hi Aaron, thanks for clarifying your position! i'm a simpleton who lives often below curb-height, and think poaching=stealing=wrong. this exponent poaching seems like a sort of stealing to me and it would surely tick me off vastly if i found my 33M exponent was checked in a day before my PC finished its ~3 months of work. indeed if it did happen to me, i would probably do as Mary has surmised and "resign" from GIMPS and join another cooperative computing effort such as SETI or anthrax-cure-finding or anthrax-genome-finding or whatever else.
i think i see your point regarding the state of 'exponent poaching' long before i joined GIMPS, and how it is no longer useful. thank you for educating me about the past history of "poaching" here as well as the current state of the issue here. as for parting company with my alleged opinion about "what to do": i surely do not support hassling anyone by google-searches or posting home addresses or phone numbers or anything like that. a quick google search for an email address, or a query to a mailing list, "does anyone know how to contact this person so i can email them" doesn't strike me as any sort of stalking... as long as it ends there, or ends with what i saw here: "the guy's a ham-radio-dude, you can look up his email address as a ham callsign or email this ham-mailing-list to maybe find him". as you might imagine by my "forward" use of language, i actually have an internet stalker of my own. he lives in the SF Bay Area, near where i used to live, and he has done all sorts of threatening things to myself and *many* others. he has spent time in jail due to at least some of: (convicted) violations of anti-stalking laws, (alleged) firebombing of cars & businesses, and (convicted) child-porn activities. also he has lost some civil suits which he has initiated against his detractors from various usenet groups. so i understand how horrible it is to be the target of a stalker and would never support or contribute to such activity! regards, /eli _________________________________________________________________________ Unsubscribe & list info -- http://www.ndatech.com/mersenne/signup.htm Mersenne Prime FAQ -- http://www.tasam.com/~lrwiman/FAQ-mers
