No Subject

[owner-cypherpunks@toad.com]

At 10:16 PM 2/13/96, Perry E. Metzger wrote:

>I will repeat, Tim. You have no job and do nothing for a living. For
>you it is probably hard to understand that some of us prefer to get
>our mail segregated by topic so that we don't have to spend more time

The issue of what I do with my time is a red herring. As it happens, many
folks in the "cyberspace activism" spend as much time or more as I do on
the Net. In any case, who cares how I spend my time?

I also note that for several years Perry was clearly spending a whole lot
more time than even I am now on the Net, making the "Top Ten Usenet
Posters," or somesuch.

I am sure that when Perry was a Shearson-Lehman, or Lehman Brothers, or
whatever it was called, and was posting several articles an hour on
Extropians, Cypherpunks, Libernet, Usenet, etc., that he would have roughly
the same reaction I am now having to someone writing: "Perry, you are
writing too much--some of us are trying to get some work done!" He would
likely have dismissed their complaints as irrelevant, that no one is forced
to read his articles.

Likewise today. No one is forced to read my posts, Perry's posts, or anyone
else's posts. This is what filters are for. As it happens, I do *not* read
all of the posts here. In fact, I delete about 90% of them after scanning
the first paragraph, the subject, and the author. Takes me about 15
seconds, tops, to do this, and sometimes I'm even faster. (Do the math: I
can "dispose of" about 50 or 60 messages a day in 10-15 minutes...and this
is about the best that can be hoped for, even if Perry were the moderator
and the 10 or so messages a day that are truly off the wall were screened
out...it just wouldn't change the basic time to screen all that much.)

>than needed reading our email. However, for some of us, time is
>money. I have failed to directly answer your comments on this sort of
>thing out of deference to your "elder statesman" status around here,

Spare me, Perry. As I mentioned, you certainly used to write a truly vast
number of rants to Extropians, Libernet, and, yes, even Cypherpunks. A
check of the archives will show this clearly.

It is well and good that you apparently are now very busy and cannot write
your customary number of articles. But spare us the insinuations (in
several of your perrygrams) that because you are too busy to write you are
doing critical work and because some of us use our time to write we are
slackers.

I write because setting down my thoughts and exploring ideas is far more
important to me than just about anything else I can imagine doing,
including writing C programs. If you don't like this, learn how to use
filters and filter me out, or leave the Cypherpunks list. Seems simple
enough to me.

--Tim May




>but this is getting silly. If you want to post about libertarianism,
>libernet, so far as I know, still takes postings. If you want to read
>about the habits of migrating birds, there are interest groups for
>that. We don't have a lot of good places to discuss specifically
>cryptography and its impact, and this group was set up *for that*.
>
>I mean, why not just have one mailing list for all topics of all sorts
>if "filtering" and "hitting the 'd' key" are supposed to be the only
>way we deal with this stuff, hmm?
>
>Perry

Boycott espionage-enabled software!
We got computers, we're tapping phone lines, we know that that ain't allowed.
---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:---------:----
Timothy C. May              | Crypto Anarchy: encryption, digital money,
tcmay@got.net  408-728-0152 | anonymous networks, digital pseudonyms, zero
W.A.S.T.E.: Corralitos, CA  | knowledge, reputations, information markets,
Higher Power: 2^756839 - 1  | black markets, collapse of governments.
"National borders aren't even speed bumps on the information superhighway."