score by other means, although it's sort of pretty. It comes with a die, which is used only to determine who goes first. The little scraps of paper are pretty nice; the pencils are mediocre, and why do I need to buy special pencils to play the game?

The original game design awards points as follows:
* 2 points each time someone picks one of your fake sayings.
* 2 points for picking the real saying.
* 3 points, if you read the sayings and no one picked the real one.

This turns out to be a little too much. It also lacks granularity. A couple of suggestions:

1. If you have only three players, everyone contributes two sayings. So, the "Reader" (the player who actually knows what the real saying is) makes up a fake saying, and *then* looks at the real saying and writes it down too.
2. Instead of picking one saying, you cast votes. You have three votes. Each vote you cast for someone else's saying earns that player a point. Each vote you cast for your own is wasted. Each vote you cast for the real saying earns you a point.

You might think it's never useful to vote for your own saying, but it can be. Since players pick their choices in order, if you're stumped, and at least one player will pick after you, picking your own saying can make it seem more likely, because people normally don't pick their own sayings.

For reasons unknown, the game board, as provided, gave a 3 point bonus for getting a score of exactly 10. With the default scoring, this is likely to happen most of the time for players who have never been the Reader when no one picked the right saying, and never for Readers who are successful. This seems annoying, and we just ignore it.

The voting changes the dynamics of the game considerably, but seems to be more fun.

With four players, we had each player including the Reader invent a saying, and then the Reader writes down the "real" saying. (You must invent the fake one without seeing the real one.)

This is probably less necessary with a larger group, but it's still sort of fun.

The sayings themselves are the highlight of the game; they range from painfully pithy to utterly incomprehensible. It's very hard to guess what the "real" saying is.

A very good game. Is it worth $40? Probably. However, I think they could do a better game with simpler rules (1 point for everything worth points, no 3-point bonus for hitting 10), less collateral (no board, no special pencils, no useless d6, no pawns), and more cards. The voting rules are also a good feature, and I hope that games of this sort start including them as a recommendation, for the benefit of people who don't read my blog.

I'm back!

I'm not all the way better, but I'm better enough to start working again, and that implies that I feel up to writing.

I hate the common cold. Probably not as much as it hates me, though. I don't know what it is about me and colds, but I always get the bad ones. But, after a week or so, it tapers off so I just have a slight runny nose and a cough, and I have those for another week or three, but I feel pretty much okay.

So, back to the grind. Something interesting will be along shortly, I have a handful of ideas I wanted to write about but didn't feel up to.