kent@xanth.UUCP (03/26/87)
I don't know if this will help or hurt, but a few thousand articles per week including the last part of my .signature should certainly discourage the stargate folks from acting as anything but a common carrier. If they need licensing for such, let them go through the application process. We need a replacement for a common carrier, because the current one has gotten moby greedy. We don't need someone manifesting greed in a new way, by ripping off our rights in our intellectual properties. Stargate doesn't want to be responsible for the contents of my or anyone else's flames, either, I bet, so common carrier is the only safe way to go. This doesn't need to be a war; but it sure is turning out that way, somehow. I guess the folks at the stargate project should take a look at the heat they are generating, and rethink what they are doing, and why what they are doing is causing so much discontent among what they hope to be their customer base. We can all win. If we all save 60% on our phone bills, and split the other 40% between the Stargate folks and the cost of the startup hardware, we and they would be better off. Personally, I'd pay to put up an antenna for my private use, if someone would provide a public service like Stargate proposes. I much prefer email to phone-tag, even for my private communications; my phone spends most of the day supporting a modem, so I'm cut off from incoming calls anyway. -- Kent Paul Dolan, "The Contradictor", 25 years as a programmer, CS MS Student at ODU, Norfolk, Virginia, to find out how I was supposed to be doing this stuff all these years. 3D dynamic motion graphics a specialty. Work wanted. Unemployment is soooo nice though...I never have to disclaim anything! UUCP : kent@xanth.UUCP or ...seismo!decuac!edison!xanth!kent CSNET : kent@odu.csnet ARPA : kent@xanth.cs.odu.edu Voice : (804) 587-7760 USnail: P.O. Box 1559, Norfolk, Va 23501-1559 Copyright 1987 Kent Paul Dolan. All Rights Reserved. Incorporation of this material in a collective retransmission constitutes permission from the intermediary to all recipients to freely retransmit the entire collection. Use on any other basis is prohibited by the author.
heiby@mcdchg.UUCP (03/26/87)
In article <748@xanth.UUCP> kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) writes: >Stargate doesn't want to be >responsible for the contents of my or anyone else's flames, either, I bet, >so common carrier is the only safe way to go. Sorry, Kent. You're wrong (at least) here. Everything I've heard about Stargate, including at a couple of open Usenix Board meetings and articles in ";login:" indicate that Stargate does NOT want to be "safe". They want to be *valuable*. The last thing I need is a high bandwidth trash chute into my machine. Sure as anything, the chute will soon fill to capacity, and I can't afford the disk space for it all. I have enough trouble with the space news already takes on my machine. I have heard at least one member of the Stargate team say that if Stargate were to end up as a "common carrier", he wouldn't be interested in the project, either. I would love to have someone else weed out the utter crap, flames, repeats, etc. and give me timely, reliable access to what's left. I believe that there are still questions to be answered by the Stargate team, but I don't think the "common carrier" question is one of them. It has been answered quite well, already. I'm willing to give them some more time to work things out and detail their plans before criticizing them. -- Ron Heiby, heiby@mcdchg.UUCP Moderator: mod.newprod & mod.os.unix Motorola Microcomputer Division (MCD), Schaumburg, IL "There are only two of them that I think are idiots." Brian Reid
kent@xanth.UUCP (03/28/87)
In article <283@mcdchg.UUCP> heiby@mcdchg.UUCP (Ron Heiby) writes: >In article <748@xanth.UUCP> [I wrote] >>Stargate doesn't want to be >>responsible for the contents of my or anyone else's flames, either, I bet, >>so common carrier is the only safe way to go. > >Sorry, Kent. You're wrong (at least) here. Everything I've heard about >Stargate, including at a couple of open Usenix Board meetings and articles >in ";login:" indicate that Stargate does NOT want to be "safe". They want >to be *valuable*. [...] I have heard at least one >member of the Stargate team say that if Stargate were to end up as a "common >carrier", he wouldn't be interested in the project, either. I would love to >have someone else weed out the utter crap, flames, repeats, etc. and give me >timely, reliable access to what's left. > >I believe that there are still questions to be answered by the Stargate >team, but I don't think the "common carrier" question is one of them. >It has been answered quite well, already. I'm willing to give them some >more time to work things out and detail their plans before criticizing >them. >-- >Ron Heiby, heiby@mcdchg.UUCP Moderator: mod.newprod & mod.os.unix >Motorola Microcomputer Division (MCD), Schaumburg, IL >"There are only two of them that I think are idiots." Brian Reid Ron, I really don't think that the stargate folks can succeed at being censors of what goes over their net redistribution mechanism. First, it takes about 6 to 8 persons to thoroughly scan the net, reading 40 hours each per week, and, on their shoestring, they can't afford the help. Second, a lot of the "value" of the net is in entertainment. Group soc.singles, for example, is (one of) the highest message count group(s) on the net (don't know about byte count). That means lots of folks carry it, and lots read it, to get that much traffic. Evidently, it is not moderated! More important, it is frequently rude, obscene, insulting, etc. So, they cannot carry it safely as a broadcaster. Yet, it is a popular part of net traffic. So, if I, as a site administrator, want to save communications costs, finding a cheap way to copy soc.singles is high on my priority list, because it is high on my expense list. Stargate as presently planned doesn't make it. Substitute at least a hundred other newsgroups for soc.singles, and you begin to see the size of the problem. Third, there are tremendous differences of opinion among net users on what constitutes proper postings. Look through the recent postings in comp.emacs about the inclusion of sex.1 in the GNU emacs distribution. This also shows why a censor would have to read *all* the net traffic. (I guess even the arced, compressed, crypted, uuencoded part -- that should be fun!) As a net user, I would not be interested in letting someone else decide that my postings shouldn't be passed on, or that others postings should not be passed on to me. As a site administrator, I don't want to deal with defending such filtering to my users, nor do I want to spend the money for hardware, licensing, etc., for a facility that only solves part of my cost problem and worsens my administration problem. Fourth, a significant portion of the net traffic is email. Since it costs just as much in administration and maintenance costs to handle email as posted news (though, thankfully, less in message unit costs), a complete solution must account for email too. Censorship here is obviously out. I hope a stargate-like facility succeeds. I have a grudge against high phone costs, and want a better way found. To succeed, however, stargate must continue to support the creative anarchy which is the net, or lose its audience and not fulfill its promise of cost savings. I think, to do this safely, it must be a common carrier. Kent. -- Kent Paul Dolan, "The Contradictor", 25 years as a programmer, CS MS Student at ODU, Norfolk, Virginia, to find out how I was supposed to be doing this stuff all these years. 3D dynamic motion graphics a specialty. Work wanted. Unemployment is soooo nice though...I never have to disclaim anything! UUCP : kent@xanth.UUCP or ...seismo!decuac!edison!xanth!kent CSNET : kent@odu.csnet ARPA : kent@xanth.cs.odu.edu Voice : (804) 587-7760 USnail: P.O. Box 1559, Norfolk, Va 23501-1559 Copyright 1987 Kent Paul Dolan. All Rights Reserved. Incorporation of this material in a collective retransmission constitutes permission from the intermediary to all recipients to freely retransmit the entire collection. Use on any other basis is prohibited by the author.
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (04/05/87)
> I don't know if this will help or hurt, but a few thousand articles per week > including the last part of my .signature should certainly discourage the > stargate folks from acting as anything but a common carrier. If they need > licensing for such, let them go through the application process... Why can't people understand that it is not *up* to Stargate whether they are considered a common carrier or not? There is *no* *way* to just fill out a form and become, in law, a common carrier. If you act exactly like a phone company, you are a common carrier. If you act exactly like a publisher or a radio broadcaster, you are not. If you act like something in between, like Stargate, *nobody* *knows* which you are. The FCC does not have the power to declare you a common carrier! Congress does, but that is (a) difficult, and (b) fraught with risk that they might legislate something entirely different once they get the bit between their teeth. In the absence of legislative action, the only way you could find out is in court, at great expense and considerable risk of the wrong result. -- "We must choose: the stars or Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology the dust. Which shall it be?" {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (04/05/87)
> First, it takes about 6 to 8 persons to thoroughly scan the net, > reading 40 hours each per week, and, on their shoestring, they can't > afford the help... Last I heard, they do intend to eventually pay their moderators. It's the only thing they can do. One reason why we don't have more moderated groups is the difficulty of finding volunteer moderators. 6-8 persons should not be needed. 1.5MB/day is about 250kwords/day, at 500 words/minute (really fast readers are faster) that's 500 minutes a day, not much more than one 8-hour shift. Call it two people to allow for overhead, weekends, vacations. And that could probably be cut to one if you simply forget about the high-volume low-signal/noise groups like soc.singles. Actually it would be split much more widely, I'd expect, to get the desired level of expertise for the technical groups. -- "We must choose: the stars or Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology the dust. Which shall it be?" {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry
kent@xanth.UUCP (Kent Paul Dolan) (04/13/87)
>> = me In article <7878@utzoo.UUCP> henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) writes: >> First, it takes about 6 to 8 persons to thoroughly scan the net, >> reading 40 hours each per week, and, on their shoestring, they can't >> afford the help... > >Last I heard, they do intend to eventually pay their moderators. It's the >only thing they can do. One reason why we don't have more moderated groups >is the difficulty of finding volunteer moderators. > >6-8 persons should not be needed. 1.5MB/day is about 250kwords/day, at 500 >words/minute (really fast readers are faster) that's 500 minutes a day, not >much more than one 8-hour shift. Call it two people to allow for overhead, >weekends, vacations. 1) I would be very distraught as Stargate's attorney (not me, no sir ;-) if I thought that articles were being read at 500 wpm for culpable legal problems. I _might_ agree that an analysis to avoid legal problems could done, by an expert in libel and such stuff, at 5 wpm. 2) As a submitting author, I would be _very_ upset if my article, making several subtle points in the philosophy of consciousness, were evaluated and discarded, at 500wpm. I might let an expert try to make that decision at 50 wpm and several rereadings. [Myself, I read fiction at about 600 wpm, or 1800 wpm if I'm showing off my rusty speed reading skills, but it often takes me an hour to read a 450 word page of technical material, and I consider the time well spent.] 3) As a moderator, (nope, not me, no way, never; thankless job!) I would rarely be content with just _reading_ an article; most of them are edited for publication. For example, we have one netlander publishing worthwhile, cogent articles whose .signature includes: "Debbie's cat house, where the customer comes first." I have to be paying enough attention to notice what that really says (not at 500 wpm after 7 hours, I won't), then I have to stop and edit it out; worse, it is tastefully arranged stacked as several lines at the right side of the .signature, so I have to spend quite a bit of time editing it out neatly. Then, suspicious of what this poster is trying to slip by me, I have to go back and reread the article a couple of time to see what _else_ he's stuck in there. 4) Also, as a moderator, I have to consider the value of the article: does it contribute something new to a discussion, or is it the same old stuff, from the same tired arguer in a lost cause. This slows me down a lot. 5) As a last small demurrer to the value of carrying only moderated groups, I just went and byte counted our unexpired news, moderated against the rest. (Nearly shook the disk drives out of the computer room. ;-) We have a 2 week expiration horizon, and if there is a newsgroup to which we don't subscribe, it is not for lack of trying. The moderated stuff is just under 16% of the total. Are the savings going to be worth the hardware investment, the time spent revising the news software, and the extra administrative hassle of taking care of two systems, if all Stargate is willing to carry is one sixth of the news? Can they safely carry more until they have taken the legal steps required to confirm common carrier status? 6) Despite all of the above, I am very much in favor of SOME cheaper way to spread the news. I even think a properly devised Stargate could do the job and earn a profit. However, and happily, I notice, perhaps in reaction to the reactions to the Stargate plan, that a new "how to do it cheaper" experiment, called UUNET (sp ?), has been publicized in this newsgroup. Another great way to reduce costs would be for all the sites to install one of the new "9600 baud on a voice grade, unconditioned line" modems recently discussed in the fidonet newsgroup. I'm in love with the one that splits the line into 512 frequency channels - baroque! I think we are still doing news here at 1200 baud, so that would cut our AT&T communication costs by 7/8, while Stargate would only achieve a savings of 1/6, as now planned, if the hardware, the subscription, and the administrative overhead were all FREE. These are just _my_opinions_. Take with salt. What are your comments? Kent. -- The Contradictor Member HUP (Happily Unemployed Programmers) // Also // A Back at ODU to learn how to program better (after 25 years!) \\ // Happy \// Amigan! UUCP : kent@xanth.UUCP or ...{sun,cbosgd,harvard}!xanth!kent CSNET : kent@odu.csnet ARPA : kent@xanth.cs.odu.edu Voice : (804) 587-7760 USnail: P.O. Box 1559, Norfolk, Va 23501-1559 Copyright 1987 Kent Paul Dolan. How about if we keep the human All Rights Reserved. Author grants race around long enough to see retransmission rights recursively only. a bit more of the universe?
henry@utzoo.UUCP (Henry Spencer) (04/21/87)
> 1) I would be very distraught as Stargate's attorney (not me, no sir ;-) if > I thought that articles were being read at 500 wpm for culpable legal > problems. I _might_ agree that an analysis to avoid legal problems could > done, by an expert in libel and such stuff, at 5 wpm. Experts in libel and such are far too expensive for Stargate, or for that matter for newspapers and radio stations, who seem to manage fine without. (And who almost certainly read their material at faster than 5 wpm!) > 2) As a submitting author, I would be _very_ upset if my article, making > several subtle points in the philosophy of consciousness, were evaluated > and discarded, at 500wpm. I might let an expert try to make that decision > at 50 wpm and several rereadings... Somebody at Stargate might give the article a quick scan for legal trouble, but the question of whether the article is subtle or just stupid would presumably be made by somebody competent to resolve such issues, namely the moderator of the group. Whether he reads it at 500 or 50 is not too relevant, since he's only doing one group, although I would recommend 500 if he's going to try to keep up with the traffic! Note that he does not have to understand everything you are saying, just enough to decide that it's worth sending out. I doubt that Rich Salz reads every line of mod.sources. > 3) As a moderator, ... I would rarely > be content with just _reading_ an article; most of them are edited for > publication... On the contrary, most articles posted to moderated groups are not edited for publication, and there is no good reason why they should be -- most of them don't need it. > For example, we have one netlander publishing worthwhile, > cogent articles whose .signature includes: "Debbie's cat house, where the > customer comes first." I have to be paying enough attention to notice what > that really says (not at 500 wpm after 7 hours, I won't), then I have to > stop and edit it out... Why? I can see that some moderators might prefer to edit out noisy signatures (for example, Peter Neumann routinely edits down my modest signature for mod.risks postings), but unless the above example draws objections from the management of Debbie's cat house, it doesn't need special attention because of its contents. (He who tries to edit out anything that *somebody* might object to will end up publishing nothing; compromises are necessary.) > 4) Also, as a moderator, I have to consider the value of the article: does it > contribute something new to a discussion, or is it the same old stuff, from > the same tired arguer in a lost cause. This slows me down a lot. As a news reader, it seldom takes me more than a fraction of a second to decide this! :-) Granted that moderators bear a greater responsibility to avoid unnecessarily harsh decisions, it is nevertheless true that an article which looks boring probably is. Any commercial author knows that style of presentation is just as important as content; bouncing an article which says worthwhile things in such an obscure way that nobody would bother to read it is legitimate, proper, and desirable. > Are the savings going to be worth the hardware investment, the time spent > revising the news software, and the extra administrative hassle of taking > care of two systems, if all Stargate is willing to carry is one sixth of > the news? Can they safely carry more until they have taken the legal steps > required to confirm common carrier status? If it's the best one-sixth, sure it's worth it. Remember that the other five-sixths will not be around indefinitely, because our current network cannot accommodate its inexorable growth forever. There will come a time when fed-up payers of phone bills pull the plug on things like talk.religion! Note that there are no "legal steps required to confirm common carrier status", unless you are thinking of lengthy and expensive legal battles that Stargate could not possibly afford to fight. There is no foreseeable way of getting common-carrier status for Stargate. It's not possible, period. > However, and happily, I notice, perhaps in reaction to the reactions to the > Stargate plan, that a new "how to do it cheaper" experiment, called UUNET > (sp ?), has been publicized in this newsgroup... The idea has been kicking around for quite a while, actually; I think you are reading too much into a coincidence of timing. I agree that UUNET is interesting. > Another great way to reduce > costs would be for all the sites to install one of the new "9600 baud on a > voice grade, unconditioned line" modems recently discussed in the fidonet > newsgroup... Many of us have been aware of them for quite a while, actually. They do have their problems, like lack of standardization, substantial prices, and trouble when used for things like uucp. (Being spiffy for interactive work is not sufficient to make them viable for bulk data transfer.) They are promising but not magical. -- "If you want PL/I, you know Henry Spencer @ U of Toronto Zoology where to find it." -- DMR {allegra,ihnp4,decvax,pyramid}!utzoo!henry