Re: [Evolution] Sig placement

[Sam Mason <sam samason me uk>]

On Mon, Sep 28, 2009 at 07:51:53PM +0000, Art Alexion wrote:
> On Mon, 2009-09-28 at 15:16 -0400, Sam Mason wrote:
> > In the case of two (or another small number) of people in limited
> > discussion the copy-everything mode of top-posting doesn't matter.
> > Efficiency concerns really don't matter most of the time here.  
>
> To paraphrase former US Senator Barry Goldwater, a gigabyte here, a
> gigabyte there, and pretty soon you are talking real storage.[1]

But it's kilobytes we're talking about; this is five decimal orders of
magnitude less than most peoples storage capacity.  The example above
seems to be about a couple orders of magnitude.

Mailing list archives seem to be about the only people it affects.
Everybody else is going to be much more worried about attachments
getting large first.  Or were you replying to bits you didn't quote?

> > I'm still amazed nobody noticed my changes to Pete's message--that
> > was the only reason I top-posted.
>
> Which is why the argument is spurious.  When people top-post, nobody
> reads the quote for context anyway.

Pete was contending he does and I know I do if I'm forwarded a message
with lots of conversation in it.

> LIke I said, businesses grow and prosper due to business' belief that
> changing bad behavior is hopeless, and some automated data slenderizer
> is the only answer.

Changing a large number of peoples' behavior is *very* hard and
introducing technical fixes is often much easier.  Witness the craziness
with cars at the moment; the most amazing amount of research is going
into producing more "efficient" cars (they barely are, i.e. a few
percent) and yet a much "better" fix would be to change society so that
we don't drive as much.  We'd "easily" be able to chop the amount of
driving we did down a lot (an order of magnitude) by changing a few of
our habits and introducing other changes (better public transport).

The fact of the matter is that "old habits die hard" and the technology
card almost always trumps all.

> [1] The actual quote

...seems to be a misquote:

  http://www.dirksencenter.org/print_emd_billionhere.htm

-- 
  Sam  http://samason.me.uk/