CDR: Re: Niiice kitty....

[Steve Furlong]

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 at acmenet.net