Initialling Quoted Texts

"John Edser" <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

NAS wrote:-

Quoted message said:

"Perplexed in Peoria" <[email hidden]> wrote
in message

news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

"Anon." <[email hidden]> wrote
in message "]news:[email hidden]...
> But it is - in finite populations, you get an excess
> of homozygotes,as any student of population genetics
> should know.
Dooohh! Ignore my other post. Reality gives an
excess of

heterozygotes.

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

The Hardy-Weinberg "law" gives an excess of
homozygotes.

To clarify, are we assuming no selfing here? If not, I'm
struggling to see why you get the result that you do.

NAS:- Whoops, I was confused as to whether I was
responding to NAS or BOH. I'll watch for BOH's answer as
to why finite populations affect HW in his response to
Bill Hunt.

JE:- Why not simply initial all quoted text so that
anybody can easily see who said what, as Josh our esteemed
moderator recommended.

You have answered your own question, John. I didn't type the
above text.

Surely it is easier to just quote as many lines of "X
wrote", "Y wrote" etc as required at the top of the post,
and then simply count the number of ">"s preceding each line
of text to work out who typed it?

Quoted message said:

JE:- Why not simply initial all quoted text so that
anybody can easily see who said what, as Josh our esteemed
moderator recommended.

NAS:- You have answered your own question, John. I didn't
type the above text.

JE:- My apologies. However, if the parts of the text I
quoted had been initialled at the start of the first quote,
I could not have made this mistake. Nature can stamp
genomes with the hand of the previous author using
methylation. Why not learn from nature? All this confusion
about who said what as text is quoted and requoted, only
has one rational answer IMHO: initial all quoted text
blocks from the _start_ of the quoting process. In this way
authorship can never be lost.

NAS:- Surely it is easier to just quote as many lines of "X
wrote", "Y wrote" etc as required at the top of the post,
and then simply count the number of ">"s preceding each line
of text to work out who typed it?

JE:- Not necessarily. If, like myself you receive sbe as an
email, these ">"s can become all mixed up. Even within news
format, this can happen. Why should anybody try to count
garbled lines when just a simple initial, at the start of
quoting always remains unambiguous no matter how far down
the line the text block or part thereof is quoted making
less work for the reader?

Regards,

John Edser Independent Researcher

PO Box 266 Church Pt NSW 2105 Australia

[email hidden]

NAS:- But somehow you still managed to do just that, as we
saw. And even if such mistakes were vanishingly rare, ..

JE:- The logic is _very_ simple. If quoted blocks of text
are correctly initialised from the very _start_, which was
_not_ the case here, as our moderator has recommended
(perhaps Josh may wish to confirm such), then it is almost
impossible to mistake authorship.

NAS:- ...there are other problems. For instance, reading
your posts I often get confused as to who said what
*when*. t's often difficult to see what is reply and what
has gone before.

JE:- This is the way return sbe _emails_, format using
Outlook. I can see no way to correct it. However it makes
little difference if the dialog has been correctly
initialised.

NAS:- Let me illustrate . . . Ahem. John, would I be wrong
to suggest that your contributions to this newsgroup are
entirely worthless?

JE:- Your hostility remains, palpable.

Regards,

John Edser Independent Researcher

PO Box 266 Church Pt NSW 2105 Australia

[email hidden]

Quoted message said:

snip<

JM:- I agree with almost everyone else on this group -
please use a methodology that automatically inserts the greater-
than signs, John.

JE:- I receive sbe as a email listing. Outlook 2000 _emails_
do not reply format in this way. Email remains the only
secure way for me to reply. If anybody can instruct me as to
how to reformat outlook 2000 email replies to include ">"
please inform me. However, the use of correctly initialled
blocks of text from the 1st reply, remains the most simple
way for correct authorship of text not be lost or mistaken
no matter how often the text may be quoted.

Regards,

John Edser Independent Researcher

PO Box 266 Church Pt NSW 2105 Australia

[email hidden]

Quoted message said:

NAS:- ...there are other problems. For instance, reading
your posts I often get confused as to who said what
*when*. t's often difficult to see what is reply and what
has gone before.

Quoted message said:

JE:- This is the way return sbe _emails_, format using
Outlook. I can see no way to correct it. However it makes
little difference if the dialog has been correctly
initialised.

Quoted message said:

NAS:- Let me illustrate . . . Ahem. John, would I be wrong
to suggest that your contributions to this newsgroup are
entirely worthless?

Quoted message said:

JE:- Your hostility remains, palpable.

NAS:- And your punctuation, unpredictable. John, I wasn't
being hostile. I was illustrating an abstract point in a way
that would make you sit up and take notice. I specifically
said that it was an illustration. Don't take it to heart.

JE:- I cannot to see what your "abstract point" was supposed
to be. Also, if I prefer to put a comma after "remains"
within my reply above to emphasise "palpable" using a pause,
then that is none of your business.

The only thing a rational person can take to heart here is
more evidence of consistent evasion. Do you agree or
disagree with the logic that the most simple and consistent
(over different formats) way to maintain quoted text
authorship over endless replications of that text is to
initial blocks of text from the very _first_ quote, as the
sbe moderator has recommended?

Regards,

John Edser independent Researcher

PO Box 266 Church Pt NSW 2105 Australia

[email hidden]

John Edser <[email hidden]> wrote or quoted:

Quoted message said:

Why not simply initial all quoted text so that anybody can
easily see who said what, as Josh our esteemed moderator
recommended.

Text is normally attributed by newsreaders at the head of
the post - usually with the full name and address of the
poster in question.

This makes initialling each quoted section logically
redundant.

It might help readers remeber who said what somewhat - but
it's also rather a waste of vertical space. However the real
killer is that it is tricky to automate effectively - and no
newsreader I have ever seen has attempted automatic
performance of the task.

As for skipping indentation characters - that makes
conversations *extremely* difficult to follow - since the
information about who is responding to whom too easily
gets lost.

I don't recall the moderator ever recommending paragraphs be
initialled. That is certainly not the standard usenet
convention. Some reference to what he actually said on this
issue would consequently be appreciated.
--

[moderator's note: I may have said something to the effect
that readers with no access to a newsreader would have to
wing it, as they'd be using email clients. Since John uses
Outlook, the simple fix is to turn on quoting in the
included text, which can be done under the "Tools" menu (tools->options-

Quoted message said:

email options, and change the "on replies and forwards"

fields). This preserves threading well and mimics the
standard Usenet format. - JAH]

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"John Edser" <[email hidden]> wrote in message
"]news:[email hidden]...

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

JE:- Why not simply initial all quoted text so that
anybody can easily see who said what, as Josh our
esteemed moderator recommended.

NAS:- You have answered your own question, John. I didn't
type the above text.

JE:- My apologies. However, if the parts of the text I
quoted had been initialled at the start of the first
quote, I could not have made this mistake.

JM:- However, I would have still made the mistake (NAS vs
BOH) that started this discussion. The problem wasn't that I
_couldn't_ figure out who wrote what - it was that I didn't
bother to. I was expecting that BOH would be the person
responding, and I didn't bother to notice that it was
actually NAS. Sorry about that.

I agree with almost everyone else on this group - please use
a methodology that automatically inserts the greater-than
signs, John. And, if you are reading, this also applies to
you, Tom, and you, Michael.

"John Edser" <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

Quoted message said:

JE:- Why not simply initial all quoted text so that
anybody can easily see who said what, as Josh our
esteemed moderator recommended.

NAS:- You have answered your own question, John. I didn't
type the above text.

JE:- My apologies. However, if the parts of the text I
quoted had been initialled at the start of the first
quote, I could not have made this mistake. Nature can
stamp genomes with the hand of the previous author using
methylation. Why not learn from nature? All this confusion
about who said what as text is quoted and requoted, only
has one rational answer IMHO: initial all quoted text
blocks from the _start_ of the quoting process. In this
way authorship can never be lost.

NAS:-

But somehow you still managed to do just that, as we saw.

And even if such mistakes were vanishingly rare, there are
other problems. For instance, reading your posts I often get
confused as to who said what *when*. It's often difficult to
see what is reply and what has gone before. Let me
illustrate . . .

Ahem. John, would I be wrong to suggest that your
contributions to this newsgroup are entirely worthless?

JE:-

Not necessarily.

NAS:-

I see.

BTW, why "NAS" and not "NAAS"?

"John Edser" <[email hidden]> wrote in message news:<[email hidden]>...

Quoted message said:

NAS:- ...there are other problems. For instance, reading
your posts I often get confused as to who said what
*when*. t's often difficult to see what is reply and what
has gone before.

JE:- This is the way return sbe _emails_, format using
Outlook. I can see no way to correct it. However it makes
little difference if the dialog has been correctly
initialised.

NAS:- Let me illustrate . . . Ahem. John, would I be wrong
to suggest that your contributions to this newsgroup are
entirely worthless?

JE:- Your hostility remains, palpable.

And your punctuation, unpredictable.

John, I wasn't being hostile. I was illustrating an
abstract point in a way that would make you sit up and take
notice. I specifically said that it was an illustration.
Don't take it to heart.