Date: Fri, 5 Jan 1996 08:39:36 -0500 (EST)
From: malgosia askanas <ma-AT-panix.com>
Subject: SAVE YOUR POSTS!  and anglo-saxon fascism


This is a sorry thing to say, but you should really always save your posts
until they have appeared on the list.  The list is not a perfect transmission
medium -- it sometimes breaks, for one reason or another.  If you write
anything that you'd be sorry to lose, don't assume that sending it to the list
will guarantee its delivery.

As for the anglo-saxon fascism, the Spoons are currently working on trying
to get the Virginia mail system to transmit 8-bit ascii correctly.  If we 
succeed, this will eliminate one obvious, glaring source of the anglo-saxon 
fascism.  But it won't totally solve the problem, because every piece of
mail to and from Virginia goes through a number of other systems, each of
which may mangle the 8-bit ascii in its own peculiar way.  The only
fool-proof solution right now, it would seem, is to use uuencode on the 
sending end to encode the 8-bit ascii as 7-bit ascii, and then have every
recipient use uudecode on the receiving end to restore the message to its
original readable form.  This is an enormous hassle for both senders 
and recipients, and I cannot imagine people doing it on any kind of regular 
basis -- even if we all had uuencode/decode easily available (which is 
probably not the case).  



-malgosia, in spoon hat 

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