X-Message-Number: 5908 Date: Sun, 10 Mar 1996 17:09:48 -0800 (PST) From: "Kevin Q. Brown" <> Subject: The Great Cryonics Debate As a few people have pointed out, the long-running cryonics debate on sci.cryonics, uk.legal, and sci.life-extension has exceeded the capability of the forwarding arrangement between the CryoNet mailing list and sci.cryonics to convey adequately all that has been happening. That is not _always_ bad, because USENET postings often quote in entirety a previous message, with just a few new comments interspersed. While that is accepted on USENET, that style doesn't work as well for a mailing list. Nevertheless, as described below, some things can be done to fill in the gaps. Message #5383 describes how the forwarding between CryoNet and sci.cryonics is done. You can direct your CryoNet messages to be autoforwarded to the USENET sci.cryonics news group (but not also uk.legal or sci.life-extension) by including "SCI.CRYONICS" (in capital letters) in your Subject line. If you need to crosspost a USENET message to several news groups, though, then please do the USENET posting yourself, since the CryoNet software is not set up to do that. Also, remember that the sci.cryonics news group is _supposed_ to be for scientific / technical issues related to cryonics, so the closer you can stay to that charter, the better. For the sci.cryonics to CryoNet forwarding I have tried to direct representative and interesting sci.cryonics messages to CryoNet, but doubtless have missed several that should have been forwarded and perhaps forwarded a few that I should have skipped. If you notice a sci.cryonics message that should have gone to CryoNet but did not (within a few days of its posting to USENET), then you may want to forward it to CryoNet yourself (or send it to me at for forwarding to prevent possible duplication). FYI: CryoNet currently has about 265 subscribers, whereas the readership of sci.cryonics was somewhat over 10,000 a few years ago, sci.life-extension had even more, and I don't know about uk.legal. If someone has more up-to-date figures for the readership of those USENET news groups, I would like to see them. My files include a note to check: ftp://rtfm.mit.edu/pub/usenet-by-group/news.lists/ and look for "USENET_Readership_report_for_..." to find the Arbitron summary. I couldn't find any such thing a short while ago, but perhaps one will show up within a few weeks. Or have those postings been discontinued? Even at the 10,000 figure for sci.cryonics, though, it's easy to see that the poster-to-lurker ratio is quite large. As a few people pointed out, one does not need to convert the "anti-cryonics" side of the debate to your point-of-view for the debate to be worthwhile. There are _many_ people watching that debate, making up their own minds, but not posting. A debate also helps one see the "anti-cryonics" arguments and practice fencing with them. Before posting, though, bear in mind that your total readership is not only today's 10,000 or more people, but also everyone who scans the sci.cryonics, uk.legal, or sci.life-extension on-line archives in the future. Thus not only your brilliant posts but also your petty, uninformed, or mistaken posts will be readily-accessible to the world from now onward. Kevin Q. Brown Rate This Message: http://www.cryonet.org/cgi-bin/rate.cgi?msg=5908