About the trademarks/labels thread Message #1 Posted by Dave Hicks on 16 Nov 2000, 10:44 p.m.
I'd like to clarify why I asked the labels thread to "cool it".
In a small part it was because the subject matter was a little "dicey" and off-topic because it was becoming much more a question of law than of calculators. (I don't believe that there is anything in trademark law that is specific to calculators.)
More important was the fact that it was beginning to generate several looping sub-threads. What I mean are spin-off threads argued by passionate people that are highly unlikely to be resolved here. I've seen this sort of thing since I started reading Usenet in 1982. Someone would refer to pirated code, abortion, gun control etc., and the debate would go on for months. Looking at the posts you'd see the same points being made over and over again often with increasing anger or ridicule. Due to the question and answer format of newsgroups and forums people tend to assume that the last posting is the most authoritative answer so everyone keeps posting away. We've already seen one post made to accuse the previous poster of wanting to get the last word. We've seen a post about mass-producing and selling labels morph into doing your own and a new sub-thread complaining about software patents and movie copyrights. I felt that it was better to stop it early than to try to clean up later.
I tacked my request onto the most recent "loop" at that time. This was not meant to imply that I was taking sides.
Like I said below, I'm happy that I've never had to do this before. In some of the forums I visit, moderators feel the need to completely delete several threads per day to keep the forum from blowing up. I'd like to thank everyone for "cooling it" gracefully.
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