This is the mail archive of the cygwin-talk mailing list for the cygwin project.


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]
Other format: [Raw text]

Re: Windows 95 support ?


On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 03:43:03PM +0100, Dave Korn wrote:
> On 26 April 2006 15:30, mwoehlke wrote:
> 
> > Christopher Faylor wrote:
> >> On Wed, Apr 26, 2006 at 12:04:40AM +0200, Samuel Thibault wrote:
> >>> Christopher Faylor, le Tue 25 Apr 2006 14:05:54 -0400, a ?crit :
> >>>> On Tue, Apr 25, 2006 at 06:01:49PM +0000, g.r.vansickle@xxxxx
> >>>> wrote:
> >>                                             ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> >>                                             tsk, tsk.
> >> 
> >> This really is a losing battle isn't it?
> > 
> > Has anyone considered reconfiguring the mail software to 'correct'
> > this automatically?
> 
>   Well, it's trivial to configure rewriting of email headers.
> 
>  But we're talking about body text here, and the web archive of this
>  list.  If you keep what you present to the world as an authentic
>  record of what people wrote, then there are moral and perhaps even
>  legal implications if you feel you're allowed to rewrite it - even in
>  what seems a mechanical and trivial way, the thing is that what you
>  are then presenting in your "archive" is in fact *not verbatim*.
 
IIRC, Google does something similar for their archives of usenet (aka
Google Groups) postings.  Admittedly, munging email body content isn't
trivial, but not impossible, either, made easier by the fact that any
email address would invariably be part of single-line attribution.
You're correct in saying it wouldn't be varbatim, but I wonder how
important that really is.  My own carefully-preserved archives of
correspondence and list subscriptions go back years, but I'd be the
first to admit that most of it is rubbish, including anything written by
me.

As for any related legal issues, I'd wager a hippo to a dollar that
Google's lawyers have sorted them out long ago.

> Plus the problems it would cause when somebody quotes a bit of program
> code with an at sign in it that triggers a false positive and gets
> mangled into non-compilable gibberish.

Might be a fair compromise.  Personally, I find Google's interface
unreadable, but I doubt I'm alone in saying that I appreciate the
lengths they've gone to in preserving the confidentiality of personal
information. 

-- 
George


Index Nav: [Date Index] [Subject Index] [Author Index] [Thread Index]
Message Nav: [Date Prev] [Date Next] [Thread Prev] [Thread Next]