[quoting Cook, 19 Sep 95] Shouldn't we write our comments on the net to fit the context? ITForum, for example, could be understood to be a professional environment for which we write with the understanding that we could be quoted.
But there's more to it. For instance, the U.S. Government has just decided that all e-mail has to be archived as official documents. This lends a whole different context to the status of your e-mailed comments (and I refuse to stop and reflect on what that means for what I just wrote).