ignatz@ihuxx.UUCP (11/13/83)
Gosh, I've seen this kind of thing before--"I don't want to hear your trivia" vs "I'll say what I want, and...". I think that this reflects the birth pangs of the 'world community'...and it is painful. The biggest pain, apparently, is the cost of sending items of marginal interest to Europe/Australia/etc. There are thousands who could care less about many of the things on net.general, net.misc, or (Ghods forfend) net.tv; but since phone charges are (relatively) trivial within the continental US, they just 'N' those groups. Obviously, this doesn't work when going over the Big Water. This issue, I think, is one which is greater than the immediate issue. If we're going to see a real worldnet, then some way of getting from here to there-- affordably. How about suggestions for the proper group, and maybe some comments occasionally to the other major groups (net.misc?) on any conclusions? For instance, there must be some hams on the net--how impossible would it be to digitize and use one of the OSCAR satellites to skip the expensive trans-(Atlantic|Pacific) phone costs? If hams might object to the monopolization of their transponder, how about a data-communications satellite? If amateur hams could plan and finance one, couldn't we do it? There's probably a thesis in just planning such a project... Blue-skying it, Dave Ihnat ihuxx!ignatz