"Rigorous and objective" (if at first...)

[Petro]

On Friday, November 16, 2001, at 08:29 PM, Faustine wrote:
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> Tim wrote:
>> The list has only 5% of the content it had in its glory years, 1992-95.
>> And perhaps only 10% of its content in its declining years, 1996-98.
>> It's now at about half the level of its senile years, 1999-2000. This
>> past year has been the worst.
>> There are many reasons for this decline, discussed as early as 1994.
>> Any newbies who think this list is now interesting or exciting has my
>> sympathy.
> Bah. One can regret having missed the glory days while still feeling 
> like
> there's a good handful of people worth coming back for. Maybe the 
> upcoming
> legislation will have the same effect as Clipper and cause the list to 
> reach
> critical mass again.

	I started reading this list back at the tail end of what Mr. May 
describes as "the glory days", and it won't ever happen again--not in 
this area.

	Part of the energy in those days was people pushing in to vastly 
new territories, figuring out how to solve the hard problems--and there 
were a whole bunch back then. There are still lots of hard problems, but 
they come in dribs and drabs, and often one of these new problems can be 
reduced to one or two old problems--which isn't nearly as interesting.

	It's also the nature of the problems that has changed. Then it was 
easy to get money to try out a new idea. Now that is the problem--how do 
I take one of these ideas out of this big ass barrel and make *money* 
off it.

	Which really isn't nearly so interesting to a lot of the people who 
were hear before--they either had their money (Mr. May, Gilmore) or 
cared more about playing with ideas, philosophies and technology than 
getting rich.
	Which isn't exactly accurate. There really hasn't ever been any one 
thing that was true about every poster here, other than in some fashion 
or other they could use an email client (maybe not well, but they could).

	Today getting money is a bitch, and just about anything to do with 
crypto is going to be a huge risk--product liability, government 
regulation, etc. makes many of the really interesting projects a bitch 
and a half to even get off the ground, and the one thing that would make 
it all come together, the one thing that has generated more traffic than 
any other on this list is still virtually non-existent.

	Which is, I guess, why some of us still wander back through here 
every so often. It's kinda like going back to your childhood home. Look, 
there Mrs. Rice, she taught American Civics, And there's that crochety 
old man May, I bet he *still* has my baseball in his house somewere. 
Bastard chased me out of his yard with a FNFAL. You wander back looking 
for news of the people you knew (What ever happened to Sameer P? Perry? 
Is Karl Johnson still in the Big House?) or looking to see if things are 
any better, but it's a small town, and it's not on the main highway any 
more.