From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Date: Sun, 20 Dec 1998 17:48:47 +0800
To: cypherpunks@cyberpass.net
Subject: Re: CyberScam
In-Reply-To: <3.0.5.32.19981023111259.007c9100@max-web.com>
Message-ID: <3.0.5.32.19981219212836.008297e0@idiom.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain



At 12:43 PM 12/16/98 -0800, Tim May wrote
>I wanted to see what other nonsense this nitwit has written, and found this:
>At 10:12 AM -0800 10/23/98, Kevlar wrote:
>>My bad. You were serious. But still...
>
>My bad _what_? The fragment "My bad" is nonsense.

Don't be an old fogey, Tim :-)  I've heard the phrase from
young and otherwise at least semi-educated people.
Like, language evolves, y'know -- it's far out that the
younger generation is participating in the literary process, man.
Donaldson's law suggests that Sturgeon was an optimist,
and one hopes that this phrase will soon be recognized for
its place in the 90+% and fall out of fashion,
rather than spurring a major industry like the annoying
"Successories" wall-plaques with MBA/salesdroid jargon on them.
At least its meaning is generally clear in context,
unlike some of the popular post-modernist drivel,
and its artificial stupidity is no more artificial than 
using "mea culpa" in modern English.

>>Mozilla (NS), IE, and many other less well known (but certianly as popular)
>>WEB browsers have encryption built right into them, so you can do things
>>"Securely". Nobody uses their real name on the internet, unless it's for
>>buisness,
>Nonsense. Many of us use our "real names" on the Internet, right here on
>this non-business list. In fact, real names outnumber nyms by probably
>10-1. Ditto for most of the Usenet and most mailing lists. Chat rooms may
>be a different story...I wouldn't know about them.

Similarly, IRC and CuSeeMe appear to be nym-oriented rather than
real-sounding-name-oriented.  AOL isn't exactly the internet,
but it tends to use screen names.  I'm not sure about ICQ, but 
I think it's also nym-oriented, and it's got 10 million or so users.

>>Naturally this is in compareison to the internet's predacessor (Not
>>ARPAnet, that was a government project. BBS's came first)
>><grumblegrumbledamninternetstoleallthecallersfrommyboardafter5yearsofrunning
>>itgrumble>, which were mostly free to anyone who came and wanted to dl/ul a
>>file or post in the message base. And usally if it wasn't open you could
>>apply for access.
>
>No, BBBs (not "BBS's") did _not_ come first. I had an ARPANet account in
>1973 or so, long before any meaningful BBSs were available. (And the
>ARPANet goes back to 1967-8 or so.)

The Better Business Bureau has been around much longer than that?

Ward Christiansen, inventor of XModem, also credits himself with
inventing the "first" BBS in 1978.  Perhaps it was the first for
cheap PCs, but I'd already been using the Plato Notesfile system 
for about 3 years by then, which was really just a better BBS 
running on a much more expensive computer and terminals
(plus it had multiplayer interactive Space War :-)
and it wasn't too new when I started using it.

And ARPAnet mailing lists had been around for quite a while before 78,
as well as mailing lists in the BITnet/CSnet/Phonenet environments.
Usenet emerged around 1981, and for the first few years was
primarily running on dialup UUCP as well as higher-speed LANs
of various sorts.
				Thanks! 
					Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF  3C85 B884 0ABE 4639