Official White House Email Address

[David Kristofferson]

>          President Clinton        Vice President Gore
>
>     PRESIDENT at WHITEHOUSE.GOV      VICE.PRESIDENT at WHITEHOUSE.GOV

Well, initially I was delighted but as I read further, I began to
wonder whether this service was ever going to amount to anything more
than a, e.g.,

YES ON BOSNIA INTERVENTION

versus

NO ON BOSNIA INTERVENTION

polling device, i.e., would it really be worth anyone's time to write
***in detail*** if the mail was simply read by a "droid" program??

Furthermore such a poll by e-mail would obviously not represent a
statistical cross-section of the nation, so what would these results
really mean????  If anyone doubts this, take a look at some of the
bulletin boards on the Prodigy service sometime and you might think
that rednecks rule the roost over here in the good old US of A.

Of course, one can counter that paper mail is probably treated in an
almost droid-like fashion now (i.e., is the FOR stack higher than the
ANTI stack?), but at least one retains the slim hope that some staff
person might be sufficiently impressed with a message that it might
reach a higher up.

As heretical as it might be for me to say this, computers and
automation are not the answer to all of our problems.  In fact, our
main premise at BIOSCI has always been to let computers help *people*
to interact with each other.  I would hope that this project does not
degenerate into a simple but biased "vote" counting device.

				Sincerely,

				Dave Kristofferson
				BIOSCI/bionet Manager

				kristoff at net.bio.net