Seebach Exhibit 7

Debunking... chocolate?

This is one of the finest pieces of investigative reporting I've ever read:

Dallas Foods debunks Noka chocolate.

It turns out that this insanely pricey boutiquey chocolate is just mass-produced chocolate bought from a particular vendor and, uhm. Cast. Into small squares. You know, like anyone could do at home.

Beautiful investigative reporting. If we're lucky, their PR shill will post a comment on my blog pretending to be someone else. Watch carefully.

(For more, read about Dan, tireless defender of Noka chocolate, and PR shill extraordinaire.)

Why gamblers lose money.

I found a card in the park. On one side was a detailed (and possibly even correct) chart of when to make which bets in a blackjack game to maximize your chance of winning.

On the other side was a Betting System. You know, a pattern of bets that is supposedly guaranteed to improve your odds. Here's this one:

So, the summary is this: If you win, you increase your bet. If you lose, you reset to your "normal" bet. The idea is that this will maximize the payouts of "winning streaks", so you get more money when you are winning.

There's just one tiny problem: It doesn't have any effect at all, except to make you lose money faster if you win a couple of hands. Doing the math may be instructive, but it's also a lot of work. The simple way to see it is this:

After each hand, either you have won money, or you have lost money. However, either way, your chances on the next hand are exactly the same as they would have been on any other hand. Betting more right after winning doesn't do you any more good than betting more right after losing. It has the arguable advantage that, if you've just won, you have more money available to lose, but... That doesn't really help you; you're just betting that money too, and thus having a real chance of losing the money you just made as well as your regular bet.

They love to invent terms, but in the end, all the systems are bunk. (I'm not talking about, say, card-counting, which does work -- which is why many casinos ban it.)

And as long as there are people out there willing to spend money to be told how they can definitely win next time, there will be people making money off them. Selling "systems" to gamblers is about the only way, other than running a casino, to consistently make money off gambling. Lots of people go broke betting that there ought to be a way to take advantage of "winning streaks". No one ever goes broke underestimating the intelligence of the general public.

PS3: First impressions

I have a PS3 now. It's for work.

Thus, a few first impressions:

1. It is loud. I have a dual G5 system (2.0GHz, a year or so old), an Athlon 4000+, and an intel-based Mac mini all sitting at my desk. The PS3 is louder than the other three systems put together.

2. It is not exceptionally efficient at some tasks. I asked it to format the disk, splitting it into 10GB for PS3 stuff and 50GB for Linux. This took 215 minutes. Yes, that's a tad over three and a half hours. To put it in perspective, if it wrote every single byte on that disk at the speed of a slowish drive, it would take about three hours. Given that there's no need to do anything for the part of the drive being assigned to Linux (it was, after all, a factory-blank disk), it shouldn't even have needed to do that. I assume the intent is that zeroing out the whole disk prevents people from filling the disk with PS3 stuff, then repartitioning and getting access to TOP SECRET FILES. Which they could get by putting the disk in another machine anyway. DUMB!

3. The basic UI is sorta mediocre. Having both this and a Wii, the Wii's menu is IMHO more pleasant to interact with -- of course, some of that is because the Wii has a pointer, and can give rumble feedback when the mouse goes over a button. The PS3 just has to have huge and complicated scrolling menus. Also, the very austere black and white motif just plain doesn't look that nice; I'd rather see a bit more use of color.

4. The HDMI to DVI thing is good, but not perfect. My monitor is 1050 pixels tall; the PS3 identifies it as supporting 1080p (that is, 1080 rows per frame), and can even drive it like that -- except that it gets occasional frames of pure static. Setting it to 1080i (540 rows per frame) seems to work just fine.

5. There is not a single game for this machine I want or care about.

6. I have no interest at all in Blu-ray movies. Why should I want a special way of making movies marginally better that limits me to a single expensive player, when I can buy regular DVDs and see them on anything I want?

7. The PS3 won't drive my regular monitor, because that monitor doesn't support the special copy-protection feature they require.

And here's the thing: Everywhere you go on this box, you are reminded that Sony is in charge, and this hardware is not really yours to use, but theirs to let you use as they think best. Region coding back and forth, special limited access to the hardware for Linux (you don't even get real access to the disk, you get filtered access that prevents your system from even SEEING the part of the disk used by the PS3), mandatory copy protection on the video output, etcetera.

This system is, fundamentally, built to keep you from using it. The system's capacity is artificially reduced by the fact that parts of it are full-time dedicated to protecting it from possible unintended uses. The desire to provide "copy protection" trumps any question of "how can we make the best gaming experience possible" or "what would make this hardware useful". The disc format used is designed first and foremost to increase the level of control given over movie-watching, making it as hard as possible for people to do things like "not watch all of these previews again" or "watch a movie that they picked up while on vacation in another country". Well, that, and to give Sony royalty shares of the new technology, instead of one of their competitors. Nevermind that many of us would rather just have plain old DVDs which we can play in everything we own.

It's gonna be an interesting project, and honestly, I expect to enjoy having it around and using it for some software development, but I think Sony has not yet learned anything from all their other fiascos. This is the company that installed an actual rootkit (software to gain control of a Windows machine and hide the fact from other software) on untold numbers of computers to try to reduce the frequency with which people copy songs from audio CDs they have legitimately purchased to iPods they use only for their own use.

They have not learned anything from this. More's the pity; if it weren't for that, I think the hardware would be incredibly attractive.

Maybe they'll suddenly develop a clue and a future firmware update will open the machine up for third-party development on the whole machine, not just on a carefully-selected subset that's supposed to prevent people from developing anything that Sony doesn't want developed.

Today's cool idea

I think there should be plastic bags using a plastic which dissolves in contact with saliva, but not in contact with water.

This should be eminently doable; we have a pretty good idea which enzymes human saliva contains.

Some number of kids suffocate every year because a bag gets stuck over their mouth and they can't breathe. If the saliva that presumably gets on the bag from being over a kid's open mouth broke the seal, even a little, they would be fine.

If you can do this, and make money at it, more power to you.

ChristianForums: Defining marriage, part 2

So, to follow up from part 1, I'll resume the story later in 2006, some time after the rules were revised to eliminate any reference to the definition of marriage.

Our story starts, not at ChristianForums, but at IIDB, where a former CF staffer ("oftenbuzzard", at IIDB, aka "buzz") makes an offhanded remark (October 11th):

Call me crazy but removing a person from CF staff who is in a transgendered "marriage" does not seem radical to me. I was not on staff at the time, but from your description in threads here.... I think Erwin made the right call.

This post was, for the record, not edited by staff; it might have been considered a flame, but by the time forum staff got to it, a substantial chunk of smackdown had already been administered on the wisdom of someone professing to be a pastor making snide remarks about other peoples' marriages.

Anyway, other posts by this same poster crossed a number of lines; he had been gradually getting out of hand for a while. For instance, he responded to another poster with:

Your profile says you are 14 years old.
You will be in my prayers, my young friend.

Now, nearly anyone would already recognize the insult, but there was also a sarcastic "rolleyes" smiley in the original post. He denied that it was insulting, insisting that offering to pray for people isn't insulting. (In and of itself, I don't think it is; in a context like this, it's condescending and insulting.) He was put on notice that he must agree to abide by the rules. (He summarized some of these events in his CF blog -- but changed some of the names to blame the innocent.)

So, what do you think happened next? Simple. He went to CF and starts asking about what the rules are for the "married" icon in a user's profile. Pure coincidence, do you think? The new thread was started on the 16th -- only a couple of days after the previous hullabaloo died down.

The official answer is provided: The requirement to display the wedding-ring icon is that you selected "Married" in your profile. Our ex-staffer goes on to promote the idea that CF ought to adopt a formal standard and enforce it. The thread is closed.

A couple of days later, our friend posts a comment about a Christian tattoo site, directing it specifically (and by name) at a poster who has a long history of difficulty refraining from flame wars when tattoos are brought up. He is banned from IIDB on the 17th.

A couple of things happen.

One is that two users -- ksen and rnmomof7, both Calvinists and close to buzz both personally and theologically -- show up at IIDB claiming that Buzz was banned for insulting me. Untrue. Where would they have gotten that idea? Good question. But that's not all.

On the 18th, ksen announces a new policy. According to this new policy, people may only declare themselves married if they are in a marriage consisting of one man and one woman. This policy is announced by someone who has publically stated that he believes that buzz (a friend of his, and a fellow Calvinist) was banned for his comments about my marriage.

In addition to the public announcement (which my logs show as being around 11:30 AM in my time zone), there's a private staff discussion thread.

In that thread, someone asks the question:

ksen, in the US, if a person gets a sex change, they can be legally identified as the opposite sex, and can legally marry. There was a question asked about this recently in the rules forum - how does this ruling apply to this not altogether hypothetical situation?

ksen responds:

This must be seebs.

Ask him if his wife is a female. If he can't answer "yes" unequivocally then he can't use the married icon.

In later discussions, while denying that specific users were discussed in conjunction with this policy, ksen claims that he was the one who brought this policy forward. He claims there is no relationship to the banning of his buddy or his buddy's decision to bring this up, but... He also makes a couple of other claims.

On the 19th, a full day later, ksen writes:

I NEVER said I considered you marriage invalid. Why would I? I know nothing about your marriage. Believe it or not some things that happen at CF actually have nothing to do with you.

So, he knows nothing about my marriage. Sure, the moment anyone mentioned a sex change, he was the first to mention my name.

He also reminds us, on the 19th, that he believes this is why our buddy was banned:

Apparently he can't since he's now banned for goring your particular ox.

But that's okay. Really, he's not aware of any problems:

Why should your rings be in danger?

Nevermind that he's the one who, a day earlier, said that I had to meet particular standards (and given that he brought me up in that context, he presumably believed I didn't) or I couldn't keep them.

He claimed this was not a fishing expedition, but in context, I just plain can't believe it.

So, anyway, time passes. They start trying to remove the wedding ring icons from a gay guy. My profile is, indeed, reported. Lots of public statements are made. We're told that the language was always supposed to be there, it was just an "oversight" that it was removed. Not so; the person drafting the rules intentionally omitted that. We're told that nothing changed, that this rule always applied to profiles. Not so; it was only ever applied to the content of posts before, and only indirectly. We're told that staff do not gossip about users. Not so; staff exchange a number of speculations about what genitalia my spouse has.

In a fairly large thread, rnmomof7 first claims that God has appointed her in authority over the users of CF, and then goes on to state that she does not consider me validly married. In the public thread. This post is not edited, on the grounds that it is a personal opinion, and not a flame... In fact, had it been anyone not a conservative Calvinist saying it to just about anyone else, it would have been edited, but the executive team in charge of the site have a number of conservatives who were pretty mad at me. (I have since been told that any possibility of editing that post ended when flesh99 posted the contents of that staff thread on his blog. Why? Because it's obviously my fault, and at CF, if you are party to breaking the Sekrits, it is not a violation of the rules to attack you.)

After more feuding and in-fighting, the rule is established that no gossip and searching things out will be ceased (well, eventually), but the rule will remain.

The question is, why? I mean, apart from the pure vengeance aspect, in which ksen and rnmomof7 beat me up because they blame me for their friend's ban (even though they've been told repeatedly that it wasn't a factor)...

Why?

The problem ChristianForums has is that it's trying to be open to everyone, and that means compromise. On the marriage icon, there has to be a compromise between people who are horribly offended when anyone they don't think is validly married gets to claim to be married, and people who claim to be married. You know, like the way we compromise in normal society between ravening lunatics who physically yank the rings off other peoples' fingers, and the people who are just going about their business wearing rings.

The fact is, the arguments for this rule are all in vehement and consistent opposition to the site's stated purpose, of uniting Christians. They are there because the site has a huge number of staff, especially the more dogmatic Calvinists, who feel that the best way to unite Christians is to exile the people they don't think are good enough Christians.

And, for now, they're winning, which is why I can't post there. If I post there, moderators dredge up three month old posts and send me nasty notes about them. The open flames directed at me stay, because the people who posted them are friends with people in power, who will believe just about anything bad that's said about me.

Ksen did eventually apologize for bringing up his beliefs about my spouse's genitals in the staff forums. He has not identified a source for those beliefs, nor, I think, has he quite reached the point of understanding why the question was never any of his business.

IMHO, a great portion of the tragedy here is that all of these people seem to have bought into the notion that plumbing matters more than commitment. Not that they agree on how; some believe it's the sex you're born, others that it's the sex you're currently equipped for. But they're very convinced that somehow this matters more than, say, anything else. Like commitment.

A lot of these people believe that, if I had dumped my spouse for being transgendered, that'd be a good and pure and clean and holy thing, and that this kind of ritual purity would mean more to God than love and commitment do.

And I am sad about this, because this means these people have never really found the point of being married. If your spouse came home and said "You know what? It turns out I'm transgendered. I'm not the sex you think I am, that's just a sort of weird accident. I might get it fixed.", and you immediately started worrying that your marriage was invalid... You haven't gotten the point yet. There's more to be had; you can be closer, you can be more in love. Keep working at it. One of my friends, in defense of these people, said it takes a very special kind of person to stay in those circumstances. Well, that's the thing, isn't it; the whole point of marriage is to become that special for someone, and to have them be that special to you.

But this definition will never be acceptable to the evangelical community in America, which uses divorce, disowning, and other tactics to eliminate gays and other undesirables from their family structures. When Jesus comes, they're going to be all shiny and ritually pure, and as far away from the sinners as they can manage. Which, I think, may turn out to be rather bad luck for them.

Anyway, that's most of the story of the marriage icon. There's a lot more. There's lies and abuse and so on. If you want copies of some of the threads, feel free to ask; I have, of course, saved just about everything.

Oh, and if you're wondering why I wrote this post now, and not another time?

Because some years back, I saw in another person what God sees in all of us, just for an instant, and I said "'til death do us part", and I have never looked back. Against that, the question of whether my spouse is "male" or "female" is the most trivial of details; you might as well ask whether I'd get a divorce if my spouse wore a different-colored shirt, or changed hair color.

And twelve years ago, today, we exchanged rings. Happy anniversary, sweetie.

Drive carefully out there!

Yesterday, I saw a traffic accident. I stopped for a light. Around when the light turned, a car in the left turn lane going the other way finally made her turn.

When she was halfway through the intersection, a largeish truck smashed into her car. I think he was doing 30-35 when he hit the intersection, although he did hit his brakes at the last instant. The truck smashed into the side of the car pretty much perfectly broadsiding it.

There was a passenger in that car. I have no idea whether or not she lived; I saw blood, but she was still moving some. The ambulance was there within a couple of minutes.

Anyway, here's the thing:

If you get hospitalized, you will not get to keep looking for that elusive Wii or Tickle Me Elmo or whatever it is that you haven't got yet.

Your kids would rather have you for Christmas than a toy. Even a very good toy.

Drive more carefully.

A person I know on a bulletin board wrote about being on duty on Thanksgiving once:

Nikitona talks about being a cop.

I was called to the scene of an accident involving a family of four. The father (driver) appeared to be in the worst shape, his neck was broken. The mother had been holding a pumpkin pie which was spattered on the dashboard. The little girl in the back had extensive face and head injuries. The little boy in the back had crushed legs. All were unconscious, unmoving, silent. I don't know if all survived. I suspect the father was already dead, although the Paramedics did what they could to revive him.

Later that evening, I pulled over a car that was speeding and driving erratically. He would drift over the center line and then overcorrect. It turned out he was drifting because he was turning around to yell at his kids in the back seat. He was speeding and driving in anger, probably because they were running late. When I approached the car, you could feel the tension. This, too, was a family of four. This time the little girl in the back was holding the pie.

Read it. It's worth seeing.

And then drive more carefully. It's not just that you have to not drive badly; you have to remember that a lot of other people are driving especially badly.

Frys still going...

Just for reference, the Frys spam run to old addresses is still going; I just got my fourth. So far, I have gotten no response from them, despite sending all the requested emails, jumping through hoops, and so on... And yes, I'm still getting mail from them.

Their hold music is horrible sappy love songs, and I've been on hold a good ten minutes so far.

Boy, are they not winning my affection.

Oh, wait. They improved: They hung up on me after 15 minutes on hold. No explanation, no "our system is too busy". Just hung up.

ChristianForums: Defining marriage, part 1

This one's long enough to need to be a series.

There was recently a big fluff at CF over the "definition of marriage". I'm going to start with a bit of an old-history overview. This applies to various things at the site, such as a user's profile (where they can indicate whether or not they are married) or whether a given thing constitutes "extramarital" sex in a debate.

ChristianForums has often made use of a definition of the word marriage. In 2003, around the time of the great crash, a spectacularly stupid rule was put in place, that prohibited "promoting sin". The language of the rule said that it was prohibited to "promote anything that may be considered sin according to the Bible" (a quote from memory, not an exact quote, but definitely not my own words). This convoluted wording was followed up by a specific list. As you might guess, everything on the list was sexual in nature, except abortion -- and abortion, as understood by these people, is all about sexuality. Despite the in-theory sweeping nature of the rule, it was never once cited by staff in reference to usury or murder. It was not used in reference to torture, either. No, just sex. Lots and lots of sex.

The rule tried to capture the general sense of pseudo-Puritan sexual morality by banning all "promotion" of "extramarital sex", and had a parenthetical stating that by "marriage" they mean "a marriage between a man and a woman". This rule was used against gays, and it was used against unmarried straights.

During this (but unfortunately lost during the Great Crash, I believe) there was a discussion of how this rule determined marital status. I posed a specific example; imagine a couple who meet on a mission trip in a hypothetical country that does not recognize Christian marriages. They have a church ceremony but the government doesn't recognize it. Are they "married"? Erwin's official answer, and the site has never changed it, was "no, they are not." That couple could not "promote" their sinful lifestyle by admitting that they have sex.

Now, some of you might be wondering why a Christian site would be more concerned with the dictates of a government that doesn't recognize the Christian church than with the dictates of an actual Christian church. I sort of wonder too. I think it's an inability to understand differing circumstances; in their own country, they'd assume that anyone without a civil marriage license was in some way invalid, so obviously, that must be true elsewhere. I have no idea. It's sort of weirdly historical; the early Church considered marriage essentially a secular thing and mostly ignored it.

The "promoting sin" rule was unenforceable and ill-defined; no one could ever reach agreement on what constituted "promoting sin. The rule gradually migrated, and eventually this became a rule stating that discussions of those topics could occur only in specific forums. However, the marriage thing itself remained always a modifier of that particular rule. In the entire history of CF, up until late 2006, it was never, ever, enforced as a rule about user profiles. There is no evidence that anyone on staff ever thought that it was applied in this way, and there is not a single instance on the record of a staff member making any statements about who could or couldn't identify as married.

In early 2006, the rules were massively revised. This definition was dropped. Some staff have claimed that this was an oversight, but the person who drafted the rules said it was intentional; it was not a useful thing to have, and it served no useful purpose.

In late 2006, we got the Marriage Icon Saga. More to come on that, but it's large and will take a great deal of research.

Allied Telesyn followup

This is just a followup to my article about the Allied Telesyn junk fax class action.

1. It got written about. If that link doesn't work, here's another link to the article at the Rocky Mountain News

2. I did finally find the thing that really bugged me in their claims of long ago; this comes from Allied Telesyn's counsel.

In one prior letter I stated: "we expect an extremely high claim rate because the original fax list was "scrubbed", i.e. personal contact was made with every individual on the list and the contact information was carefully verified. Therefore, if the notices are sent to the same fax numbers as the original scrubbed list, a high response rate of close to 100% is to be expected." In my discussions with Rob, the only reason that I ever suggested fax notice was because the original list was a list of phone and fax numbers.

The problem is, the claim that personal contact was made is totally false. They never contacted me.

In the end, that was a major factor in my evaluation of them. I don't know whether it's the attorney or the company that originated this false claim, but someone in there said something because it was convenient, not because it was true. Or, perhaps, it was the list broker; they bought the list, so perhaps they just believed that someone selling them a list of numbers they couldn't legally used would magically be telling the truth.

This came up in the context of their discussion of how they didn't have addresses; eventually, claim notices were sent based on reverse lookups, rather than by fax, because faxing claim notices for a junk fax suit adds insult to injury. I don't think they ever did say where they purchased the list.

Allied Telesyn done!

So, way back when, I mentioned my junk fax suit against Allied Telesyn. The eventual settlement, signed in August 2005, was confidential until the settlement checks were mailed. They've been mailed.

The short answer is, Allied Telesyn sent junk faxes to about 6,000 businesses. Early on, they were claiming they had called all of these businesses to gain permission, and so on. However, my business is just me at my house; there's no one who could have given them permission, so we know that statement was false. Later, it came out that for many people all they knew was a fax number. Through a lot of reverse lookups and such they came up with a reasonably large list of people to contact with claim notices.

The final settlement was for $250 per claim. BTW, to clarify: That $250 is a check for $250.00. Not a "coupon" good on future services which the company can use as cheap advertising. The settlement order mentions just short of $160,000 for the class members who filed claims, and a $16.5k distribution to a law fund. As class representative, I got $5k. The law firms that represented me split up $300k, and of course, Allied Telesyn presumably paid their own attorneys for representation over the several years this case ran.

That's a lot for a single fax, although it's not the most I've ever gotten per fax in a settlement. On the other hand, it's by far the most it's ever cost someone to fax me.

Cue the whiners saying one should unsubscribe. Unsubscribe from what? Allied Telesyn had their own list; not a list anyone else used. I only got one fax from them. Nothing to unsubscribe from, but with millions of businesses in the US, I couldn't afford to get one fax per business in any event.

This is, I think, about how the TCPA is intended to work; it is very expensive to send unsolicited faxes, because Congress outlawed them. This is not a law intended to "discourage" an action; it is an outright prohibition, and the penalties are, if anything, demonstrably too small -- it is very hard to get enough money on junk fax suits to justify the cost of participating. One reason I was willing to accept the fairly low $250/class member settlement (by law, they would be entitled to at least $500 in individual suits) is the huge hassle of having to bring your own case. $250 you actually get for filling out a single claim form is better than $500 you can't afford to spend $1,000 to go get.

The settlement took way longer than anticipated, largely because of a series of humorous mishaps. Response to the initial round of claim forms was tiny. The second claim form went out with a typo, claiming people had only 30 days to file (they actually had 60). So a third went out, and then Stuff Happened. Law stuff, court stuff, whatever it was.

But the claim checks have been mailed, so the agreement saying I can't publicize the settlement or talk about it is now over. I did get one gripe about my previous entry, from March of 2005. Apparently, the mere fact that the article in question was written five full months before the settlement agreement was signed was a little too subtle for the folks over at Telesyn to pick up. They didn't make a big deal out of it, but they probably would have done better just to not mention it at all.

So, there you have it. Yes, you can sue people under the TCPA. Given that this took three years to resolve (I started it in May of 2003 or so), I don't think most people could "make a living at it" or whatever.

And no, I don't feel that it's unfair to businesses. I think that it provides businesses with a crucial defense against the effective loss of their fax machines.