The 03.05.20 at 07:42, will wrote:
If I find one that rambles in a direction I don't like or get bored with I just drop the thread. I do feel sorry for the "billed" people in other countries and those with slower connections sometimes.
As one of those that get billed by the minute, I don't mind much about off-topics. I mind more about mails (or people) that do not trim the quotes, or long flame-wars, but more due to the effort involved in reading or skimming them than my own monetary cost. (As an aside, on some lists they publish a "blacklist of quoters") Let me see, the previous email (scsijon) had nearly 6 KBytes (the record this month is one with 15Kb, including a log file); lets say at 3 Kbytes/second transmission rate (about half the unattainable maximum, a conservative value taking into account ISP handling delay), that's less than 2 seconds. The cost varies on the hour and the day, but... I have one on my receipt, 20 minutes, 0.2429 Eur. So, two seconds cost me, lets say, 0.000404 Eur (no eur simbol on my xterm, pity) I guess I can afford it! X-) Of course, if you consider that it is downloaded by thousands of people, and transmitted, and stored, and multiplied by thousand of messages per month... there is a noticiable cost, I suppose. -- Cheers, Carlos Robinson