Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!cs.utexas.edu!wuarchive!texbell!vector!attctc!rissa
From: rissa@attctc.Dallas.TX.US (Patricia O Tuama)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: Complimentary but not overlapping
Message-ID: <10791@attctc.Dallas.TX.US>
Date: 31 Dec 89 12:47:40 GMT
Organization: Lone Star Cafe
Lines: 59

In article <37521@apple.Apple.COM> chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach) writes:
>Pat:

Charley!

>If you'd only ask the right person...

You're right -- I should have realized Peter didn't know what he was 
talking about, he so seldom does.

>The guidelines have not been amended or modified to include a new voting
>system or to change the discussion period. There's no intention to. 

Well, why not?

>newgroup creation setup. I, personally, plan to look whether a proposal is
>done within the intent of the rules rather than nitpick details, since
>that's what the net has told us is more important 

Heavens!  When did the net tell you that?  Was this recently?  

>Rather than getting bogged down in administrivia, I think it's important to
>worry more about what's good for the net. They're only guidelines, after
>all. So if something isn't strictly conforming to the guidelines and seems
>to have a positive basis in the net, I'll be lenient. I don't know how Spaf
>and Greg will react, but it seems to me that it's more important to do the
>right thing than it is to uphold silly rules nobody cares about.

If they're silly rules that nobody cares about then why are they part
of the guidelines?  Surely it would be better to amend the guidelines 
to remove the extraneous ones, yes?  After all, the reason why we have 
them in the first place is so that all 500,000 of us have at least the 
same basic understanding of how new groups are created.

You made a lot of noise about Richard supposedly bending the rules yet 
when Peter came up with a whole new voting process, you didn't say a 
word in protest.  The guidelines you accused Richard of "breaching" 
suddenly turned into "silly rules nobody cares about."  You're operat-
ing a double standard here, one for groups of which you personally ap-
prove and one for those you don't.  And that's wrong, Chuq.

>there's an active discussion, implicit or explicit -- about the group, that
>seems good enough for me. A formal 'call for discussion' seems like a silly
>formality when it's already being discussed.

Then you have an obligation to write this into the guidelines so that
it's clear to everyone.  You also have an obligation to point out that 
an "opinion poll" is the same thing as a "formal call for votes" and 
that either one can be declared after at least two weeks of discussion 
have passed.

>Have fun intentionally misinterpreteing everything I just said. I"m looking

I didn't misinterpret what Peter wrote.  Like Jay Maynard, Peter in-
sisted on trying to second guess me and to turn the conversation to-
wards a rehashing of the *.aquaria debate.  My refusing to be drawn 
into that particular net.feud does not translate as misinterpretation.
I deliberately stayed out of the *.aquaria debate and I was not about
to allow either of them to steer the conversation in that direction.