Nirbheek Chauhan <nirbh...@gentoo.org> posted 8b4c83ad0905160454h132e44fboecd75784934fe...@mail.gmail.com, excerpted below, on Sat, 16 May 2009 17:24:57 +0530:
> That's the question you should ask Duncan. Not me. I provided statistics > to highlight and provide dramatic effect. Wow, the number of follow-ups generated on the net due to not properly communicating "dramatic effect" must be... <dramatic> Wow, over all the years of email and usenet, what, 500,000? No, probably too low. Maybe 500 million? Or is it 500 billion? And (somehow we're now counting all of Internet history as a single thread, forgetting the fact that if that's what we're doing, we don't have to mention thread at all) that's what, at least 500,000 unnecessary messages IN THE SAME THREAD. What a waste! Why are we wasting our time on other stuff with such a big waste staring us in the face?</dramatic> If only people would learn to mark drama or sarcasm as such! But a question, what would /you/ do if someone threw out numbers with no hint of dramatic effect indicated that you were losing 90%+ of your messages, but with no hint in /your/ messages (quotes of stuff you never saw the original of, etc) that such loss was occurring? My reaction was to question it, post my counts, and wait for some clarity to appear in the replies, which it did. Be that as it may, I apologize that given no indication otherwise, I took the literal text as just that, literally intended. It would have saved us both some trouble had I (somehow) recognized the intention. <sarcasm>There really otta be a tag for that!</sarcasm> Of course, what /really/ makes your point is that it wasn't so obvious that I couldn't miss it. If 500 posts was even plausible, to that single thread in the given time... well, I guess that makes your intended point, doesn't it? And pretty dramatically, I might add. =:^) Don't tell me you schemed all of this to make the point even /more/ effectively! =:^) -- Duncan - List replies preferred. No HTML msgs. "Every nonfree program has a lord, a master -- and if you use the program, he is your master." Richard Stallman
