kevin@sun.uucp (Kevin Sheehan) (01/16/85)
<moderation in all things> Having just recently starting to follow the stargate experiment, it occurs to me that some of the arguments regarding the content of transmission (ie, moderation of postings) fails to regard the practical nature of the problem. The news I read here at sun is by the good graces of those of you who type, the systems that relay that info, and sun for letting me use it. The folks who type presumably pay with their work, and the unwitting work of their fellow employess (with some benefit expected), the relay sites with their disk/cpu/phone time and costs with the same expected benefit, etc. A given site even has some of the cost borne by other sites on the way (and vice versa, or they are kind folk indeed). I do not want to sound humble here, but this is GRAVY boys and girls!! I don't remember paying for this lately, and I doubt most of you have either. We rely on the good graces of some who plan to benefit indirectly, some who are nice guys, and so on. The point here is that Lauren (I believe this is the proper person) is conducting an experiment that has great benefit, NO COST to us so far (so far as I know), and has every right (and some real good reasons) to do with it as he pleases. If I said I would carry folks over a river, and a few folks took me up on it, fine. If the city of philadelphia showed up, I'd decide to find another river, thank you. Lauren has a large set of artificial constraints to deal with, and seems to be living with those while trying to provide a service to the net as a whole. He has to deal with technical problems, legal problems (thank you US law...), and the net opinion that stargate should be this or that. In summary, the notion that moderation is censorship in a completely private venture done for the benefit of the net as a whole is perhaps too utopian a view of things. I cannot believe that there is anyone who could not find something they dont think should go over the gate for various reasons (bandwidth, content, bad breath, whatever) and SOMETHING has to make that decision. Surely the proprietor of this establishment has the right to decide that method without undue hassle. I will defend your right to say it to the death, but he doesnt have to publish it at his peril. l & h, kev PS no flame, no blame, just thought he deserved a break while we all think about things a little bit more.
grunwald@uiucdcsb.UUCP (01/19/85)
My only concern over moderated net mail is that it's not clear that we need
to eliminate much "trash". Certainly libalous material should be moderated,
but 'drivel' is not really that important. Someones drivel is another
persons research area.
From my understanding of the stargate project, the bandwidth would
be pretty reasonable & the pickup cheap (hook into local cable net, right?).
So what it 2Mb moves through this every day? Each site can save the groups
it wants to and nix the ones it doesn't want. Like wise, perhaps the news
software will improve to allow people to deal with a large volume of mail.
Dirk Grunwald -- "My drivel runnth over"
Dept of CompSci, UIUC
grunwald@uiuc.arpa
grunwald@uiuc.csnet
{ihnp4, pur-ee} ! uiucdcs ! grunwaldlauren@vortex.UUCP (Lauren Weinstein) (01/20/85)
Bandwidth, even over the satellite, is definitely not unlimited. For example, as much spare time as possible needs to be filled with repeating messages for error correction and for good ECC codes if possible. With a broadcast satellite transmission system, you can't just NAK a packet if you didn't receive it properly. Without optimum use of the bandwidth (for example, deleting the 50 different messages which answer the same question in the same way or make the same request over and over) there will be bandwidth problems as the net grows. People who insist on inserting entire messages into their replies, in cases where this really isn't necessary, represent a similar potential problem. --Lauren--