The subjects already suggested have generated pages and pages of comment, but the one closest to my heart has not been addressesed, yet. Robert Terry asked for technical standards, and George H Brett II pointed out the need for definitions of the terms we 'assume' have definitions we agree upon. Standards and Definitions *must* be explored and accepted, or we can argue without end, not realizing we actually agree, but are using different terms to describe the same things. This is, perhaps, a problem to be first addressed by our moderator, Bob Carlitz. [Moderator's Note: This is a good point. I will try to help provide an overall framework for the discussion as we go along. For the first few days, however, I think it's a good idea to let people say what's on their minds. I don't want to force the discussion into channels which the majority don't find to be the most important ones to explore.] Another is the volume of words we transmit by including the .snip.. to identify the passage to which we are responding. Short of preserving every response, what else can we do? Is there not more concise way to identify the initial comment, and the subsequent responses? [Moderator's Note: I would recommend that people minimize quoting of other messages. If you haven't looked at the on-line archive of messages, please do. It includes indices by subject, author and thread, which make it pretty easy to follow a given line of discussion without any quoting of previous messages. You can find it at http://www.info-ren.org/projects/universal-service/discussion.html ] I am not a visitor to 'chat rooms' and am innocent of e-mail etiquette which might ease my concerns. It does seem that some have redundant self identifiers in their closings, since we are to respond only to the given posting address. With over 250 registered in this seminar, it may tax the capacity of our storage if everyone must respond each week.