From: lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner)
Subject: Re: Mitel Name
Reply-To: lasner@watsun.cc.columbia.edu (Charles Lasner)
Organization: Columbia University
Distribution: na
Date: Sun, 26 Jul 1992 16:36:49 GMT

In article <1992Jul24.025811.2356@geovision.gvc.com> pt@geovision.gvc.com writes:
[irrelevant to what follows stuff deleted]
>
>I guess I just have to fill some bytes here, otherwise I won't be
>maintaining the tradition of net.abuse, according some newby who took
>violent offence when I told him that it wasn't necessary to keep 66
>lines of quoted text in a posting where he asked a 5 word question
>about something mentioned in the last 4 lines of the original post.  Oh
>well - I've plonked him now, so I don't have to read his abuse.
>

Your head game is over Paul.  It's time to come out of the closet now.  You
are apparently so much a frustrated net.cop.wannabe that you are now
figuratively shooting people to demonstrate to the real police that criminal
jaywalking is occuring.

Face it, the net is an anarchy.  If someone wants to post a several hundred
line article with greatly detailed followups quoting the previous chain of
every related article, but in effect adds nothing to the discussion, the
newsgroup analysing programs you seem to give so much stock in will gleefully
pass such bandwidth waste.  Size never reveals quality.  Further, the Net
isn't someone's life-work (unless they are in need of Getting a Life and
the net is just what they use at the moment while waiting for one to drop
off a truck).  Most people are going to post randomly, which means, as I
do for example, (and I'm not a newbie unless you consider only people as
old as Mel the drum programmer to be non-newbies) I post whatever it takes
to get the job done.  This means I might edit down real mean and lean if I
have the time/inclination and it's appropriate when replying to do so for
the course of the discussion, *or* I may not.  The reasons for either
direction may stem from laziness, expediency, real world (tm) stresses or
time constraints (sorry netters; I want to watch Star Trek in 3.7 minutes,
so this post isn't going to be pretty :-)) or other random reasons.  Nobody's
perfect, nor should they be judged by anyone's measure of net.efficiency of
overall message format.  There's too many discussions here that in someone's
book is a 100% waste of bandwidth regardless of format, but I wouldn't
want to be the judge of which "community standards" to apply.

So, give it up!  We will still have groups where 30 consecutive uuencoded
sequence files of one unbroken file are reposted 27 times because someone
is complaining that they didn't get number 8/30 the previous time, and
other times the .d discussion group will get the affected party in contact
with a supplier of his missing item and that will occasionally limit
bandwidth.  And we will continue to have add-your-2-cents comments at the
end of long quoted articles, as well as some so editted down that they
are no longer intelligible to the thread causing more bandwith to be
wasted by misapplied followups traceable to the data lossage, etc.

So, Paul, consider yourself "outed".  Maybe you can get a small part in
Police Academy 29: their Usenet assignment.

cjl (while this article may be in the public domain, it may not be in the
right-hand plane)

Newsgroups: alt.folklore.computers