Re: Cowboys herding cats

cryptoguy <treifamily@xxxxxxxxx> wrote:
If you don't want to be nagged for your failure to keep up, don't
ask for special consideration for your deliberate backwardness.
It makes you look foolish and desperate.

Asking a question on rasff is asking for special consideration? When
did this rule start? And whatever happened to AKICIF?

...and I was speaking of the acquisition of trivia, which seems to
be something you judge people by.

It was my impression that that was *your* standard. It just happens
to be something I'm very good at.

You could get more trivia about more things more easily on the
internet than by any other route.

It's probably a tie with books. But yes, I can spend hours just
cruising through Wikipedia, learning as I go. Perhaps after I've
memorized all of the text in Wikipedia and everything in all my
text-only books I should consider "upgrading" to a graphical browser,
in order to learn even more. Don't hold your breath.

If you're unimpressed by the ability (for example) to call up street
level maps for almost any spot on earth, in seconds, on a whim,
well, I guess your sensawunda is dead.

That's not what I said.

And, as I said, whatever 21st-century thing you're doing to post
here is mangling the attribution lines of your quoted text. And
no, that's not a function of my newsreader. Everyone sees those
three dots in the middle of the email address.

That's a 21st century thing to deal with a 21st century problem, the
automated harvesting of email addresses for spam purposes.

I've been fighting spam for over a quarter century. That's one of
the stupider approaches. The (mis)quoted email address *already*
appeared, correctly, in the newsgroup, and any spammer with a standard
newsfeed already harvested it. Mangling quoted addresses only
interferes with legitimate communication, not with spam. It's like a
lock that keeps the legitimate residents out but doesn't stop burglars.

If you had a full featured browser, you could go to Google groups,
and get the unmunged version after solving a CAPTCHA. Its a
feature, not a bug.

Sure, if you assume that everyone on Usenet is also on the Internet,
that nobody uses an offline newsreader, that everyone has a graphical
browser, and that it's a trivial effort to get our of your newsreader,
fire up your browser, go to Google Groups, locate Google's copy of the
message you were just reading, and solve the CAPTCHA, several times
for each message you read in a high-volume newsgroup.

It also assumes that anyone who keeps a personal archive of Usenet
messages would never want to look at it offline, or to look at it at
all if Google goes out of business or shuts down their Groups interface.

Google's algorithm is stupid enough that it often mangles message-ids,
apparently mistaking them for email addresses.

This is just one of many assumptions built into the way many people
use the net which I consider bad -- with a lot more justification than
your criticism of someone simply for daring not to use a graphical
browser.

I'll also mention that your text often consists of alternating long
and short lines. Is this another "feature"?
--
Keith F. Lynch - http://keithlynch.net/
Please see http://keithlynch.net/email.html before emailing me.
.

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