The uses of pseudo-links

[Tim May]

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 at 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