to be honest, i never attacked you, bob metcalfe, the person. in fact i have nothing but respect for your accomplishments. i have also stated that i can't believe that a person of your abilities can "get it wrong" so many times without doing so somewhat intentionally. if you'd really like to know what i take issue with, it is the following: They are installing new equipment to meet ramping demand, are operating well below capacity, and are not losing even a single Internet packet ever, they said. Then came the three large Network Service Providers (NSPs). Sprint, ANS (http://www.ans.net), and MCI (http://www.mci.com/resources) each showed, after some Macintosh booting, that they are installing new equipment to meet ramping demand, are operating well below capacity, and are not losing even a single Internet packet ever, they said. Then the fit hit the shan. Various earnest young speakers from Merit stood up one by one to report "alarming" statistics from the Internet -- rapidly increasing packet loss rates and routing instabilities (http://nic.merit.edu/routing.arbiter/RA/statistics). They asked the NAPs and NSPs, "Where are so many packets being lost?" "Somewhere else," came the denial. now, if i have to stand up in front of my peers and say "we are losing packets on our tail circuits into the NAPs" which i did stand up and say... as did other providers. and that "we are trying to remedy this situation by adding more capacity into the NAPs and are engineering direct interconnections between ourselves and other large providers" you ought to at least get it right when you go off and tell the world: "Somewhere else," came the denial. and, yes you also said that we should respect our audience by wearing a suit - but i found that rather funny. in fact that very suggestion has been the outcome of many a practical joke played on unsuspecting newcomers from our office to the nanog and/or ietf meetings. nuff said, i return you to discussions of "running code" Jeff Young young@mci.net