Warning! This is about a metatopic, not about North American Network Ops. If you're only here to listen to discussions of North American Network Ops you should hit D now. I mean it. Don't read this unless you aren't interested in off-topic posts. OK, but remember, you were warned. Since Merit's mailing list management consists of a guy with a hammer and tongs who works on alternate leap days, I have never been able to redirect the nanog list to a newsgroup where good things like KILL files can work. That means I have to read it in real time, as I suspect the rest of you also do. That, in turn, means I have to hit D, D, DDDDD, D, D, D, DDDDD whenever someone decides that I've just gotta know more about BGP route withdrawals, communist routers, or some other topic that has absolutely nothing to do with North American Network Operations. Listen up, all of you. The reason I don't subscribe to com-priv is that I am not interested in the general topic of commercialization and privatization of the Internet. Anything which would be appropriate for that list is just automatically not appropriate for this one -- there is no overlap in the topics whatsoever. Since Merit's mailing list software is unable to reject articles that are offensively cross posted, the only way we are going to keep this mailing list even roughly on topic is with a little tactic called SELF RESTRAINT. I expect this message to have no effect but I just had to send it anyway.