HALLAM@vax1.physics.oxford.ac.uk ("Phillip M. Hallam-Baker") (12/17/90)
Dear Net, Sorry to have mentioned to one and all the fact that our effort may be malappropriated by others for purposes we do not approve of. I also appologise if anyone thought my comment rude. In this country we do not call it rude we call it satire. In future I will keep my comments to the following :- 1 Requests to join/leave the network (on the broadcast server not transputer-request naturaly) 2 Complaints about the paraversacaplinsunmos C compiler not performing correctly 3 Comments on folding editors 4 er.. 5 . 6 Did someone mention occam ?, deadlock freedom, fault tolerance, massive parallelism, online data aquisition for realtime experiments or anything else that the transputer was meant to be good for? I also maintain that my original article was justified on the following grounds :- 1 The putchase of a coffee pot by the US airforce at a cost of $2500, (also an ash tray at $500) 2 The said coffee pot was indeed avaliable in some equivalent of woolies but at a cost rather above that of $2.50 3 If someone gets so wound up by a few comments they were obviously well aimed. In this context I would use the phrase "pricking a bubble of pomposity" but that realy WOULD be rude. 4 There is a serious point where we as scientists and engineers have a reasponsibilty for what we create. The guys who built the bomb only realised afterwards that. (And before anyone gets steamed up I cite openhiemer 5 It may be rude but not half so rude as invading someone elses country (no names no pack drill [sic]) Feel free to kick me off the network if you like but i kinda guess that over here we don't quite like that sort of soceity. We have a name for it I think it was achademic freedom or something. If you don't like irrelevant tat on the mailing list just pretend that it was another "please join message" and hit the delete key. But on the other hand if you arn't at least someway interested by it why on earth did you read this message down to the end in the first place ?????? wierd ! Ever yours Phillip M. Hallam-Baker