In a lot of computer things (such as programming languages, or systemenvironments) we have the choice between being concise and leavingthings implicit, and being verbose but making things explicit. Hereis the thing about this choice:

Computers are fine with implicit things because they never forget ;they effectively have perfect memories for this sort of thing. Buthumans have limited memories (especially short term memories) that haveto be periodically reinforced, so we necessarily forget some of theimplicit stuff every so often. Which periodically causes

Here's a paradox about bug reporting: while details are good, too muchdetail is bad (and by this I don't just mean too much verbosity).

Specifically, you should not go into too much detail about what is goingon unless you are certain that you know what you're talking about andyou're sure you're correct about it. By what is going on I don't meansymptoms (those are relatively easy, although tedious, to get right) butwhat

Several times now we've had cases of 'accidental BitTorrent' on ournetworks (and generally gotten email from the campus network peopleabout it); people running BitTorrent clients on our networks withoutintending to. It turns out that this is an amusing (to me) consequenceof the pervasiveness of laptops and laptop hibernation these days.

(You might reasonably ask why we 'allow' BitTorrent at all. There's atleast two reasons; first, without deep packet inspection (and maybeeven then ) we