Remember, wherever ...there you are!
— Buckaroo Banzai
It's your kids! We’ve gotta do something about your kids!
— Christopher Lloyd in Back to the Future
#$$((#&$(^#@#$(!!!
— Billy Martin
Q: What should I do when someone sends a rude note to me, or, worse, to a mailing list?
A: Mr. Protocol recommends the collected works of Miss Manners, who has honed politeness to such a degree of effectiveness that it may be necessary to include her in the next round of strategic arms limitation talks. Unfortunately the effective use of this weapon requires a mind like Dorothy Parker’s. The saving grace of electronic mail is that one may delay one’s response until inspiration has struck.
“Flame” has always been one of Mr. Protocol’s favorite terms in computer science. It’s so much more dynamic than “bit”, and so much simpler than “accumulator” (“register” is too modem for Mr. Protocol, and “microcode” sounds like something typed by gnats). “Flame” doubtless described the behavior of some early computers, but has now come to describe the behavior of some computer users. It refers to baseless, unsubstantiated ranting, and it has become an art form. “On another network”, as they say, it has its own equivalent of a mailing list, and it is one of the most active categories on that network. “Flaming”, the act of creating a flame, calls forth images from the comic books of characters with flames shooting out of their mouths.
Most flames are simply boring, except to their targets, and hence should be avoided on that account alone. Most human beings find computer science boring, as it is currently constituted, and Mr. Protocol feels that the few who do not should avoid boring each other at ail costs. (This is also why he avoids most conferences.)
A very few flames are interesting, and a tiny percentage are fascinating. One of the best flames ever published simply consisted of the annotated error log of an Internet gateway machine, demonstrating all of the things that were going wrong in the early days of connecting different networks together. Hence, correct flaming requires not only literary ability, but some degree of imagination. Bad art is bad art, whatever the medium.
This flame was also rare in that it had no particular individual as a target Most flames are not so generous, and therein lies the danger. Most flamers become unpopular and come to be regarded as unpleasant timewasters. In fact most ill-considered flames are the result of an itchy trigger finger, and would be either considerably improved, or eliminated, by the use of some thought
To improve the quality of network correspondence, Mr. Protocol makes the following suggestions:
- If your black-and-white terminal suddenly appears to be generating dark red characters on a pink background, avoid sending mail. You are either enraged, or have just suffered a stroke. In either event, any mail you generate is liable to be gibberish, to the detriment of your reputation.
- Mr. Protocol (semi-seriously) suggests that a new alias, "furnace”, be created on each system, which swallows tracelessly all mail sent to it. If any mail you read creates condition (1), above, send the reply to “furnace.” Then send the real reply to the originator of the mail. This alias also comes in handy when certain mailing lists become so full of flames that the sense can no longer be discerned through the glare.
- “Flame not, lest thou be singed.” And, if you do flame, try to make it a really good one. It should avoid a human target, and be directed at some piece of utterly inane technology. “The mail system on FLOPOS makes trained turtles look good” is a much better flame, for instance, than “The cretin that wrote FLOPMAIL must have lived on Coke laced with arsenic for four months, and then run the code through a Fortran-to-Cobol translator.” The latter raises two possibilities: a) your company will hire said cretin and make him VP of your division, and/or b) the Coca-Cola Company will sue you. Actually naming the cretin is, of course, worst of all, for if you do, he will invariably turn out to have been a Turing award recipient for three years running, and his calm and reasoned response pointing out that FLOPMAIL was a challenge to see if Cobol could be used to write a mail system, will leave you hanging out to dry.
- Never send mail to anyone who wears full thermal armor to work.
• • •
Mr. Protocol would be pleased to hear from his public. Questions and comments will be gratefully received. Flames will be redirected to “furnace.”