At 15:56 10/09/09 +0000, you wrote: >Patrick Bond <pbond <at> mail.ngo.za> writes: > >> >> I'm voting, as usual, for full posting of articles - copyrights be damned. >> >> The reason is that I sit at the base of Africa (in Durban)
I also got a chuckle when I heard the story about them getting data transferred faster using carrier pigeon than the internet between Durban and a city 80 km away! And I immediately thought of Patrick in Durban, whose post I had at first found a bit surprising. However I just wanted to follow up on this thread (regarding the posting of complete articles), because I thought enough people weighed in to demonstrate a near consensus, but the conclusions of that consensus were never quite acknowledged. I want to do that now. This started when Les chastised one poster for including an entire article in a post rather than just the URL to that article on the web, saying that this was a (minor) breach of list policy. I hadn't heard of that rule, but Les defended it as a savings of bandwidth: >for people with slow downloads who do not want to read all of an article, >the download costs go up without the rule. The policy was intended to be of assistance to those living in countries with poor internet service and/or who use a dial-up connection, Cuba being cited in particular. However every single person in that situation who weighed in on the issue emphatically expressed the OPPOSITE view concerning long posts: that they considered it a FAVOR when someone sends them a 10 or 20KB email with an interesting article RATHER than requiring them to obtain it from the original source using their web browser. I had pointed out that the data downloaded from a website was typically 10 to 100 times as great as the actual amount of text that makes its way into an email. The responses went further than I had been aware, to say that they often cannot even pull in an entire webpage to read such an article! My original motivation was more that having an article right in your email is CONVENIENT and avoids having to look at all the advertising and crap that fill webpages these days. But the replies from the bandwidth-challenged comrades indicated that even the original rationale for the rule actually mitigated AGAINST the rule and FOR including the complete text of articles! Am I mistaken? Les: >though i still advocate for some way to separate news forwards from discussion >on this list Well this separate issue sprung from the bandwidth issue, with a suggestion that if there was a separate list for articles then some subscribers could limit their bandwidth by only subscribing to the discussion list. Again, I saw no support for that among the supposed beneficiaries of that scheme. There would have been some logic in having articles and discussion posts separate or marked as one or the other type, for purposes of organizing our bulging email boxes. But even that hardly struck a chord. Instead what I DID see, and strongly agree with, is that there should be no artificial divide introduced, precisely because it IS articles from which most discussions are initiated! Is that not as it should be? Any discussion that starts here is in response to some thesis or news report that is posted, and if it was not a publicly available article, it could still be described as an "article" written by the initial poster, right? How can you draw the line between "real" articles and mere "posts"? What's more, I object to a separate list where anyone can freely post any old article that they might find interesting. That isn't what I expect. Rather I am relying on comrades' judgements of articles and their discretion in posting ones that I would (with some likelihood) also be interested in looking at. I don't expect any hard and fast rules about it, but clearly if someone kept sending in articles on topics that no one was interested in, or articles of poor quality or simply repeating familiar material, then that person should get a little tap on the shoulder. But I don't see that happening. I find this list to be a reasonably good filter for articles that I might be interested in reading, and I provide the final filter by scanning the text that I receive in an email before deciding to read it. Can't we just keep it that way? And can't we ENCOURAGE the sending of the full text in most cases? I would make exceptions, such as when someone wants to post a bibliography on a subject, or references of a historical nature, or feels justified in referring to gobs of material that are very specialized or completely off-topic. But in most cases, where the judgement of the poster is sound, let us get the text delivered in full, just like the morning paper (but with far superior content)! - Jeff > http://www.internetworldstats.com/stats1.htm > http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/africa/8165077.stm > >Les (from gmane.org ) >JOHANNESBURG (Reuters) - A South African information technology company on >Wednesday proved it was faster for them to transmit data with a carrier pigeon >than to send it using Telkom , the country's leading internet service provider. ________________________________________________ YOU MUST clip all extraneous text when replying to a message. Send list submissions to: Marxism@lists.econ.utah.edu Set your options at: http://lists.econ.utah.edu/mailman/options/marxism/archive%40mail-archive.com
