Different roles make different demands. What must be learned to drive an automobile is indeed minimal.
The requirements for membership in trhe Society of Automative Engineers (SAE, as in the 'SAE' prefixed to motor-oil grades and weights.) are much more onerous. Reductiones ad absurdum sometimes help in situations like this one. The skill requirements for crossing the George Washington Bridge on foot or by car successfully are exiguous. The skills required to design and build it were not, and those that would be required to replace it today are not.. As technologies mature the requirements for using them diminish sharply, but the requirements for implementing such easy-to-use technologies do not. We can, that is, make it easy to use, walk or drive over, a bridge. We cannot make it nearly so easy to build one. Worse, the chief consequences of trying to do so are that all bridges come to be much alike and to be well adapted only to the obsolescent requirements set for their prototypes. John Gilmore, Ashland, MA 01721 - USA ---------------------------------------------------------------------- For IBM-MAIN subscribe / signoff / archive access instructions, send email to lists...@listserv.ua.edu with the message: INFO IBM-MAIN
