[cap-talk] Failure isolation

[Jonathan S. Shapiro]

On Tue, 2008-03-18 at 16:58 -0700, Raoul Duke wrote:
> Basically, to what extent are humans destined to not work well with
> POLAs? If humans are by nature not going to be perfect wrt security...

This is a small part of a larger, harder question: to what extent are
humans destined not to work well with electronic information?

Today, all of our intuitions about property, protection, and so forth
are driven by our intuitive mental models of tangible artifacts. If I
give you a rock, you now have the rock and I no longer have it. These
intuitions are very nearly useless in information systems, and they have
been for decades. One might hope that the human model will eventually
stretch to encompass information artifacts, but it seems likely to me
that this may take quite a while, and I am not convinced that it will
ever fully occur.


shap