At 8:04 AM -0800 1/9/01, Ray Dillinger wrote:
On Tue, 9 Jan 2001, Trei, Peter wrote:
[Jim: It's ok that you have no problem with your ineffective methods of giving pointers to articles, but your wasting your own and other's time - there's simply no reason for people to follow your links, since they are generally useless]
Actually, not *entirely* useless. Usually right after jim talks about an article and posts a link that doesn't point at it, someone else will post a correct link. If Jim just shut up, some of these stories probably would escape our notice. In the course of correcting his errors, people do provide useful information.
Your definition of "useful" is different from mine. I believe lists like ours should primarily be about discussions and points of view, not a third-hand CNET or Register or Slashdot. There are many Web sources of breaking news (not that a lot of the "functional quantum computer" sorts of stories are usually breaking news...). Personally, I like it when someone finds a news item, provides a detailed URL, even quotes (in ASCII, not MIME!) a paragraph or two, and then comments on it and connects it to Cypherpunks issues. Merely dumping out "general science" items, with general URLs, is just plain abusing the list. --Tim May -- Timothy C. May tcmay@got.net Corralitos, California Political: Co-founder Cypherpunks/crypto anarchy/Cyphernomicon Technical: physics/soft errors/Smalltalk/Squeak/agents/games/Go Personal: b.1951/UCSB/Intel '74-'86/retired/investor/motorcycles/guns