Actually, I'm mostly better. Stomach flu of some sort; out cold for about a day, suddenly feeling almost well again.
But I've only eaten fifteen crackers, and no other food, in the last 48 hours or so, which means I'm awfully hungry.
I think I'll have a pizza. The foundation of all human enterprise is optimism.
One of the miseries of the "holiday season" is the tendency for people to find themselves, unexpectedly, with nowhere to go. There is something horrible about the day when all your friends are visiting their families, and you are alone. This happens to different people every year, for different reasons. Perhaps a sibling is visiting Puerto Rico in late december. Perhaps a dispute over whether or not a loved one is a suitable partner has created a rift. Does it matter? There it is, December 24th or 25th, and there's no one to spend time with; just an empty house, perhaps with a forlorn tree, which you are increasingly aware is already dead, even if it doesn't know it yet, and which will shortly need to be thrown out.
The solution is simple; a party for people who are not invited to any parties. A friend of a friend of a friend hosted one once; I went, because I had nowhere else to go, and I enjoyed it a great deal.
With this in mind, we're hosting one this year. December 24th, people will be invited to come visit us, during the afternoon and evening. Maybe a few will show up; maybe only one or two. There will be food. There will not be Christmas music. There will be no preaching or evangelizing; I know too many people whose families have rejected them for being of a different faith, or of no faith at all. The spirit of the season, it seems to me, is better served through kindness than through proselytizing.
The party for the people who are not invited to any parties; it sounds like Russell's famous "set of all sets which do not contain themselves".
I encourage others to do the same. The foundation of such a party should be simple; a friendly place for people who are alone to be less alone for awhile. A respite from the painfully repetitive music selection most of America is confronted with during December. A chance to meet new people. A brief interval during which "stranger" means "friend I haven't met before".
Ours is in Saint Paul, Minnesota. If you want to host one, pick a day (the 24th and the 25th seem like likely days), and announce it by whatever means are convenient to you. Reach out to the people who cannot spend the time with their families. If you, yourself, are in that boat, well, all the better reason to have a party.
Thanks, again, to whoever threw that party. It might have been Chris, but I don't remember any more; all I remember is that, on a day when I could have reasonably expected to sit home alone, moody and depressed, I got a chance to sit in a warm, well-lit house, talk to interesting people, and have a few cookies. It was a good day.
Who's with me on this one?
So, in 1996, I was a real jerk. Some newbie posted what he intended as helpful advice to comp.lang.c. I insulted him at some length. A while later, he posted pointing out that I had been right... but a phrase stuck in my head.
Pete tore me off a strip and I sat reading his reply from my screen with tears in my eyes. I had been, rightly, put in my place and I have learnt from that mistake.
Over the years, it's occurred to me occasionally that maybe the word "tears" ought to have been some kind of cue to me that my behavior was not entirely within the boundaries appropriate to civil discussion. But I've never quite gotten around to doing anything about it.
Today, I finally tracked the guy down and apologized.
I don't know why I waited so long. A bit lazy, perhaps. A bit afraid. A bit unwilling to admit that I fucked up but good.
Ahh, well. One down. How many thousands left? What of the ones I don't even remember?
Being a decent person can be hard; becoming one is harder.
I have to go scan the pages, but pretty soon, we have the long-awaited metanoia update. If the secret to a happy ending is knowing when to stop the story, well, we just missed our chance.
This is where the ride gets a little rough.
Here's the trick. It's not hard to write about things you know. What's hard is writing about things you don't know. To do this, you have to learn things, quickly. You have to beat the self-evaluation problem. You have to know what you don't know, so you can figure it out, so you will know it. You have to learn to recognize blind spots.
As a freelance writer, I have learned toolkits, APIs, frameworks, library interfaces, system startup routines, and other such things. Generally very quickly. It tends to lead to headaches. But it's fun, there's no denying that. There's something wonderful about being asked to write about a topic you've never heard of, and a week later, having a reasonable technical article exploring that topic.
You might think you could just learn things on a normal schedule, and write about the ones you know, but there's not enough work out there to support all the writers out there. The niche market I've found is simple; brand new stuff. Before you could download the final version of Safari, I was learning how to build plugins for it. When there are only a handful of people who know something, and a lot who want to know it, you've got a market for someone willing to stay up until 3AM poring over manuals, writing test programs, swearing a lot, and drinking root beer floats for sustenance.
It's fun work, really. I mean it. It's just hard, and stressful, and occasionally a little unpredictable. The surprises are reasonably evenly split between upside and downside. Downside can be "oh, yeah, there's a problem with the company we outsource accounts payable too, sorry, we're running about two months behind on issuing checks". Upside can be "can you write a book about OS X? Can you or your agent review a contract by Friday?"
When I was younger, I used to go hiking with my father. We liked mountains, especially. We could never pass up a hikable mountain. I'm not talking mountain climbing here; just friendly, walkable, paths. When we were in Lassen Volcanic National Park (my favorite of the national parks), one of the trails available was on Mount Lassen itself. Well, we couldn't pass that up. So, up we went. We brought snacks and drinking water, because it was a longish hike. We took a few rest breaks. We struggled to cross the one place where a snowfield covered the trail; my father's balance wasn't all that good.
But we made it. We made it to the top of the mountain. And there, among the small crowd of people hanging around and enjoying the view, was a guy on crutches, with his leg in a cast.
There is something humbling about this. However hard it seemed to us to get up this hill, this man had made it before us, and under circumstances under which we would never have tried it. I'm not sure whether it was harder for him, or whether he was just so much better a hiker than us that it was easier. But it was very different.
This memory has often come to me when I do something hard, only to find out that other people found it easier.
Anyway, for as long as I can remember, I've been fascinated by religious questions. I was taken to a Lutheran church as a little kid, but once I realized that the word "God" didn't refer to someone or something in the ceiling over the alter, I sort of lost interest. Confirmation class was very disappointing. The first year was actually pretty good; the pastor handling the class was really compelling, and did a good job of talking about his own beliefs, rather than just reciting doctrine. The second year, it just wasn't useful to me. I remember being very frustrated at being unable to get a straight answer as to whether or not I was expected to believe that the world was only 6,000 years old. I told them I wasn't going to do the confirmation ceremony; after all, I wasn't convinced, so why should I say I was convinced? If memory serves, my parents were directed to try to ensure that I went. I have no idea why. The impression I had at the time was that going through the motions was more important than actually believing, or even understanding, the questions.
It's not as though I "lost" my faith. I just never had any. When I stopped going to church, well, I stopped. No big deal. I didn't miss it; it seemed strange, formal, and arcane. When I went to college, at St. Olaf college, I found religious people disconcerting; the end impression was one of near-universal hypocrisy. Religion was an excuse to attack people who were different; it seemed to have no other purpose. At its best, it was merely empty ritual. There may have been a few exceptions, but they were rare. I spent a great deal of time, however, on the standard foundational questions of philosophy, especially morals. At the time, I insisted on restricting the question to ethics; the distinction I drew was that ethics were things you did because they were right, and morals were things you did because everyone else said they were right. Cynical little bastard.
Nonetheless, it was arguably progress; I went from the pure, unconcerned, amorality one associates with children and animals to a kind of gradual adoption of a set of ethical rules designed, originally, largely in utilitarian terms. At one point, I had identified five virtues which I was pretty sure were sufficient. I don't even remember what they were, now.
Did I believe in God? No. The question was, it seemed to me, self-evidently unanswerable. Indeed, the perfect unanswerability of the question rather appealed to me. I became a militant agnostic, attacking both theistic and atheistic arguments with equal fervor - a hobby I retain to this day.
However, part of the key to this position is the recognition that the arguments are inherently empty, and, perhaps more importantly, that their emptiness is necessary. I gradually developed competing worldviews; I could interpret everything according two ways. One of these I now recognize as metaphysical naturalism; nothing exists but what you can observe with your senses. The other was its contrary; the claim that there are things you cannot observe.
There's something you can only learn by doing this, which is that the systems are beautifully, perfectly, symmetrical. Each has ways of disregarding the other. The metaphysical naturalist can dismiss nearly anything as "hallucination" or "confirmation bias"; other tools exist when you need them. The supernaturalist, because the supernatural are mostly sentient spirits, can happily ignore any particular failure to perform on command.
Each system is perfectly self-consistent. Each has an explanation for everything; sometimes, the explanation is unsatisfying, but it's still an answer. You never have to leave that comfortable little box. Essentially, neither system is falsifiable.
This leaves very little reason to prefer one over the other. You could argue from something like Occam's Razor; don't believe in anything you don't need. I did that for a while. However, I gradually came to distrust this. After all, there are a number of cases where you can't really measure something, but it's still reasonable to assume it exists. Self-awareness is a good example. I can never know whether or not other people are really aware, but it seems to me that it is only polite to act as though they are, and not unreasonable to conclude that it is so.
As this was going on, I was still working on ethics. I reached the point where I was pretty sure that ethics was a descriptive science, but an impossible one. The thing measured was real, but close to unmeasurable. But real nonetheless; I grudgingly accepted the idea of moral standards which applied to everyone, but maintained that they couldn't be known with certainty.
Over time (these things always take time), I gradually migrated towards Deism. Despite their theoretical equivalence, my worldviews weren't quite on equal footing. Things like morality, self-awareness, and the sheer inexorability of mathematics, led me to believe that the material world was not everything. Eventually, I decided that, the question being apparently undecidable, I was going to pick an answer. The things I experience which I can't describe are probably supernatural, and may involve God. This assertion, while not knowledge, makes for a good axiom. In fact, it led to a substantial simplification of great chunks of my cosmology, by providing pat (if mostly useless) answers to a number of other questions.
It may seem weird to assign an explanation, but consider: When I fell in love, I didn't declare the explanation unknowable and refuse to commit to a position; I found a common experience whose description sounded familiar, and accepted it as an explanation.
Over time, I gradually drifted into somewhat more conventional theism. I remained (and remain to this day) formally agnostic; while I think God is the best explanation for my experiences, I can hardly call this belief "knowledge". I don't know. I'm not certain. But I have faith, and that seems to me enough.
C. S. Lewis convinced me that Christianity was not quite as horrible as it seemed, in particular, by being genuinely compassionate. I had, until then, mostly only seen Christians who felt they had an unlimited license to condemn things in others. Lewis's positions, while not always perfectly sound, were certainly more coherent than what I had previously been exposed to.
The defining moment, I think, was when some friends of mine and I were at Minicon, reading bits from the provided Gideon Bible. (See? They do work!) What happened was, we stumbled across a widely-quoted fragment of Paul's writings... and read the next verse. We kept looking. Time and time again, the most disturbing, obviously-wrong, teachings we'd seen on TV turned out to be fragmentary bits, taken out of context. Jesus was even more impressive; it turns out that He said all sorts of things no one likes to talk about.
This left me with an essential quandry: I like Jesus, but hated Christians. Christians, as a group, are inclined to hypocrisy, condemnation, vanity, arrogance, and just about everything else. Jesus was sufficiently pure that I found it reasonable to imagine that He could have been God incarnate.
Over the years, I have spent a great deal of time trying to reconcile these things; trying to figure out how to compare the teachings of Jesus to the world I live in, and figure out how to apply them. I have found myself at odds with nearly every major Christian denomination. I have been called just about everything, from a false teacher to a liar. And yet... Every so often, when I am unable to understand how anyone could love a given person, or what God could see in some aspect of creation, I open my mind enough to find out. These moments of brilliance are so unlike anything in my experience that I can hardly doubt. I maintain my skepticism; I think God made me a skeptic, because He needs people who will not believe what they are told. But, at another level, I have a great deal of confidence in these things.
I could be wrong about whether or not God exists. I do not believe I am wrong about whether or not we should be kind to people, or how important it is that we do so.
In this, I found myself changing. I am a very angry person, by nature. I anger quickly, I yell a lot, and I don't listen carefully to what people say. And yet, over time, this has changed. When I am about to lose my temper, some still small voice reminds me that the person I am losing temper with is important, too. See you these billions of people? Every one of them is, in fact, worth dying for. Remember that.
By bits and pieces, in fits and starts, I have developed my theology. Fifteen years or so after I first started being able to really understand the questions, I have found answers I can live with. I have found things I am confident enough of to assert. I cannot assert them as certainty, or as knowledge, but I can assert them as being sufficiently likely to merit serious consideration.
In the last couple of weeks, I've added a few minor points. A couple of weeks ago, in a digression from a conversation about what exactly "coveting" is, and why it should be bad, I came to realize that I like toys more than is particularly healthy for me, and that I need to work on living more simply. Resources are scarce enough. And, in the last week or two, I have come to realize that the oaths proffered by courts are entirely without merit. The fact is, the people who are going to lie (if they ever read this blog, I'm sure they know who they are) are going to lie under oath too, and the people who tell the truth will tell the truth anyway. The idea that there is a normal standard of honesty, and a special one for the courts, is simply wrong. I reject divisions between religious and secular; if there is truly a God who created all things, what can you point to and say that it is not in some way holy?
On the evening of Friday the 14th, I met the guy with the crutches.
Okay, there were no crutches. There were just people here already. These fifteen years of blood, sweat, and toil, have yielded a set of beliefs which have been known and practiced for hundreds of years. The things I believe, the attitudes I have, are taught by a group of people.
It turns out, you see, that I am apparently a Quaker.
Before Friday evening, I didn't know much about Quakers. I'd heard a couple of jokes about them, I knew they were generally pacifists, and, well, that's about it. I couldn't have told you whether or not they were Christians. (Most are.) I couldn't have told you what creed, if any, they hold to. (They don't.) I couldn't have told you any of this.
But when I found it, all written down, it was shockingly familiar. It was very, very, disconcerting. In my debates with other people on Christian web sites, I have not found my positions to be popular or widely accepted. They are widely considered a little weird, a little questionable perhaps. But I never knew of anyone else who believed these things.
You may think I'm complaining. I'm not. Can there be any gift greater than this?
On my own, I had very little support, except for the occasional flashes of the Divine, to tell me whether I was on the right path or not.
Had I stumbled across Quaker teachings a decade ago, I might well have believed them, but I would always have wondered whether they were true, or whether I was accepting them because they were part of a package deal.
But, in this one world, in this one incredibly outlandish chain of freak coincidences, it turns out that I built this theology from scratch. I know every nail, every strut, every piece of support in it. I know it like my own soul. No one convinced me. No flashy arguments, no compelling presentations. I did it myself, but I found company at the top of the mountain.
This is as close to being certain as anyone could ever hope to be. Am I still unsure? Of course. It is in my nature to be unsure. I don't know why God needs skeptics, but when I see the harm done by people who are arrogant in their certainty, well, I can see the justification.
Wednesday night, there was a nearby Friends meeting. I went. I sat in a circle with people who never knew me before, and together, we tried to find God. No one said anything; words that can meet such a circumstance are rare. After an hour of silent worship, we shook hands. After this, people sat back in their chairs, relaxed for a moment. Then, and only then, they suggested introductions all around. I was not asked to introduce myself first; one of them went first. I was not a stranger, asked to justify myself; I was a friend, made to feel welcome.
It took me fifteen years to get here, but here I am, at last. I have climbed the mountain. After fifteen years of wondering why it is so hard to find God, I have my answer, and it is, as always, an answer so much better than anything I could have suggested or imagined that words fail entirely to describe it.
I am not, technically, a member of the meeting; that's a process. It takes time. It takes acclimation. There is no hurry in the way the Friends do things. Why should people hurry things like this? Things which are important take time. If it's important enough to do, it's important enough to be sure you're doing it right. However, at the same time, it is clear that I have found what I was looking for. I'll keep going.
After fifteen years, I have found a religious group which doesn't present itself as a barrier between me and God. I have found people who are not impatient to ask questions, who don't demand justifications.
Robertson Davies, in The Papers of Samuel Marchbanks, put it very well.
An envelope full of tracts came for me in the mail this morning. Tracts always ask foolish questions. "Are you on the way to Heaven?" said one of these. "Are you prepared to meet God?" said another. "Are you prepared for Eternity?" asked a third. "Are you going to a Christless grave?" enquired the last of the bunch. Really, I do not know the answers to these questions, and I doubt the ability of whoever writes the shaky English grammar of these tracts to answer them for me. I am not even prepared to meet Professor Einstein or Bertrand Russel; why should I vaingloriously assume that God would find me interesting? And I really cannot claim to be prepared for Eternity when I have so many doubts about today. I wish that whatever God-intoxicated pinhead directs these inquiries to me would cease and desist. In the struggle of the Alone toward the Alone, I do not like to be jostled.
A bit of elbow room, a little peace and quiet; these go a long way.
If you want to know what these "Quakers" are, I recommend the semi-official homepage of The Religious Society of Friends. The name "Quakers" may have originally been derogatory, but is widely used simply because it's less confusing then trying to hear the capital "F" in "Friends".
p.s.: Contrary to Kevin's joking prediction, the "Quaker Meeting" was not, in fact, a LAN party.
So, Sunday, I moved some furniture.
Today, I got sore.
I remember, when I was a little kid, getting sore later in the day when I did something. I remember sleeping through the sore part. I remember it being the next day.
This is the first time I recall getting sore the day after the day after I did something. And it scares me. I thought my parents were making this up, when they were sore two days after we did something. I don't know why it happens this way, but it scares me, because it means I'm turning into things I never understood.
Over thirty years. Have I done anywhere near half a life's work yet? Not even close.
He says he doesn't want to fight.
He picks fights, true. He says things like "I gave you this home, and I can take it away from you". He raises his fist, even when he doesn't hit.
He says he doesn't want to fight.
The first time he saw a guy in over a year, the first thing he asked about was a long distance bill that he paid for. He can never stop reminding people about the things he pays for. He offers them as gifts, but what kind of gift is it that you demand someone pay back over a year later? What kind of person takes an already tense situation, and starts off by attacking people, probing for weaknesses, trying to seek some advantage, assert his role as the alpha male?
He says he doesn't want to fight.
He says she's crazy. He says it's all her fault. He blames her. He tells her that her family are bad influences, that she shouldn't listen to her friends, because they conspire against them. He swears at the woman who took her in once, because he fears that this woman, too, will seek her loyalty, and perhaps infringe upon the territory he has staked out.
He says he doesn't want to fight.
The only reason he fights is that people won't listen to him. They won't play along. They don't say what they're supposed to say. They are strong when they should be leaning on him for support; they are ungrateful when he has nothing to offer them. They insist on living their lives without needing him. They don't remember their lines. They don't follow the script.
He says he doesn't want to fight.
I cannot remember a time when she has not been fighting with him. A time when they haven't been at war. A time when they haven't been moving out or moving back in, or breaking up or getting back together. I remember when he persuaded her that he would pay for her, he would share an apartment with her, and she didn't need to hold that job down. I remember the shock of her coworkers when, on his advice, she just didn't show up one day.
He says he doesn't want to fight.
I remember the frantic scrambles to come up with the rent when, having power, he found himself with no choice but to use it, to withhold the rent, to assert his authority. I remember the suspicions, the allegations, the unrest that came from this.
Today, my friend moved out from the apartment she had been sharing with her ex-boyfriend. It would take too long to try to catalogue the ways in which he has hurt her, the ways he has tried to poison her so she would be the needy woman he needs to have, not the strong woman she is becoming. All I can say is this:
He says he doesn't want to fight, but he is a liar.
It's sort of becoming a recurring nightmare. Companies with whom I once had a happy relationship turn to spam. The latest victim is The Chip Merchant. These people used to be a good source for reasonably-priced computer parts. I bought a lot of stuff from them. My first order was probably in 1998, and they sent order confirmation to a tagged address in the domain "nospam.plethora.net". As they should have.
Yesterday, I got spammed at that address. But not for the first time. This was the second or third time. The first time, I sent a friendly note pointing out the obvious database mishap. But the second, or maybe third, time I got FOUR SEPARATE SPAMS from them, one to each tagged address I've used over the years, I had lost any hope of salvaging things.
I still have my order confirmations around. In the comments field, I put helpful reminders. For instance, in December 1999, I made two orders. The comments were "No spam please" and "No mailing lists, please".
Until 2003, they never once sent me spam. In 2003, they spammed me. To the same old addresses, which they had previously left alone.
This is the worst part about acquintance spam. It's bad enough being put on mailing lists you didn't ask for. It's bad enough being put on mailing lists after being told the company doesn't do that. But when it happens FOUR YEARS after they got an address, well, then it's pretty scary. A lot of people don't even have an email address for four years.
What this does is create an environment where people are afraid to give out their email addresses, and rightly so. What it does is undermine what little trust people have left for the email system.
On November 9th, of 1998, I asked them this question:
2. You (or yahoo, since they seem to run the store) may wish to make it more clear whether or not you plan to add email addresses to some kind of mailing list - ideally making it clear that you don't unless people ask to be added to a list. ;)
They responded, on November 10th, 1998:
Unfortunately, we do not have a mailing list. receive messages from customers all the time. We only use e-mail addresses for problems with a customers order, parts not in stock, etc.
Well, so much for that. They changed their minds; now they use email addresses for spam. What ever happened to "we only use email addresses for problems with a customers order, parts not in stock, etc."?
The one thing worse than spam, which is merely evil, is spamming someone who keeps all his old mail after telling him you wouldn't, which is stupid, too.
The problem with D&D is that it's fun to have a good, detailed, world, but it's a lot of work to make a world interesting enough to play in, without building into it The Conflict which, once resolved, leaves you with nowhere to go.
We're starting, yet again, down that path. Trying to name the world, name its parts. In our world, the moon is the white of snow and ice, not the white of lifeless stone. A dreaming goddess creates a city on the moon, which is spoken of only in legends by the earth-dwellers. Steam technology and magic coexist, if a bit uneasily.
Are there to be elves? It's always hard to decide. They're a cliche, but they're a cliche because they're fun to play with. We can rule out kender easily enough; too annoying. How many continents shall we have? Are there common fauna not native to our world? Can I get my wife to let me put in the common Semnian ground-horse, finally?
It's a good hobby. It's like model railroading sometimes; the fun is mostly in the building.
This, it seems to me, is what "God's image" is. We have spoken the light and the darkness into being, and it is good.
Sometime this week, I got my 200,000th piece of spam. Actually, this is not precisely true. It's my 200,000th piece of spam since I switched to the MH mailer in October of 1997. I'd gotten a bit before then.
Message #200,000 is actually a Windows virus, distributed via email. But don't worry! Message #199,999 is regular spam.
Subject: The debt cleaning system znqygpgyg jxut
Date: Fri, 13 Jun 03 16:52:36 GMT
Message-Id: <3w6$9$$q6axfo0l9ux7-0@a0y2q.rug4>
Actually, I got it on November 10th. In fact, the date being set to June of 2003 is spamsign - evidence that a given message is spam. Why? Because some spammers have software that tries to set the date in "the future" so it'll show up first in your list. Of course, the software is still in use, long after June of 2003 has come and gone.
Why is this still happening?
There's a number of factors. The first, and biggest, is the incredible amount of lobbying effort that has gone into preventing anti-spam laws. For that, we can thank the DMA (Direct Marketing Association), the organization devoted to guaranteeing that its members can harass you beyond all human endurance, on the off chance that you'll buy something as a result. Without these lobbying efforts, spam would be less frequent.
The key here is that the same rules that would prevent spams like #199,999 up there would also, almost certainly, end up crimping the style of companies like Equifax and Amazon. Companies who have built a business model which depends on some degree of cost-shifting, and on their ability to do creative things with personal information. When EBay changed their privacy policy from an opt-in one (you get only the things you ask for) to an opt-out one (you get everything you haven't told them to stop), they sent a clear message: Big customers are going to freak out if ISPs do anything about unsolicited email.
The problem here is that it's very hard to write a policy that prohibits full-time spammers from spamming you, but doesn't also prohibit companies like EBay from, say, going into your account preferences and "resetting" them due to a "database problem" and, in the process, marking you to receive everything from telemarketing to promotional email to steel girders up the ass. And there's a lot of money in hosting companies like EBay.
A second facet of the problem is that, during the internet boom, a lot of companies hugely overbuilt their networks, with the net result that bandwidth is cheap, and it's very hard to be competitive. Thus, many of the backbone providers have, at one point or another, gotten into the business of offering what are called "pink contracts". These are contracts which give a customer special license to break the standard anti-spam language of the provider's Acceptable Usage Policy, but cost extra. Good money, if you can get it.
Spam is a big industry. It's hard to tell how effective it is; the few companies that have had the guts to come forward and talk honestly about their experiences have generally reported very negative results. The companies that get "good" results from spam are mostly companies like Amazon or EBay, who are, for the most part, engaging only in what's called "acquintance spam" - spamming people who did give them an address at some point, but without permission, or in many cases, after repeated attempts to "opt out".
There is no easy solution. Thanks to die-hard spam-friendly providers like Chinanet, and large bulk-mailing companies like Topica, anyone who wants to spam you can reliably produce millions of messages much faster than your filters can really adapt. Techniques for getting spam past filters are well-studied, and actively developed. Of course, the more filter-breaking they do, the more likely it is that you won't want the product, but I think the spam industry has long since stopped caring about that.
As larger companies get involved (Kraft Foods has at least one subdivision which spams actively and constantly for coffee products), it gets harder to imagine a solution. This is the best example I've seen in my lifetime of the tragedy of the commons; email is a shared resource, the value of which decreases rapidly as people abuse it.
The small-time spammers produce the bulk of the traffic, but they do so in an environment carefully created for the benefit of the larger companies.
It's not ignorance. When I called Barnes & Noble with concerns about their privacy policy, the man I spoke to, Ben Boyd, said that they had formed a plan to, at some unspecified time, start sending promotional messages to everyone whose email address they had access to, even though they had never asked for any kind of permission. They did not plan to send a single notification offering people access to a list; they planned to just start sending mail. He explained that they knew that many people would think of this as spam. At the time, the title he was giving was "director of communications".
Sure enough, they spammed. Their spam run lasted three days, and over that time, hit just about everyone I know who had ever dealt with B&N online in any way.
Later, they said "gosh, that was dumb", and stopped. Good for them. But the fact is, when the initial spam happened, they knew.
Network Associates also gets an honorable mention. For a while, their privacy policy said, paraphrased, "if we can obtain your email address, we may send you promotional mailings". They were not kidding. They sent spam to the support@ address at one off their vendors, with a combination of email address and personal name which exists only in response to support requests - in other words, they scraped addresses out of every message that touched their mail server.
It's the people like this who built this climate. People like Exactis, and Media3, who sued the MAPS RBL for quite truthfully fingering them as spammers or hosters of spammers. People like Amazon, with, and I am not making this up, instructions like "send email to no-special-offers-ever-3@amazon.com". No, really, I'm not making it up: Here's the original post.
The fly-by-night spam operations survive because the big-name spammers actively lobby to prevent legislation which could do anything to stop them, knowing that such legislation might slow them down.
Most of the big, famous, internet companies spam. They do it because it costs very close to nothing to them, and because the majority of the costs are borne by the rest of us. They will keep doing it as long as it's legal and there's no significant backlash. And there's no significant backlash because people are so tired from getting three hundred or more spams in a day that they don't have the time or energy to complain.
Finally, one last shout out to my special buddies at ZDNet, who have resubscribed the same dead address multiple times, despite repeated complaints. Oh, and Roxio (the part of Adaptec that sells Toast/Easy CD Creator). Oh, and... Why bother? You know the drill. It's everybody. Everybody out there spams. They all figure that just one more spam won't hurt, and that, if anyone's going to benefit from free email before the system melts down entirely, it had better be them.
They don't care. They have no ethics, no morals, and they don't even have the sense to look ahead and think about what their actions lead to. And because of them, most of my readers probably get more pornography than personal mail in their mailboxes these days.
To add insult to injury, Sanford Wallace stopped years ago. By all accounts, he decided that spamming was wrong, so he quit.
By the way, if you want to know how long it took me to get this spam, starting from October of 1997:
10,000 spams in just under four years.
20,000 spams in one year.
30,000 spams in one year.
20,000 spams in three and a half months.
60,000 spams in five months.
20,000 spams in one month.
40,000 spams in one month.
Anyone want to make that argument about self-regulation now? We tried it. We failed. The DMA, the Amazons of the world, are simply too greedy.
I got a GameCube a while back. It was cheap, and it had neat games, but most importantly (for me), it lets me play GameBoy games on the Big Screen.
Here's the weird part.
The GameCube itself has little feet, and little holes where the screws go. Stands for GameCubes generally have little indentations for the feet, and little nubs where the holes are, so the GameCube won't slide off the stand.
The GameBoy Player attachment, designed by Nintendo, does the same kind of thing; it fits very snugly.
But it has feet in different places than the main console, and doesn't have the little indentations.
So it slides smoothly off the stand.
WHY WHY WHY?
Everything else about it seems to be well designed. It's still video-cable compatible with my old Super Nintendo. The controller, if perhaps a bit small for my hands, is wonderful. Everything's neat. Except for the feet on the expansion gizmo.
To write about usability is to notice these little details. Everywhere you look. Every day.
Just for the record:
I've called the number on their website.
I've emailed them.
I've tried by every reasonable means to find out why I'm on TechCentralStation's spam list. And I'm still getting spam (most recent hit: November 7th), and I'm still on the list, and they still haven't told me where they got my address, or why they think they have permission to send junk to it.
Wasn't the blog community supposed to have clue? How much clue does it take to RESPOND TO EMAIL?
So, in an old version of IBM's VisualAge Java development environment, there was a thing called a "Problem List". This was, as the name suggests, a list of problems. When you typed in code, the list would be updated to reflect problems with the code. So, when you fixed the problems, the list got shorter.
In the current product (WebSphere something-or-other), it's now a "Task List".
They're not problems, they're tasks.
I want to see the error messages produced.
"Maybe it's just me, but I'm feeling a little uncomfortable with your punctuation on line 73."
"Do you think we could talk about the syntax of import statements? The one on line 7 doesn't have a class name or an asterisk, and I really feel validated when import statements are syntactically correct."
"I feel the left bracket on line 237 lacks closure."
Behind all this is a problem; the code a friend of mine has been working on is being submitted by a group to whom some development tasks are being outsourced, and it comes in with the Task List full of big red X's, indicating code which can't even be compiled, let alone tested. Maybe, if it were called a Problem List, they'd understand the issue; as is, he's fixed code, sent it back, and had it come back with new problems introduced. They don't appear to be clear on the issue.
Maybe the compiler is being a little too soft on them. I mean, sometimes you really do need "tough love".
It's times like this when I wonder whether anyone with a soul is left in corporate America.
Belkin introduced a router "feature", which is that the router will periodically hijack connections and redirect them to Belkin's web site.
That is to say, if you get this router, and you and your family are browsing the web, about every eight hours, one of you will randomly be connected to an ad for other Belkin products, not to the page you requested.
If the connection that gets redirected is, say, a paid download of some sort, well, too bad for you. If it's the confirmation screen for a credit-card order, and the only way to get the page would be to resubmit the order, hey, it's not Belkin's money on the line.
There's a reasonable story about this over at The Register. There's some coverage on Slashdot, with the predictable slew of teenagers making grandiose proclamations.
But the fact is, this means I will never buy a Belkin product again. The fact is, this decision was pure evil. It's more destructive than it seems at first blush - imagine what happens if this product is used with automated systems which grab data over HTTP. In a hospital, for instance. The company's requirement that you "opt out" becomes scarier when you look at the method; go to a web page, click on a button, and their server will send a magic packet to your router which changes the configuration setting. What else can you reconfigure about this router from the OUTSIDE? They aren't saying. The elaborate procedure they describe for turning this "feature" off manually is merely annoying, not impossible, but... It should never have been needed in the first place.
Every part of the chain has to have failed for this to happen. Engineers must have implemented it, and they should have known that it was technically unacceptable. Marketers must have proposed it, and they should have known that it made their product undesirable. Everyone involved has to have put the company's short-term good above any possible consideration from the user. In a post to Usenet (which was removed from the Google Groups archive somewhere between about 8:30 and 8:50 Central time on November 7th, shortly before a new post on the topic showed up from the same Belkin representative), they claimed it was for "ease-of-use", since they wanted people to be "easily" able to find out about the router's feature.
The problem here is that either everyone involved was incompetent or unethical, or someone very high up was incompetent or unethical, and forced this decision through. Either way, Belkin has shown that they cannot be trusted to make even an easy moral decision correctly. How can we trust them on anything else? What's to keep their next KVM switch from displaying ads whenever the display is idle, or possibly just every eight hours? What's to keep a USB keyboard adapter from, noticing that the user is typing a URL, putting in a Belkin one? All of these things are stupid, but so was the one they actually did.
At this point, I think Belkin is dead. Trust cannot be easily rebuilt. The only path to rebuilding this trust involves making public EVERY SINGLE DOCUMENT which has to do with this decision, so people can see how it happened; unless we know what went wrong, no proposed "solution" will address our concerns. Merely fixing this router does not fix the problem.
The decision to remove the original post from the Google Groups archive was one of the worst things they could have done. It makes it seem like they have something to hide. Decide for yourself. Is that a post you'd be ashamed of? (Special thanks to Steve Sobol who arranged for a safe backup copy.)
So, one of my habits is genre fiction. I love genre fiction. I know it's not "real literature." I don't care.
I recently picked up a book called Digital Knight, published by Baen books. The author, Ryk E. Spoor, is a guy I know from Usenet, which is what got me to buy the book.
I found it fascinating, and I thought I might as well give it a mini-review. I read the book on my trip to Hawaii, and finished it while I was there.
The basic substance of this book is a variant on a theme we've all seen before; non-supernatural guy encounters the supernatural. What makes this one interesting, I think, is that the guy uses modern research tools and techniques, and takes the claims seriously. He does this instead of either trying to suppress all such theories, or suddenly going psycho and taking up swords and armor. The net result? I think it's more convincing than a lot of these books have been.
I got the impression while reading the book that parts of it may have previously been seen as short stories, or even sort of long stories. I'm told this is correct. In the entire book, there's exactly one paragraph of recap that I'd associate with the conversion to novel form; the rest struck me as well-integrated.
Is it literature? I don't think so, but it never claimed to be. It's a fun book, with interesting characters, good plot, and some neat twists on traditional monster mythology. If we are to assume that the author will improve with practice, it's a very promising start to a career. Even if he never improved, he'd be solidly better than average. :)
If you like Laurel K. Hamilton's books, you might like this. It's a bit less spooky, and I personally liked the characters better. It reminds me a little bit of Rick Cook's writing; it's most similar to Mall Purchase Night, although not as silly. It even reminds me a little of Metanoia. Computers and vampires; what more could you hope for?
I would definitely buy another book by the same author, based on this one. If you like one or another of the genres it's arguably in (bits of mystery, bits of fantasy, bits of science fiction), give it a look.
One of my father's favorite sayings was "a definition is the obituary of an idea". For all that our culture, and our very survival, depend on rationality, it has its limits. There are things we cannot usefully encapsulate in our nice, rational, minds. Some things don't survive dissection; you can take a clock apart to find out how it works, or at least how it used to work, but you can't take a kitten apart to find out why it's cute. There are things which no definition can fully capture. I can describe them, and you can recognize them if you've experienced them, or possibly just if you've experienced something similar. I've "recognized" what people were talking about when they spoke of "being in love" more than once. I think I'm right this time, but that's what I thought last time, too.
There is a danger to this. It's too easy to throw these things away; to dismiss them as "irrational", rather than merely "non-rational". Down that path lies madness. It's too easy to accept these things without question, becoming a mindless ball of emotional response. Down that path lies madness, too.
These things must be balanced. You cannot be fully human while rejecting the parts of your experience which are beyond the scope of rational analysis; you cannot be fully human while refusing to analyze anything. The art lies in finding the balance between these things.
Religion is often dismissed as "irrational". If the only evidence I feel I have for my faith is personal experience, why do I believe it? I am told by people who are sure they are much wiser than myself that I should dismiss my religious experiences, toss this "faith" away, since its roots are so irrational, unreproduced in any laboratory. Surely, people assert, this is special pleading. Are there other things I treat the same way?
Yes, there are.
My friends, Dave and Jordan, had a baby recently. (I understand Jordan did most of the work.) I got to hold the baby. There is no way for me to put this into words. I was invited over to the hospital, to hold the baby, to share the champagne, to debate whether or not "Anne" should have an E on the end. I can tell you this, but I can't tell you what it was. I can say "friends", but the word is pallid and empty compared to the experience. I can say "new baby", but if you've never held the newborn baby of a friend you've known for more than half your life, there is no hope that you will understand what happened. You can have the facts, but not the experience. I can only say that it is impossible, today, for me to be other than joyful. I woke up early today, eager to see the world, to be in it, to be conscious to experience this joy. I can't tell you why. I just know that it was important.
Should I dismiss this too, O Wise Ones? Shall I describe it in terms of "social bonding rituals," and note dispassionately how many children were born in the same hour, the same minute, as little Sylvia? Do you nod sagely, as you acknowledge that it's surely for the best that I attach no special importance to the daunting knowledge that I have seen the beginnings of a life as vast and unwieldy as mine?
Go ahead. Throw out everything which isn't totally rational. Throw out all the things you can't reproduce under the watchful eye of some priest-skeptic, trained to disregard that which cannot be given discrete numeric values. But please, be careful with the tissue paper left of the world; it will be fragile when all the flesh is gone from those weary bones.
In the end, all we have is rooted in faith. I have faith that my experiences describe something external to me; it pleases me to imagine that this "universe", as I have come to call it, is a real place, full of real people. This charming fantasy, totally unsupported by any external evidence, fills my time with excitement and adventure, but only so long as I suspend my disbelief. In the end, though, I must admit that what I have is only experiences. I have no way to verify them, except to have more experiences. All I can tell you is that these experiences seem consistent. Maybe they aren't, and my memory is unreliable. I could never know such a thing. So, I act as though the world I perceive exists. Following the same path, inexorably, I act as though my friends matter to me, as though there is a distinction between right and wrong, and as though the force which moves me sometimes when I pray is God. You may draw a line between "rational" and "irrational" in the sand wherever you please; the waves will wash it away presently.
One of the problems you occasionally face is trying to communicate with people who simply don't have the framework to understand what you're doing. For instance, some of the junk faxers I've talked to have been, so far as I can tell, incapable of comprehending the motive "I think this behavior is wrong, and want to make people stop doing it". If it's not profitable, it doesn't make sense. You talk about damages, they understand. You talk about giving money to charity, and all they hear is indistinct buzzing noises. The words simply can't make sense. A couple of these people have made it quite clear that they've "seen through" my claims that I think junk faxing is wrong. They don't buy it, not for a minute, because that's not how people are.
One of my friends had a similar experience. She was talking to other students in college, and was trying to explain that she was studying molecular biology because it was interesting, not because of a specific planned career path. In fact, a lot of people who pick up a couple of college classes run into this; many people are in college to Advance A Career, and simply don't see any other explanation. They want to know what you're getting out of it, and "education" isn't an answer that makes sense.
The most depressingly common form of this, however, remains morals and ethics. Another friend of mine got tagged for speeding a while back. She mentioned this in a social setting, and someone told her to contest the ticket. Her response was, to my mind, perfectly obvious; "But why? I was speeding." The other party went on to explain all of the ways in which one can get out of speeding tickets, but seemed totally incapable of understanding the premise; if you do something for which there is a fine, and get tagged, you pay your fine, you don't whine about it.
The idea that we should be responsible for our actions, and accept their consequences, seems to be wildly unpopular these days. And yet, the people dismissing this idea as naive, or foolish, don't seem to be able to comprehend why they might be looked down on, or distrusted. One early spammer explained that he was spamming, fully aware of the harmful effects it had, because it was allowing him to buy stuff for his family. That's his moral system; he takes care of his family. (You still out there, NUK?) You know what? If a paper wasp can fully comprehend and implement your moral system, you have problems. Problems which cannot be addressed without admitting, up front, that this moral system is simply deficient. It's not really a moral system, just a set of rationalizations and excuses.
I think this is the hidden downside of attempting to legislate morality. The more you have laws governing morality, the more likely people are to think that anything they can get away with, legally, is therefore also moral. It isn't so. Laws are the baseline; the bare minimum. What is illegal is not everything wrong, but only those things so egregious and destructive that we need to enforce a ban on them, and not even all of those.
What's really terrifying is that this is in America. The richest country in the world, by most accounts. We have technology. Our definition of the "poverty line" allows for color television. Very, very, few people starve around here. The people who are the most vocal in condemning "old-fashioned" models of ethics or morals are not the ones who are starving. They're the ones who want to pay for a second brand-new SUV.
These people are mentally unwell, by any reasonable standard. When you meet them, try to be compassionate; they simply don't know any better, and they're too stubborn to learn. This doesn't excuse their behavior; it just explains it. There's not much point in trying to explain what they're doing wrong. They have built a worldview in which terms like "morals" are just buzzing sounds, to be disregarded while one focuses on meeting a sales quota. Their lives are more empty than most of us can imagine. Don't hate them. Pity them.