barrel roll in 172

On 2006-08-08, Jose wrote:
That's one place where I disagree - top posting saves money.

Although there may be a correlation between top posters and post
trimming, it is the post non-trimming that costs money (to others), not
the top posting. Actually, top posting saves money for those who, after
reading your comments, don't need to read what you were referring to
(because they remember it), and therefore don't need to download it KB
by KB.

News readers don't work like that unfortunately. When you select an
article, the reader downloads the *whole* article, not just the bits of
it you are reading. Therefore, a top post with an untrimmed set of
quotes (usually, when top posters reply to top posters, you get an
enormously long history of quoted material at the bottom). Unless the
top poster trims the quoted material (which almost none of them do), you
end up downloading their 5 line comment along with 300+ lines of quotes.

The only occasion where someone reading Usenet would only download a bit
of the article they are reading is if they are reading Usenet over an
ssh connection to a remote server. However, the latency over GPRS is so
bad, this is quite painful - so anyone reading Usenet using a mobile
device will almost certainly use a news reader on their mobile device
rather than an ssh connection to a remote system.

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