Tim May wrote:
At 1:42 PM -0400 10/7/00, Steve Furlong wrote:
Ray Dillinger wrote: <<snip Ray's solution to the C-name flame war>>
No, no, no. To judge by the list traffic, Cypherpunks don't write code. Cypherpunks don't make maximal use of the tools they have. Cypherpunks complain endlessly and engage in flamewars. I'm afraid your post was off-charter.
A cheap shot, as James Donald has written more crypto code than most here, by a wide margin. Cf. his "Kong" program.
I meant it as a joke, not really a cheap shot. The paucity of emotive grammatical structures in English obscured that. (Let's hear it for Lojban, the clear choice for a universal human language!)
As for "list traffic," it has been very low by historical standards for the past year or so.
<eyebrows raised> Oog. c-punks is the major filler of my inbox. Maybe I just need to subscribe to more mailing lists to lower the percentage <g>.
Only a handful of names--perhaps a dozen--account for 80% or more of all posts.
That's clear enough. I don't think the 80% is right, though if you disregard the obvious trolls and spam you probably nailed it. A lot of the posts aren't especially related to the technology, use, or politics of crypto, but are of interest to people of a c-punkish mindset. No objection to those. My only real objection to the list traffic is the inconsistency of some of the regular posters. If Joe Smegface posts nothing but garbage, he's easy to filter. If he posts about 85% garbage but 15% really good stuff, I don't want to filter him because the 15% is worth it. The problem is the time and aggrevation involved in identifying and discarding the 85%.
Many who have been posting here in the past year have apparently _missed_ the core ideas, hence their blathering about the need for privacy laws, about calls for collective action, about legitimate needs of law enforcement.
Which tells me we need words more than we need some chunk of C code.
Agreed. Coderpunks is good for the code aspect, cypherpunks for all-round issues. Ta, SRF -- Steve Furlong, Computer Condottiere Have GNU, will travel 518-374-4720 sfurlong@acmenet.net