Communication Ethics book part for Hand Copying. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for Historical Overview of Information Transmission. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for Definition of Information. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

Communication Ethics book part for The Conventional View of Communications. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

I can't believe the number of searches for "What does spam stand for" I'm getting to my Spam Filtering's Last Stand piece. Hopefully this entry will override that one once this is indexed. Apparently Google has nominated me to answer this question, so: "Spam" doesn't stand for anything. It's not an acronym. SPAMTM is the name of a meat product by Hormel. Spam came to mean "junk email" by analogy to a Monty Python's Flying Circus skit, wherein a restaurant's good food is drowned out by the spam, much like good content is drowned by spam on the Internet.

iRights was formed in January 2000 to track legal issues on the Internet. I was interested in these issues after spending the previous year in Third Voice anti-advocacy, and after studying the relevant law on censorship and such, I realized that nobody really knew how legal Third Voice was. Not only that, but there wasn't even a legal theory adequate to describe the situation as it truly was. A lot of metaphors were tossed about, but they all failed to capture vital aspects of the situation, even the metaphors I made.

Communication Ethics book part for Prelude. (This is an automatically generated summary to avoid having huge posts on this page. Click through to read this post.)

This is the first of what I hope will be semi-regular newsletters on the struggle to ensure that voting equipment produces a "voter verifiable audit trail".... I am convinced that any solution to the voting machine problem is going to require major and sustained grass roots pressure. Magical thinking about computers strikes again, and this time may adversely affect our entire government system. This issue is far, far more important then it seems, and it's an uphill battle just to get people to understand that.

As of yesterday at about 1:10 p.m. EST, I am officially done with school. I have completed the program for a Masters degree in computer science at Michigan State University, and all that remains is a bit o' graduation ceremony (though I'm not going to the big one), and getting the diploma in the mail. (This explains the light, even for me, posting; been busy.) My current workplace is picking me up for a few months, then I hope to directly sell a software program I am currently working on to the public, which you'll hear some more about as I have more substantial information to show.

I've ended my boycott on Amazon.com due to the news that Bezos is using his fortune to get into the private space industry. I'm still not willing to use them preferentially, but you can't be a one-issue consumer, right? I guess I'm willing to let those two things cancel.