RW> I'll grant there have been no amendments to policy, but it appears 
 RW> from here to be at least a stable situation without the open 
 RW> warfare that was apparently the norm then.

 RN> P4 was never ratified by the grunt SysOps, but there are those who
 RN> have a different view about it.

i still fail to understand this... yes, in some areas, the defined and
published methodology was not fully followed but that still doesn't negate
the fact that P4 was put to the populace for voting... *I* cast a vote for
our node in that process... at the time, i was in Va Beach, VA and a member
of the net that carolS is now in... our NC, at the time, presented, as per
the published rules, P4 and accepted votes from each node as yea or nay
whether to ratify P4 or not... IIRC, every one of the nodes in our net cast
a vote and that vote was tallied... the majority count of that vote was
forwarded to the RC as the net's vote... the other nets in that region also
cast their net's vote with the RC who tallied them and forwarded that on to
the Z1C as that region's vote...

yes, in some cases, the net votes cast by the NCs were supposedly
'contrary' to the actual votes cast but this was never proven... the same
thing is said about the regional votes and that, too, was never proven...

yes, in some cases, NCs may have been away or for some other reason never
polled their net for their nodes' votes... the same for some regions... but
it still remains that the yea votes outnumbered the nay votes in the final
count at the top and so P4 was put in place...

)\/(ark