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Path: utzoo!watmath!clyde!burl!ulysses!allegra!mit-eddie!genrad!decvax!decuac!avolio
From: avolio@decuac.UUCP (Frederick M. Avolio)
Newsgroups: net.news
Subject: Re: Is anyone else offended.....
Message-ID: <546@decuac.UUCP>
Date: Sat, 29-Jun-85 09:46:24 EDT
Article-I.D.: decuac.546
Posted: Sat Jun 29 09:46:24 1985
Date-Received: Sun, 30-Jun-85 03:10:01 EDT
References: <266@timeinc.UUCP> <2908@nsc.UUCP> <270@timeinc.UUCP> <2918@nsc.UUCP>
Organization: ULTRIX Applications Center, MD
Lines: 41
Summary: costs

Some folks have no idea of the costs -- phone, disk space, cpu cycles,
etc. -- of moving news around the world.  Might be interesting for
some of the "backbone" systems to post this information. (Seismo does
-- take a look at the stats they post and figure how it would affect
*your* site.) It might sober those who insist that a site must pass
all the news through even if people on it don't read it.  No one is
stopping a site 30 hops away from a backbone to call other sites
farther away who still would be willing to send certain groups.  This
is not fascism.  This is not censorship.  It is practical.

    [Digression:  To many people their own company's, let alone
    other people's company's -- phone bill is totally insolated
    from them.  I know someone (his initials are F.A.) who was
    using -- with his manager's okay -- his telephone charge card
    to charge the long distance calls from his home terminal to
    the machine at the work site.  It wasn't until the company
    finally started breaking out individual charges by person
    that this person found out that over a 3 month period the
    monthly average was around $500.00 in calls.  Needless to say
    said person now has -- for $26/month -- a work-local exchange
    in his home!]

I agree that if a SA is going to disappear a new group he/she does
have a responsibility to poll the folks downstream from that site and,
as Chuq mentioned, trying to help them find another source for a
particular group or groups (if they indeed want them).  And I think it
would also be smart for folks to start off with a subset of the net --
only things users on their site want.  Groups can be added if their is
a demand for them.  This makes for much less traffic (but a much
messier -- now that word looks funny -- much messier news/sys file...
as cvl!andie and dolqci!mike could tell you).

Finally, yes, net.flame should go away.  I does not serve a useful
purpose.  If one needs to argue with another it is best carried out
one to one via mail.  At the very least, postings to net.flame should
be forced in the software (I know it is easy to get around!) to go
*only* to net.flame. (One of the sillier things people write in
postings is "Send flames to /dev/null." That is exactly where *all*
flames should *always* go.)

-Fred