[Mailman-Developers] Opening up a few can o' worms here...

[Jay R. Ashworth]

On Tue, Jul 16, 2002 at 10:33:20PM -0700, Chuq Von Rospach wrote:
> On 7/16/02 9:22 PM, "Jay R. Ashworth" <jra@baylink.com> wrote:
> > Well, ok... but in a case like that, your mailer logs would likely have
> > the appropriate information.  But still, as rare as such a circumstance
> > is, I don't see that you have any moral obligation to be *that* prepared.
> 
> How many people keep their logs three weeks? How many people long ago
> stopped keeping detailed SMTP logs because of their size? And rare as the
> circumstance is, if YOUR house was burned down, would you still care that it
> was rare? (it's real easy to say "don't care, it's someone else's house...")

No, but I wouldn't hold the list op responsible for not keeping the
info, if not keeping the info was their policy all along.  I might
*yell at them*, cause I think it's a stupid policy, but that's a llama
of a different color...

> > Stipulated.  But I don't believe that the toaster *is* cheap and shoddy
> > -- ie: that it's *your* responsibility -- merely because people break
> > into your house, and jam oversized bagels into your toaster repeatedly
> > until it won't hold toast anymore.
> 
> Take a look at the court system. You're so far in the minority it's not
> funny (really not funny). Have you ever read the instruction manual for a
> toaster? The warning pages in the instruction manual, that say things like
> "do not use toaster in shower"? Because if they DON'T say that, they get
> sued because someone does?

Case law?  Yes, there are silly disclaimers, yes some of them
correspond directly to cases.  Hair dryer in shower, yes.  *Toaster*?
Naw; if that has a shower disclaimer, it's merely ass-covering.

> > Except that the spam isn't the *problem*.  The *spammers* are.
> 
> Sorry. That's like saying "bullets aren't a problem, guns are". If you get
> shot, you don't waste time arguing semantics like this. Unless, I guess,
> you're a libertarian. But frankly, most of the libertarians I know who HAVE
> been shot (instead of arguing about what they'd do if, theoretically, they
> were shot) stop arguing semantics, too.

No, neither bullets *nor* guns are the problem: *CRIMINALS ARE*.

I sometimes question why I have to keep pointing that out.

I call your attention, on the side topic, to Kennesaw, Georgia, the
town that instituted the city ordinance some years ago *requiring* all
heads to household to keep firearms:

http://www.mcsm.org/kennesaw.html

I *really* think this is pertinent, I'm not just trying to change the
subject.  How many libertarians do you know who have been shot?  How
many of them were shooters, themselves?

> > Even when they get unreasonably strident, and scream for all the wrong
> > reasons -- and they do -- I still back the Second Amendment
> > absolutists, because history has proven that they *put that amendment
> > in there for a reason*.
> 
> That would be a fun argument, but I'll spare the list. Pass. (but if you
> look at the historical record of the debates over the amendment, it's a lot
> more ambiguous what the founding fathers THOUGHT, vs. how it's been
> interpreted. But, pass...)

"for the common defense" was loudly shouted down as clouding the point;
that's good enough for me.  If you're interested in bandying this, we
can do it off list; maybe I'll learn something.  :-)

> > It is largely because of RMS' intransigience on many points related to
> > Free Software that we have most of it, and most particularly Linux --
> > I really don't believe it would have happened at all except for the
> > developer-protection provided by the GPL.
> 
> And off we go into left field, to blame something completely tangential to
> the issue at hand. 
> 
> Oh, never mind, pass.
> 
> > Sometimes a cigar *is* just a cigar.
> 
> That's what monica said, too.
> 
> > Sometimes, you've got to let junior take the fall.
> 
> Why? How very libertarian of you. May you never find someone calling you
> junior... (it's easy to say "let them eat cake" when you aren't starving
> with them. At least until the wagon arrives....)
> 
> > Not at all.  It's not a question of ease.  Undertaking responsibility
> > is not easy. 
> 
> No, ducking responsibility is easy. Undertaking responsbility, however, is
> how things get done.
> 
> > Someone has to fix the problem.  It has been proven to my satisfaction
> > that the technologists can't: it's not a technology-fix problem (so few
> > 'problems' are).  Someone has to get *pissed*.
> > 
> > That'd be the people with the mailboxes, Bob.
> 
> Wrong. It's the people with the skillset. Lots of people have mailboxes. Few
> people have the skillsets. But those people, it seems, are willing to let
> others rot, because it's easier for them personally. Well, some of them.

You may choose to think that this is my real motivation if you're so
inclined.  If I think that people who don't want to be swamped in spam
ought to learn how to use the already available tools to avoid it, and
you think that makes me elitist, so be it; I've been called elitist
before.

> Look, if I wanted easy, I wouldn't even be on this list. I'd just download
> tarballs and do what I felt like. I'd like to think we're all on this list
> because we're better than that.

Well, that sounds like a fairly broad ad hominem... but I think you're
better than that.  ;-)

> > Fine. 
> > 
> > But this isn't procmail, nor SpamAssassin; they're at the other end of
> > the hall; third and fifth doors on the right, respectively.
> > 
> > This is a mailing list program.
> 
> This is a tool that users attach trust to, and that trust is that we won't
> abuse their mailbox and will send them what we tell them we'll send them. If
> they stop trusting the tool, they'll stop using it. So we have a
> responsibility (if not to those users, to the TOOL) to do what we can to
> protect that trust a user attaches to the program when they agree to
> subscribe to a mail list through it.
> 
> > Letting spam through likely only gets you yelled at; accidentally
> > blocking important stuff gets you burned.
> 
> No, actually, both get you yelled at and/or burned, depending on who gets
> upset about what. At some level, it's a no-win situation....

Yeah; great, ain't it?

Cheers,
-- jra
-- 
Jay R. Ashworth                                                jra@baylink.com
Member of the Technical Staff     Baylink                             RFC 2100
The Suncoast Freenet         The Things I Think
Tampa Bay, Florida        http://baylink.pitas.com             +1 727 647 1274

   "If you don't have a dream; how're you gonna have a dream come true?"
     -- Captain Sensible, The Damned (from South Pacific's "Happy Talk")