Danny Wilde wrote:
<snip>
> The question now is, why are you responding to him?

I already answered that question:

>> <snip> an occasional
>> weakness for "kick me" signs.

I'll add that my other plans for GW obviously came to naught, I've caught up 
on my most pressing correspondence, and I have a few hours to kill. And 
_Imperial_Hubris_ is too bloodthirsty to enjoy for long stretches, though 
it's an interesting perspective.

Yesterday's main time-killer was a little picnic at the local shrine. 
Weather wasn't clear enough to see Fuji-san, but it was quiet enough that I 
only saw about 5 people in two hours--but one of them ruined my pleasure by 
insisting on making conversation. If her actual goal was to capture the best 
bench, she succeeded, since I quickly left. Today's big plan is to run down 
to the library and renew a book.

> I find it's difficult to read some of these newsgroups without
> killfiles in place. In the larger newsgroups I use them to cut down
> on the number of posts I have to read. In this group there are lots
> of troll posts about "sex with niggers" "Nanjing" etc. so I use the
> killfile so I don't have to see them. I didn't particularly think
> about killfiling Mike Cash though.

Actually that returns us to the issue of sock puppets, since they bypass 
killfiles. Reviewing this thread, it pretty obviously has one or two sock 
puppets in it. Perhaps more. In the absence of authentication, you never 
know if you are talking to an actual person, a fresh sock puppet, a sock 
puppet impersonating an actual person, an actual person writing a parody of 
a sock puppet, a sock puppet impersonating another sock puppet, ad 
infinitum. The killfiles don't really help, because the fundamental design 
of NNTP is flawed. It was designed in a "small universe" of mutual 
cooperation and technical expertise that no longer exists. To remember those 
"days of yore" fondly cannot bring them back.

Google's new approach is interesting and shows significant potential. It's 
not perfect, since the penalty for abuse is minimal, but at least they are 
enforcing a higher level of accountability. They've already addressed the 
responsiveness problem quite well, but the address-harvesting spam problem 
remains unresolved. Another flawed design legacy of those happier, more 
trusting days...