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"It’s like I’m addicted. I go on at least once a day or I don’t feel right." "When you stop experimenting, you’re dead, because then you have no ideas, you have no breakthrough thinking." OFFICE HELP(LESS) An e-mail making the rounds offers some creative fodder for reviews of employees who don’t make the grade. You’ll almost certainly never use them, but it might do your heart good just to imagine that you could.
THE PLANE TRUTH The next time you’re enduring a behind-schedule, lost-bags, fat-guy-snoring-in-the-next-seat nightmare of a trip, perhaps these flight-crew tales will lighten your load:
TOWER: “Speedbird, do you not know where you are going?” PILOT: “Stand by a moment, ground. I’m looking up our gate location now.” TOWER (with impatience): “Speedbird 206, have you never flown to Frankfurt before?” PILOT (coolly): “Yes, I have, in 1944. In another type of Boeing, but just to drop something off. I didn’t stop....” CLICK HERE FOR FORGIVENESS In February, London’s Premier Christian Radio launched an online confessional at www.theconfessor.co.uk, where visitors can tell their sins to a computer screen. Before the confession, the user is invited to read excerpts from the Bible about confessing sins to God, as well as get a quick lesson about sin’s meaning and consequences. The confessor then types in his transgressions or, if pressed for time, chooses a prepared confession. Executives at the nondenominational station say that confessions are confidential and that they are erased from the confessor’s computer’s memory when he is finished. A spokesman for the U.S. Catholic Conference says that the church doesn’t recognize online confessions and that people who use the Web site won’t receive absolution. I DVRC U Sixteen husbands in the Gulf emirate of Dubai used cellphone text messages to divorce their wives between April and June, according to Gulf News. Under Islamic law, a man may repudiate his wife simply by saying “I divorce thee” three times, and Islamic religious scholars in Dubai have ruled that a text message can do the trick. (A religious court in Singapore has disallowed the practice.) Gulf News reports that one Dubai man ended his marriage by sending his wife this message: “Why are you late? I divorce you.” AWK! POLLY WANT A HACKER! Firemen in the U.K. community of Willenhall recently spent an hour searching an office building after a startled security guard said he had heard a parrot screaming “Who’s a pretty boy, then?” from inside a wall. After 60 minutes’ worth of kicking in doors and probing heating ducts, the firemen stumbled into an office to find the parrot bouncing up and down and yelling at them from a PC screen saver. UNCOMMON LAW Pamela Samuelson, a professor at the University of California at Berkeley (www.berkeley.edu), has established herself as a voice of reason on how laws should be applied in cyberspace. Samuelson, who teaches at both the School of Law and the School of Information Management and Systems, has become a go-between among the couldn’t-be-more-different worlds of technologists, legal experts, and public policy makers. Samuelson, a 1997 winner of a “genius” grant from the John D. and Catherine T. MacArthur Foundation, has been trying to find ways to construct what she calls “an information society in which social and cultural values can be preserved.” It isn’t a task for the fainthearted. Samuelson chuckles that she tells her students that if they want to be technology lawyers, they must “have a high tolerance for change....If you want something certain, go into estate planning.” To gather some perspective on the confusing world of cyberlaw, Context Senior Writer Bob Diddlebock recently chatted with Samuelson.
CONTEXT: What do you see as today’s stickiest legal issues for cyberspace? PAMELA SAMUELSON: One minefield is in business-method patents. It is one thing for the U.S. Patent Office to issue patents on plows, tractors, vacuum cleaners, and chemicals. But they can’t do a competent job on business methods, no matter how hard they try, because they don’t have business degrees; they have chemistry degrees. The courts likely will throw out any bad patents that are issued. The problem is that it costs millions of dollars to litigate patent cases, which can disrupt what would otherwise be very rapid growth. CONTEXT: Where do we need new law? SAMUELSON: A question that pops up all the time is: Can you take old laws and apply them in cyberspace? I am not one of these pessimists who says that, for example, copyright law is dead on the Internet. I think that some of the things that are considered copyright infringements when you do them in “meatspace” [the physical world] are copyright infringement when you do them in cyberspace. There are some ways that copyright law has to be adapted, but it isn’t one of those places where the current law can’t work at all. Privacy, though, is one place where new law is needed. In the past, you didn’t need a law to protect you, because it was too hard and too costly to collect all that information. Now, it is easy. CONTEXT: How do you carve out the right legal parameters? SAMUELSON: The problem is that when Congress or some other policy maker looks at the Internet, they don’t try to address the problem in the narrowest way. They go whole hog. They enact, say, the Communications Decency Act, to make it illegal for anyone to say anything indecent on the Internet. That isn’t a reasonable approach. The act has been ruled unconstitutional. Instead, we should adopt what I call “proportional response.” We should create some simple, flexible rules and then let them adapt over time. Let us adapt the laws we have had in the past, so we can accommodate new technology, and as we need additional rules we can add them. What you have to be willing to do is revisit the issues from time to time.
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Works well when under constant supervision and cornered like a rat in a trap.