Filed under: metrics
…everything seems ridiculous. The problems of “Denial of Service” and “spoofing” have been around since long before there was human-generated electricity… now it’s just cheap and easy to carry one out from across a country.
What prompted this commentary is SCO’s new letter claiming open-source software is a threat to national security. So: who’s really behind their current program? Do they have an arrangement with MS? Why is this broad extension of their initial lawsuit a profitable foray for them? [It would seem much more profitable for a larger company with more to gain — MSFT, a thousand times larger than SCO, seems like a more promising suitor]
And: if people start publishing sincere meaningless letters, and research papers [prompted, say, by business interests, or for personal fame], and books [propaganda, private vendetta, political or financial gain, sincere delusion], and financial reports, historical documents, resumes, instruction manuals, etc — how can the world react in such a way as to efficiently cull truth from fiction? In which areas of writing/thought is it possible to perform such a separation?
Presumably, in the presence of a quick cheap metric, one could enact spot checks combined with stiff punishments to probabilistically suppress misleading communications. Else? How to leverage distributed community efforts, accounting for 2d- and higher-order errors? This seems to be a significant problem of universal inliquidity.
When people abuse communication channels… …