Futplex writes:
Perry writes:
I don't care about quantity. Steve Bellovin is worth 500 subscribers -- maybe 1000. I'd rather hear his or Phil's off the cuff remarks on a lot of this stuff than most of what passes for careful thought from the average person here.
I have some not-so-hypothetical questions:
Suppose I have serious and plausibly realistic aspirations to become an authority in some subtopic of cryptography, network security, etc. (sometime well into the next millenium). Am I more likely to learn and hone my skills by actively participating (sticking my neck out) or merely lurking indefinitely ? Regardless of the answer to the previous question, should the list suffer me my missteps and naivete ?
I do not consider these questions rhetorical, and the answers are very important to me on a personal level.
I don't see any problem with a naive person participating. I do see something wrong with people posting stuff that has nothing whatsoever to do with the topic of cryptography etc. A discussion of social security privatization might be interesting, but irrelevant, to name one example. Perry