I just got a 15k mail message from one Dave Banisar that consisted of wire news clippings, only one of which had anything even vaguely related to cryptogrophy. *This* is why pepole drop off the list so often. (Or don't show up at meetings, thinking they'll be as noisy?). If it's just more of the general computer geek/privacy/libertarian stuff all over again, the same crud that flows in such volumes on the libertarian list, and a couple of other lists I've had the misfortune to be on, people will go away. (In particular, evoting, pranks to prove points, general ranting.) Let's try a little self-restraint, perhaps? Or take discussions off-list, or to the appropriate list? Maybe if the list were more hard-core crypto (and less noisy), more people would be on the list, and more research types might be willing to be on the list. mp-render, the massively parallel rendering list, has high content, low volume, and some of the top folks in the biz on the list available for discussion. I'm sure if myself and a few other starting going on at length about how cool Pixar's juice-box commercial was, there'd be a lot of people unsubscribing... Luckly, I have a mailer that supports 'kill', so I can easily blast through multiple rounds of whether evoting is the End of the World. :-) But I've worked with plenty of researchers (and been in the position myself) where getting more than a few email messages a day is a big pain in the ass. Lots of people *doing* things don't put the effort into making 'the net' as much a part of their lives as some of the people here. Hell, my boss at NASA was still reading their mail with /bin/mail until I pointed them at elm. Can you imagine getting 30-40 messages a day, and having to wade through them with /bin/mail? (I watch my gf do this, I think she's nutz and on about a dozen too many mailing lists.) Granted, I've only made on c-punk meeting (travel and illness have interfered with my other attempts), and the code I'm working on will only be able to run on a machine with limited numbers (only 50 or so built), so maybe I'm in the 'not doing so much' part. (I'm not immune to Off-Topic disease, either. :-) -- jet@netcom.com -- J. Eric Townsend -- '92 R100R: "CLACKER" "Either what you've said is so vague that it's meaningless or I disagreee with you completely." -- Tom Maddox