RE: How to pay $47 for a copy of RFC 793

[John C Klensin <[e-mail]>]

--On Monday, May 09, 2011 21:47 -0400 Ross Callon
<[e-mail]> wrote:

> This reminds me of what a colleague once said about
> government-run lotteries: "A tax on people who are bad at
> math". In this case the fools don't seem to be throwing all
> that many dollars away (at least not per document). 

Indeed.  And, as others have pointed out, the sums are
relatively trivial for the communities of fools most likely to
be affected.  I always took that to be the point of the comments
of Jon's to which Bob and I referred: someone who finds the
costs (both monetary and waiting for documents to show up in the
post) painful enough to motivate a little research will swiftly
find free and immediate sources for the documents.  If those who
find the costs lower than the cost of spending time on that
research want to pay for the documents, it isn't our problem and
we should not strive to make it so.

It seems to me that not having the series available in IEEE
Xplore and having documents in the ACM Digital Library but not
indexed by RFC number is a problem in that searching for the
documents is a little harder than it ought to be and is our
problem (even though typing "RFC 793" into at least  few
general-purpose search engines does yield pointers to non-cost
repositories).  Requests to fix both the ACM and IEEE problems
have been made to the relevant folks.

Beyond that, unless someone has a cure for fools, I suggest this
is a problem that is not worth our putting energy into solving.

   john