Re: Tim May the Luddite--His Last Message for A While

["Amanda Walker" <amanda@intercon.com>]

> The consensus of the active posters in this latest thread (Perry, 
> Amanda, Lucky, Jim, others) is that I am a hopeless fuddy-duddy, 
> unwilling to begin posting in the latest modality. 

Actually, that's not my feeling at all.  I haven't (at least intentionally) 
been making or intending to make the kinds of "get with the program" remarks 
that Lucky, Perry, and some other have been.  I've just been trying to explain 
why I think that MIME isn't necessarily bunk.  There is a middle ground 
between "the one true way" and "utter crap," after all, and I found your 
assertions that MIME was useless to be just as annoying as assertions that 
it's a panacea.  I'm not telling you (or anyone else) to use MIME.  Even I 
don't use the fancy features MIME for most of my off-site email, especially 
mailing lists, for exactly the reasons you describe.

I'm just tired of people deciding the because they're not able to take 
advatange of something, that it is therefore useless.  That's all I've been 
intending to complain about, and I'm sorry if I've come across more strongly.
I certainly don't want to chase you off the list.  You're one of the people I 
take pains to read, even on high-volume email days...

> Bluntly, I'm fucking sick and tired of these cheap shots and 
> personal innuendos. Maybe it's the "young guns" syndrome, with a 
> codger like me whose first Net account was in 1972 being a ripe target 
> for the newest pistoleros with their .486-caliber Linux boxes in 
> their holsters.

Well, I came onto the net after the NCP/TCP flag day, so you've got some 
seniority on me, but I'm hardly a young gun, and I hate Intel processors and 
UNIX :).  I started in the spring of 1982 on a VAX 11/780 with real live DEC 
VT100s, and an ADDS Viewpoint on a 1200 baud modem (at the time, this was 
really fast) in my dorm room.  I was just awful to come back from a week's 
vacation and spend a whole hour catching up with Usenet--and that was before 
you could unsubscribe to individual groups :).

To a large degree, it's this dozen years of experience with the net that makes 
me optimistic about things like encryption, MIME, and so on.  Every time the 
baseline moves up, people complain.  It happened moving from NCP to TCP/IP.
It happened when moving from A News to B News (my site was actually an A News 
holdout for a long time).  It happened when net.* got broken up into a set of 
hierarchies (alt.* is a remarkably long-lived fragment of that changeover), 
and it's happening now with things like PGP & MIME.  Plus ca change, plus 
c'est la meme chose.

Part of the cypherpunks mission, as I understand it, is to help to keep moving 
that baseline, concentrating on one particular direction (privacy).

I'll stop posting on side issues if it will help keep the focus on privacy, 
and help keep folks like you from giving up in frustration.  After all, 
cypherpunks is far from the only soapbox I subscribe to :).


Amanda Walker
InterCon Systems Corporation