"Daisy, Daisy, give me your answer do..."
Sorry, couldn't help myself. I hope the guy's on vacation. I hope
SOMEBODY is because it sure isn't me!
Someone mentioned the other day that they were fearful of ordinary
citizens having programs like WebCrawler for themselves. I would be
afraid if every node on the Net had humans around so clueless about the
nature of the Net that they would want the entire thing replicated on
their hard disks automatically every night.
Hell, I'm more afraid for those clueless ones who find this necessary.
And if you guys are talking about bot-to-bot communications standards,
PLEASE develop them with the strongest encryption possible. Last thing
I want is my request for my agent to go blabbing around the net about my
shopping preferences.
Of course, individuals deserve all kinds of bots... interest rate bots,
airline pricing wars bots, deals on concert tickets bots, agents that
schedule all your doctors visits and such, agents that clean up dirty
diapers... If they don't deserve them, (y)our market has just been
needlessly reduced by huge factors, which is not what WE want, right?
I'd say that freeware agents could be reviewed by some group of bot
savvy netizens, or there could be a testing lab set up somewhere for
bots...a proving grounds that would be separate from the rest of the
net. I mean, we can't have a billion bloated indices of all the same
data right? It seems like that would just kill off the last of our
bandwidth...
--
Rob Turk <mailto:rturk@austin.ibm.com> Unofficially Speaking.
Never Explain -- your Friends do not need it and your Enemies will not
believe you anyway. --Elbert Hubbard (1856-1915)