There is a certain strange randomness to where and when people donate; it's so often reactive rather than following a plan or policy. I recall giving to Americans United specifically because of Roy Moore (or maybe my memory is wrong and it was because of
Michael Newdow). And of course donations to EFF often cluster around our victories or losses in major court cases, even though EFF needs money day-in and day-out for its budget and operating expenses.
Wealthier people sometimes form a real philanthropic plan and think things through, or even create a foundation and have a whole staff to think things through. But Wolfgang pointed out that millions of people in America (probably including most people reading this) can be philanthropists of a sort for the third world and closer to home.
Today I'm sending donations (reactively and haphazardly) to the American Red Cross and the Wikimedia Foundation. I promised myself at the start of Wikimedia's campaign that I would participate, and I've kept my promise. And for days along the way, I've found the effects of Hurricane Katrina absolutely shocking and sickening.
Since my birthday is coming up this month, I'd like to suggest that anyone thinking of getting me a birthday present consider donating to an organization such as
If I think about this for longer than an hour, I'll probably come up with dozens more organizations, especially in animal rights and animal and vegetarian advocacy, and organizations that work outside of the United States.
Looking at the variety of issues and scales on which the organizations I've just mentioned work -- both geographic scales and time scales -- I'm reminded again of how disconcerting it is not to have an overall plan for trying to improve the world, but being confronted with problems and projects (and catastrophes) in a way that seems kind of random.
People often ask Richard Stallman whether he really thinks that the issues that he works on are the most important issues in the world. He always responds that they are not the most important problems, but they are the problems that he personally is best equipped to work on in consequence of his particular expertise and skills.
And there is an obvious truth to this. Richard noticed problems that were not the most important problems in the world but that he was perhaps better at noticing than anyone else in the world. There is some diversity in the kinds of problems people are prepared to help with, on many, many, different levels and meanings of "prepared".
I remember the blood drive Betsy organized in high school. I had not only a severe fear of needles, but even a history of starting to faint when I was poked with a needle or otherwise cut (what doctors sometimes told me was "vasovagal syncope", which is exacerbated by fear or stress and which raises the weird question of whether I was afraid of needles because I would faint or whether I would faint because I was afraid of needles, or both). So I helped people with the paperwork and protocol of blood donation, and gave them juice and cookies afterward, instead of giving blood myself. At one level, this seems a sensible way to help; at another level, maybe I should try harder to get over my fear of needles. (See also The glass floor and the meaning of rationality; here the fact is that people will need blood donations for the rest of my life, and I know that my level of fear, and likely my risk of vasovagal syncope, can be changed together over time depending on what I do. So why shouldn't I put together a plan to change them?)
So there is a dizzying (with apologies to the glass floor) problem not only of our current capacity to work on problems but also of our ability to develop different capacities and skills which would influence what we could do (and which problems would start to catch our attention and seem more or less compelling and urgent).
If I showed up in the Katrina disaster zone today, I would be worse than useless. Not only am I out of shape and at risk of fainting, but I haven't been through ICS training, nor CPR, nor Search and Rescue, nor even First Aid. Not so Nicol, who has had many of the elements of formal paramedic and disaster training, and may actually be in a position to help. The Red Cross literally told me in so many words that I have already done the most useful thing I could do, which is to send them cash. In every disaster, established relief organizations have to waste a tremendous amount of time trying to persuade people that it is not helpful to ship commodity donations long distances to a disaster site, and that it is not helpful for untrained volunteers to travel long distances to show up in person at a disaster site.
But despite this, it is not absolutely clear that simply sending money is actually the most useful thing I could do, because I know something about ICT, if not about ICS, and because people on several mailing lists I'm on were talking about whether they could get permission to set up an Internet cafe in the Houston Astrodome for the benefit of refugees. And while they were talking about it, an established Texas technology organization already did it -- because, naturally, they were in a better position to do something like that, since they already knew people and sources of equipment in Houston.
But Ping and some techfedders are talking about infrastructure -- and, more importantly, co-ordination and interoperability -- for missing persons databases. (You can read about Ping's work on this problem, if you're interested.)
On the other hand, I could actually try to get First Aid, CPR, and other kinds of training, at least by way of being prepared to use them in my day-to-day life, especially since there are many indications that people in actual emergency situations often react more courageously and usefully than they might have expected. The adrenaline reaction is just the start.
There is really a dizzying regress that we necessarily run up against when considering how we could become more useful against the problems of the present and the future. I can't help immigrants with their legal problems, but I could give money to organizations that do; I could go to law school, but I'm not willing to become an officer of the court, so I couldn't practice law. But I could do things to help other people who are willing. I could learn First Aid and hope or try to reduce my propensity to vasovagal syncope at the sight of blood. I could try to get in shape so that I might actually be able to help with a search and rescue operation.
"[Ts'ui Pên] believed in an infinite series of times, in a growing, dizzying net of divergent, convergent, and parallel times. This network of times which approached one another, forked, broke of, or were unaware of one another for centuries, embraces all possibilities of time. We do not exist in the majority of these times; in some you exist, and not I; in others I, and not you; in others, both of us. In the present one, which a favorable fate has granted me," I was able to help Dmitry Sklyarov go home to his family, while innumerable others spent years in prison for non-violent drug offenses.
But after spending five hours yesterday reading about New Orleans, Biloxi, Gulfport, and people who will actually know what I have only heard about in literature, I want to agree with Johnny Gunther that "sufficient unto the day is the evil thereof"; so if you are stuck and dizzy in the Garden of Forking Paths this afternoon, please at least give what you can to the American Red Cross.
I still haven't finished my series of posts about fighting junk mail, but I promise to get around to it some day.
I was just looking at the Post Office's Setting the Record Straight page, which catalogues the letters written by USPS public relations vice president Azeezaly S. Jaffer to various people who said mean things about the Post Office. Jaffer gets on the case whenever someone criticizes postal rates or uses a term like "going postal" or "junk mail".
"Junk mail"? The Post Office doesn't want people to call it "junk mail"?
That's right: they want you to call it "advertising mail".
Ms. Hornidge does express concern over what we here like to call advertising mail although she has another term for it. I would ask though that she bear in mind while that some might call it "junk," to others it's a solicitation from a favorite charity, it's an offer on a favorable mortgage interest rate to the young couple buying a first home or a bargain on a car to someone who needs one.
Or again:
So, you'll understand that I'm also annoyed when people use the term "junk mail." To some, it's "junk mail" but to others, it's solicitation from your favorite charity, it's news on an attractive mortgage interest rate to the young couple buying their first home, it's information on a bargain price on a car for someone who needs one and yes, it's a part of the economic engine that makes this country go.
More importantly, unlike the telemarketer interrupting your dinner, ad mail is not intrusive. It's delivered to a box at your home and you can look at it at your leisure—or not at all. Only you are in control of your mail. So I'd suggest you be patient, and enjoy your evening "mail moment." Who knows, you might find a bargain.
Or again:
So, I'm always disheartened when a newspaper chooses to refer to advertising mail as "junk," as in your July 8 story "You've got mail - junk mail, that is."
That story can only be described as an all-out assault on the advertising mail profession and it didn't just quote others but in the words of your writer, Carolyn Straub, "There you have it: Junk mail. Phooey."
Well, to some it is junk mail. But to others, it's a solicitation from a charity in need. It's also an offer on a favorable mortgage interest rate for a young couple buying their first home, or a bargain on an automobile to someone who needs one.
To a lot of other people, this so called "junk" is a job. The livelihood of more than a million Californians depends on the advertising mail industry. This number is not just the creative employees of an advertising agency but it also includes the printers, typesetters, truck drivers, warehouse workers, paper recyclers, office workers and yes, mail carriers and more who are connected to the development and delivery of advertising mail.
Maybe the Postal Service is touchy about junk mail because it makes a large portion of its revenue from unsolicited bulk mail that it knows the public hates and would love to get rid of. Only the extremely effective political organization of the junk mail industry has probably stopped Congress from putting an end to junk mail. Meanwhile, the Postal Service adopts policies that help prevent junk mailers from finding out about the fact that most people they target are upset about that fact. Significantly, although other categories of mail can be refused or returned to the sender at the sender's, or the post office's, expense, third class mail can practically never be returned at all unless the recipient is willing to pay to return it (something I've begun doing on a regular basis).
We need to find strategies that will raise the direct and indirect costs both to senders of junk mail for sending it and to the post office for carrying it. The lobbying arms of the junk mail industries are too powerful -- and their product too profitable for USPS -- to make it foreseeable that the Postal Service will do anything to reduce junk mail solely because people hate it (or editorialize against it).
To the Smithsonian magazine, no less:
However, you do a disservice to your readers when you refer to any part of the mail that Americans send and receive as "junk." It's ironic that on the same page you mark the birth of the potato chip, calling it culinary history and noting its $6 billion industry. One would hope the same level of detachment would be used to describe the mail, which supports an $800 billion mailing industry that employs 9 million people. That's not junk. That's commerce.
Hmmm, I think John Maynard Keynes made a suggestion on another way of using junk to create employment:
If the Treasury were to fill old bottles with bank-notes, bury them at suitable depths in disused coal-mines which are then filled up to the surface with town rubbish, and leave it to private enterprise on well-tried principles of laissez-faire to dig the notes up again (the right to do so being obtained, of course, by tendering for leases of the note-bearing territory), there need be no more unemployment and, with the help of the repercussions, the real income of the community, and its capital wealth also, would probably become a good deal greater than it actually is.
Jacob Appelbaum is on a plane right now, headed for the New Orleans disaster area as a part of the Champaign-Urbana Community Wireless Network contingent of tech volunteers who are going to work on rebuilding communications capacity somewhere in the Southeast (perhaps in New Orleans itself).
What will you do to celebrate Software Freedom Day this Saturday, September 10?
Software Freedom day celebrates free software. That means that the public enjoys
- The freedom to run the program, for any purpose.
- The freedom to study how the program works, and adapt it to your needs.
- The freedom to redistribute copies so you can help your neighbor.
- The freedom to improve the program, and release your improvements to the public, so that the whole community benefits.
Writing in LinuxWorld On-line, Don Marti took people to task for saying that free software was nothing more than a "development methodology":
Do people really spend their weekends helping annoying new people install free software because it has a more efficient development methodology? Of course not. If it were only about efficiency, hobbyists would volunteer to replace the old ballasts in companies' fluorescent lights.
If you're in the Bay Area, you can follow up your Software Freedom Day celebration by attending the Solano Stroll in Berkeley on Sunday.
Mako has a great name for his apartment. Since I helped him come up with that name, I have to confess that there is a sound argument that acetarium actually means "salad ingredient", not "salad" (although he can counter with an equally strong argument that acetarium must be a synechdoche for "salad").
In Lewis and Short, acetaria (plural of acetarium) is given as Pliny's word for salad (which is probably where my teachers got it from when they used it at the Rusticatio). L&S explain that they take the phrase as "acetaria sc. olera", which is to say "vinegared [read: and oiled] stuff". If they're right, then acetarium would be a "vinegared [read: and oiled] thing" -- short for "acetarium et olerum". Perhaps, then, the fullest form of Mako's apartment's name is The Acetarium and Olerum at The Cantabrigia.
If Mako wanted to avoid the confusion about the exact number of vinegared and oiled things at the Cantabrigia, he could call his place the Acetaria at the Cantabrigia. (N.B.: Acetaria is plural; Cantabrigia is singular and is Latin for "Cambridge". Appropriately enough.) However, he's already registered Acetarium.com, so I guess his home will continue be a place of singular vinegary distinction.
Cool!
"I'm passionate about treating people equally," Newdow told The Chronicle. "Imagine you send your kids to school every day, and the teachers made them stand up and say, 'We are one nation that denies God exists.' Imagine you are Jewish, and they say, 'We're one nation under Jesus.' Imagine you are Christian, and they say, 'We're one nation under Mohammad.'"
Sometimes the courts want to let issues fade away, and sometimes people won't let them.
However, the question of tactical incrementalism is strong and as live here as it is in same-sex marriage. Many civil libertarians who want a strong rule are nervous about Newdow because they want to do it piece-by-piece and bit-by-bit, and because they perceive that "the country isn't ready for it" -- just as with same-sex marriage. Again, it's a strange thing about a precedent system where the answers you get depends significantly on the order in which you ask the questions.
So you have people who say that justice consists in doing the right thing now (although the right thing is incredibly unpopular), and people who say that there's no prospect of that, and that you must, so to speak, build up a ladder and then, so to speak, throw away the ladder after you have climbed up on it.
A funny thing is happening on Wikipedia that I will mention after it's over so as to avoid fomenting a conflict of interest.
Don Marti agrees with several observers that user education is not the answer to computer security problems -- contrary, I think, to a commonplace view only a few years ago and perhaps still today.
As editor of Linux Journal, Don published an article I wrote called "Give TCPA an Owner Override", in which I worried about security technologies that irrevocably take choices away from end users. Interestingly, there are (at least) three threads among trusted computing advocates and implementers, only one of which is particularly relevant here. The first two threads are about allowing or forcing users to give up certain kinds of control in on-line interactions because the user might do something that a publisher or service provider doesn't like, or that other users wouldn't like. There is then an argument about whether this is good for the user and whether it's important whether it's good for the user or not. The third thread is about allowing or forcing users to give up control because the user might do something that the user would regret but that the user wouldn't be able to understand was wrong.
This falls, for example, under the heading of protecting users against worms and Trojan horses that might undermine security policies that are thought to be in the user's pure self-interest. Microsoft gave a trusted computing demo that emphasized that NGSCB (in its original design) could help protect users in a way that I have called paternalistic. This paternalistic approach to security is related to the traditional concept of mandatory access control; NIST, for example, writes that MAC is employed where
the security policy of a system dictates that:
- protection decisions must not be decided by the object owner.
- the system must enforce the protection decisions (i.e., the system enforces the security policy over the wishes or intentions of the object owner).
Trusted computing systems with remote attestation provide a means of implementing a kind of mandatory access control in a PC operating system for paternalistic reasons: because the user is at risk of making bad decisions (under the influence of phishing attacks, to take just one example, or if the user voluntarily installs dangerous spyware, to take another) and therefore must not be permitted to defeat or circumvent the security policies.
Some recent informal conversations with TCG members persuaded me of three things. First, it is actually possible to implement some kinds of paternalistic security under TCG. For example, you can give users an authentication credential that they can't transfer or give away, that spyware can't steal, and that the users can't even authorize spyware to steal if they wanted to. That's pretty interestingly and pretty different from the status quo. Indeed, you can build a client that allows people to access a particular service (say, a bank account or an on-line auction) in a way that actively prohibits them from delegating or transferring any of their authority to another person or noninteractive process, even if their system is compromised, or even if they want to transfer it. (Well, there are limitations to this; they could still tell another person their passwords, but those passwords would never work if used from a different client machine, because the server has a way to distinguish different clients, or at least to distinguish different identity-to-client bindings.)
Second, some people consider this ability a prerequisite for some kinds of on-line commerce because they simply do not believe that high-value transactions can safely be conducted on traditional general-purpose operating systems on general-purpose computers without an attestation feature.
Third, some people who aren't on board the DRM bandwagon but who come from traditional computer security think that this paternalism or mandatory access control application is important enough by itself to justify trusted computing deployment.
Now, the tricky thing for me, and I presume for Don, is that this paternalism is really paternalistic paternalism. It is the genuine article. The way you enforce a policy like "the user has a credential that can't be transferred to spyware even with the user's consent" without being psychic or AI-complete is that you define every single piece of user-installed third-party software as presumptively spyware. That is, you say that the user has a credential that cannot be transferred by the user to any program (sc. "operating environment", "software stack") that is not on a pre-approved list. And you have technological enforcement of this; you have mandatory access control; it doesn't matter what the user thinks. If the user modifies the local software environment or uses an unrecognized client, it temporarily voids the user's authorization to authenticate to particular services. And this does away with the need for user education for security for those servics, because the user is physically incapable of doing anything that will violate their security policy!
Now, some computer security people are saying that this is, in some form, the only plausible future for computer security. I have heard a sober argument that we need to be able to have a sort of formal proof that the user is not running a program that is against the user's own interest, or that would expose high-value transactions (whatever you want to define them as) to surveillance or interception or falsification by an unauthorized party. And of course the only way to do this is to say that the user shall not run certain programs for certain purposes, at all ever, whether the user wants to or not. This is not quite the same as an application blacklist or a document revocation list or not having a general purpose computer, because you can run whatever you want when you're not doing something "security-sensitive"; you could, in one extreme, have an operating system full of viruses and spyware and games, and another operating system full of financial software and VPN clients and secure remote desktop tools and cryptographically-enabled e-mail clients, and just not let them interact at all. (Or, continuing the MAC analogy, the financial software could read the viruses and spyware and games, but not vice versa.)
In this model, the user gets to decide what software to run in general, but not what software to run while doing something security-sensitive. One interesting question here is how we know that people actually implementing security software will have the knowledge or the incentives to act in the user's interest and not in some other interest (and a related question is about what happens when there is a merger of pro-user and anti-user features in a single program, or a different mix of features in rival programs, or a conflict of interest, or the user actually does know better in a particular case but the security policy author doesn't have the knowledge or the authority to agree that the user really does know better). Another interesting question here is whether things like Internet access will eventually fall into the category of things that are considered security-sensitive; cf. Trusted Network Connect, which lets ISPs define what client software configurations are acceptable, a power they've arguably never had before and which many of them will claim to be exercising in the end-user's interest.
While I agree with the sentiment that there is much to be done in security and in security usability, I am nervous about the entire abandonment of the concept of user education. The only possible consequence seems to be building systems that don't (for fear of phishing and the like) even permit users to do things that are against the security policy and that give them no way to override or alter it.
We were once told (in a sentiment attributed to Doug Gwyn) that "UNIX was not designed to stop you from doing stupid things, because that would also stop you from doing clever things" and it seems clear that at a certain level this is an inherent tension. If users can (without giving up interoperability!) debug their kernels, then they can install kernel rootkits, even at the request of persuasive phishers. If users can replace their browsers, or install browser plugins, then they can install spyware. If users can install screensavers, then they can likely install keyloggers. If users can script their operating systems, then they can run script kiddies' packages on their operating systems. (N.B. There are, of course, operating system security techniques that will mitigate some of these risks. But that brings us back to the same problem: if users can alter the implementation of the security techniques that mitigate the risks, they can counteract the mitigation of the risks and reintroduce the risks...) On the other hand, if someone has a technical mechanism for blocking spyware, for blocking certain third-party applications, for allowing only a single application ever to read a particular resource, for forcing software upgrades, and so on, then there is a political question about how these powers will be used, and with what collateral damage to tinkering values and open-standards values. I have also alluded to this essential tension in section 2, and especially section 2.3, of the EFF Comments on the TCG best practices document.
The article by Jakob Nielsen that Don cites does not seem to propose particularly paternalistic steps; it proposes mostly steps related to usability. However, Nielsen does not suggest creating security measures that users can't defeat or override; that means phishers can still try to persuade users to defeat or override these measures. Clearly some kind of user education would still be necessary, wouldn't it?
If we really want a computer security in which users can never be tricked into violating the security policy at all, we need to take users' unpredictable, not-characterized-by-formal-models subjective decisionmaking processes out of the loop. I see a long-term trend headed in that direction, and I worry about it. The trend seems to involve replacing user education by paternalism that includes enforced limits on users' software choices, at least in particular contexts. And it is more than a little tempting to accept this in a few contexts while fearing what lies at the end of this path. I would like to know what Don has to say about this trend and how it relates to his skepticism of user education.
Why do credit card companies sometimes unilaterally offer a lower interest rate? This happened to me today, and I've sometimes heard stories about it from other people, too. There is a customer service script triggered by some kind of inscrutable database condition that causes the customer service agent to lower your interest rate for no apparent reason.
My theory is that they are afraid of losing customers to other lenders' refinancing and balance-transfer deals, perhaps when research indicates that a particular demographic will be particularly tempted by a particular lender's program, and so they try to pre-empt it by partially undercutting the other lender's offer, and so retain customers. Is there any other reason for this?
The funny thing on Wikipedia was that the Wikipedia article about me had been proposed for deletion, which turned out not to be successful.
Pete Peterson pointed out that university jobs are not the only jobs lost over state loyalty oaths; now Illinois has turned away a hurricane shelter volunteer for refusing its loyalty oath.
Jessica Parman wanted to help hurricane victims but didn't see the need to pledge allegiance to her government to do it.
Parman said she was turned away from a hurricane relief center in Chicago last week because she refused to sign an oath presented by the Illinois Emergency Management Agency.
Interestingly, as Matthew Belmonte first told me, the idea that disaster relief workers need to owe political allegiance to the government that is co-ordinating their activity is one of the legal rationales for the contemporary California loyalty oath. See Cal. Gov. Code section 3100 et seq.. So from the point of view of California law, maybe disaster relief work is a particularly relevant kind of work to the loyalty oath, rather than a particularly irrelevant kind of work.
Jessica Parman wanted to help people in a shelter hundreds of miles away from an actual disaster. The state refused her help over a loyalty oath. It's hard to see anything but waste in that unless you think that expressions of political allegiance are inherently good and desirable in themselves.
"Die Welt des Glücklichen ist eine andere als die des Unglücklichen." (Wittgenstein, Tractatus 6.43)
On Sunday morning I woke up with severe pain on the right side of my abdomen. Half an hour after I woke up I was on the phone with a nurse; one hour after I woke up I was at the emergency room; one hour and five minutes after I woke up I was being examined by a triage nurse; an hour and a half after I woke up I was receiving intravenous morphine and antibiotics; four hours after I woke up I received a CAT scan; five hours after I woke up I was diagnosed with appendicitis; six hours after I woke up I met my surgeon; seven hours after I woke up I was in surgery. (Some of these times may be inaccurate, since once I got on morphine, and especially general anaesthesia, my short-term memory started to fail, and they also took away my watch when preparing for surgery.) Some friends visited me in the hospital on Sunday evening as I was waking up from my general anaesthetic.
The surgeon came back on Monday and discharged me from the hospital; my cousin took me home and I got some rest and some more visitors.
This was my first time being hospitalized, having a CAT scan, receiving general anaesthesia, and receiving morphine or any opioid. So I had a lot of new experiences in a hurry. One other was the dramatic loss of short-term memory as a result of the painkillers. The day I was discharged from the hospital, I could easily remember the beginning of the Iliad from μηνιν αειδε Θεα through to Λητους και Διος υιος, which is exactly as far as I've ever known it. (It would be great to have a version of the old joke about playing the piano after surgery in which I ended up knowing more of the Iliad after surgery.) But in the same conversation, I had to struggle momentarily to remember who had come to visit me in the hospital the night before.
I was extremely impressed with the care I received at St. Luke's Hospital. And I would especially like to thank Praveen for spending his birthday in the hospital with me.
I had been writing a long letter when my hospitalization interrupted me, so I decided to finish it as normal, and then to attach a subsequent page titled APPENDIX describing my hospital experience. You only get to use that joke at most once in a lifetime. I've also been looking, without success, for a joke about the Appendix Vergiliana.
This pun was totally not planned ahead of time.
A month ago, I had a conversation in Portuguese with one of our interns, in which I discussed Latin grammar and the forms of the Latin word mensa (table), which are more numerous than in Portuguese, since Portuguese has lost some of its inflections. Roughly speaking, Portuguese (like English) requires word order, and sometimes prepositions, to show grammatical relationships that can be shown in Latin by changing the form of a word.
I don't want to claim this is a good pun, or even, truth be told, a funny bad pun, but it's the first time I've made a pun in Portuguese other than a pirate joke (I pretty much missed Talk Like a Pirate Day due to appendicitis), and Richard Stallman puts great stock in the experience of punning in foreign languages. So, in recounting my conversation about Latin grammar, I wrote: "Eu gostei de falar sobre mesas." (I liked talking about tables.) And then I added: "Também gosto de comer sobremesas." (I also like eating desserts.)
Jacob gave a very intense talk at WebZine this afternoon describing his father's death and Jacob's time in Iraq and then in New Orleans. Since Jacob is a photographer, the whole thing was illustrated by a constant slide-show of professional-quality documentary photographs.
Jacob's theme was the humanity of everyone everywhere and the failure of our institutions to respect it and to communicate it to us. I think it was one of the most memorable and most personal speeches I've ever seen.
Latin has temporal infinitives. For example, you can express having-done-verb with a single word (e.g. portavisse, to have carried) or being-about-to-do-verb with almost a single word (e.g. portaturus, about to carry, or the more famous morituri, those who are about to die, or those who will die, which is to say everyone).
Portuguese has personal infinitives. For example, you can express for-us-to-do-verb with a single word (e.g. perguntarmos, for us to ask) or for-them-to-do-verb with a single word (e.g. perguntarem, for them to ask).
One of the many ways in which these infinitives are useful is in predicating qualities of them. For example, you can say concisely in Latin that it is good to have gone swimming or it is exciting to be about to eat or it is difficult to be about to write something or it is better to have loved and to have lost than never to have loved at all (my guess is melius est amavisse et perdisse quam numquam amavisse) or even the corresponding it is better to be about to love and to lose than never to be about to love (melius est amaturus et perditurus esse quam numquam amaturus esse). And you can say concisely in Portuguese that it is sad for us not to be able to help (é triste não podermos ajudar, where "for us not to be able" is conveyed by não podermos).
What's interesting is that Portuguese has no temporal infinitives and Latin has no personal infinitives. You can see this easily by contrasting reference books like Barron's 501 Latin Verbs Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses (Prior and Wohlberg) and 501 Portuguese Verbs Fully Conjugated in All the Tenses (Nitti and Ferreira). The grammatical categories are simply different.
It would be fun to have both features available in a single language, so that we could form temporal personal infinitives by some means of grammatical inflection. For example, we would be able to have a single word for my having gone or their being about to eat or our having studied or your being about to read. Is there any language that can do this? Neither Portuguese or Latin is up to the task.
There is actually another grammatical feature that Latin infinitives can convey -- voice (active or passive). A Latin infinitive can also refer to the state of experiencing an action, as opposed to engaging in the action, and this is true for past infinitives as well as present infinitives. Most Latin verbs can form five different infinitives (amare, to love [now, or in general]; amari, to be loved [now, or in general]; amavisse, to have loved [in the past], amatus esse, to have been loved [in the past], amaturus esse, to be about to love [in the future]). Some authorities also suggest the future passive infinitive amatus iri, to be about to be loved [in the future]. I have never used this form or seen it in a text, but I have no doubt that it's attested.
Thus, Latin infinitives and Portuguese infinitives both support different kinds of inflection along different dimensions akin to the regular inflection of finite verbs. They both suggest a general pattern where we can move from a finite verb form that expresses a tense, mood, voice, person, and number to an infinitive conveying the notion of "for this to happen" or "the idea or fact of this happening". In Latin, the allowable dimensions of this parallelism are limited to tense and voice; in Portuguese, they are person and number. (Nitpicking: those Latin infinitives that rely on participles also indirectly express number, and arguably gender, which is not otherwise marked in Latin verb inflection: amatus esse and amati esse; amaturus esse and amaturi esse. Latin infinitives that do not rely on participles never express number.) Neither language allows subjunctive infinitives, which seems to be OK because you can often get a subjunctive effect where strictly necessary by using a subjunctive of the verb to be (or, in Portuguese, sometimes a subjunctive and sometimes a conditional).
So a larger question might be whether there is any inflected language with a regular process for making infinitives (or other nouns -- or, for that matter, participles, which could be the subject of a whole other post in themselves) out of any arbitrary finite verb. Latin and Portuguese, taken together, offer tantalizing hints in that direction, but neither one quite goes there.
Some suggestions for reducing and eliminating junk mail, and for increasing junk mailers' costs to reduce the nationwide incidence of junk mail for everyone. Note that all of the suggestions below are free except for three, and I include an offer to pay your costs for two of those three.
Join the Do Not Call List free on-line via donotcall.gov; this list is operated by the Federal government and in my experience is over 95% effective at preventing calls from for-profit entities with which you have no prior business relationship. (Most such calls are prohibited by law once you are on the list.) OK, so that one is about telemarketing rather than junk mail, but you can use the time you save not answering telemarketing calls to pursue getting off of junk mailers' lists.
Opt out of all credit card offers by telling credit bureaus not to give information about you in connection with transactions you did not iniatiate (you can still get credit if you ask for it; you just won't get offers in the mail) for free at optoutprescreen.com or for free by phone at (888)5-OPT-OUT. This is a legitimate service of major commercial credit bureaus and is endorsed by mainstream privacy advocacy organizations -- and it worked promptly and completely for me. (This is also useful for sharply reducing the risk of someone else fraudulently applying for credit in your name.)
Subscribe to the "Mail Preference Service". Read about it at DMA's web site, but please don't pay the DMA to list you in the MPS; instead, sign up by mail by sending a postcard with your name, address, and signature to Mail Preference Service, Direct Marketing Association, PO Box 643, Carmel, NY 10512.
If you want to subscribe to the MPS and don't want to pay the postcard postage, I will personally pay for your stamp (offer limited at this time to first 500 MPS registrants only) because I hate junk mail that much and want to make a contribution to reducing it. If you have to buy a postcard, I will pay for the postcard. (I would also be interested in getting some postcards pre-printed with the MPS mailing address and lines for people to write in their own names and addresses, and then pre-stamping these and handing them out at some kind of fair, festival, or conference. If anyone is interested in doing this with me, let me know.)
A prolific junk mailer who does not use the MPS is ADVO, Inc. I find them especially obnoxious because they use a relationship with the National Center for Missing and Exploited Children as cover for their wasteful junk mailing activities, and they twice ignored my request to stop receiving their mail. But, if you receive their frequent junk mail flyers, you can still sign up with them at their web page and hope that it makes a difference.
File prohibitory orders against junk mailers; you just need to complete USPS form 1500 and take it to your post office with the junk mail. The post office has no right to review and no discretion to disagree with your characterization of junk mail (or the products it advertises) as "erotically arousing and/or sexually provocative" and there is no filing fee. It will be illegal for that junk mailer to mail you again after the prohibitory order issues. (Thanks, Chris.)
Bounce junk mail. If junk mail bears the text "FIRST CLASS POSTAGE PAID" or has a regular first class stamp, write on it "Remove me from your list -- Return to sender" or "Refused -- Return to sender"; then cross out your address (lightly) and drop the junk mail in any mailbox. If it does not say "FIRST CLASS POSTAGE PAID", you also need to affix a first-class stamp to get the post office to carry it back (because return service is not included in "standard mail" postage, unless the junk mailer wrote something specific about return service or return postage). Doing either of these things is preferable to simply throwing it out or recycling it in your home, since it will make the junk mailer pay the costs of disposing of the junk mailer's own mail -- and junk mailers, not you, should be paying to dispose of their junk.
Send blank Business Reply Mail postcards back to junk mailers. If you open junk mail (intentionally or unintentionally), you will often find Business Reply Mail cards or envelopes inside. You should always use these -- but not to buy what the junk mailers are selling! The junk mailers will have to pay the return postage. Either write "REMOVE ME FROM YOUR LIST" and your address on the back, or simply write "STOP SENDING JUNK MAIL". Please do not do this with Business Reply Mail cards sent by mailers other than junk mailers, since Business Reply Mail has many completely legitimate uses.
Write to Azeezaly S. Jaffer, Vice President of Public Affairs for the Postal Service, and tell him to stop trying to get the news media to call junk mail something other than junk mail. You should be able to reach him at United States Postal Service, 475 L'Enfant Plaza, SW, Washington, D.C. 20260, ATTN: Azeezaly S. Jaffer. I will also be happy to pay for your stamp if you write to Mr. Jaffer.
[Main]
Contact: Seth David Schoen
