Machine readable version of ANSI draft

[Barry Margolin]

In article <1525 at hoptoad.uucp> gnu at hoptoad.uucp (John Gilmore) writes:
>  But it appears that technology is not going to save us from
>brain damaged policies in our standards bureacracy; I guess we'll have
>to reform the bureacracies instead, which is a lot less fun than building
>good technologies.

ANSI is basically a publishing house.  Do you know of any other major
publishing house that would be in favor of you copying their books onto
the net?  Why is this brain damage?

The only possible brain damage is that private companies manage the
standards process, rather than having standards managed by the
government.  This makes sense, though, since the standards are just
voluntary agreements among groups of busnesses.  The only part the
government plays is that of a user of standards, so the National Bureau
of Standards has representatives on many standards committees.

Considering how the government tends to screw things up, I'm pretty
happy that they don't control the standards arena.  The price we pay for
this is that capitalist concerns affect some of the procedures.
-- 
    Barry Margolin
    ARPA: barmar at MIT-Multics
    UUCP: ..!genrad!mit-eddie!barmar