[Beowulf] Admin action request

[Peter St. John]

My take on this is two-fold:

When I copy an interesting link to friends or colleagues, I include a
sentence or a paragraph explaining why I think they want to follow the
link. Copying the entire article (as opposed to a pithy quote) is just
spam, and a bare link is a distraction, a bare link looks like a virus. So
I consider the mentioned posts as what we used to call "unmannerly".

The other part is that it's difficult, perhaps not possible, to define all
mannerly behaviour with explicit rules. So I believe what usually happens
is that groups like this one rely on peer pressure (reactions like this
thread itself) to push back on unmannerliness without resorting to making
rules; but that we'll make rules if we need to, in the cases that some
people just persist without responding to the peer-pressure.
It's all unpleasant, we don't want rules, we don't want spam, and we don't
even want to discuss these issues because we are interested in beowulfry
not politics.

To me, getting labelled as spam would be very uncomfortable. It's bad
enough when I fail to grep an acronym that's familiar to everyone else on
the list :/

Peter


On Fri, Nov 22, 2013 at 5:01 PM, Tomasz Rola <rtomek at ceti.com.pl> wrote:

> On Fri, 22 Nov 2013, Andrew Holway wrote:
>
> > +1 for Option 1.
>
> +1 for Option 1, assuming the voice of lurker matters.
>
> To be frank, I don't recall any kind of "house rules". And I am subscribed
> for quite some time, starting back when I was stupid and arrogant.
>
> >From my personal experience, I get plenty of emails per day. If there is a
> link, quite often I don't click at all, mostly because I put it on the
> shelve and forget. If there is a content inside, I have a chance to skim
> it quickly, or thoroughly. I consider law dealing with this stuff to be
> tricky. Can I learn the article by heart? Do I need permission to do that?
> What parts of it can I remember, actually? Can I make notes? Can I make
> extensive notes? With pictures? What if I have no hands, can I make a
> photocopy? All of this and more I am willing to classify as fair use.
>
> I would rather not delve into the subject of law. Strangely, only certain
> groups are expected to abide it. For example, since it all started with
> music, musicians are expected to abide but record makers may be ok with
> not abiding, as long as they don't get caught - while still touting around
> how they are being robbed. But, certainly there are some exceptions on
> both sides. And with this remark I would like to end.
>
> BTW, as far as I can tell, Chopin and Mozart (and possibly more composers)
> "stole" the folk music (see, in quotes, because I don't agree with such
> notion). Perhaps we should define what is a genuine creation. One day,
> when money goes somewhere else.
>
> Now, of course it is different when a group of people gets involved. There
> should be some kind of agreement between them with regard to the content.
> Unfortunately, the three options given by original poster are not very
> good to choose from, the least offensive is number 1, which I choose.
>
> Alternatively, Option 4 is to form a rule to be followed from now on.
> Here, in public. Hence no excuses for those who didn't know. Plus, include
> it in welcome message or something.
>
> Regards,
> Tomasz Rola
>
> --
> ** A C programmer asked whether computer had Buddha's nature.      **
> ** As the answer, master did "rm -rif" on the programmer's home    **
> ** directory. And then the C programmer became enlightened...      **
> **                                                                 **
> ** Tomasz Rola          mailto:tomasz_rola at bigfoot.com             **
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