[nylug-talk] How to get a Windows tax refund

[Eric Moore]

Ok, a recent post in this thread (that this is a reply to) had:

144 lines of quoting
13 lines of message
4 lines of signature
4 lines of auto-added list spoo

Taking all of the quoting as noise, and all of the sigs we get as
signal to noise ratio of:

  S/N = 13/152 = 0.0855 = -10.56 dB

By my count, 7 of quoting would have identified the point being
responded to sufficiently.  So we could count those 7 lines of quoting
as signal instead of noise, unfortunately that doesn't help much:

  S/N = 20/145 = -8.60 dB

To be more charitable, we could consider quoting of the whole 29
lines of the message it was in reply to as signal (quoted auto-list
added spoo and sigs still taken as noise).  That makes the
signal to noise ratio:

  S/N = 42/123 = 0.341 = -4.66 dB

Including the body of the whole previous _two_ posts as signal we get:

 S/N = 61/104 = 0.586 = -2.317 dB

And if we just don't count the 4 lines of auto-added spoo except when
quoted (since they're noise that the poster has no control over) we
get:

 S/N = 61/100 = 0.61 = -2.15 dB

And that strikes me as a *very* charitable definition of signal and
noise.  And it's still negative.

Trim your freaking replies people.

-- 
Eric