Re: Need help bad!!!!!

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

iBlackNight says

"        Due to my teacher's lack of availability and the few people that I can
find on campus that know ada, my resources here are not very exstenive. I use
them when I can but they are rarely available. I did look through the LRM, the
reference manual, the Rationale and numerous tutorials. I don't have the money
to buy a manual on Ada. In the end the solution was simple, I should have seen
it earlier. I did spend 8 - 9 hours working around the problem, the longer I
worked on it, the farther away from the solution I got until I was utterly lost
and frustrated. That is why I posted a request for help in this newsgroup. My
apologies to those who found my request unfounded and irritable.


So let's examine this. Because this student does not feel like buying a
text book, computing resources, and people's time around the world get used
up which in aggregate total FAR more than the cost of that text book, but
because the student does not pay, he does not care about this.

It is such incidents that increasingly make clear that the current model
of internet pricing is not viable in the long run. I notice for instance
that I get about 20 ads a day at my email address, well sure, why not,
it's absolutely free for people to send out mass bulk mailings in this
way. I see no reason why that number will not increase from 20 to 2000
a day, rendering my email address useless, unless a stop is put to this
kind of misuse of the net.

Going back to the issue of students. I would estimate that perhaps five to
ten thousand students are currently learning Ada world wide, perhaps I
am way under by a factor of ten, but even if ten thousand is right, and
they all post once a week to CLA. We then have well over a thousand messages
a day asking simple questions, and, as has happened to many other internet
newsgroups, CLA is destroyed, since no one reads it any more. And remember
my estimate might be off by a factor of ten!