Managing Google Groups headaches

[rusi]

On Wednesday, December 4, 2013 6:10:05 AM UTC+5:30, Cameron Simpson wrote:
> > Dennis Lee Bieber  writes:
> > > [NNTP] clients provide full-fledged editors
> >    and conversely full-fledged editors provide
> >    NNTP clients
>   GNU Emacs is a LISP operating system disguised as a word processor.
>         - Doug Mohney, in comp.arch


In a similar vein, most phones nowadays are just computers
with a pocket-size form-factor and some wireless networking.

So when you say…

> My first act on joining any mailing list is to download the entire
> archive into my local mail store. I have a script for this, for
> mailman at least.

and you happen to own >1 thingys that have general computing
functionality -- phones, laptops, desktops, etc -- do you sync
all your mailing-lists with all of them?

I know friends who have installed a home-data-store…

[Ive been resisting getting something like a NAS because each new
thingabob I own is one more thing to maintain. I also know from
past experience that such luddite battles are in the end always
lost -- Im no technophile but I expect to live and die a techie]

And inspite of all that it still sometimes happens that one has
to work on a 'machine' that is not one's own.  What then?

The unfortunate and inexorable conclusion is that when the 
(wo)man <-> computer relation goes from 1-1 to 1-many, data and
functionality will move away from 'own-machine' to the cloud.

Will the data be subject to privacy-abuse and worse? Sure
Will the functionality be as good as something one can fine-tune
on one's own computer? heck no!

But in the end, uniform access will trump all that -- compare the 
number of vi+emacs+eclipse users with google-doc users…

So to come back full-circle:

Earlier (your quote paraphrased)
Emacs is a full-blown OS -- only lacks a good editor.
Now: replace 'emacs' with 'firefox'.