Randy Bush wrote: > business management is in more need of luminaries as the business failure > rate is orders of magnitude higher than the internet packet drop rate. Yes, that's interesting. I hadn't looked at it that way. I guess you could say that Internet routing is basically successful, since something like 99.X% of packets are delivered to their destination, whereas business is basically a bust, since 90% of business fail in the first 18 months (or something like that). That's obviously an apples-to-oranges comparison, since the packets have a short natural lifespan within which to succeed, whereas the "natural lifespan" of a business is open-ended. But back to the point, why we don't need luminaries in this business: We're an engineering culture, and we celibrate the oral tradition of didactic tales of failure, rather than the cult of personality. The handing down of tales of failure, which is what we do for entertainment and social reinforcement, is what allows us as engineers to build upon the successes of previous generations and avoid replicating their failures. Celebrating personality is irrelevant to our social construct; it serves no function. The luminaries of our culture, if they exist, are the engineers who made the famous mistakes which are indelibly commited to our collective memory, from which the greatest number of other engineers have learned a lesson without replicating the learning experience first-hand. -Bill