K00L, RayDewd! Like, I'm glad dewdz like you can , like, _follow_ this stuff. Maybe you can translate it into ordinary prose for old farts like me, who favore multi-sentence paragraphs and even reasonably thorough explications of ideas that don't fit into a single line of repartee!
Not quite as you think. You see, only the posts with (6) in front of them were visible to those in the 6th row. :-) The AOL Time Odeon auditorium is broken up into the stage (everyone sees what gets posted from there, but only those on the stage can send messages to the stage.)
From there on everyone is assigned a row. In my case it was the 6th row.
There were 85 people listening to the confrence, probably also generating as much noise as the folks in my row.. However neither Denning nor Barlow can see the conversations in row 6. Neither can the folks in row 50, or 95, or 69 or 666 see what's talked in row six unless they move to row six. :-) Weird, but true. AOL does provide the ability to send questions and comments to those in power on the stage. I sent quite a few flamatory messages down Dennings way of course, however, no comment/question of mine made it. :-) Ah, censorship at its best... (My questions were in the lines of, Dr. Denning, how can someone of your intelligence possibly support the idea of giving full control of everyone's privacy over to the government we all know to be quite corrupt, and the old, why should we pay $10Billion in taxes a year to help the feds catch 10 or so cases a year via wire tapping...)
No insult to Arsen Ray is meant, and there may even be some nuggets in there I missed. But it sure does reinforce my hatred for "IRC" and similar fora for the attention-challenged. From what I could see scrolling by from Ms. Denning, she wasn't getting into the "dewd repartee" either, showing that we have at least one thing in common.
She didn't see any of it, except for the flame questions I sent, and quite possibly a huge ammount of others in the audience. THere were 85 or so folks there...
Repartee has its place, and we all do it. But the format here is not conducive to getting views exchanged and coherent thoughts developed. What a waste.
Ineed, too bad she couldn't see the comments. Too bad I wasn't on stage with JPB to grill her to a nice shade of dark brown toast..
Me, I'm not as polite as Ms. Denning. About one minute into this I woulda said "Fuck this shit, I'm outta here!"
Well, I had my fun. :-) I'll post up a clean *official* transcript of this session when one becomes available...