NavList:

Paolo,
Just so you don't worry about it, there's no problem at all with replying to an old post, and just as soon as I saw your first post on slope, I knew that Peter Fogg's messages on plotting against slope might come up. It's a worthy topic for discussion, and unfortunately Peter and one or two of the people he corresponded with regularly ended up "butting heads" in many previous discussions, generally ruining the value of those discussions.

-FER

PS for Sean, et al.: I agree that there should be some sort of notice when replying to an old message. Many online forums "close" replies to old posts. I can understand that policy in certain topics which age out, but I don't want to shut down any fresh NavList discussion that might have been inspired by a post written ten or even seventeen years ago (the earliest posts in our archive date from 1996, thanks 80% to Dan Allen and 20% to the defunct "irbs" archive). So here's a possibility that I have had on a "to do later" list for a couple of years: if a post is more than a month old, the reply page would include a notice saying, "The post you are replying to is 'n' months old. Please consider this when composing your reply. Note that the original author may no longer be following NavList messages. Consider quoting from the original message for context in your reply."
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