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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!we13!ihnp4!afinitc!wuphys!gang!eric
From: eric@gang.UUCP (Eric Kiebler)
Newsgroups: net.jokes
Subject: Re: Old jokes
Message-ID: <111@gang.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 28-Apr-84 04:23:37 EDT
Article-I.D.: gang.111
Posted: Sat Apr 28 04:23:37 1984
Date-Received: Tue, 1-May-84 08:16:49 EDT
References: <6462@rochester.UUCP>
Organization: A galaxy far, far away... St. Louis
Lines: 45

[Lineas Eatemupus Yummi]

Repeated jokes occur because people tell a joke that they have heard
before on the net, but that's not important now...

While many of us read the news every day (all day and night...) there
are many newcomers to the various newsgroups.  I know for a fact that
if I suddenly get a wild hair and get interested in something, I start
looking at that newsgroup.  Also, there are just boatloads of people that
are new on the net.

Net participation is like a floating crap game, also.  When you get busy
with other things, or your boss cans the news for a while because it is
too resource-intensive, or any number of reasons, people fail to read the
news consistently.  I don't know about other sites, but my newsreading
behavior falls along the lines of reading net.jokes and net.unix and
net.micro about every other day, and then catching up on the weekends.
At work, we expire news every three days.  This leads to holes in 
newsgroups other than those listed above.

A less prominent phenomenon, which seems to be gaining in popularity,
is the "well, he told the joke a while ago but I can tell it better
so I will change it slightly and repost it so I can be wonderful too."
I have heard of this on other BBS's, but have not seen much of it on
our net.  Hope it stays that way.

Is there a solution?  Unless you send out the UNI* Police and start
writing summons for people that shirk their moral obligation to read
news every day, I can't see one.  I think it would be very nice if
USENIX or /usr/group or one of the regional UNI* groups did news
archiving, so that when people come on the net, they can send a tape
to them, get the last 6 months of news (better send 4 tapes...),
and get caught up.

We are victims of our own design.  The elevation of duplicate
packet detection to the logical level, aka duplicate message detection,
on a NSMA (NonSense Multiple Access) net yields it's own rewards.

eric
-- 
from the gang down at...  38.37.45 N   90.12.22 W
	..!ihnp4!afinitc!{gang|wucs!gang}!eric

Any sufficiently advanced technology is indistinguishable from a rigged demo.
Copyright (C) 1984 All Rights Reserved.