From Wayne Smith re: Vista + filePro

[Fairlight]

>From inside the gravity well of a singularity, Bill Campbell shouted:
> people is unacceptable, not censorship.  My message might have
> said something like ``are you as stupid as you appear to be''?

OMG, I was diplomatic for a change?!  Mark your calendars, ladies and
gents...

I'll just say that even if it's not "stupid" per se (I think it is, but
let's make a giant leap of assumption), it's inconsiderate at best.
Broadband penetration is still not at 100%, you don't know everyone on
the list has broadband.  If you hang someone's pop3 session with 3.1MB of
downloading on dialup, they're gonna be pissed when they find out it was
entirely unsolicited and uncalled for, I'm sorry.  I'm talking about your
conventional user, here.  

Anyone doing such a thing has obviously never dealt with systems that
limit your resources.  I have 50MB of mailbox and 50MB of home filesystem.
Between them, I ride anywhere from 5-35MB in mailbox (main inbox central),
and a lot of my mail is sorted into folders in my home directory, and
that filesystem I usually ride at about 42MB for the last year.  A few
weeks ago it was at 48.5MB.  If I'm riding both quotas (both exceedingly
reasonable, and I pay by the meg for storage on this RAID system at the
ISP for additional quota) high, then if I got 3.1MB that overflowed my
home filesystem and proc tries to emergency-dump it to my mailbox and
-it's- just barely got enough room, then what happens when a client--a
legitimate, paying customer--sends me a document I had no choice but to
take in email format, and it bounces?  Then you've just disrupted my
company's operations.  Technically, and this varies from locale to locale,
but disrupting a company's operations by means of a computing device tends
to be illegal.

And there is -no- reason in hell unless you're sending a state-wide traffic
map in a TIFF for business, why an image should be 3.1MB, I'm sorry.
Whomever thinks that's reasonable needs to learn about image compression in
a big way.  (Pun semi-intended.)

That's just the technical side.  There's no rant there, there's just facts
and some common courtesy information to evaluate before you hit the send
button.

Now on a personal note (I'm gonna get less diplomatic), I take very
personal exception to the (paraphrased), "...for those of you that aren't
HTML handicapped.  Hahahahah!"  That's just taunting the list admin,
it's taunting those helping him, and it's just plain rude, period, the
end.  It has -nothing- to do with whether I do or don't take/reject HTML
mail, attachments, whatever.  You -know- the policies and general list
ettiquette, you've been down this road yea many times, do we need to hold
your bleeding hand and show you what the polite thing to do is, or can you
raise yourself above a 3rd grade mentality on your own?  Because after 'x'
many times, you're doing it JUST to piss people off, I'm sorry...there
aren't any other logical explanations, unless you really are a complete
idiot.  So someone pulling this kind of nonsense can be judged either 1)
rude, 2) ignorant, or 3) a blithering idiot.  Take your pick.

I don't even mind the personal abuse you dish out my way, Smitty.  Really I
don't.  You're not even worth pondering in that regard for more than half a
second because I just can't take you seriously, all things considered.  But
when you start mucking up -systems- that matter, that people depend on, and
then tweak the admin's nose (there was no reason for you to believe I would
be the responsible party on this, it more than likely usually would be
Bill) on top of it, well that's just plain out of line.  And I take offense
as much for Bill and I would for myself, because he's a hell of a good
admin, and he doesn't deserve that kind of antic thrown at him.  And
admins, even those that sometimes disagree, tend to stick together...we all
have a common bond in that we know what it's like to admin a system where
someone's fouled the works out of ignorance or malice.  So yeah, I take it
personally even if it's only directed at his systems.

If you can read messages and others can read yours, THANK your admin
(ie., Bill)...don't slap them in the frakkin' face.

> If I were into modifying messages to the list, the first thing I
> would do is configure Mailman to strip or reject all HTML
> attachments.

If -I- were "in charge", anyone doing that sort of thing when they've
been warned multiple times would have been banned already.  He's here yet
at your sufferance, not mine, Bill.  Believe me, my finger hovered over
the ban checkbox when I did that one--but I don't like to overreach, as
a guest.  My solution (where I have a choice) is not to eliminate the
content, it's to eliminate the user from the potential for technical abuse
when they've proven they can't handle themselves.  I'm not talking politics
or personality clashes...I couldn't care less about that.  That goes in
one ear, out the other.  I can handle that no problem.  I'm talking about
sheer technical abuse and lack of technical consideration for anyone but
themselves, clogging up systems and uplinks without so much as a "by your
leave" from -all- recipients...which you'll never get in a public forum, so
why not just behave like a civilised adult and NOT DO IT?

I already reject all text/html only emails on my end.  The problem is
when you get multipart/mixed or multipart/alternative combined with
multipart-mixed.  I'd love to see a 'defanger' on the mailing list that
just tosses all mixed attachments.  You could leave alternative in, I can
privately grouse about the HTML section bloat, but no biggie.  But the
mixed gets really abused when it gets abused.  Case in point...  So if you
ever decided to do it, you've already got my vote.

mark->
-- 
print("Content-Type: person/now-desceased\n\n");
# The only good MIME is a dead MIME.