On Wed, 7 Aug 2002, Sunder wrote:
Not to detract from my own arguement, but to entertain you a bit further, style can be forged. There are even "Best of Bad Hemmingway" contests and books for example. Style means nothing. It's as easy to copy as posting mp3's on a p2p network.
You're of course aware that even shallow textual analysis of list archives allows good fingerprinting of even casual posters. Even if we all would post anonymously you could still build reliable clusters. It is impossible to scramble that signature as long as your posts are nontrivial in length by pretending to be somebody else. I'm not aware of a fully automated tool to reliably scramble that fingerprint. (Pointers welcome). Doing it semimanually is prohibitively expensive in a forum such as this.