>Nice piece of writing, Howard.
>
>There is a point you make ( English commons ) which sounds an awful lot like
>"democracy lasts only until the participants realize they can vote
>themselves privileges, at which point it turns quickly to anarchy"
> paraphrased badly, I'm sure )
De Toqueville said something along similar lines -- that American
democracy would end when the people realized they could vote
themselves money.
>
>People always act in their own perceived best interest. That perception may
>be clueless. It may be well intentioned.
There's some relevance here to certification. Sometimes, the most
knowledgeable people don't do well on exams, because they see nuances
in the potential answers of which the test writer wasn't even aware.
The only time I know that an experienced, thoroughly clueful CID or
CIT instructor failed the CCIE lab involved the instructor arguing
with the proctor that the scenarios were insane, and that anyone who
built a network that way in the real world should be summarily fired.
>
>Have you been wasting your time reading the NANOG threads on email != ftp
>and the related? Interesting only in that it seems to beg the issue.
There is an art to reading NANOG, a more subtle art than reading
USENET. With USENET, Godwin's Law is one way of telling when a
thread has degenerated completely: assuming the thread has nothing
to do with modern European history, Godwin's condition is true when
one person refers to another as a Nazi. Some NANOG threads,
especially dealing with sp*m*ing (don't know if that's a filter
word), do, in fact, trigger the Godwin condition.
Other threads will tend to die when Susan Harris or another MERIT
staffer says ENOUGH! This seems to happen a lot with domain policy.
Even with all that, NANOG does convey a tremendous amount of useful
information.
>In the
>end, ease of use ( and therefore more bandwidth ) will win out. Limiting
>file xfer size will lose. Virus replication is not the result of Microsoft's
>evil intentions, but rather their very good intention of trying to make
>computer use as simple as toaster use.
Long ago, at the internal GTE networking symposium (1980? 1981?) I
defined electronic mail as a technology to lose the mail at the speed
of light. The president of GTE, who was technical, rose and inquired
"then what about your own division's offering, Telemail?"
I thought for a moment, and answered Dr. Vanderslice, "Oh. We lose it
more slowly."
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