Fire Upon the Deep
rdip...@qualcomm.com (Ron "Asbestos" Dippold) writes:

> >j...@zikzak.apana.org.au (Joe Slater) writes:
> >|This newsgroup gets what, a hundred or so messages a day? A
> >|comparable interstellar newsgroup would expect millions of
> >|messages in the same period. I don't care what sort of filtering
> >|you have; that's simply too many to be of any real use.
> >|What sort of criteria could reduce that number
> >|to a few dozen?

> An artificially intelligent news selector that's as picky as you tell
> it to be.

My point is that it can't be picky *enough*, because with that volume of messages there's an arbitrarily large number which express the same point and do so as well as eachother, and probably an arbitrarily large number of *opposing* points. You cannot compress an encyclopedia into a few minutes' idle reading.