Play-by-mail games are a pivotal part of John Darnielle's novel WOLF in WHITE VAN. Some of these games sound like ones depicted in the book. Very interesting!
Generally speaking. For example, Nicehash, which had been chugging along for a long time, went belly up yesterday after what seemed like a regular maintenance period.
Coincidentally, EXTROPY magazine and its associated brand of techno-libertarianism was more reflective of where we have actually ended up. I have an old issue from 1995 that focuses on digital money that more or less advocates what we know now as cryptocurrency, including an imaginary monetary unit called Hayeks. With that said, stuff like cryonics and immortality is still pretty marginal.
The Extropians and Cypherpunks mailing lists had a fair bit of overlap in temperament with Mondo 2000 and with each other. They're also easier to search.
It's fun, sometimes a bit depressing, to search those archives for years that have now passed and see what people expected by now. (ag "by 201", ag "by 200")
Serious underdelivery so far on:
- Molecular manufacturing
- Increasing single-thread performance of desktop computers, with ever-growing clock speed
- Robotics outside of industrial facilities
- Therapeutic breakthroughs in medicine from genomics
- Encrypted and networked communications revolutionizing politics/society
You might object that most of these developments, dimly foreseen in the 1990s, are actually significant in this decade in some form. But you have to go back to the originals to appreciate just how quantitatively aggressive the predictions were. (10 GHz desktop CPUs by 2014. Followup in the same discussion: No, the clock speed will be twice that, and arrive before 2010!)
I have 2 issues of EXTROPY myself and hope to scan them at a point after Mondo. The issues rarely hit ebay, and when they do they are listed at incredibly high prices. I'm always looking to find them.
The first question that came to mind upon reading this was: "are lawyers involved in the contest letter filing process? If not, I wonder if they may have a problem re: unauthorized practice of law in CA.
My fiance got a ticket on Muni that was clearly in error (her Clipper Card record showed her tagging 9 minutes prior to the ticket being issued). We followed the instructions for submitting a protest, and never heard back. After some back and forth, it seemed like the protest process was just /dev/null-ed, so we paid up just to make the problem go away.
My take-away was that if you wanted to actually fight a citation you'd have to take them to court. As I understand it, fare evasion was a criminal offense until a few years ago, when they decriminalized it in favor of the new citation system, in order to save money on court costs.
> As I understand it, fare evasion was a criminal offense until a few years ago, when they decriminalized it in favor of the new citation system, in order to save money on court costs.
It also changes the requirement from "proof beyond a reasonable doubt" to "the preponderance of the evidence", a much lower standard.
It wouldn't have to say anything like that. The determination of practicing law without a law license isn't based on what the government body requires, but generally on rules about what is and isn't legal practice.
I assume they've looked at legal ethics decisions before they opened for business. But who knows, start ups sometimes cut legal corners.
Practicing law? This isn't a courthouse. Sure the SFMTA operates with the blessing of the government, but I do not believe "parking court" is in the same realm as the "courthouse" you're thing of.
Practicing law is more than just appearing in a court. I'm not totally sure where the line is, but writing a defense letter is definitely near the line.
They may just have supervising attorney's who double check all the work before it goes out the door. A lot of small firms have teams of paralegals who do paperwork and one attorney who signs off.
In CA it's defined as: 'As the term is generally understood, the practice of the law is the doing or performing services in
a court of justice, in any matter depending therein, throughout its various stages, and in
conformity to the adopted rules of procedure. But in a larger sense it includes legal advice and
counsel, and the preparation of legal instruments and contracts by which legal rights are secured
although such matter may or may not be depending in a court.'
I guess that the government's legal justification for this is that people have no reasonable expectation of privacy under the 4th Amendment re: the info on the outside of the mail (name, address, etc.). That is why the need a warrant to actually open the mail.
The best analogy re: address info on mail is to garbage that you leave on the curb for the trash collector. You probably don't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in that garbage because you exposed it to the public by leaving it out on the curb. There is case law to back this up. Similarly, if you hand over a letter to a postal carrier, you arguably wouldn't have a reasonable expectation of privacy in the info on the envelope since that info can be gleaned by anybody who looks at the letter. Email would be different since that is presumably store on your computer or a server or some other place or thing that would fall under the 4th Amendment protections (and require a warrant).
In a way email is worse, due to all the third-parties who might conceivably be "shown" the email en route.
Perhaps the courts will come up with a legal construct that information which is processed and handled in a completely automated fashion does not "count" as having been seen in public. Something similar to DMCA safe harbor and "common carrier" provisions already defined in telecommunications law, except that it would apply in general and not just to 'large enough' websites or telecom companies.
That is probably in their interest, since they do get lots of valid takedown notices. For them it would be easier to streamline the process with email.
Actually, if the target of a DMCA notice files a counter-notice, the ISP has to reinstate the content within 10 days unless the person/entity filing the DMCA notice alerts the ISP that an injunction has been filed within a specified period of time. See 17 USC § 512(g)(2)(A)-(C).
I have read almost 1/4 of this guy's book--Trust Me, I'm Lying--and it is actually interesting. He rather explicitly describes the process by which he has manipulated the news media for various clients, including American Apparel (he is the guy who makes those "controversial" ads), by feeding or leaking info to blogs (his definition of a "blog" is very broad) and then working those stories up the media food chain. There is lots of puffery and some of it will trigger any reasonable person's b.s. detector, However, a lot of it rings true and he definitely presents a lot of interesting nut-and-bolts ideas--that may or may not actually work.
As to financial results, I can recall one instance where he specifically identified a link between a campaign and financial results. Whether you believe it is another matter . . .
I think the impact could be bigger than you suggest. Communications between Stratfor staff, clients, and sources are buried in this data dump. There is an entire spreadsheet of non-US media contacts who had agreements of some kind with Stratfor. There is correspondence between Stratfor executives and their attorneys that was most certainly subject to attorney/client privilege before it was posted. This only scratches the surface.
That's not particularly useful to people who want to rip through the entire corpus using standard textmining tools; we'd really rather a signed torrent of a compressed imap archive or something similar. Having all the headers in formats accessible to scripts to read and tag different emails, etc.
This is sort of like having to do research on an archive that's been photocopied onto kleenex. But, we'll suck it up, and write a scraper to turn it into what we need. But it means that some of the interesting stuff is delayed, because wikileaks is trying to get the most bang for the buck by dribbling it out.
Just to pick an example of what I mean by interesting; tag all emails that mention a country or city and see if there are correlations between who sent and received emails and the countries mentioned, or if informants are mentioned in connection with more than one country.
