[lug] On standards conformance

[Tom Christiansen]

In-Reply-To: Message from Nate Duehr <nate at natetech.com>
   of "Tue, 01 Dec 2009 01:16:57 MST." 
   <2B18ED69-A284-4349-99B5-BC17B5A5F4F5 at natetech.com>

> (I'll leave the reply context header...)

> On Nov 30, 2009, at 20:29, Tom Christiansen <tchrist at perl.com> wrote:

> Too much caffeine Tom?

No, not doing much of that today, nor in fact for about a week.

Does it show? :(

And if I didn't have that mail from yestertoday, I wouldn't remember
what I wrote.  Blame my oral surgeon's 90-minute session of IV'd 
Versed and Fenatyl.  Amnesia would be bad enough, since it makes
you forget things in the past; anterograde amnesia makes you forget
them in the future.  Blah.  What was I saying?

> I'm going to reply to this with my iPhone, since it top-posts --  
> unless I  feel like taking 5 minutes to do cut and paste formatting...

> (GRIN...)

Oh, "friends" do that to me on purpose.  And giggle.

> Okay not really TRYING to specifically annoy you, but you're making it  
> a little too easy.

> I'd add an "attachment" but that'd just be going overboard.

> I understand your frustration.

> You've done an excellent job "proving" that both the RFC process and
> e-mail in general are utterly and horribly broken, but just saying
> "Don't top post" or stating whatever other broken things (of which
> you've pointed out are many!) are "inappropriate" won't fix it, or
> stop it.

I didn't say to how to fix it.  I just said that despite all protestations 
to the contrary from the lazy, that it was not a failure
of technology but rather one of courtesy.  And I believe that.  

It turned medieval when psillies who demonstrably don't even know what 
an attachment is (because their beloved holy Genuflectwhenyousaythatmail 
lies lies lies lies lies to them about it) were trying to "ban" attachments.

MOOOOWAHAHAHAHAHAHAH! Little do they know!

> When do we move on to something better-designed? 2010? 

Hm, that's rather proximate, isn't it now?

> 2020? How many more decades will e-mail survive with 1/4 or > more of the
traffic arriving at port 25 being spam,

Maybe on YOUR port 25.  On mine I get maybe 50 legit mail messages
delivered daily, or maybe 100 on a busy day.  That's NOTHING compared to
the anywhere between 40,000 and 95,000 illegitimate spamvert crappioli that
attempt to deliver themselves to my eager +inbox/direct (think DMA).  Most
don't get through, but even the complement of most sucks.  I think I see 5
or 15 a day find their way to +inbox/direct.

None whatsoever make it to my +inbox/personal, reserved for those who are
prewhitelistered or who've unwittingly embedded the secret undivulgible
cluepattern in their missives; no, I'm not talking scoring.  There is a
secret pass-through watermark.  I've never told anyone.  It works.  

On the bad days, I just close my eyes to the DMA turnbottoms for a few days
when it gets me down and delusionize about the coming world vigilante
movements against soon to be *very* ex-spammers.

> Is this the BEST that thousands of open AND closed source "Software  
> Engineers" can do? Really? 'Cause this bridge we're all standing on  
> seems mighty wobbly! ;-)

There are ways to only receive the Good Stuff.  Obviously I'm doing a lot
of that through my five or six levels of filtering to whittle away four or
five levels of magnitude.  But you still pay a price.  That said, I've
got port 25 on a ppp modem (yes, really) and my load average stays closer
to 0 than to 1 most of the time.  On bad days it crawls up to 3 or 4.

I still resent it to a positronically explosive degree, though.  I hates
them forever; I want these slime declared outlaws in the ancient sense,
then have a world-wide makes-everybody's-day law to shuffle off these
trasholes to somewhere very warm with their minced gonads tied up in the
little maggoty handbasket that'll take them there.  

> On the other hand...

> Take it easy man, no emergency here, no one's bleeding on the floor or  
> unconscious and not breathing... Perspective.

Yah, yah.  I find it really funny (not haha) how many people don't even
known how this stuff works anymore--at all!  In some senses, that means
it's a success.  In others, that it's a failure.

Very well-meaning and (generally) very well-informed folks now and then
mail me and say, "Hey dude, did you know you sent me an attachment?", to
which I truthfully tell them, "Why no, I'd know idea!"  Of course, I've
done so such thing, but who am I to pop their great ggreen boobble?

> Comfortably typed from under a blanket on the couch, but darn... Top- 
> posted... From my "evil" iPhone.

> I guess I will go snip off your reply so it'll look like I care... ;-)

If that's your notion of snippy, best you snip in the bud any dreams of
ever becoming a famous mohel somenight.

> I'd say the fact that Snuggies for Dogs exists as a product is more a  
> sign of the end-times being near, than top-posting.

Top, bottom.  Why fight about it?  Middle is best.

> So tell me, where are we really going, and why are we in this  
> handbasket?!

How else to best travel to the freezeless land?

--tom