On Wed, Apr 02, 2008 at 07:45:23PM -0700, Bart Schaefer wrote:
( If you rely on my well for free water every day, you're not
damaged by my decision that you don't get free water any more.
This is true even if your bread-making business is no longer
viable due to lack of my water.
You may in fact be damaged, but not by me: you did it to yourself
by virtue of your flawed business model. )
The distinction is that when the term "collateral damage" is used, we
aren't talking about the baker, we're talking refusing water to the
whole village because the baker was taking more than his share. It
doesn't matter that none of the villagers were entitled to the water;
it doesn't matter that you chose to refuse them all water based on my
advice; it doesn't even matter who (the baker, you, or me) caused the
damage. The villagers are still damaged collaterally.
I knew I'd hate myself in the morning for introducing this analogy. ;-)
I don't see that they are damaged in any way. They were never entitled
to the water in the well. They might have *assumed* they were, because
its owner chose to generously extend privileges to them for some period
of time, but if so, that assumption is their error.
To look at it another way (oh good grief!): their enjoyment of access
to the well for some period of time, at the pleasure of its owner,
was a positive for them. With the cut-off, that positive no longer exists.
That does NOT result in a negative: it's merely the cessation of
a positive, returning the balance to zero.
No negative, no damage.
Similarly, if I permit mail from example.com for five years but cut it
off tomorrow, I have not damaged the users at example.com. I've simply
stopped providing them with a free service (a positive) thus returning
the balance to zero: I provide them nothing. I have not in any way
damaged them, I've just stopped being generous to them.
As an aside, let me note that the correct mental perspective for the
villagers (above) is not to blame the keeper of the well, who has,
after all, generously shared resources for some period of time. It's
to blame the baker, who drew water in excess every day, severely
impacting my ability to use my own resource. But as everyone on this
list probably knows, this is not how it plays out with email: users
often vociferously attack the very people who have been exceedingly
generous to them *at the same time that generosity has been repaid
with systemic, sustained abuse*. This is one of the reasons I've
grabbed onto this point with the tenacity of a starving Chihuahua
holding onto a pork chop: I don't want to see the "victim" attitude
that so many users mistakenly adopt reinforced by a document that
tells them they've been "damaged", when clearly they haven't.
---Rsk
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