Alice (or someone representing themselves as Alice) said:
What I'm trying to say is that if someome posts from watson.ibm.com, and IF they are talking about OS/2, we will not accept that they are not speaking independantly of the knowledge they have garnered from watson.
And that is understable.
In the same way, someone who writes from Netscape.com or AT&T, or Sun and tries to disclaim that they are speaking for the company, when they step out as an employee of a company is deluding themselves.
This is a complete non sequitur. See if you can follow this: only those authorized by the company to speak for the company are authorized speak for the company. There is a genuine difference between a corporate officer saying The Amalgamated Widget corporate policy on stong crypto is ... and some engineer from Amalgamated Widget saying My private opinion on strong crypto is ... The consequence of every statement by every employee being taken as company policy is that every employee (except for public relations) will be prohibited from contributing to any public forum or even answering apparently innocuous questions on the net. This would not be a desirable outcome. Still speaking for myself, PK -- Philip L. Karlton karlton@netscape.com Principal Curmudgeon http://www.netscape.com/people/karlton Netscape Communications