[e2e] (no subject)

[Marc Herbert]

On Wed, 14 Sep 2005, Fan Ye wrote:

> I'm really astonished to see your technical discussion on ns drifting, or
> "accidentally dropping",  onto some language attacking an ethnic group
> (see below quoted text). You may not have the intention, but what you
> wrote seems to imply that all these guys are clueless chinese students who
> dont know a better way to plagiarize.

I really wonder how many people felt it like this.


> > (I have no idea where they are really from - are they using such
> > addresses because they are afraid their university will catch them
> > plagiarising,
> ^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^^
> > or are they blocked in china?) and they do more harm than good.
>                                                ^^^^^^
>
> I'm very, very upset to see this kind of language, not to mention at a
> least expected place, a technical discussion list.

Well, if you are reading this list since several years, you probably
noticed it's not "purely" technical, probably because there is no such
thing in this field.

Of course I agree with you that we are still way off-topic right now.


> [...]
>
> To check the validity of your claim that these guys (at least most) are
> from china, I did a quick sampling on ns-users 2005 Aug archieve.  At the
> end is a sorted list of those who used yahoo addresses. Of these 31 guys,
> only 4 have chinese names. I can reasonably say that nearly 90% of them
> are NOT from china.
>
> So how did you find out
> 1) they're plagiarizing
> 2) they're from china?

I suggest you carefully (scientifically?) read every word/sign of Jon,
in order, and not only the ones that tease you/support your thesis.

The whole sentence you are basing your analysis on was between
parentheses, which quite clearly demonstrated IMHO the lack of
conviction, importance and exhaustivity of the enclosed conjectures.

But probably the main interpretation mistake you make is skipping the
"or" link word between "plagiarising" and "China":  they quite clearly
had no relation to each other!

According to my understanding, the only visible reason Jon spoke of
China was because he was looking for an example of a well-known and
developed country where censorship still exists.

All this is of course totally off-topic but I felt the need for at
least one public third-party interpretation of Jon's words, answering
your (quite severe I think) accusation. Hopefully there won't be many
concurrent other answers.  I won't complain if the editors filter this
message out of course.