Re: ROBERT DEWER, Chill out...

[dewar@merv.cs.nyu.edu (Robert Dewar)]

<<It's nothing you did.  It's Professor Dewar's attitude.  It seems that
he considers this newsgroup to be his personal fiefdom and if someone
does something that gets in his way, his habit is to send them rude,
pompous e-mails (please note the plural). >>

Just so people know, I have indeed been sending emails to people who have
almost certainly been cross-posting on the troll posts to CLA without
realizing it. 99% of the time I get a polite reply saying something
like "oops, sorry, I did not realize this was cross-posted", but I
guess Charles is in the 1% (he also did not realize he was cross-posting,
but takes the attitude that he is entitled to, which is of course true,
anyone can say anything).

Actually I am quite surprised that so many people react positively to
such messages, and it definitely helps keep accidental noise down. You
can't tell people what do do, and you will always get some noisy minority
who wlil post no matter what, but it helps quite a bit if the reasonable
majority takes a little bit more care not to accidentally post.

These cross-posted trolls come and go of course, but it sure seems like
CLA has been beset with them recently, and once again the noise-to-signal
ratio is getting a bit high.

(I guess Charles is a bit frustrated, he threatened to complain to me
to my employers at Ada Core Technologies :-) :-)

Well at least we get some signal, I am happy to finally get at least
ONE reply (from Stephe) on how to handle that interesting error message

<<When you point out to this arrogant, conceited pillock that you don't
appreciate unsolicited e-mails and will happily take the argument
further, he then sends another stream of personal insults, finishing
with an announcement that he has put you on his mailer rejection list.>>

P.S. If anyone wants to know how to get on my mailer rejection list, it's
an easy algorithm (in fact I could probably automate it!) If I get a message
with obsenities or rude language, then you go on the list. It is not that
this offends me, it is just that I take this as a signal that the 
probability of further intelligent discussion has dropped to zero :-)

An entertaining thread title (should be DEWAR of course, but I don't
want to disturb those who want to use their thread following mailers
to follow this thread :-)