-- On 17 Sep 2001, at 0:03, chefren wrote:
Problem is I'm against "absolute" anonymity, I think working on it is technically interesting but the result is nothing less than a-social and I'm not at all against democratic societies. It's easy to say so for me since I live in a pretty free country (The Netherlands) but as a whole when there is no war, we don't need anonymity as far as I see it.
The reason your country is pretty free is that when your mother was sucking off German soldiers, US soldiers came and gave you your freedom. I guess it was not worth the effort.
Anonymity like we have on the net now makes me think of the middle ages, when the cities started to come up. When you weren't a citizen you might not enter with weapons those day's. "Leave them at the entrance." Often it was even necessary to leave the city before the night... After some time (centuries) they came up with the "horrible idea" to give people identities that could be verified. They later evolved to "passports". So people from one city could operate in other cities and even countries, as long as your country more or less guaranteed your identity.
Passports were not required for travel in most places until the early twentieth century. Things really shut down when the germans started infiltrating troops, and have not opened up since. --digsig James A. Donald 6YeGpsZR+nOTh/cGwvITnSR3TdzclVpR0+pr3YYQdkG 6Ccv99xSTQ49aSVy10p8b+XMoA6gBIWtQUg+prTQ 4BSH1Vq6WUKYYIjUjTanlsN5sLnfpJDyiEjgfl3Dl