Sender: •••@••.••• (Glen Raphael) >JUMPING THE GUN ON SYSOP LIABILITY [...] >The White Paper makes various recommendations for legislative changes which >it hopes will grease the onramps to the Information Highway. This "greasing" is presumably done so that people attempting to steer high-performance equipment onto the Information Highway skid off the Information Embankment and crash into the Information Tree, producing an Information Fireball. Can't we find a better metaphor? This one has all the wrong connotations. I suggest that we concentrate on the fact that the Net in its current state is the evolutionary outgrowth of a distributed effort by thousands of participants rather than any central planning agency, and call it the Information River or the Information Forest. Most people believe that if you go in and try to micromanage a forest, it is possible to destroy the very thing that makes it a unique and special place. That's just as true of the Net. Words are weapons; if you accept this bit of terminology of Gore and company you've already lost the battle of ideas. -- Glen Raphael, •••@••.••• President, Stanford/Palo Alto Macintosh User's Group <A HREF="http://www.batnet.com/liberty/raphael">Home Page</A><BR> ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~-~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~ Posted by Andrew Oram - •••@••.••• - Moderator: CYBER-RIGHTS (CPSR) You are encouraged to forward and cross-post messages for non-commercial use, pursuant to any redistribution restrictions included in individual messages. ~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~-~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=-=~
