> I wonder whether the concern for "long articles" "tying up my machine"
> is a problem of better figuring out the mailer software involved.
There is a genuine technical consideration, in that considerable
bandwidth and costs can be associated with transferring through
many hops many K of articles only to be discarded at the other end.
The Internet (and the associated systems that relay at their
pleasure) are not a limitless resource; we should be economical and
ecological even in our use of these resources.
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Peshewegunzh
peshe%mamia.UUCP@mthvax.cs.miami.edu
mthvax.cs.miami.edu!mamia.UUCP!peshe
peshe@mamia.UUCP
mthvax!mamia!peshe
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[ I agree that we should all be somewhat conscious of the implications
of all of our actions, including broadcasting articles on NativeNet.
That having been said, however, as several people have pointed out
lately, many people feel they do get genuine value from most of what
is sent out. There's always going to be some "waste" - how many of
the articles in a typical newspaper do people actually read? Consider
the number of trees felled relative to the fraction of an average news-
paper that's actually read, and the gasoline and electricity and ink
and human labor and everything else that goes into a newspaper that is
required to produce it, and how much real material waste there is, we
are quite efficient by comparison. My conscience is quite clear, when
I consider the relatively tiny fraction of the net bandwidth we're con-
suming (NativeNet is - for now at least - a mailing list, not a newsgroup,
which is the real culprit, when it somes to soaking up net bandwidth, for
reasons I won't go into here.
--Gary ]