Re: Interesting thing to try to do

Will Robertson wrote:
It should go without saying that your theory is incorrect.

No, it shouldn't. I base my beliefs upon evidence in preference to
hearsay or naive assumptions of goodwill.

To be brief, here's why, in a nutshell, you don't receive good answers
here.

You don't use your real name.

That is not a logical requirement for receiving useful answers to
questions (other than, perhaps, questions related to "What's my
name?").

You don't read what people write in enough detail, or look into their
solutions in enough depth

Enough, as defined by whom? The Usenet Cabal? There is no great Usenet
Authority to determine arbitrarily, and impose upon me, a particular
definition of "enough". Not that I am aware of. I don't always have
much time to devote, and getting a lot of mainly both voluminous and
content-free replies with a few potentially-useful ones mixed in
further reduces the time I can devote to each response. I'm looking for
quick fixes now, not involved discussions, as a general rule. So are
most users who are looking for support info, as a general rule, so get
used to it. So yes, proposed solutions that seem to be either total
overhauls instead of quick fixes and messages that seem to be
completely beside the point fall by the wayside. Sales pitches get a
bit of my attention when they indicate a possible motive for the
peculiar behavior of some people here, but don't get any real interest
from me. Actual answers get quickly skimmed to make sure they are
relevant and don't involve completely redoing everything from scratch,
then the gist (which could be as little as a single command-line
switch, if that's what I'm expecting/looking for, or as much as a code
snippet; a detailed explanation only if nothing like those is there to
zero in on) extracted and tried. I just don't have the time or
inclination to read often-verbose posts, re-read them, answer a short
comprehension quiz, and so forth -- especially when much of the excess
verbiage is hostility and flamage not at all worthy of my attention.

[snip some amazing remark about my not caring for your time]

You obviously don't care much about my time! Suggestions that won't
work "out of the box", suggestions phrased misleadingly, responses that
aren't answers, nonsense and flamage.

You lot conduct yourselves quite differently from those in
comp.lang.c++. And are, it seems, a lot less friendly, a lot less
tolerant, and a lot less generally helpful and/or charitable than they.
Why the difference? And why do you care what my offline identity is? It
is none of your goddamn business, that's what it is. It is wise to
separate one's offline life from most online activities -- especially
Usenet. Otherwise one puts oneself at risk of actual physical
stalking/harm, increased risk of fraud or identity theft, and so forth.
By using a pseudonym, as nearly every net user has since time
immemorial, you reduce these risks and generally insulate different
parts of your life from being unduly affected by one another. You stop
an online flamewar from potentially escalating to physical assaults,
for instance. Since this is widespread online practise with good
personal privacy and even safety reasons behind it, anyone who starts
discouraging a particular person from engaging in it, most especially
if they use hostility/coercive tactics (such as, say, threatening to
withhold information selectively from pseudonymous people), must be
viewed with a great deal of suspicion. There can be no legitimate use
for their offline name if they are reluctant to share it; the only
reason you might want it is to track down offline contact information
and either bother them through some channel, such as snail mail, that
they obviously don't want you bothering them through, or outright
harass, stalk, attack, or generally disrupt them.

So yes, when one person in this group makes a sales pitch and several
others ask me for offline contact information, I get suspicious, and
rightly so. You have no legitimate use for the information, and sales
pitches are generally considered bad form on Usenet. Prying into
someone's identity, should they choose to keep their offline identity
private, is another online faux-pas last I checked. That includes
asking them if they don't volunteer the information, probing less
directly, or speculating that they are <insert name here> and anything
of the sort.

Your own handle looks to be a pseudonym (isn't that a character's name
from the old Lost in Space show?), which makes you look like a
hypocrite, too.

And all of this is utterly off topic here. This is a TeX newsgroup, not
a newsgroup about people's names, a biz newsgroup or a foo.bar.buy-sell
newsgroup, nor alt.flame. Can we get back to the topic at hand? The
particular motivation for this thread was a TeX related problem that
has now been solved, so, discussion over -- any post to it now is
necessarily going to be off-topic and therefore better left unposted.

.