response 101 of 326:

Oct 6 01:13 UTC 1995

   Please don't put words into staff's mouth--it doesn't taste good,
and besides, it won't work; there are too many of them.

   With all the talk in this item over this, *I* won't rush out
and do this--its does seem to be actually contraversial, and other
than technical things, staff doesn't like setting precedence on
things.

   I'd really like to see people be able to come up with some
sort of agreement over all this.

   I don't think I've read any staff people saying that they *would*
do this, but that they saw the reasons.

response 103 of 326:

Oct 6 03:13 UTC 1995

She is a decent person, really...  >8)

Might I suggest that those who want to discuss the "can people
love each other without having met" topic head on over to
the new and improved Sexuality conference, which would be
a bit more appropriate?

response 105 of 326:

Oct 6 04:54 UTC 1995

I would like to reiterate my final (so far) opinion of what I think the
policy should be:  it is the responsibility of the loved ones, not staff.
Staff's sole responsibility should be to allow a friend of the deceased
to take over the account, either by allowing a password reset or by
contacting said friend when the account is about to be reaped (the latter
of which has been done in other circumstances, anyway... Popcorn let
me know, for instance, when my wife's Valerie login was reaped).

As for the Net relationships issue, I agree fully with Rob.  I think
there already is such an item.  It's not the only distracting thread,
though, and it seems unfair to characterize it implicitly as irrelevant.
It is relevant, very relevant, but the relevant content has been laid
out and further discussion would be redundant or unnecessary.

As for the civil treatment as Rane described, I prefer my approach, which
was (roughly)  "Hi, I'm curious about your login.  Somebody with that 
login died a few months ago, and unless you're terribly attached to it,
you might consider changing it.  People are likely to be upset at 
seeing it.  Oh, you are attached to it?  Cool, keep it, but be aware of
the situation...."

*shrug*  We're all just humans, after all.  Except for the AI subprograms,
but we're not supposed to talk about those... :)

response 107 of 326:

Oct 6 10:46 UTC 1995

You've piqued my curiosity, katie, where do *you* think that
topic should be discussed?  I don't recall seeing any
love-but-not-sex conferences around, and let's face it,
sex is a part of virtual relationships.

response 109 of 326:

Oct 6 11:52 UTC 1995

A lot of the late mlady'd friends online were not necessarily sexually
interested in her. The subject arose around her. Love and sex are
not interchangeable terms.

response 111 of 326:

Oct 6 18:14 UTC 1995

Good point, Katie.  OTOH, HSex is the closest we have to a relationships
conf, and I think Selena would take umbrage that the conf is JUST
about sex.  That's why the flirters were all kicked to After Dark.
If you're talking about (platonic) love, then, yes, I think that does
fall under HSex's purview, despite the name.  If you're talking about 
friendship, then, no, it doesn't.  I thought that the thread was focussing
on love, platonic or sexual.

And how did we get a metathread going on this one?  *giggle*

response 113 of 326:

Oct 6 21:31 UTC 1995

(I thought comparing Mark Furhman to Hitler was a bit much, but kerouac? :*)

response 115 of 326:

Oct 6 23:47 UTC 1995

  Debra, you can get another login and just keep the mlady login, under
your name but inactive,  with mail forwarded, and you
will never have to worry about someone else getting it in newuser as
long as you log it in every three months.
  And as for your hitler analogy, if were in nazi germany,  he would
have shut down Grex because there is no way to be 100% certain of who is
who and what anyone is saying.  I am saying EVERYONE has the right  to
say ANYTHING and be ANYTHING they want.  That makes me radically LEFT
wing, not right wing.  Brighn  is the true right winger (only kidding)

I'm wondering if Grex's entire reap policy needs looking at.  An  unused
login doesnt take up space, but files do.  So maybe the idea should be
to reap the files after three months and only reap the actual  logins
that are inactive every year or so to clean things up.  Staff can keep
track of which logins  havent been used in three months and just whipe
out the files.  

Of course this would make Grex's community seem much larger than it 
actually is, but who decided three months is the magic number anyway? Some
people do go away for summers or semesters and come back.  Revising
the reap policy would go  a long way towards solving this current debate
too because logins would only circulate after a year making the 
possibility of someonegetting an old or deceased user's login less likely.

Question for staff:  Has the reap policy ever been debated or amended?

response 117 of 326:

Oct 7 04:29 UTC 1995

Actually, if you don't want to use mlady, do want to get mail from it,
and don't want anybody else to use it, it suffices to make a mail alias
for it.  newuser is smart enough not to allow the use of a mail alias as
a loginid; it won't take up any filespace or a line in the pw database;
and you don't have to worry about it being reaped.

I have found there are two kinds of people; those that think the name is
an integral part of the person, and those that think of names as
convenient labels.  The former kind of person gets very upset if you
give them different names on different days.  The latter sort of person
merely gets confused, and may or may not think you're weird.  This may
seem like an arbitrary or even petty difference, but people generally
seem to feel quite deeply that whatever way they feel is the one true
answer, and that the other sort of person are crazy.  I think it
reflects some sort of deep feeling people have towards other people and
the universe, and in that sense, I think it's not at all imappropriate
to call it a "religious" feeling.  (As an extreme example of names; one
might consider the Hebrew circumlocutions for the name of God; or the
the traditional witchcraft notion that to know the name of something is
to have power over it.) On grex, we've always had a "chfn" program, and
people have always been free to change their name.  I think most people
here accept that as a fact of life; but the fact is, on Grex's most
direct ancestor, M-net; for at least the first 7 years of M-net's
existance, there was no chfn, and changing your name was a big hassle
(and god forbid you should pick a name like Mickey Mouse.)

response 119 of 326:

Oct 7 21:02 UTC 1995

When you meet someone on the net, the only thing you can be reasonably sure
about that person is their login and home system.  There is only ONE
lilmo@cyberspace.org.  Yes, you can change your login, and other ppl will
catch on without too much trouble, but at any given time, a login and home
system is COMPLETELY identifying.  A RL name is not.  Name and home city, or
home club, or home dorm, or even home address, is NOT completely identifying.

I may change my physical appearance, as I may change my login, but you will
catch on before too long.  If I die, and someone shows up with my appearance,
you are very likely to freak out.  A friend of mine graduated, and left school
Spring '94, and I can't tell you how badly I freaked out when I saw someone
that looked like her that fall.

On the 'net, a login IS somebody.  If someone has established an identity,
I don't think it's fair to saddle someone else with that burden, nor to put
the friends of that person throughthe shock of seeing it.

response 121 of 326:

Oct 8 01:09 UTC 1995

  I have noticed that the !who program on mnet prints out the names
as well as the logins.  If the !who program on grex was modified, or
maybe it already is under another name, so that names showed along
with the login, this mlady thing might not have caused so much fuss.
Then Debra's name would be listed with mlady next to it.

response 123 of 326:

Oct 8 05:41 UTC 1995

finger is the standard command for that sort of thing, not just in Unix but
in just about every software package that is created to put a non-Unix
computer on the Net.  Renaming finger would really not make sense, as
unintuitive as it sounds.  who is also a standard Unix command, that does just
what it does here on Grex.  It prints out some information that finger
doesn't, I think, and also runs considerably faster.