On Tue, 2006-07-18 at 20:00 -0400, Kanwar Ranbir Sandhu wrote: > On Tue, 2006-18-07 at 14:43 -0700, jdow wrote: > > What you did and I am doing in reply because I am human and can adapt > > to fellow humans is called top posting. If you'd posted your comments > > inline and below the signature instead that is what the other folks > > who are pedantic about correct behavior and intolerant of differences > > insist is the one and only true way to post email. > > It's not intolerance. It's requesting that everyone help everyone else > to make things easier. I see nothing wrong with that. > > (Don't put words in my mouth or try to make me defend the actions of > others: I can't. Everyone has the right to choose. What that choice is > and how it effects the community is supposed to be weighed and measured > by the individual.) > Hi Ranbir, Normally, I do not like to comment on matters of style and guidelines, but I think your reply shows a kind of dangerous logic. I think we need to be clear that there is a difference between actions that help others, and actions that prevent others from getting hurt. There is some overlap between the two, of course. But you are drawing a link between the two by saying that top posting is equivalent to assaulting a policeman or bathing with a plugged-in toaster! Actions that hurt others should be sanctioned, but I hardly think that top-posting counts as hurtful in any way. There are literally legions of office workers who use Microsoft Outlook, which does top-posting by default, and though I think that is not an ideal way to communicate, I wouldn't stop people from using email because they did it (and I was a systems administrator before, and could have done it quite easily). To use (abuse?) an analogy from jdow, regardless of what I think about corsets, I would neither support forcing all women to wear them nor outlawing them completely. -- Pascal Chong email: chongym@xxxxxxxxxxxxxx web: http://cymulacrum.net pgp: http://cymulacrum.net/pgp/cymulacrum.asc "La science ne connaît pas de frontière parce que la connaissance appartient à l’humanité. et que c’est la flamme qui illumine le monde." -- Louis Pasteur
Attachment:
signature.asc
Description: This is a digitally signed message part
