response 131 of 255:

Jun 12 09:09 UTC 2000

I think people here are getting way *WAY* too tied up in lawyer-land.
There is a danger here, in that there are a lot of people who confuse
the rules for the deeper sense of right, or who enjoy twisting the rules
to see what breaks, or simply just don't want to deal with it and tune
out & drop out.  To date, we haven't had a lot of problems with this on
grex.  But it's not hard to find examples of this elsewhere, that have
caused real damage.

I believe there's a limit as to how far we should go to protect things,
how much we should protect the system, vs. how much we should protect
individuals, and I believe we ought to be especially careful about
creating additional liability for the system.  To pretend that words
from a conference ought to be treated tread the same as e-mail could
present a real risk to us; there is a bunch of law that concerns the
privacy of e-mail, with some pretty sharp teeth.  At the same time,
words from a conference are *not* private - they are no longer secret,
and are in fact public knowledge to a lot of people.  Even if the actual
words can in fact be expunged from the universe, their impression
remains.  It shapes the subsequent flow of discussion, and arguing about
who owns the thoughts that come out of that is like arguing over how
many angels can dance on the head of a pin.

Like it or not, this is a system where the real value is not the storage
of material, but the *publication* of information, and most of our
community is in a very real sense surfing the wave of information.  Most
of the stuff that is posted here is seen nearly at once by hundreds of
eyes, and even attempting to pretend that it's possible to "take back
words" is a lie.  The liminality of experience is the reality here;
everything else is illusion.

As it happens, most people are already equipped with a perfectly fine
internal censor, that keeps them from blabbing things like their own
password, credit card number, or their lover's secret name to the world
at large.  Indeed, in most people, this censor is sufficiently powerful
that the real challenge is not to keep people from saying what they
ought not say, but to get people to actually participate in the first
place.  It is very rare for people to say things they shouldn't have
said, and even rarer for them to later wish they hadn't said it.

When we code things in policy, we are creating more should's and
shouldn'ts.  This can't fix the problems with someone blabbing what they
shouldn't; that's a past thing.  What we are instead creating is an
opportunity for someone to sue grex, in the name of violating their
privacy, when the fault is really their own.  Is this really going to
help that person?  Is it really going to benefit grex?

Whenever you create policy, you can't just ask "what do I think is
right?" You need to also ask "how will this help? and "how will this
hurt?" It's easy to make rules.  It's a lot harder to make things
better.

response 133 of 255:

Jun 12 14:36 UTC 2000

(Voteadm hat:  The vote program is now up.  Type "!vote" or "vote",
depending on flavor of prompt.  The rest should be self-explanatory.)

response 135 of 255:

Jun 12 14:55 UTC 2000

I agree with Marcus and John too.

response 137 of 255:

Jun 12 15:32 UTC 2000

        Fortunately for everyone, this isn't uselessnet.

        Now, for fun: try to find your responses older than a year.

response 139 of 255:

Jun 12 16:58 UTC 2000

So... if you ignore the law, or pretend that heeding the law will somehow
make the laws applicable to email govern conference content, you... what?
Marcus seems to be arguing that following the law constitutes getting
"tied up in lawyer land", while simultaneously arguing that system policy
should be dictated upon what seems to be a bizarre pseudo-legal fantasy. 
I'm not sure what people are agreeing with.

response 141 of 255:

Jun 12 21:59 UTC 2000

I don't think Grex should ignore any laws.

response 143 of 255:

Jun 13 02:44 UTC 2000

As far as I can tell, the web vote is not set up.

response 145 of 255:

Jun 13 04:26 UTC 2000

I don't know whether anyone's tried it.  Since they honor the X-No-Archive
flag, they at least have an argument that you had the option of avoiding
archiving of your posts.

response 147 of 255:

Jun 13 04:50 UTC 2000

I'm not surprised, and I suspect they would pull an individual's postings if
the individual were willing to push them on it.  The law would be against
them, so they'll probably do it if confronted by a serious request.  (There's
a way to tell if a request is serious, and a way to weed casual requests out,
though many service providers simply assume copyright claims are always
honest.  But I don't want to digress onto that.)  

If they are doing it as a matter of policy, they probably also ask people
not to talk about it as a condition of the settlement -- that way both
sides save court fees (though the requester may still have to spend some
money proving seriousness), and most people on the Net assume that Deja
News won't remove stuff, so they aren't deluged with casual requests.

If you want to try it, I can outline the serious approach in an item where
it would be on-topic.  I don't feel like going after DejaNews myself,
though someday I might.

response 149 of 255:

Jun 13 14:04 UTC 2000

This discussion only reinforces my impression that in balancing
individual privilege vs. the public interest, current copyright law errs
on the side of the former.

(re web voting:  There's a web interface for board elections, but I
haven't yet gotten around to doing one for proposal votes.  So, sorry,
but you currently have to log in to vote on proposals.)

response 151 of 255:

Jun 13 17:34 UTC 2000

That's certainly one way of looking at it.

I guess where I'm coming from is from a whole other direction.
I can't imagine myself making a public comment then trying to
take it back by censoring it.  If I screwed, which I do,
then I own up to it,  make apologies as needed, and remember
to maybe not go that route next time around.  Now, I know
I'm just speaking for myself here, but removing something
from a public conference because I'd rather not be held 
accountable for what I did seems, well, cowardly and has
all the earmarks of avoiding responsibility for my actions.

Your mileage may vary.

response 153 of 255:

Jun 13 20:58 UTC 2000

I agree.  You should always leave the door open for when
altruism comes to call.  It has been known to happen. ;-)

(I am just being a stinker here, Joe.  Pay little attention.)

response 155 of 255:

Jun 14 01:34 UTC 2000

It certainly could.