Path: utzoo!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!cs.utexas.edu!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!ucbvax!hoptoad!tim
From: tim@hoptoad.uucp (Tim Maroney)
Newsgroups: news.groups
Subject: Re: Call For Discussion: comp.sys.mac reorganization
Message-ID: <10377@hoptoad.uucp>
Date: 21 Feb 90 02:24:13 GMT
References: <38768@apple.Apple.COM> <3996@hub.UUCP> <38783@apple.Apple.COM>
Reply-To: tim@hoptoad.UUCP (Tim Maroney)
Organization: Eclectic Software, San Francisco
Lines: 30

This is a highly silly idea.  People on the network are not fastidious;
they are, in fact, downright sloppy.  The divisions between the
newsgroups would not be respected, since people simply blather on about
whatever suits their fancy in any newsgroup which seems marginally
related to the subject.  If this division were instituted, one could
not be sure from reading group X that one would be reading most of the
posted messages about subject X, nor that one would even be reading
mostly messages on subject X.  This situation would create a great deal
of frustration, and would lead to all the new groups having a large
number of metadiscussions about how article 49717523@foo.edu does not
belong in newsgroup comp.sys.mac.wombat, it belongs in newsgroup
comp.sys.mac.platypus.  Between inappropriately posted messages and
flames about inappropriately posted messages, we would be replacing one
unreadable newsgroup with some ten unreadable newsgroups.

The proposal shows a naivete about network sociology which would be
surprising in a person with a decade's experience on the net; but it is
not surprising, considering that it comes from an alienated mega-nerd
with absolutely no perception of social reality.
-- 
Tim Maroney, Mac Software Consultant, sun!hoptoad!tim, tim@toad.com

FROM THE FOOL FILE:
"Those Mayas were sacrificing not only pagan children, but baptized
 Christian children, for crying out loud!  And they were carrying out
 those sacrifices, those barbarities, with great savagery, without
 giving the victims the benefit of the humane types of death that the
 European Church accorded even to heretics and witches during that
 century, such as burning at the stake."
		-- Matthew Rosenblatt, rec.arts.books