Jim's posting practices [ Was: Re: to Jim.]

[Trei, Peter]

> Jim Choate[SMTP:ravage at ssz.com] wrote:
> That's actually a misrepresentation. What you are proposing is nothing
> more than more 'freedom for me, not for thee'. Why?
> 
> Simply, your argument is,
> 
> -	It's personaly inconvenient, I want it thusly.
> -	Because it's inconvenient then it should conform
> 	(too much ST perhaps?)
> -	So, let's move the 'inconvenience' off on another party so
> 	I'm not bothered.
> -	Never mind the effect on them.
> 
> It's a bullshit line of reasoning. It's self-absorbed, rude, and
> socialist (in the sense of coerced monotonic behaviour).
> 
[...]

> The only requirement ANY participant in this community or any other should
> have is to be fair and considerate of others and a willingness to
> participate in a dialectic. Conformity or consensus are not required (and
> are really detrimental). Whether a particular post conforms to some
> 'format' is really a moot point.
> 
> This is supposed to be an anarchy, yet the leaders of the 'conformity
> clique' are supposedly anarchist themselves. How odd...
> 
> 
[I'm posting this to the list since Jim appears to prefer that - most people
would rather receive criticism in private, but I'll accede to his wishes
here.]

Jim:

You are confusing two distinct issues: Form and Content.

On the Content side, you are essentially correct. I and many others
find the beliefs you espouse on physics, law, and mathematics 
idiosyncratic,  peculiar, and often just plain wrong. However, I think 
we'd all agree that you are free to post them. The list IS an anarchy
in that sense.

However, as to Form, you're mistaken. Cypherpunks is NOT an 
anarchy - it's a forum for communication. 'Communication'  shares 
roots with  'Common' and 'Community' . More than one party is 
involved. For effective communication to occur,  certain agreed 
(often tacitly or by default) protocols and standards are adhered 
to by the parties (note the plural) wishing to communicate.

This is where you are failing ('What we have here is a failure to
communicate' :-)

To be specific, your methods of citation of outside sources are
both burdensome and ineffective.

Consider a very recent example. This morning, you posted an
note titled: 'CDR: IP & copyright - Somebody with a clue?

The message consisted of:

1.  4 lines of message:

	The original article is over on /.. Apparently Baen Books is willing
to
	put their wallet where there mouth is to prove that the current IP
argument
	is doomed. It will be an interesting experiment.

...which would have been greatly improved by the sentence: "Baen is putting 
some of its books on the net for (cheap) downloads."

2. A one line URL (a useful one, BTW).

3. 12 lines of sigfile, including a non-working hostname
(www.ssz.com).

4. An attached HTML page, which does nothing but put up
a screen saying 'Baen Free LIbrary', along with a broken
image link. Jim: Can you explain why you did this? It adds
zero, zip, nada to the usefullness of  your post, contains
no link, and takes up space. Don't you check your 
messages before you send them?

This is (a) ineffective, since you don't tell us *what* Baen
is doing which is interesting, and (b) burdensome, since you
tagged on a totally useless attachment. You tagged it on to
every single copy received by list members.

A couple questions:

1. If by expending one minute of your own time, you can 
save *each* of your (several hundred) recipients a minute 
of their's, is this an unreasonable burden to ask 
of you? You're asking hundreds of people to consider your
posting - isn't it reasonable for you to make it easy for
them to do so?[1] 

2. You say:

> The only requirement ANY participant in this community or any other should
> have is to be fair and considerate of others and a willingness to
> participate in a dialectic. Conformity or consensus are not required (and
> are really detrimental). Whether a particular post conforms to some
> 'format' is really a moot point.
> 
Are you being 'fair and considerate of others' when you burden every single
one of your recipients, to the extent of proposing that they use search 
engines to puzzle out to what you refer because you were too lazy to 
obtain a durable URL?

I'm not asking you to conform in your beliefs and positions. Others may 
criticize you there, but I don't think I have (crankish as I may consider 
them).  I am asking that you show 'a willingness to participate in a dialog'
by communicating in the common manner. To do this, the 'format' is far
from moot. If you posted entirely in uuencoded PDF files,  MIME-encoded
AVI's of your interpretative dances, or in Latin, your posts would go
unread.

To be read, considered, and appreciated - isn't that what you want? To
reach those goals, it's not good to post in such a way as to suggest
either contempt for your audience's needs, or technical incompetence 
on your own part.

Peter Trei

PS: You *have* been improving. You no longer post kilobytes of
included material. This is greatly appreciated.

-----------------------------
Footnote:

[1] For non-clued readers, Choate's reference to 'ST'
probably points to Star Trek and a quote from the
show: 'The needs fo the many outweigh the needs of the
few'.]