Reply Delays

[Ned Deily]

In article 
<7f014ea60910130325n34156771r7f79eed588eaa018 at mail.gmail.com>,
 Chris Colbert <sccolbert at gmail.com> wrote:

> Heh, for whatever reason, your post is dated earlier than my response,
> but wasn't here when I sent mine. [...]

It's not always obvious but this "forum" is multiplexed in several 
places.  It's available as a Usenet newsgroup (comp.lang.python), as a 
mailing list from python.org 
(http://mail.python.org/mailman/listinfo/python-list), as a Google 
group, and in various formats from consolidators like gmane.org 
(http://dir.gmane.org/gmane.comp.python.general).  All of those 
"channels" are bi-directional so there are often latency delays while a 
reply from one channel pushes its way upstream and back out to the 
various other channels.  Sometimes those latencies are really long when 
one channel gets a little slow.  So, if a fast moving thread, replies 
will often cross in the pipeline, adding another level of confusion 
("Didn't they read first before posting??").  It's sort of amazing that 
it all works as well as it does.

-- 
 Ned Deily,
 nad at acm.org