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Re: Rubin's trolls
Posted:
Mar 13, 1997 11:53 AM
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On Sat, 08 Mar 1997 08:21:35 GMT, rbacal@escape.ca (Robert Bacal)
wrote:
>Herman, I left the newsgrp list for this message as it was....I am not
>about to go count your unique messages...I just quoted. The number is
>rather staggering, either way you cut it, my guess is you are one of
>the most prolific newsgroup posters, aside from the commercial
>spammers...that takes time, sir.
>
>But apparently, you aren't aware that technically by the standards
>that some ISP's provide, you are spamming the net (abuse of the
>internet), since some ISP's consider cross-posting to more than 5
>newsgroups is a violation. On those ISP's you would have lost your
>account...
I end up cross-posting to ridiculous numbers of groups on occasion
because I rarely remember to check the header. Unfortunately, there
are any number of jackasses who cross-post every which way among the
political groups and a few others like misc.education. I'm sure that
in responding to them I've occasionally posted to a score or more at a
time.
>What is also interesting is that I am betting that you are not paying
>for your account...does the cost come from the public purse to send
>5000 messages+? If so, is this not an abuse? And if Purdue pays for
>you to send these largely professionally irrelevant messages from your
>academic account, how do you justify your theft of resources?
If you look at the list of newsgroups in question, you'll see that
about a third of the posts were to groups that are certainly
professionally relevant. Moreover, discussions of teaching and the
educational system are in my opinion professionally relevant to any
teacher at any level.
>How do you justify that? If you saw a public school teacher doing
>this, would you not wonder? I would.
Why? Admittedly it's unlikely: the realities of time usage are
different. Public school teachers have much less time during the day
when they aren't of necessity actively engaged in something else. I,
on the other hand, have many hours each week in which my job is simply
to be available in my office. If no students seek me out, that time
is free. But it is also subject to interruption at any moment. I may
be able to use it to mark papers; I certainly won't try to do research
under such circumstances.
Unlike a public school teacher, I can use my time rather flexibly. As
it happens, I am now posting from home, not from school. It's the
middle of the day. I have papers to mark. Why am I not marking them?
Because this is the best time for me to be on-line. I may decide to
mark them this evening, say from 10:00 p.m. to 1:00 a.m.; so what?
The point is that you can't infer a damn' thing about how much time I
spend at my job from the time stamps on my posts.
> And I wonder about you, your
>amount of salaried free time, and your work with students.
And I wonder how someone able and willing to carry on a personal
vendetta in public can make a living giving advice on conflict
resolution.
>I know you don't post only in the evenings, and you do post during
>work hours...at least those that teachers and most other people have
>to abide by. I guess you get paid for that.
>
>Purdue provides and pays for your platform.
>
>How does that help your students, or contribute to your research?
If - fat chance! - any of the discussions that take place here were to
benefit *future* students, it would be time and money well spent. You
have a very narrow view of 'education', it seems to me.
Brian M. Scott
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