Hello Lee!

19 Feb 15 04:22, you wrote to me:

 LL> I have an abacus.  Doesn't even require electricity.

 Mine is in a box with a glass window an a little hammer next to it.
 I sign reads "In case of emergency break glass"

 LL> Will that work?

 I alway had the impressen the Abacus was for calculation, where numbers
 are over 99. Up to that value the fingers of both hands suffice.

 LL> Sysops have become too complacent, allowing others
 LL> to do the work for them.  Lazy bums.

 Nothing changed to the sysops that are still there. The others that
 built the software moved to other challenges, nasty defectors.

 LL> Sysops are who make fidonet what it is (for better or for worse).
 LL> Sysops can change it anytime they want, when and if they want.
 LL> But nobody, not even a single sysop (regardless of position within
 LL> the network), should tell or impose his/her own views on others,
 LL> as doing so would be anti-democratic.

 Changes are alway brought by a minority, the unwash masses just follow.

 LL> I realize the argument will be made that fidonet is not a democracy.
 LL> But that is a cop-out, given the community of sysops (fidonet) is by
 LL> definition a democracy.  The organizational structure of fidonet may
 LL> not be a democracy, but the community of sysops is a democracy.

 Fidonet is an anarchy, everybody does as he thinks fit. If somebody steps
 out of line however, he is ignored, or is incompatble with the system.
 If your goals is to communicate, you only have one option.

 Democracy in Fidonet leads to atrocities, like RC's who cannot be reached
 via the information supplied in de nodelist and cannot submit a properly
 formatted region segment, if they can submit a segment at all.
 It leads to RC's carrying several NC hats.

 KvE>> I have my gripes as well with US hegonomy in IT. In sorted computer
 KvE>> list my name is sorted under V, we do use a prefix as a primary key
 KvE>> for sorting, so it should be "E".

 LL> Atheist: "Praise the Godless!"
 LL> Feminist: "Praise the Goddess!"

 LL> See what a difference one letter makes?

 That depends on the language you use. In some there will be no difference.

 KvE>> Nowadays I scruntinize the nodelist minutely, in a effort to find
 KvE>> flaws in makenl.

 LL> Flaws?  The Goddess does not make mistakes!

 Makenl is not a Goddess, it is based on code written by man.
 As far as I know, in this case,the word "man" indicates the spiecies,
 not the sex of the programmer.

 LL> Fidonet originated in the USA.  Had it originated
 LL> in China, the primary language would be Mandarin
 LL> Chinese rather than English.  And then it would be
 LL> the lonely American who would be writing messages
 LL> to himself/herself ...

 Good for you, but you are looking to far intoo the future.

 KvE>> Fidonet is not the tool for Mandarin networks,

 LL> Fidonet is becoming more and more a tool for Russian
 LL> and Ukrainian networks rather than American networks.

 If you take a proper look at the nodelist and the information
 that is in it, you will notice that those networks are in
 decline as well. For regular people Fidonet is a technology of
 the past.

 LL> I would say European, but Russia and Ukraine are both
 LL> European countries, and everybody knows that Americans
 LL> are horrible spellers when it comes to the English
 LL> language.  Just think of what it would be like for
 LL> Americans trying to have a fidoconversation in Russian
 LL> or Ukrainian using the Cyrillic alphabet.  I mean,
 LL> just trying to get their keyboards to work would be
 LL> a monumental accomplishment ...

 Whatever you come up with, in the past when the Royalty, Diplomats and
 the Rich were the ones who travelld abroad, French and to some extent
 Spanish were the international languages.

 History changed that. Arrogant Brits and ??? Americans expected everybody
 to speak English. Due to their influence in World trade and wars, English
 became the common international language, whether you like it or not.
 You will have top live with it.

 KvE>> and you cannot shoehorn it into one and certainly not this late in
 KvE>> the life of Fidonet.

 LL> Maybe we should all start using pictograms.  ;)

 With the quality the current education systems are growing intoo, that will
 be the only option.

Kees

--- GoldED+/LNX 1.1.5