[plug] Middle East?

[Craig Ringer]

> Bury heads in th.....   ....nope, maybe I won't go there.

In the end, its anybody here's choice to do exactly that, should they 
desire. Alternately, perhaps they avidly paricipate in relevent mailing 
lists, usenet discussion, meetings / discussion groups, etc. Either way, 
they're reading this list because they're interested in Linux and 
related stuff, and want to talk to people in and around Perth about it.

The internet makes it even easier to choose to involve yourself in 
things as much, or as little, as you choose. Either way, there's no 
point in trying to bring in a lot of discussion well outside the stated 
topic of a forum, otherwise quickly we'll have thousands of homogenous 
groups all filled with _exactly_ _the_ _same_ _thing_ - whatever's big 
at that moment. That's what IRC and general discussion mailing lists are 
for. It'd be counterproductive to have _many_ discussions on parallel 
topics anyway, you have a lot of duplication.

Sorry if I sound a bit sharp on this, but IMHO the amount of cruft on 
the list has been increasing, and I make a point of keeping track of 
news etc via other, more appropriate (or merely more direct: lwn, etc in 
the case of linux news) chanels, so most of the news posts etc are "seen 
it" or "will see it next time I see the site, and its not exactly time 
critical", and then there's the quite-OT stuff too. It makes it that 
much harder to keep up with the actual on-topic discussion on the list.

I'm not in the "head in the sand" camp, but rather the "I'll choose 
somewhere more approprate to hold a conversation about this" camp.

Anyway, my thoughts on this matter are done. In the world of real 
proportions on the serousness of things, it's only one more keypress to 
mark a thread, so its just not too important.