A woman approached the Pearly Gates, and Saint Peter asked for her social
 security number. The woman told him, and Saint Peter typed on his
 workstation:
 
 pearly-gates:~/peter> grep 212-53-6432 /earth/human/status
 
 The computer responded:
 
 212-53-6432 Cindy Smith cms@dragon.com!earth  naughty
 pearly-gates:~/peter>
 
 Saint Peter then told her she was eternally damned, and that a minivan to
 hell would be arriving shortly.
 
 Cindy began to protest, "but what did I do wrong? I loved my fellow
 neighbor as I loved myself, I was a kind, warm, gentle person! Surely there
 must be a mistake!"
 
 So, Saint Peter looked up on the files, and saw, lo and behold, that she
 truly was a kind, warm, gentle person ... until he saw the entry for Jan 7,
 1992 - Earth, which read:
 
 **DAMNABLE VIOLATION #69***
 Posted irrelevant article to newsgroup.
 
 After probing a little more, Saint Peter explained to the woman, "It seems
 that on January 7, 1992, you posted an article to alt.religion.computers.
 
 "This article gave no praise of Emacs, no snide remarks toward Microsoft,
 and not even a comment on the proper definition of 'hacker'! In fact, the
 article was not even relating to computers at all, and discussed, of all
 things, human religion! There wasn't even a reference to Bob or
 Discordianism, Zen, or the Tao of programming.
 
 "Oh dear, this is terrible. You see, heaven is a perfect place, and we only
 have room for the most perfect people. Ever since we ran the T-3 line up
 from New Jersey, we've been particularly harsh on breakers of netiquette.
 from New
 Didn't you read RFC-23654? The one proposing commandments 11 through 15?"
 
 He opened up another XTerm and searched for some files. After a few
 moments, the laser printer spat out a crisp sheet of paper. It read: 
 
 11: Thou shalt not flame spelling or grammar.
 12: Thou shalt not have a .sig file longer than 3 lines.
 13: Thou shalt not send "All fags must die" messages to 19 random groups.
 14: Thou shalt not request post a frequently asked question.
 15: Thou shalt not post to a group without first reading a week's worth of
 posts, thereby avoiding irrelevant articles.
 
 When she was done reading, she began to stammer, but Saint Peter stopped
 her, saying "I'm sorry. There's nothing I can do. To register a complaint,
 you'll have to send mail to status-change-request@godvax.heaven.com. We
 have a group of cherubim who manage such requests. But don't send it to
 status-change@godvax.heaven.com, or your request will be distributed to the
 whole mailing list. They *hate* that! In fact, there's some discussion
 about making that the 16th commandment..."
 
 At that point, a Dodge minivan drove up and came to a stop. Satan, in the
 form of a Microsoft salesman, stepped out. "Welcome!" he said. "We've been
 waiting for you..." Cindy, almost in a trance, stepped into the minivan and
 was whisked away to the netherworld, a world of COBOL, System 36s, punch
 cards, incompatible network standards, and irresponsible news posters.
 Satan turned to Cindy, and smiled. "You'll like it here", he said, "We have
 netnews, but we've greatly simplified it. We have only one group, it's
 alt.talk.sci.comp.soc.rec.misc!"
 
 From: Nathan

Wil Stark, wstark04 (at) pobox _dot_com

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