weemba@garnet.berkeley.edu (Obnoxious Math Grad Student) (09/08/88)
In article <9650@tness7.UUCP>, mechjgh@tness7 (Greg Hackney ) writes: >It's not a question of being fired. It's a question as to whether >bucks will be budgeted to support Usenet in free public service. >It's difficult to present netnews to management as a wonderful thing >of great value, to claim to them that we need to drop bucks to set >up some gateways, and have them look at news for the first time >and pull up alt.weemba.sheep that has gotten created overnight. Hahaha! This is really funny!! This whole stink you brought up is nothing other than bad timing??? SHeesh. Why is this any different than the time some major Denver site pulled all of USENET since some upper management was offended by un-rot13-ed dirty jokes??? I have no idea who went on an orgy of alt.weemba.* newgrouping, but to hear the above hard luck story sure makes it worth it. Hahaha!! Isn't it time that hide-from-management features were installed? You know, like the Boss-is-coming key in various games? Just like there's a FASCIST option to block posting, maybe there should be a DWEEBIST option to secretly hide the more trouble-inducing parts of Usenet from those awful dweebs who-just-dont-UNNERSTAN? Let's see: (*) Newgroups are offered only upon sysadmin approval. (*) Rot13-ing doesn't work. (*) Postings with obscene language are never visible. (*) {alt,talk,soc,rec}.* (cross)postings are never visible. (*) Certain voluminous posters are never visible. It wouldn't be too hard to implement a first approximation to this in rn or Gnews or 3.0 rnews: there'd be a file /usr/lib/news/dweeb-kill, and a list of dweebs /usr/lib/news/dweeb-list, and anyone on the list gets the indicated dweeb KILLs applied globally. A sysadmin could fine tune this as desired. ucbvax!garnet!weemba Matthew P Wiener/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720
silverio@brahms.berkeley.edu (C J Silverio) (09/10/88)
[followups to news.misc] In article <9754@tness7.UUCP> mechjgh@tness7.UUCP (Greg Hackney (214+464-2771)) writes: >In article <2335@alliant.Alliant.COM> cook@alliant.Alliant.COM (Dale C. Cook) writes: >>What you're doing is censorship of the worst kind >>You choose to damn the entire tree. Sad. [ cable TV illustration ] >Likewise, we are distributing netnews, and reserve the freedom to >carry the news groups we choose. It would be sad if we we told what >news groups we had to carry. (This brings to mind foreign tv stations >who are told what they have to carry.) We reserve the right to carry >the newsgroups we please, and you have no grounds to challange that. >You can challenge the logic behind the decision, and you have, but >you have done so without knowing all the particular facts in our case. >You do not know me, or the all of the story. The application of the cable TV illustration is more like this: you subscribed to the basic service, and got the HBO package too, which included other channels as well. One of those channels transmitted material you found offensive. So you dropped the entire HBO package. Of course it's your right to do so. The point people have made is that you don't have to drop the whole alt package if you don't want alt.{sex,drugs,flame}. You can pick and choose, because the software makes it easy. You're at the controls of the cable transmitter. Or, since we're all so keen on illustrations here, take Dale's: you chopped down the whole tree when all you had to do was prune. People are pointing out that your solution seems extreme, given the nature of the problem. They suggest alternatives. Since you announced your action here in this noisy and argumentative forum, you have to expect comments. --- ucbvax!brahms!silverio C J Silverio/Brahms Gang/Berkeley CA 94720 "He must be an oddity, I think," said she. "I cannot make him out. There is something very pompous in his style. Can he be a sensible man, sir?" --Pride & Prejudice.