Please Include

[Steve Fouts <sfouts -at- ELLISON -dot- SC -dot- TI -dot- COM>]

Hi folks! I'm going to inject a little meta-topic in here, if I may. As
you all probably know, many of the readers of this group read this group
on email. If you've taken any TCP/IP courses, you know that email is
kind of the <insert insulting epithet of your choice here> of the Internet
community, something that many routers batch process, hold until off-peak
minutes, or whatever, and others zip through at the next best thing to
the speed of light.

This fact, combined with the somewhat lightning-like tendency of email
to never follow the same path twice (no flames here, I am engaging in
hyperbole to stress a point, which I will get to now) means that you
may get a piece of mail from the list minutes, hours, even DAYS before
I do. You may, in fact, reply to a particular piece, and I may receive
your reply before I ever see the message you are replying to.

The point of all this is, folks, this is not a serial discussion in
my mail box. So when you reply to some minute point in the previous
message, PLEASE include some relevant bit of that discussion so I know
what you are talking about. Otherwise, this group starts to look like
a bag lady convention. Everyone is talking about disjointed bits of
some topic that hasn't even been raised yet.

Thank you, we now return you to your regularly scheduled newsgroup.

    _______________   _____
   /  ___  __/__\  \ /  / _\    Steve Fouts
  /___ \|  |  ___\  |  /  __\   sfouts -at- ellison -dot- sc -dot- ti -dot- com
 /   /  \  |      \   /      \
/_______/__|_______\_/________\ "She understood, as he did, that all writing
was infernally boring and futile, but that it had to be done out of respect
for tradition"                  --Stanislaw Lem