I am sure these are the kind of "discussions" people had in mind when they suggested that we should make better and more effective use of the e-mail lists for our work in IETF... Regards, Christer ________________________________________ From: ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx [ietf-bounces@xxxxxxxx] On Behalf Of Dave Cridland [dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx] Sent: Monday, October 31, 2011 7:10 PM To: Robin Whittle Cc: IETF-Discussion Subject: Re: The death John McCarthy - LISP, HIP & GSE On Sun Oct 30 09:45:43 2011, Robin Whittle wrote: > The "both" was not meant to include you But yet that's clearly what you said, suggesting that splitting hairs over whether the definite article implies a singleton, despite protestations from the authors to the contrary, is possibly not approriate either. Describing you as "Robin Whittle, the Australian engineer" would be entirely accurate, yet would not imply you are the only engineer on that continent - merely that if there were any confusion over which Robin Whittle I might be referring to, that sobriquet might assist. Similarly, referring to "LISP, the Locator/Identifier Separation Protocol" seems reasonable, and disambiguates from other uses of LISP, such as speech defects, programming languages, and so on. It does not imply, to my eyes, that the speaker believes it to be the one true protocol, any more than "lisp - the speech defect" implies that nobody must consider any other speech defect. On a final note - from me at least - if people genuinely do take offence on behalf on a deceased computer scientist because some other group of people chose to name their protocol similarly to said late scientist's programming language, I am astonished. We seem to have developed a global culture that leaps to a kind of offence-by-proxy at the slightest thing, I realise, but really, I find it hard to believe that people can be actually *offended* at the name of a protocol. Perhaps, like Robin's confusion above, I am misunderstanding what the term "offended" means. Dave. -- Dave Cridland - mailto:dave@xxxxxxxxxxxx - xmpp:dwd@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxxxx - acap://acap.dave.cridland.net/byowner/user/dwd/bookmarks/ - http://dave.cridland.net/ Infotrope Polymer - ACAP, IMAP, ESMTP, and Lemonade _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf _______________________________________________ Ietf mailing list Ietf@xxxxxxxx https://www.ietf.org/mailman/listinfo/ietf