curt@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca (Curt J. Sampson) (03/16/91)
In article <138@s5000.rsvl.unisys.com> gray@s5000.rsvl.unisys.com (Bill Gray x2128) writes: >But I believe the upline entity was a tax-supported institution. If that is >true, it may be worthwhile to ask why rec.autos (for example) is worthy of >a tax subsidy and alt.sex.pictures is not. There are plenty of reasons for this. The first thing to take into consideration for any group with the kind of volume that a.s.p has is "how many people are reading it" and "how many people are reading the groups it would replace, if I don't have enough disk space for both?" If rec.autos gets a hundred kilobytes per day and a.s.p gets fifteen hundred kilobytes per day, obviously one won't make space to carry a.s.p by dropping merely r.a. You'd have to drop a pile of other groups, too. Now, if we are a publicly funded institution, we probably want to try to satisfy the greatest number of people with the volume available. It would be silly to drop 1.5 MB of rec.all to carry a.s.p if we had fifty people downstream from us reading that portion of rec.all and only ten people downstream from us who would read a.s.p. That's certainly not a great use of public funds. The other question, of course, is "are there alternate sources for the information in the newsgroup?" In the case of rec.autos, you can probably get some similar (but certainly not the exact same) information from auto magazines. On the other hand, if what I have heard is correct, you can get the original pictures that have been posted to a.s.p simply by going down to the corner store and buying a few magazines! Why pay for moving the stuff around if it's already easily available anyway? cjs -- | "It is actually a feature of UUCP that the map of curt@cynic.uucp | all systems in the network is not known anywhere." curt@cynic.wimsey.bc.ca | --Berkeley Mail Reference Manual (Kurt Schoens)