From: utzoo!decvax!cca!Ted@sri-unix Newsgroups: net.space Title: Article-I.D.: sri-unix.2348 Posted: Fri Jul 30 13:23:26 1982 Received: Sat Jul 31 03:05:09 1982 I assume that the reason for these appearent violations of causality are caused by people responding to messages that appear on their local (or at least more local) Sapce BBoards, and the "luck of the draw" causes them arrive first. Since the transit times through the Usenet seem to vary wildly this seems emminently plausible. Another cause of the problem is that the Unix people seem the messages directly without going through the digestification process. Thus there is no central "clock" which keeps all the discussions causally related (synchronous). I suspect that the original question that prompted the "rat" reply will filter in. An alternatice suggestion is that the person accidently misdirected his reply to the Space digest. Fortunately this is not a serious problem so the best thing to do is probably to ignore it. -Ted Anderson