[Tfug] Technical harassment, or "Computer knowledge is more important than anything else in the world."

[Chris Niswander]

At 06:54 PM 2/27/2006 -0800, you wrote:
>
>--- Christopher Robbins <robbinsc at gmail.com> wrote:
>
>> Technically, they had to navigate the site to
>> subscribe to the list....In
>> theory, shouldn't one be able to navigate to the
>> same place they subscribed
>> to the list to UNsubscribe from the list?
>
>Agreed.  Put a filter on the list to reject messages
>with "unsubscribe" in the sbject/body.  When a person
>keeps getting mail from the list and his/her
>unsubscribe pleas are unanswered, he/she will
>*eventually* get motivated to solve his/her own
>problem!

I always love it when some computer-illiterate person
has no idea how to resolve some problem, and they
get constructive reactions like this.

Wouldn't we do better to design systems that help people
who don't know much about computers to solve their problems
anyway?

For example, if someone sends 'please take me off your mailing list'
type emails, a rudimentary heuristic scoring system should recognize
them and send the person emails saying that to stay on the mailing list,
the person will have to do something (send back a specific type of reply?
check a web form? something like that) or the person will be removed.

There are millions of people with better things to do than to
learn to really understand computers.

The ideal would presumably be something like the OS X Mac but *more* so:
a top layer friendly to novices, with progressively more sophistication 
underneath, until somewhere under BSD you finally reach a layer that includes
microscopic soldering irons, logic probes, and nanomanipulators 
so you can modify your chips if you want to. :-)

Or alternatively, 95% of the population could just keep using Windows
forever. :-)

I do almost admire the resourcefulness some users show in
getting themselves into problems that they don't understand.
Not that any of *us* have ever been there. ;-)

Hm...now I will have to decide if *I* always have something better to do
than to write up a patch for Mailman to address this problem...

Or I can just sit back and imagine a *Linux/BSD version* of the Apple 
"Think different" ads, with Gandhi, Einstein, Earhart, etc. being harangued 
about how instead of wasting their time on politics, theoretical physics, 
airplanes, etc., they should be learning more about computers!

Chris
---
"It's not a flame, I'm just being honest." :-)