Re: Just a tidbit

[nessus@media.mit.edu (Douglas Alan)]

In article <WELSH.93Mar24101251@aquamarine.epcc.ed.ac.uk>
welsh@epcc.edinburgh.ac.uk (E Welsh) writes:

>   Previous attempts to guess the meaning behind The Symbols have
>   proved fruitless, with IED refusing to be goaded into either
>   confirming or denying theories presented by numerous intrepid
>   philocanines. If REW casts his mind back, one particular
>   theory--not his own--springs to mind: In Excelsis Dea which, if
>   REW's total lack of latin education fails to expose him for the
>   charlatan he is, means Goddess in heaven.

Don't bend your mind too much -- I, E, and D are just the first three
letters of his old username, IED0DXM.  His account was probably on
some godawful IBM mainframe, where the system managers felt they must
give users account names with apparently random sequences of numbers
and letters, just so that everything would look proper and
businesslike.

After all, if you start allowing people to have any old usernames,
it's only a matter of time before they will want names like
"dierepublicanscum" or "katebushisgod", and eventually things will
disolve into a horrible state of anarchy.  And then where would we be?
You'd have all these people buying whatever old PC or workstation they
wanted, rather than paying for overpriced IBM mainframes.  Then the
value of IBM stock would decline, Microsoft would be worth more than
IBM, and our entire capitalist system would crumble, like the house of
cards it is.

|>oug