🚀 go-pugleaf

David Stodolsky <david@ruc.dk> writes:
|
|   Please read carefully:
|   Any article posted to comp.goupware uses a minimum of ten hours of
|   reader's time.

You can't multiply the time used by one reader by the number of readers,
since nobody is actually spending any more time than they themselves
spend on reading anything.  It's not as if news readers are standing in
line and waiting for the people in front of them to spend their one
second reading the article.  If an article takes one second to decide
not to read, then one second has been wasted, and only one second, no
matter how many people decide not to read it.

Take a newspaper with a circulation of 1 million, and discourage people
from submitting letters to the editor because any letter which appears
in print will take about 1 second to decide not to read, and a whole
month of 8-hour reading days is wasted by each letter.  Great logic.

Considering your line of argument, though, how much time do you think
you're wasting by asking people to follow USENET etiquette in each and
every introductory article?  How many years of wasted time does that add
up to?  No, you say, this doesn't apply?  Of course not, but neither
does your bogus "10 hours" argument.

Thanks for your cooperation.

Best regards,
</Erik>
--
Erik Naggum             |  ISO  8879 SGML     |      +47 295 0313
                        |  ISO 10744 HyTime   |
<erik@naggum.no>        |  ISO 10646 UCS      |      Memento, terrigena.
<enag@ifi.uio.no>       |  ISO  9899 C        |      Memento, vita brevis.