An Opening on the B8MB

[Terminator]

My term on the Big 8 Management Board ends April 1, if not sooner. I
will not seek re-appointment. But if I resign sooner,

There is nothing to resign from.
You are just a clique of nazi impostors and pretenders,
never elected by anyone.

You were hand picked by herr fuehrer Russ Allbery,
who has done more to convert big-8 to a purely nazi
system than anyone else besides David Lawrence,
aka tale.

I can nominate a
successor,

Sure, just like all the totalitarian dictators do.

who will then have an easier time joining the Board

There is no board.
What is so difficult to comprehend?

It is nothing but a pipe dream.

than
without my nomination. If you would like to be that successor, read on.
1) Belief that the B8MB is properly in charge of the Big 8 newsgroup
creation system

You must be utterly out of your mind.

and allied responsibilities.

There are no responsibilities on Usenet.
It is all nothing but a totalitarian garbage.

The usenet functions automatically
and was never meant to be "managed" by ANY party
as there can not exist such a party even in principle,
unless it is elected via democratic principles.

Do you live in a democratic system?

2) Belief that the system the B8MB uses to carry out those
responsibilities needs certain improvements.
3) Ability to remain at least minimally civil with the members of the
B8MB and with the news.* community.
I will judge these qualities in deciding who to nominate,

You are NOBODY to "judge" anything here.
You are simply sick with a megalomaniacal desease.

and I will
rely heavily on past postings. The reason I am appealing for candidates
publicly is not to give people a chance to make sudden conversions, but
simply to cast as wide a net as possible, in hopes of finding *someone*
with 18 months of effort in them. Because you'll also need one trait I
4) Enough dedication to push improvements forward.

What "improvements"?
So far, all your "improvements" turned out to be totally
devastating and COMPLETELY abandoned the principles of
Democracy.

Just about ALL they are is nothing more than utter
perversions created by the Stalinist style totalitarian
"committees".

More about these four points in the rest of this post.
I will be offline from the time I post a followup to this post, for
about 39 hours. After that I will participate in public discussion
in the resulting thread as time permits, at least until April 1; I
make no promise to hang around after that.
1) Belief that the B8MB is properly in charge of the Big 8 newsgroup
creation system and allied responsibilities.
The power exerted by the members of the B8MB is essentially that exerted
by news.announce.newgroups moderators since at least David Lawrence, if
not earlier.

Yes, this nazi sickness is a long standing issue.
For over 10 years, big-8 was continuously converted
into purely nazi dictatorship system.

With every new version of INN, maintained by herr fuehrer
Russ Allbery, the totalitarian grip was tightened.
In the last version of INN, he did not even provide the
code to allow non PGP signed messages as shown in
control.ctl file.

Many news admins simply take the default configuration
files and use them as is, being clueless as they are.

Thus, Russ Allbery and the interests behind hims,
such as US military and intelligence, effectively OWN
big-8 for any and all practical purposes.

Big 8 tradition holds that moderators choose their
replacements.

Thus perverting the very notions of Democracy.

Enough of this totalitarian garbage.

tale chose the first troika; they chose Brian Edmonds to
join them; the final troika chose us. They used a weird system to do
so, but there is nothing barring that.
Furthermore, I spent years on news.groups working on moderator election
schemes. I don't remember a single one of the people I've seen
agitating to elect nan moderators helping out with that work; I do
remember some of them dismissing that work contemptuously. I am
unimpressed.
Finally, while I acknowledge that Ken Arromdee, for example, has more
credibility to question the moderators of nan than I have, I did spend
five years in declared opposition to tale. Some of those of you who now
attack the B8MB faulted me for that. Again, I am unimpressed.
The B8MB is legitimate. It is not making decisions irresponsibly.
While I am unhappy with certain aspects of its system, the previous
system was broken: the previous UVV was down to zero members, and the
voters had stopped showing up to vote.
And the B8MB holds the Big 8 key. Some of its present opponents
attacked the fiat creation of rec.crafts.scrapbooks as rewarding
behaviour that tended to the fragmentation of the Big 8. I see the
same people now encouraging that fragmentation.
I will not nominate anyone from among those I've been accusing in the
past few paragraphs.
2) Belief that the system the B8MB has in place for carrying out those
responsibilities needs certain improvements.
Newsgroup creation systems in the Big 8 and its ancestor hierarchies
have always involved some mixture of public power and private power.
The old system in place from 1989 to 2005 involved so much public power
that when the public stopped showing up, the system broke down. It's
worth noting that the final nan moderators saw themselves as unable to
address the problem of dead groups; they considered that they held even
less power than they actually had.
The B8MB has correctly addressed this by emphasising private power, the
type of power that originated in the lists of active newsgroups (which
were always private efforts) and was exemplified by the backbone mailing
list of the mid 1980s. However, the pendulum, in my opinion, has swung
too far.
interest and objections. Today the Board's members are reduced to
measuring interest without stated criteria, so proponents can only know
when they've done enough by getting a majority of Board members to say
so; and measuring objections not by how many hold them, but only by how
proponents have not so far been asked to demonstrate very *much*
interest, and most proposals so far have been the sort where only
"technical" objections are particularly pertinent. Publicly stated
standards *should not* be such that the Board can never override them;
the previous system broke down precisely when the previous nan
moderators exercised their routinely stated, but no longer credible,
right to override the old public standards. But they should exist, to
help proponents and objectors and even to help the Board itself. In a
followup to this post, I will state publicly the standards I would
encourage a successor to advocate, but I'm more concerned that this
person advocate standards at all, than with the specifics of my
proposals.
Additionally, there should be a voting system in place. Not because
voting is the perfect way to measure both interest and objections, but
because when the number of objectors matters, some sort of vote is the
only way to establish it. The existing UVP has yet to conduct a poll.
I would strongly prefer to nominate a successor who would think her or
his most important job was to make the UVP effective and essential, and
who would undertake to work on that.
3) Ability to remain at least minimally civil with the members of the
B8MB and the news.* community.
I used to have a mostly unjustified reputation for civility on
news.groups; what civility I do have was strained to its limit by my
first six months on the B8MB, both the private and the public work.
I'm not looking for perfection, and I'm certainly not looking for a
clone of my personal style, but you're not going to get anywhere if
you're a flamer, so I'm not going to waste my time nominating you.
4) Enough dedication to push improvements forward.
After those six months, I burned out; since then I have done little on
the B8MB and nothing on news.*. Since September I haven't even had home
net access, and that's one reason I'm not trying to do anything like
this myself. Please only step forward if you're in a position to *work*
on the B8MB, and preferably also the UVP.
Joe Bernstein

[Terminator]

In a
followup to this post, I will state publicly the standards I would
encourage a successor to advocate, but I'm more concerned that this
person advocate standards at all, than with the specifics of my
proposals.

Last May, I intended to use the following criteria to start a public
discussion of how I should vote on the B8MB. I never followed through,
and the criteria have basically been gathering dust ever since, while
I've abstained from every group-specific vote. Conceivably, public
discussion now could improve the criteria; in any event, I have no
control over what a successor in my place on the B8MB does with them.
But I offer them as a hint of the kind of thinking I'm looking for in
a nominee, and for whatever good public discussion can finally do.
THE BASICS
If my replacement

Oh, virtual Joseph Stalin, concerned with the next
dictator?

Not interested.

Enough.

in fact votes according to publicly stated criteria,
1) Proponents have an incentive to try to meet the criteria.
2) To the extent that they do so, a public record builds up, showing how
well the criteria perform at dealing with interest and objections.
3) Over time, this record may persuade other Board members to endorse
some or all of the criteria in question.
I would not like to see any of the criteria below become absolute
requirements for the success of a proposal; the object here is not to
get all Board members in synch. The object is to find a way to combine
effective private power with useful public standards and power.
Anyway, the criteria come in two groups: interest, and objections.
The idea is simple. Meet one of the interest criteria, and meet the
objections criterion, and you're guaranteed the YES vote of any Board
member (such as, perhaps, my successor) who has endorsed them. Don't
meet them, and such Board member(s) will vote NO.
At this time, it is not possible to meet the objections criterion. So
I've abstained on all group-specific votes. My successor should feel
free to reconsider this position.
INTEREST
For a proposal for a new group, the object is to demonstrate interest
in the group.
1. A petition listing 20 people who claim to post about the topic online,
and who say they'd post to the new group. The petition should indicate
*where* each person posts about the topic online, so people can verify
the petition's claims.
[Issues for discussion: Is it better to assemble such petitions after
the RFD process has started - essentially what the existing "straw
poll" setup amounts to - or beforehand? Is it better to have a single
standard, or varying standards depending on the type of group?]
[Note: I'm not expecting my successor or anyone else who endorses a
criterion *to* verify any particular demonstration of interest. My
point is that such demonstrations should be *capable* of being verified.]
2. A poll conducted by the UVP or other credible votetakers (e.g., a
moonlighting member of ukVoting) showing that at least 50 people
support the group's creation.
3. A statement by the moderator/maintainer of a mailing list with
ye many posts per week that he or she will gate the list into the
new group if it is created.
[I suggested 10 posts/week, but whatever. There needs to be some
generalise to, say, Web forums?]
4. A traffic analysis showing that a group of this name already exists
on some servers, and has some level of on-topic traffic per week already.
[Again, I suggested 10/week, but whatever. Note that this is a proper
response by the B8MB to fragmentation, as in the case of
rec.crafts.scrapbooks.]
One more issue for discussion: What about those pesky Google searches?
I don't like 'em, but any hypothetical Board member taking my place might.
For a proposal to remove a group, the object is to demonstrate a *lack*
of interest in it. Here, the only criterion I suggested was that the
group should have fewer than 100 on-topic posts per year AND should get
fewer than 25 KEEP votes in a UVP-conducted poll.
For a proposal to unmoderate a group, I was planning to cheat, and
describe as an "interest" criterion something that isn't quite: the
group should have been dead for three months AND the proposal should
show that someone was willing to take care of posts submitted from
sites where the unmoderation failed to take hold.
OBJECTIONS
My thinking about objections has run roughly as follows. I figure not
every group should have to pass an objections test; something analogous
to the uk.* fast track system seems reasonable for sorting this out.
But if a proposal does meet significant objections, those objections
should be considered.
I would be happiest if the judgement of "significant" were not in the
hands of the Board itself, and so I was thinking UVP members should
be the ones to make that call; but that violates the standard of
neutrality that the UVV held to, so I dunno. Objective criteria are
easily gamed; I don't have a good solution.
Anyway, while in principle, objections to some simple creations should
*not* be subject to any kind of vote, in practice, the current setup
weakens objectors so much that I think the simplest solution is the
old one. If just one Board member is slaving a vote to interest and
objections criteria, then an objections vote with more than 1/3 NO
should mean that the Board member votes NO too.
There's also a practical problem. Near as I can tell, objections, at
least, should be voted on the basis of the final form of a proposal.
But the final form of a proposal initiates only a five-day period
before the Board does the consensus-or-vote thing. Say someone takes
two days to object cogently, and it's another day before a vote is
called ... UVV members fairly consistently reported that most votes
come within a few days, and that YES/NO proportions weren't all that
time-dependent, but this is still a tight squeeze.
I don't claim to have a final conclusion on objections votes. I hope
to have a successor interested in finding one.
Joe Bernstein

[Terminator]

On Sun, 25 Mar 2007 00:41:33 +0000 (UTC), in news.groups, Joe

My term on the Big 8 Management Board ends April 1, if not sooner. I
will not seek re-appointment. But if I resign sooner, I can nominate a
successor, who will then have an easier time joining the Board than
without my nomination. If you would like to be that successor, read on.
1) Belief that the B8MB is properly in charge of the Big 8 newsgroup
creation system and allied responsibilities.

Joe, I respect you but this is just wrong.
The current B*Bmy was given an assignment to find a better method of
voting. When they decided not to proceed on this assignment, They
needed to resign and Russ needed to appoint people

Who is Russ to APPOINT ANYONE here?

that had
experience in voting and polling

You mean just like yourself?

Enough.

to attempt to fix/address the
problem.
The B*-mby is not legitimate.

2) Belief that the system the B8MB uses to carry out those
responsibilities needs certain improvements.

Yes it does. a paper shredder and complete rewrite in a start on the
problem

3) Ability to remain at least minimally civil with the members of the
B8MB and with the news.* community.

the Major of the B*MBy members do not meet this standard.

I will judge these qualities in deciding who to nominate, and I will
rely heavily on past postings. The reason I am appealing for candidates
publicly is not to give people a chance to make sudden conversions, but
simply to cast as wide a net as possible, in hopes of finding *someone*
with 18 months of effort in them. Because you'll also need one trait I
4) Enough dedication to push improvements forward.

Heh... You can't change the _get_along_gang_... and pushing changes
will contradict the 1-4 requirements.

More about these four points in the rest of this post.
I will be offline from the time I post a followup to this post, for
about 39 hours. After that I will participate in public discussion
in the resulting thread as time permits, at least until April 1; I
make no promise to hang around after that.
1) Belief that the B8MB is properly in charge of the Big 8 newsgroup
creation system and allied responsibilities.
The power exerted by the members of the B8MB is essentially that exerted
by news.announce.newgroups moderators since at least David Lawrence, if
not earlier. Big 8 tradition holds that moderators choose their
replacements. tale chose the first troika; they chose Brian Edmonds to
join them; the final troika chose us. They used a weird system to do
so, but there is nothing barring that.
Furthermore, I spent years on news.groups working on moderator election
schemes. I don't remember a single one of the people I've seen
agitating to elect nan moderators helping out with that work; I do
remember some of them dismissing that work contemptuously. I am
unimpressed.
Finally, while I acknowledge that Ken Arromdee, for example, has more
credibility to question the moderators of nan than I have, I did spend
five years in declared opposition to tale. Some of those of you who now
attack the B8MB faulted me for that. Again, I am unimpressed.
The B8MB is legitimate. It is not making decisions irresponsibly.
While I am unhappy with certain aspects of its system, the previous
system was broken: the previous UVV was down to zero members, and the
voters had stopped showing up to vote.
And the B8MB holds the Big 8 key. Some of its present opponents
attacked the fiat creation of rec.crafts.scrapbooks as rewarding
behaviour that tended to the fragmentation of the Big 8. I see the
same people now encouraging that fragmentation.
I will not nominate anyone from among those I've been accusing in the
past few paragraphs.
2) Belief that the system the B8MB has in place for carrying out those
responsibilities needs certain improvements.
Newsgroup creation systems in the Big 8 and its ancestor hierarchies
have always involved some mixture of public power and private power.
The old system in place from 1989 to 2005 involved so much public power
that when the public stopped showing up, the system broke down. It's
worth noting that the final nan moderators saw themselves as unable to
address the problem of dead groups; they considered that they held even
less power than they actually had.
The B8MB has correctly addressed this by emphasising private power, the
type of power that originated in the lists of active newsgroups (which
were always private efforts) and was exemplified by the backbone mailing
list of the mid 1980s. However, the pendulum, in my opinion, has swung
too far.
interest and objections. Today the Board's members are reduced to
measuring interest without stated criteria, so proponents can only know
when they've done enough by getting a majority of Board members to say
so; and measuring objections not by how many hold them, but only by how
proponents have not so far been asked to demonstrate very *much*
interest, and most proposals so far have been the sort where only
"technical" objections are particularly pertinent. Publicly stated
standards *should not* be such that the Board can never override them;
the previous system broke down precisely when the previous nan
moderators exercised their routinely stated, but no longer credible,
right to override the old public standards. But they should exist, to
help proponents and objectors and even to help the Board itself. In a
followup to this post, I will state publicly the standards I would
encourage a successor to advocate, but I'm more concerned that this
person advocate standards at all, than with the specifics of my
proposals.
Additionally, there should be a voting system in place. Not because
voting is the perfect way to measure both interest and objections, but
because when the number of objectors matters, some sort of vote is the
only way to establish it. The existing UVP has yet to conduct a poll.
I would strongly prefer to nominate a successor who would think her or
his most important job was to make the UVP effective and essential, and
who would undertake to work on that.
3) Ability to remain at least minimally civil with the members of the
B8MB and the news.* community.
I used to have a mostly unjustified reputation for civility on
news.groups; what civility I do have was strained to its limit by my
first six months on the B8MB, both the private and the public work.
I'm not looking for perfection, and I'm certainly not looking for a
clone of my personal style, but you're not going to get anywhere if
you're a flamer, so I'm not going to waste my time nominating you.
4) Enough dedication to push improvements forward.
After those six months, I burned out; since then I have done little on
the B8MB and nothing on news.*. Since September I haven't even had home
net access, and that's one reason I'm not trying to do anything like
this myself. Please only step forward if you're in a position to *work*
on the B8MB, and preferably also the UVP.
Joe Bernstein

1) the board is illegitimate
4) the change will require a push which contradicts the need to
push...

[Terminator]

On Sun, 25 Mar 2007 00:41:33 +0000 (UTC), in news.groups, Joe

My term on the Big 8 Management Board ends April 1, if not sooner. I
will not seek re-appointment. But if I resign sooner, I can nominate a
successor, who will then have an easier time joining the Board than
without my nomination. If you would like to be that successor, read on.
1) Belief that the B8MB is properly in charge of the Big 8 newsgroup
creation system and allied responsibilities.

Joe, I respect you but this is just wrong.
The current B*Bmy was given an assignment

Given assignment by whom, you, ole fart?

Enough.

to find a better method of
voting. When they decided not to proceed on this assignment, They
needed to resign and Russ needed to appoint people that had
experience in voting and polling to attempt to fix/address the
problem.
The B*-mby is not legitimate.

2) Belief that the system the B8MB uses to carry out those
responsibilities needs certain improvements.

Yes it does. a paper shredder and complete rewrite in a start on the
problem

3) Ability to remain at least minimally civil with the members of the
B8MB and with the news.* community.

the Major of the B*MBy members do not meet this standard.

I will judge these qualities in deciding who to nominate, and I will
rely heavily on past postings. The reason I am appealing for candidates
publicly is not to give people a chance to make sudden conversions, but
simply to cast as wide a net as possible, in hopes of finding *someone*
with 18 months of effort in them. Because you'll also need one trait I
4) Enough dedication to push improvements forward.

Heh... You can't change the _get_along_gang_... and pushing changes
will contradict the 1-4 requirements.

More about these four points in the rest of this post.
I will be offline from the time I post a followup to this post, for
about 39 hours. After that I will participate in public discussion
in the resulting thread as time permits, at least until April 1; I
make no promise to hang around after that.
1) Belief that the B8MB is properly in charge of the Big 8 newsgroup
creation system and allied responsibilities.
The power exerted by the members of the B8MB is essentially that exerted
by news.announce.newgroups moderators since at least David Lawrence, if
not earlier. Big 8 tradition holds that moderators choose their
replacements. tale chose the first troika; they chose Brian Edmonds to
join them; the final troika chose us. They used a weird system to do
so, but there is nothing barring that.
Furthermore, I spent years on news.groups working on moderator election
schemes. I don't remember a single one of the people I've seen
agitating to elect nan moderators helping out with that work; I do
remember some of them dismissing that work contemptuously. I am
unimpressed.
Finally, while I acknowledge that Ken Arromdee, for example, has more
credibility to question the moderators of nan than I have, I did spend
five years in declared opposition to tale. Some of those of you who now
attack the B8MB faulted me for that. Again, I am unimpressed.
The B8MB is legitimate. It is not making decisions irresponsibly.
While I am unhappy with certain aspects of its system, the previous
system was broken: the previous UVV was down to zero members, and the
voters had stopped showing up to vote.
And the B8MB holds the Big 8 key. Some of its present opponents
attacked the fiat creation of rec.crafts.scrapbooks as rewarding
behaviour that tended to the fragmentation of the Big 8. I see the
same people now encouraging that fragmentation.
I will not nominate anyone from among those I've been accusing in the
past few paragraphs.
2) Belief that the system the B8MB has in place for carrying out those
responsibilities needs certain improvements.
Newsgroup creation systems in the Big 8 and its ancestor hierarchies
have always involved some mixture of public power and private power.
The old system in place from 1989 to 2005 involved so much public power
that when the public stopped showing up, the system broke down. It's
worth noting that the final nan moderators saw themselves as unable to
address the problem of dead groups; they considered that they held even
less power than they actually had.
The B8MB has correctly addressed this by emphasising private power, the
type of power that originated in the lists of active newsgroups (which
were always private efforts) and was exemplified by the backbone mailing
list of the mid 1980s. However, the pendulum, in my opinion, has swung
too far.
interest and objections. Today the Board's members are reduced to
measuring interest without stated criteria, so proponents can only know
when they've done enough by getting a majority of Board members to say
so; and measuring objections not by how many hold them, but only by how
proponents have not so far been asked to demonstrate very *much*
interest, and most proposals so far have been the sort where only
"technical" objections are particularly pertinent. Publicly stated
standards *should not* be such that the Board can never override them;
the previous system broke down precisely when the previous nan
moderators exercised their routinely stated, but no longer credible,
right to override the old public standards. But they should exist, to
help proponents and objectors and even to help the Board itself. In a
followup to this post, I will state publicly the standards I would
encourage a successor to advocate, but I'm more concerned that this
person advocate standards at all, than with the specifics of my
proposals.
Additionally, there should be a voting system in place. Not because
voting is the perfect way to measure both interest and objections, but
because when the number of objectors matters, some sort of vote is the
only way to establish it. The existing UVP has yet to conduct a poll.
I would strongly prefer to nominate a successor who would think her or
his most important job was to make the UVP effective and essential, and
who would undertake to work on that.
3) Ability to remain at least minimally civil with the members of the
B8MB and the news.* community.
I used to have a mostly unjustified reputation for civility on
news.groups; what civility I do have was strained to its limit by my
first six months on the B8MB, both the private and the public work.
I'm not looking for perfection, and I'm certainly not looking for a
clone of my personal style, but you're not going to get anywhere if
you're a flamer, so I'm not going to waste my time nominating you.
4) Enough dedication to push improvements forward.
After those six months, I burned out; since then I have done little on
the B8MB and nothing on news.*. Since September I haven't even had home
net access, and that's one reason I'm not trying to do anything like
this myself. Please only step forward if you're in a position to *work*
on the B8MB, and preferably also the UVP.
Joe Bernstein

1) the board is illegitimate
4) the change will require a push which contradicts the need to
push...

[Terminator]

We need a plan to replace the B*mbies...
and we need it soon.

Why?
I see a lot of complaining from you, but very little of substance. So,
what I want to know is this: were there groups we didn't create that we
should have?

Simple: UNMODERATED news.admin.moderation that was proposed a half a
year ago and totally ignored by you, power hungry sickos.
You wouldn't even allow the article to appear.

And instead, you are trying to destroy the very possibility
to have any discussions on the issues of "moderation" by
creating the "moderated" version of the same exact group.

Not only that, but SPECIFIALLY not adding .moderated to the
group name in order to sabotage this group in the future.

That single thing says more about you, nazi puppets,
than all your mealy mouth blabber.

Simple as that.

Or is your problem based on us having created groups that
have not been successful?
If the latter -- what did we do wrong? Even *you* have cited the Victory
motorcycle group's creation process as successful (despite, presumably,
disagreeing with the way the final decision was made), and yet, now you
cite it as a failure and blame it on us. Should we not have created that
group? What did we miss, at the time? Was there some information we
overlooked or ignored that would have led us to a different decision?
What is the impending disaster being brought on by us having created that
group, or the vision group, that you see a need to head off "soon"? What
is the damage being done, and how would you change the course to prevent
it? If the Victory group should not have been created, what process would
have led us (in general, not the Board) to not create it?
Of course, every time I ask you for actual, constructive input, none is
forthcoming, but you used to actually have something to contribute, so I
keep holding out hope. Do you have anything, or are you so consumed with
the "anti-Board" campaign that you have no idea what you would do if you
actually got somewhere? Why do you refuse to help *improve* the process,
which clearly needs to be improved? Why not actually *do something*
instead of just complaining?

[Terminator]

What the board needs to do is take responsibility for its actions.
That's the first step of remedying a problem.

What does this mean? Say "I'm sorry?" Remove the group?

The remedy would be not repeating the same mistake.

The only way to be sure of not repeating the same mistake is to never
create another group.

First of all, it is to remove the nazi sickos of your kind
and allow the NNTP protocol function as designed
and that is

AUTOMATED group creation.

Simple as that.

Enough.

Let's take another example, Brian -- the recently-created
rec.radio.amateur.moderated. There was a lot of comment that it should
not be created because (a) it duplicated other groups (b) it was a
moderated playground for extra-class radio licensees (c) the good
discussion would be stolen from existing groups (d) participants in
existing groups must be really stupid if they can't use killfiles (e)
the charter was fatally flawed. The Board could have listened to these
objections, and not created the group. But the group is thriving.
Or perhaps we should discuss sci.eeg, which was not created because the
proponent couldn't demonstrate potential users. It might be a thriving
group right now. According to the proponent, all he needed was an
extant newsgroup, and he could round up all the users needed to make it
viable. I don't know. You don't know.
It's real easy to second-guess Board decisions. "I told you so." Not
particularly useful, but easy.