Re: Cypherpunks' Electronic Book 3

[tcmay@netcom.com (Timothy C. May)]

To expand on the points Eric Hughes made:

>    I don't know the languages or protocols or mechanics
>    of the Internet to do it myself. I was hoping to provoke an Internet
>    guru to do this.
> 
> When I wrote the very first cypherpunks remailer in September of 1993,
> I did it without knowing Perl, which I learned during that time, over
> a 2400 baud dialup to an overloaded Unix host, using emacs to edit
> (ever seen a page up in emacs at 2400 baud?), and having to read lots of
> man pages on slocal and perl (lots more screen refreshes).

Indeed, there's a trend here on Cypherpunks to try to get others do
the work, when what is really needed is more work, period. 

Although I am probably known for "rants," I more or less agree agree
with Pr0duct Cypher's pithy "One line of code is worth a thousand
rants." (I say "more or less" because I suspect some of my political
articles, here and elsewhere, are more useful than any of the lines of
code I've written...some Lisp, some Mathematica, and now some
Smalltalk/V.) 

But one principle I try to stick to is to always bite my tongue when I
feel tempted to ask others to do something "trivial."

A better approach is to find things one can do one's self and "just
do it." One of these things I am spending a lot of time on now is a
Cypherpunks FAQ. While I will welcome contributions, corrections, and
elaborations, this will have to come after it is distributed, not as a
"stone soup" sort of project.

(The "stone soup" approach, named of course after the fable, is to
throw out a crude outline and then wait for others to write sections.
This was tried a couple of times with the FAQ (not by me)--it failed.
I fear the "Cypehrpunks Electronic Book" falls into this category,
independent of the tangential issues of how it will get "automatically
distributed" with Majordomo or procmail or whatever.)

> Now look.  If you want to do something really useful, don't assume
> that it can be done easily or without a lot of committment in time and
> effort.
> 
>    I have no idea
>    how heavy the duties of an administrator would be. 
> 
> I would suggest that since it's your idea that you should administer
> it.  If you're not already putting out similar effort, it is somewhat
> foolish to ask others to do so.

Eric is right of course. Having an idea but expecting others to flesh
it out and do the actual work is akin to the folks who naively
approach published authors and say they have a "good idea" which
merely needs a "little work." It just doesnn't work that way.

The recently debated "Cypherpunks Electronic Book" I suspect is like
this. Sorting through 40 megabytes of Cypherpunks material for stuff
to include in my FAQ, and organizing and writing for a couple of hours
a day, I have a pretty clear idea of how much stuff is out there. A
lot.

A "Cypherpunks Electronic Book" is an even bigger project than the FAQ
I'm working on. And I have grave doubts that my FAQ will be read by
the very people that most need to read it, given their apparent
failure to read the existing FAQs in sci.crypt, the RSADSI/Paul Fahn
FAQ, the documentation as part of PGP, and Schneier's FAQ. (I hope I
have not insulted anyone who is undeserving of insult. If my words
apply to you, take it as a recommendation that you read the existing
FAQs carefully.)

So, if the CEB enthusiasts want to try this, I applaud them. I just
don't see the point in trying to have it declared an Official Project
(or whatever). If you want to do it, go ahead and do it.  But don't
expect that merely proposing the "idea" will mean others will "fill in
the details." (And the "details" of the writing of sections are vastly
more time-consuming than the mere issue of distributing!)

Frankly, I favor the WWW/HTML/Mosaic/Lynx approach, and may eventually do
something along these lines with my FAQ. (My FAQ is written in a
structured outline processor, "MORE" for the Mac, but of course will
be distributed in straight ASCII. However, I can read it into
FrameMaker, which I also have, and then--I hear, but haven't
tried--embed HTML links to other articles, URLs, etc.)

But this will have to wait.  First things first.

--Tim May




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