Subject: Re: 3 Lisps, 3 Ways of Specifying OS From: Erik Naggum <erik@naggum.net> Date: Tue, 23 Oct 2001 13:53:57 GMT Newsgroups: comp.lang.lisp Message-ID: <3212834033443454@naggum.net> * Rajappa Iyer | I don't know what else one calls posting email to newsgroups, but hey, | whatever floats your boat. If you send me a message, I can do whatever I want with it until I agree to some particular terms, such as by replying privately to it, in which case I have _agreed_ to make the exchange private. You may not have noticed, but I made no such agreement with you at all, and certainly no promise or claim that I would not post it. That you think this has anything at all to do with dishonesty betrays an utter failure to grasp what honesty is and applies to, which is hardly surprising, considering how you attempt to insult people by making up one thing more idiotic than the next instead of at least _trying_ to hit the target. Sheesh! As for _your_ intentions, you simply failed to communicate them. Lots of people send mail when they wanted to post and some even the reverse -- it is a common mistake and smart people know this. It is therefore a very good idea to label messages _intended_ to be private as such, but you did not do that, did you? I repeat, and I mean it: the message was obviously intended for public consumption, by the very nature of the contents (private flames are _so_ idiotic that a sender _must_ be presumed to have made a mistake lest be presumed completely braindead), by continuing a public flame (no difference from anything you _have_ posted), by _not_ being labeled private, and by coming from a person very likely to be careless enough to make such a mistake and stupid enough not to admit it, but instead attempt to take advantage of it, which you also have done, which is really quite amazing. _If_ I had replied to you in private and _if_ I had agreed to keep it personal, I would have lied about it being intended for public view. The problem here is that you failed to understand which options you had and chose among -- I fault you most of all for not exercising _any_ of the smart options, but going _only_ for the really retarded ones. Incidentally, have you noticed anything in the news lately about how unwelcome personal mail is handled? So far, the sender of these letters has at least been smart enough to refrain from jumping up and accusing the news media of publishing them. | I always thought that the conventional advice in a flamewar was for the | concerned parties to take it to email. It means "take it outside", you doofus, an attempt at being polite when really yelling "GO AWAY!", but polite does not work with some people -- they have to be yelled at to grasp the slightest little thing, and most of them do not even get it after _several_ attempts, like you. It is not a recommendation to be taken literally. Geez, some people! Why would anyone want to send, much less receive, flames by mail? Flames received by mail can be used for only one thing: public posting, like on web pages or in newsgroups. Otherwise, trash them, like spam, and forget them. If they actually hurt, public posting is the only option, because the person behind it needs to be exposed and punished, and one cannot do that in mail. Just look at you, you do not even grasp that you have done something wrong in this thread even though the whole world is watching you self-destruct while you deny it. If you can sit there and continue to behave as if you were right in all your whining about Debian, imagine what _lack_ of public exposure does to a drooling idiot's conviction that he is in the right and everybody else is in the wrong! Sending abusive messages by mail requires that the sender believes he has the right to _dictate_ what the recipient should feel able to do with the message -- indicating that abusive mail is also a power game -- such as respecting the sender's privacy while the sender disrespects and violates the private space of the recipient. This is quite rich! You would have to be really stupid and unprincipled and generally a bad person to think you could get away with this, much worse if you think it is a good idea and gives you any right to complain about what heppens to you afterwards. Again, some people! Face it: Once you send a message on the Internet, it is out of your control. It is even true for good old paper-based mail. The only thing you can do is to try to make sure people who receive your private messages actually _do_ feel bound by a sense of privacy in the communication, and that means being _nice_ in private communication. Why does this take more brainpower than some people have at their command to figure out? Don't they _ever_ think? | I certainly do not wish to stop the flaming I'm glad to see that you can admit _something_. /// -- Norway is now run by a priest from the fundamentalist Christian People's Party, the fifth largest party representing one eighth of the electorate. -- The purpose of computing is insight, not numbers. -- Richard Hamming