Bitching about the documentation...

[Grant Edwards]

On 2005-12-05, rurpy at yahoo.com <rurpy at yahoo.com> wrote:

>>> I don't believe my name, etnic heritage, gender, age, employer
>>> or school, or part of the world I live in, have any bearing on
>>> the contents of my postings.
>>
>> perhaps not, but it's not what you think that's important
>> here.  and I sure cannot find anything in your posts that I
>> haven't seen before.  this is usenet, after all; there's no
>> shortage of anonymous posters hiding behind silly nicknames
>> who think they're somehow smarter than everyone else...
>
> I don't know what I posted that gave you that false idea about
> me.

Hmm, I though he explained it:

  1) Not using your real name.

  2) A yahoo, aol, or hotmail address.

In the ancient and hallowed (by net standards) history of
Usenet, both of these (particularly the first one) have been
pretty good predictors of crankness.  The correlation isn't as
high as it used to be, now that hiding behind silly nicknames
has apparently become socially acceptable in other venues (web
"forums" and "boards" and whatnot).
  
>> (and frankly, nobody takes people with hotmail.com or
>> yahoo.com addresses seriously ;-)
>
> You can judge people using whatever criteria you want, of
> course ;-)

He's just trying to warn you that, on Usenet, by not using your
real name you start out with negative credibility points in the
minds of most of the old-school Usenet denizens -- and having a
yahoo address subtracts a few more points.  That just means
you're going to have to work a bit to get back up to the same
point that somebody with a real name and a "real" ISP would
start at.

-- 
Grant Edwards                   grante             Yow!  Yow! Am I JOGGING
                                  at               yet??
                               visi.com