[2] Less than a week after a small flame war about forwarding, and a suggestion that it be restricted to posting pointers to relevant info, Jim forwards over 65K of relevant, though specialized information that no-one had requested. Simply saying "There's some real informative posts about RNGs in sci.math, thread name "XXX"" have been helpful, faster, saved bandwidth and people's mailboxes, and not started up this flame war.
The forwards were crypto related and relevant to some of the members who don't have anything other than e-mail accounts. How do you propose these folks get this info? Also how about those folks who have a low latency system and the posts in various medium to high traffic systems gets flushed regularly. These posts were several days old and I suspect in many systems were ready to flush (they were on mine, I 'tripped' over them doing maintenance for something else) to the bit bucket. And do you seriously propose that I or any other member ask prior to submissions? It is really funny that in general I get a few more thanks for such posts than self-interested rebuttals like this. While it is true that some of my questions are off the wall, I will continue to ask them. If they bother then .kill me. As an aside to this I will continue to remail articles of technical interest (what c-punks is about last I heard anything) that I feel have a good case of being lost. I would also like to ask a question on a personal (no flame intended) nature. Were you going to post said message about these usenet submissions? Other than myself I see very few such re-posts from anything other than a newsgroup w/ 'crypt' in it somehow. The flame ware, as I understand it anyway, had to do with forwarding multiple copies of EFF and similar material which is minimaly related to cyrypto and most users actively look for it. I doubt a lot of the users here check out sci.math, sci.chaos, sci.neural-nets, etc. If we are really going to continue this thread then a serious discussion relating to c-punks and some form of submission standard needs to be agreed upon.