Snail mail
"In the real world, you have witnesses, forensics, DNA profiling and fingerprints," says the National Criminal Intelligence Service (NCIS) spokesperson. "In the digital world, all you've got is data. If that data is being erased as it's created, you haven't got any equivalent of forensics. Our position is that law enforcement must be provided with a reasonable minimum." (The net's eyes are watching, Online, November 15).
In the real world, I can post a (hand-written) letter and the recipient can burn/shred it. Will Consignia be required to keep records of every item it handles - which postbox it was mailed in; CCTV footage of it being mailed; recorded delivery (for which we pay extra!) ...and, since this alone will not provide evidence of the contents, will every letter be opened and photocopied? Does this explain why US mail is so painfully slow?
David Lewin
J.D.Lewin@RL.AC.UK
Sleep sound
The BBC's Crimewatch televi sion programme recently asked for people who had received an email from a particular source to telephone them or the police, saying there was no way to trace the sender of messages from this source. You report that the new anti-terrorism bill could enable the home secretary to force internet service providers to keep information on their customers for a year. I shall sleep more soundly with the knowledge that the government is doing so much to keep me safe. P Mooney
pmooney@uklinux.net
What odds?
Attention David Hambling: Are you serious? Take my advice and stick to journalism. The chances of the two remaining doors being correct remain equal. They can not be influenced by your initial choice. Both door's probability of being correct improve when the third is shown to be wrong. Colin Harris
Attention David Hambling: my apologies. Dawned on me you had made the assumption that the compere knew which door concealed the treasure, in which case your odds would be correct. I assumed he did not know, in which case my odds would be correct. Your assumption makes for much better viewing. I shall stick to my day job.
Colin Harris
chems@safetyconsult.demon.co.uk
Double odds
Cancel the email I sent the other day (Three doors and a prize)! I was wrong, wrong and wrong again. Marilyn Vos Savant is right after all! I wrote a little computer program that dashed off 10,000 totally unbiased plays of the Monty Hall game and very adequately proved her correctness. One problem was that the explanation of Vos Savant's result given by David Hambling is not clear, at least to me!
I prefer this one. With three doors, the location of the prize and the possible choice of door yields nine possibilities, only two of which are logically different, ie, three correct guesses and nine incorrect guesses. The rules for Monty's door opening are such that if the user then switches choice of door, an incorrect guess will become correct and vice-versa. A switch therefore results either in six correct guesses out of nine or three incorrect guesses out of nine. Hence the chance of winning has doubled from one in three to two in three.
John Scanlon
Dreamers
In his article, A dream dies (Online, November 8), Guy Kewney claims that "nobody in ICL tried to penetrate the American market". I did, selling an ICL 2903, value about £20,000, and another in Montreal, to a subsidiary of ITT in 1974. Nor were they the only ICL machines in North America at that time.
Richard Sarson
The UN's Gates
Victor Keegan misses his own point about Microsoft's monopoly (Second Sight, November 8). Legislation is quite good at stopping monopolies forming, as in his rum example. However, it seems helpless when one has not only formed but spread its malign tentacles over the whole planet. Microsoft should be regulated on a multi-national basis, that is, by the United Nations, in order to regulate policy. While keeping the code secret is sad but probably inevitable, the UN regulator could put a stop to not just anti-competitive practice but ensure that old code is kept up to date and available.
For many of us, because of essential legacy code, what we want is a debugged NT4 with added support for USB and Firewire. By changing the drivers, Microsoft has sabotaged some mission-critical soft ware that the original authors are not able to support.
Ken Baldry
Thin air
Senseboard's Virtual Keyboard (High climbers in Las Vegas, November 16) made me think of a possibly more popular application - an air guitar that actually plays!
Phil Coughlin
