[118635] in Cypherpunks
RE: Cypherpunks NYT subscription
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Robert Hettinga)
Mon Oct 4 15:49:23 1999
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Date: Mon, 4 Oct 1999 15:19:36 -0400
To: cypherpunks@algebra.com
From: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
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Reply-To: Robert Hettinga <rah@shipwright.com>
At 10:11 AM -0400 on 10/4/99, jbugden@ALIS.COM wrote:
> Tragedy of the commons.
Christ. What leftist nonsense *that* is. I'll be charitable here,
because I'm sure *you* don't actually mean this.
This "tragedy of the commons" garbage is right up there with
path-determinacy, global warming and other innumerate, irrational,
canards. (No Virginia, Palau is *not* sinking into the sea. Hell, the
ozone "hole" is probably naturally occuring to boot. I certainly
wouldn't be surprised.)
The tragedy of the "commons", boys and girls, is that nobody *owns*
the commons.
That is, ya get whatcha pay for. The cost of anything is the foregone
alternative, and all that.
If it were possible to *buy* content off the NYT site cheap enough to
throw it away as you read it -- just like you can do now with their
newspaper on the street -- the NYT wouldn't give a rat's ass about
*who* read their stuff at all.
Put another way, the *real* economics of "you own your own words" is,
or at least will be, in a world of ubiquitous networks and
microprocessing, this: If somebody else's words are on your hard
drive *now*, they're now *your* words. You can do what you want with
them. Including giving them -- and selling them -- to anyone else.
Any law which claims otherwise is unenforceable. More important, it's
uneconomic.
If you're really all-fired crazy about making sure all of us can see
something on the NYT site, use the tools available. Have yourself a
little crypto-adventure and mail the damn thing here with an
anonymous remailer. Let's see the copyright police deal with *that*.
God knows, bandwidth is not a consideration for such things, anymore.
Especially not on a list like this one.
Anyway, by way of contributing to the aforementioned "tragedy", the
current ordinal number for "cypherpunks[N]" NYT site accounts, where
[N] is putatively some total number cypherpunks accounts, was
somewhere in the middle one-hundreds, last time I looked.
Anyone here want to guess how many of that centurion of accounts have
the password "cypherpunks", or "writecode"? You can bet the passwords
are not very entropic, one way or another.
Finally, someone can go create YAC[N] account and post the password
here. What with? Use the tools.
Cheers,
RAH
-----------------
Robert A. Hettinga <mailto: rah@ibuc.com>
The Internet Bearer Underwriting Corporation <http://www.ibuc.com/>
44 Farquhar Street, Boston, MA 02131 USA
"... however it may deserve respect for its usefulness and antiquity,
[predicting the end of the world] has not been found agreeable to
experience." -- Edward Gibbon, 'Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire'
