OT: Or is it?

[Bill Campbell]

On Wed, Jul 11, 2007, Tony Alfrey wrote:
>Man-wai Chang wrote:
>>> http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc1149.html
>>> http://www.faqs.org/rfcs/rfc2549.html
>> 
>> What is this Avian carrier all about?
>> 
>
>The scary thing is that there are people who actually have the real job 
>of writing this sort of stuff for standards agencies.  I understand that 
>there are large buildings in Brussels full of such people whose job it 
>is to, for example, convert the sentence "a computer shall have a place 
>to attach a power cord" into 10 pages of verbiage.

Back in the day when I was doing R&D for a U.S. Navy contractor,
I saw an official Army TM (Training Manual) on the ``80 Column
General Purpose Card'' (e.g. what the Real World(tm) would have
called an IBM card).  This TM was at least 20 pages long, and
contained such gems as ``the computer can't read anything written
on the card with pencil, pen, or magic marker''.

Bill
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