From: vanetten@unix.cie.rpi.edu (John S. Van Etten)
Subject: Re: WOOLWORTHS; PETS
Organization: CIE, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY
Date: Thu, 13 Aug 1992 01:33:48 GMT

Paul Roberts writes:

[stuff deleted]
>I suspect that what some people find annoying about Ferrell is that they can't
>draw him into a flame war.

Not really.  Would you consider it a good thing if we *all* posted to
this group and never read it or replied to questions?  Sort of defeats
the purpose of the group.  Which is to debate or "talk."


>Also curious is the idea (which is at leastly partly his own) that he should
>accept some kind of majority vote about whether to shut up or not. Is there
>anything in the netnews charter about this? Can we ask anyone to shut up if
>we can muster 51% votes in favour? 

Paul, the idea was *entirely* Ferrell's.  Please do not construe my
position as having anything to do with his suggestion to take a vote,
although I respect him for the suggestion.  I don't know whether there
is anything in the netnews charter about it, but I would sincerely
hope that there is not.  Censorship is a terrible thing, as I'm sure
you'll agree.  If someone doesn't want to read what is written then
that is their perogative, but in no way should any person not be
allowed to speak.  Lest you folks think I'm contradicting myself, let
me clarifly my position regarding Ferrell's posts, since I suspect a
lot a you are under a false impression.  I see this as a special case
because Ferrell is not a participant in the discussions of this forum.
I also suspect that his readership does not constitute the majority of
the other people that do actively contribute interactively to this
group.  As such, I personally feel that there are better ways for him
to distribute his information, which do not waste the resources of the
net (mailing lists, ftp, etc.).  There have been no less that three
occasions when I experienced a loss of prior posts because they "fell
off the back" of what our news server keeps pointers to on its disk
(at least I think that's how it works -- those damn comp sci dweebs
are always playing with it ;-), as a result of large numbers of new
posts being added to the front of the list by Ferrell.  I realize that
it is my problem (to some extent) for not always having time to reply
quickly to posts, and not having sufficient disk space to archive many
of them; but I do also see it as a "hogging" of resources that is not
necessary.  It's not that hard to maintain a mailing list.  Trust me.
Anyway, I would *never* wish to see Ferrell's information kept from
anyone that cares to read it (even though we all know that I consider
a lot of it to be "AR propaganda").  I also strongly encourage his use
of this newsgroup to gain new people for such a mailing list (or
whatever other format is chosen) by posting messages here of how to
get such access.  But I see no good reason for wasting our bandwidth
with all of his posts when it can be done a better way, and he is not
an interactive participant.


John

--
******************************************************************************
               John S. Van Etten     vanetten@unix.cie.rpi.edu
       Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute  1000 MIPS GaAs F-RISC Project
       --"If sand didn't irritate oysters, there would be no pearls"--
Newsgroups: talk.politics.animals