CDR: Re: Niiice kitty....

[Tim May]

At 1:42 PM -0400 10/7/00, Steve Furlong wrote:
>Ray Dillinger wrote:
>>
>>  Hi everybody;
>>
>>  I have no interest in Chomsky flames and wish they would die.
>>  In fact, I'm going to *MAKE* them die, for me at least, by
>>  filtering posts on chomsky's name.  (yes, this post right here
>>  is going into the bitbucket when it gets back to me from the
>>  list).
>>
>>  I'm just dropping this note to remind everyone who's tired of
>>  this argument that you also have the power to make your machine
>>  ignore it for you, thus saving you the trouble and bother of
>>  filtering through it to find actual relevant content.
>>
>>  If enough people ignore it, it *will* die.
>
>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.

As for "list traffic," it has been very low by historical standards 
for the past year or so. Only a handful of names--perhaps a 
dozen--account for 80% or more of all posts. There are many possible 
reasons for this, but this is another subject.

The point being that most keyboards have a "Delete" key, but very few 
have a "Create" key: it is always much easier to delete unwanted 
traffic than to cause new traffic to be created.

"Cypherpunks write code" has a certain meaning, often misinterpreted 
by newbies and other careless types as a statement that words are not 
important, only C or Java code matters. In fact, it has meaning more 
along the lines of what Lessig was writing about in his "Code" book 
(regardless of what one thinks of his conclusions).

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.

(Not that 97% of the subscribers of this or any other similar list 
have ever written a single program with any conceivable crypto 
significance.)

As for Chomsky, I've been deleting all of the recent posts arguing 
pro- or con-Chomsky.


--Tim May
-- 
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
ComSec 3DES:   831-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
"Cyphernomicon"             | black markets, collapse of governments.