response 43 of 55:

Oct 20 03:09 UTC 1999

Re #33: It depends on whether we're discussing morality or legality here.

For issues of morality, yes, something that is wrong is wrong, regardless
of whether you get caught.

For something which is illegal, it really only matters if you get caught.

Many things which are immoral are illegal, and vice versa, but in practice,
sometimes things that are illegal are things that should be perfectly
reasonable to do.

It isn't clear to me that enhancing the capabilities of picospan is morally
wrong.

response 45 of 55:

Oct 20 03:50 UTC 1999

Fix up the small business conference?

response 47 of 55:

Oct 20 20:44 UTC 1999

Re the superuser muck, two things:

1) In order to be a superuser, you don't have to be root; you only have to
have an account with superuser equivalency. There's a bunch of adjunct roots
on grex, such as woot, gcoot, noot, hoot, zoot, joot, loot, moot, foot, soot,
coot, scoot, doot, and koot. Staff could do it in the blink of an eye; there's
no need to be UID 0 or use wierd programs.

2) The programmer wouldn't need superuser access to do the program; perhaps
the program may need to be suid root, but that would be it.

response 49 of 55:

Oct 20 23:23 UTC 1999

I can start work on this in about 4 weeks.  Busy at the moment with
assignments and then I have student assignments and finals to mark also.
Is that cool?

response 51 of 55:

Oct 23 16:20 UTC 1999

Dunno what item it is, but sure, I can help mac users get started.  What do
I need to do (ie where do I need to work with these new users?).  At Kiwanis?

response 53 of 55:

Nov 14 02:20 UTC 1999

This probably isn't the place for it, but I'd be interested in continuing
the discussion of *why* some of these conferences are dead, and how likely
they are to stay that way.

Personally, I have been doing a little lurking in writing, and it strikes
me as an interesting conference, so I would favor not changing it or
making it less accessible or anything.  There are a couple of other "dead"
cfs I also read occasionally.  However, in most of these conferences I
usually just read old items, and do not post any responses -- because I
get the impression that no one else is reading them.  This leads me to
wonder how many of the "dead" conferences have some occasional lurkers,
all of them remaining silent just because everyone else is too.

Several times I'll notice a  gap of a year or more between responses in
some items.  Once one person has responded, others do as well.  A lot of
the older conferences have items that have been around for six or seven
years, and if you read through them all at once (which I"ve done
sometimes -- partly because I have no life and am willing to spend
that much time doing so, and partly because it is fascinating to see
how the discussions change) I"ll notice a whole series of responses in
1992 and '93, then
hardly any in 1994, then a  brief flare-up in summer 1996, then dormancy,
then
some more active conversation from September 1998 onwards (these dates are
made up, but I've noticed this *kind* of pattern before.)  Maybe everyone
took 1997 off and went into hibernation for awhile.  But if we'd killed
the conference in 1997, we would have missed some interesting conversation
that occurred after that.

response 55 of 55:

Nov 15 22:59 UTC 1999

My sentiments exactly.  I do that for several cf's.  I do not favor "killing"
cf's, in the sense of making their items unavailable.  What I do think ought
to be considered is combining some of the less active cf's, aliasing their
names to the "new" cf, and perhaps making the "moved" items "new" for all
readers, or something like that.  Fore example, I seem to remember reading
that there are several rpg cf's, and that more than one of them is in a coma;
would is not make sense to combine them, since they are obviously sharing a
common focus?  That's the kind of thinking I'd like to see.