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I finished the 2nd edition of Be Your Own Botmaster.

http://www.alicebot.org/be.html

September 1, 2002
388 2nd Ave., San Francisco, CA 94112
1-415-706-5675
1-415-387-1549

Dear Honorable Judge Brosnahan:

I was at the RO hearing of Dr. Goldberg and the UC vs. the defendant Dr.
Richard Wallace at Berkeley Courthouse of the Alameda County Court on June
28, 2002. From the evidence presented in court, it appeared that there was
not a shred of evidence of even a vieled threat of violence from Dr.
Wallace. It is more than a bit of a stretch to extrapolate violence
from someone plainly stating an opinion on how certain forces can be
compelled to violence under certain injustices. A similar opinion, if
expressed by Dan Rather, Jerry Springer or yourself is not inciteful but
insightful. Especially, when the two combatants are colleagues, friends
etc; you have probably had hotly contested emails with colleagues.
  If Coca Cola goes to war with Pepsi, they are two professional
concerns. And this is America.
The omission of justice in Wallace's case is especially glaring because
of the manner you had equinamiously dispatched the previous matters.
Where, people had more serious problems like jail time, and missed
work. How you can countenance this amount of vindicative whining
is really something; allowing Goldberg to bludgeon
his personal enemies with the UC's lawyer. Small wonder the UC
cannot pay their help and California cannot pass a budget.
I know you are busy, judge, but I'd like to enumerate for you
    what an egregious miscarriage of justice was perpetrated against
a mentally-ill handicapped man on welfare. And the waste
that this whole exercise has been.

1. Wallace allowed no defense.
2. Goldberg allowed to rant and rave, to the point where he became
          laughable and had to be cut short by yourself, who clearly saw
          with the weathered eye of experience that Goldberg was going no
          where and had not even a remote threat against him from Wallace.
  3. Tell me where a judge in the interest of impartiality changes the
statute
            for the plaintiff's attorney? What was wrong with the UC's lawyer?
            Doesn't the UC"s lawyer know how to properly punish Wallace to the
full extent of the law?
4 Goldberg, made a very poor witness. A full Berkeley professor who
            needs more clarification on the verb "to strike".

What is going on in Berkeley your honor? First, Julie Conger now this!
I want you to know judge I love you always with a Christian heart but this
was a bad decision allowing Dr. Goldberg to use the UC's assets to
cudgel is enemies. But in the words of James Brosnahan, defense attorney
for Jihad Johnny, "America has become a lot less freer place".

Sincerely yours,

Russell Kyle
President and CEO
Russell's S.F. True Crime Tours

Company R developed the first Railroad, and set the tracks 4 feet 8.5 inches
apart.

Then companies S, T, U, V all built trains, and they followed the same plans
as company R, and made their tracks 4 feet 8.5 inches apart. But company Z
said no, tracks should be 5 feet apart. So companies R, S, T, U and V got
together and formed the Railway Standards Association, and set the track
standard at 4 feet 8.5 inches. Then all thier rolling stock was
interchangeable between each other's companies, but not Z's. This led to a
greater economy of scale for the companies in the Association, eventually
forcing Z out of the Railroad business. Thereafter all new railroad
companies built their tracks 4 feet 8.5 inches apart.

But then new problems arose. A new company A stuck with standard 4'8.5"
track, but launched electric engines, requiring overhead electric power
lines. Company A did not have the coal and water refueling stations needed
for trains operated by the RSA companies. Another company B offered a
three-rail system, so that they could run both the RSA rolling stock and all
the old leftover stock from company Z, which was available cheap in auction
markets. The B company advertised that they would make their tracks open to
any trains of any type from any system, electric, steam, or diesel, with
tracks of any diameter. They would just add more rails.al Still a third
company C utilized the 4 foot 8.5 inch track, but built tunnels and bridges
too low for most of the rolling stock made by all the other companies. For
their own reasons, each of the companies A, B and C refused to join the
Railways Standards Association. Meanwhile, the RSA found it difficult to
expand their standard beyond the basic design established for the first
steam engines.

Company D appeared, with standard track and rolling stock, and an exclusive
government concession to build a railroad connecting dense urban areas.
Soon D became so rich and powerful that it was able to acuqire all the other
railroad companies, or force them out of business. The Railway Standards
Association was dissolved, and after that the public saw only one type of
railway rolling stock. But the tracks were still 4 feet 8.5 inches apart.

--
"There is no duty we so much underrate as the
duty of being happy... A happy man or woman is
a better thing to find than a five-pound note."
-- Robert Louis Stevenson "An Apology for Idlers"

ALICE did not write this story...

Harvest the Whales
By NICHOLAS D. KRISTOF

ARWICHPORT, Mass. -

Whales are so beloved that the authorities spent four months and $250,000
unsuccessfully trying to free a right whale dubbed Churchill from fishing
ropes last year, and the stranding of 55 pilot whales near here a few weeks
ago prompted a lump in the national throat. The "Save the Whales" ethos is
almost unquestioned, and Norwegians and Japanese risk becoming pariahs by
continuing to salivate when they see a nice juicy whale.

But it's time to put sentiment aside. The "save the whales" campaign against
all commercial whaling was necessary a few decades ago, after whaling had
devastated all large species. Even today, there are fewer than 10,000 blue
whales worldwide, compared with 200,000 before they were hunted, and right
whales may become extinct.

But it is equally true that restrictions on whaling, including a moratorium
on all commercial whaling since 1986, have led to a sharp rebound in some
whale stocks. The U.S. National Marine Fisheries Service estimated in 2000
that there are more than two million sperm whales worldwide. The
International Whaling Commission calculated years ago that there were more
than 900,000 minke whales and 780,000 pilot whales worldwide, and the
numbers are higher now. Milton Freeman, a whaling expert at the University
of Alberta, estimates that the number of minke whales has trebled over 30
years and that humpbacks are exploding at a rate of 12 to 17 percent
annually.

Indeed, the number of gray whales (which came off the endangered species
list in 1994) surged so much in the late 1990's that hundreds of dead ones
began washing up on West Coast beaches, so emaciated that their ribs showed.
The best guess is that the numbers of grays grew, the food supply shrank and
Malthus had his way.

The bottom line is that while most large whales remain at risk, for some
species we can no longer argue that we need to "save the whales." They've
been saved.

At a time when there's talk about overfishing, it's also worth pointing out
that whales now eat at least 300 million tons of marine life, three times as
much as humans. There is speculation that rising numbers of minke whales may
be holding down the population of blue whales that compete for similar food.

--

Compare a story ALICE did write:

The war began as an uneasy alliance between the Dolphins and the Great White
Sharks. The Great White Sharks had attacked the Dolphins before. But this
time they had a common enemy in the Killer Whales. In the first battles, the
Dolphins' higher intelligence and the Great White Sharks' numerical
superiority proved decisive. Unable to call upon their traditional ally the
Fin Whales, the Killer Whales even appealed to the Humpback Whales for
mediation. But large numbers of casualties on both sides proved politically
costly to the leaders of the Killer Whales, and their successors sued for
peace.

I often say that the only people who believe that ideas are valuable are
those who never have any. I never seem to run out of ideas. I have way
more ideas than time in my life to implement them. When I was younger I was
afraid that I might run out of ideas in my old age, so I would hastily write
down every idea for a program, painting, song lyric, invention, or anything
else that ran across my mind, thinking that I would save it for the day when
the ideas ran out and I could finish the job. Now I realize this day will
never come, and if I continued doing that old strategy, I would have nothing
but notebooks of half-baked ideas.

With that background, let us consider the problem of what it means to "steal
an idea" in the context of free software, specifically ALICE and AIML
business plans. We have published a list of Top 10 "killer apps" for AIML
partly for the reason that these ideas have been in the idea for so long and
held by so many people and it is almost impossible to say who "thought of"
the concept of, for example, a celebrity bot, first.

One of the first celebrity bots was the John Lennon bot by David Maggin.
Forget about the legal arguments for a second. As an ethical matter among
professional botmasters, we all respect the fact that "John Lennon" is
taken. Anyone else creating another John Lennon AIML bot might justifiably
be criticized for stealing David's idea. There may be nothing anyone can
do, David may or may not have the proper legal protections on the name "John
Lennon", but in our heart of hearts we know, and in the long view of
history, David Maggin made the first John Lennon bot.

But suppose Joe Jones approaches me and says, "I have a great idea for a
Marilyn Monroe bot," and no one else has yet created a Marilyn Monroe bot.
Then Joe Jones disappears for a couple of years. Later, Jane Jackson
appears on the mailing list and announces that she has completed and
released the Marilyn Monroe bot. It may emerge that in private
conversations, Jane and I had talked about celebrity bots, and I had even
mentioned the name, "Marilyn Monroe." Or suppose I had even said, "This
guy Joe Jones told me he was going to work on a Marilyn Monroe bot."

Knowing that Joe Jones and I had no NDAs or other confidentiality
agreements, did I do anything wrong? Joe Jones now reappears and accuses me
and Jane of stealing his idea. Of course, he has not implemented the
Marilyn Monroe bot. Jane may have written 40,000 Marilyn Monroe categories
and Joe zero, but he still claims it was his idea and we stole it. Some
Joe Jonses might even claim that I gave away the whole idea of celebrity
bots to Jane.

In conclusion, my standard for stealing ideas in the world of AIML is
evolving toward something more like plagiarism than patent infringement.
Building bots is more about work than ideas. If Joe Jones had written an
AIML set and owned the exclusive copyright, and then that content appeared
in Jane's bot, it would be no different than lifting text from a novel or a
newspaper. But if Joe Jones only had the idea for the same kind of bot, I
don't think he can claim that Jane stole anything. There should be some
hard documentable evidence for the alleged theft, such as side-by-side
comparisons of AIML templates. A vague comparison of "his idea" and "my
idea" hardly constitutes such evidence.