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From: pst@comdesign.UUCP
Newsgroups: news.admin,news.groups
Subject: Re: minimum age for voting on new groups
Message-ID: <346@comdesign.UUCP>
Date: 3 Jun 88 18:24:15 GMT
References: <441@wpg.UUCP>
Followup-To: news.groups
Organization: Network Equipment Technologies, Santa Barbara
Lines: 36
Posted: Fri Jun  3 14:24:15 1988

From article <441@wpg.UUCP>, by russ@wpg.UUCP (Russell Lawrence):
< I suppose that minimum age, immigration (ie, access rights), and other 
< restrictions on citizenship will never play a fatal role in net politics 
< because net "property owners" have so much freedom and autonomy. 

Net "property owners"?  Perhaps we should limit sufferage to TRUE net
property owners -- those of us that:
	(a) pay the phone bill
	(b) actually own the hardware
	(c) pay for the maintenance on the hardware
	(d) pay for the added disk drive that was needed to hold news

It would make the voting process much simpler for the vote taker :-), but
then again, I think there might be some flames -- does Spaf own his own
USENET node? Does Rick Adams?  Does Mark Horton?  Hmmmm, perhaps this isn't
such a good idea after all... (heavens, what if Bob Webber went out and
bought a IBM-PC with UUPC!  We'd have yet another landslide for comp.
protocols.tcpip.eniac and 99.9% of the backbone sites would have nothing
to say about it (sick smile)).

Oh well,  what about split cases (like myself), who administer a small
network at work, and have a unix-box at home... I guess I get to vote,
but what if I am using NNTP to pull the groups off of the hard disks at
work?  Am I then 3/5ths of a vote because I am slave to a real computer?

(note: to our non-US friends, this is a reference to the 3/5ths rule on
       slave votes back when we had such delightful concepts as slavery :-(.
       "Every land-owning white male is equal..." ... lovely justice)

					Grinning all the way home,
							Paul
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