[E-Lang] draft statement of consensus

[Mark S. Miller]

At 09:24 PM Monday 2/5/01, Jonathan S. Shapiro wrote:
>MarcS:
>
>In my note, I suggested an example of an ACL-class system that may be useful
>(MLS). It hasn't been rebutted, and even MarkM seems to have agreed with it.

Actually, what I said was approximately that it looks like a promising and 
challenging line of inquiry, but that I hadn't yet grokked it in its 
fullness.  (Or, for those that haven't read Stranger in a Strange Land, I 
don't really understand it yet.) The rest of your message makes it clear to 
me just how thoroughly I don't yet understand it, as well as how much I'd 
like to.  In my current level of ignorance of MLSish things, I'm not really 
able to agree or disagree with much of your message.

It seems that if we can find a category distinction between the kinds of 
issues you are here raising, and those that have occupied most of the 
discussion, we may still state a clear consensus in the area where we seem 
to have developed a joint understanding through argument, on the one hand, 
and a clear qualifier regarding the MLSish area, on the other.  As I still 
don't grok MLS, I'll refrain from proposing how such a boundary might be 
phrased.  It would be great to summarize the current points of agreement 
before we venture into a new area and lose our live shared context of the 
current area.  Even with a full email archive, this context would be hard to 
recapture.

To help me (and I suspect, others) understand MLSish things better, could 
you paint a scenario outside of gov't secrecy where one might find these 
mechanisms useful?  Corporate secrecy would be fine, or whatever works.  
It's just that with the standard gov't example, it's hard to, shall we say, 
feel motivated to solve the problem.


        Cheers,
        --MarkM