Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!rutgers!apple!chuq
From: chuq@Apple.COM (Chuq Von Rospach)
Newsgroups: news.misc
Subject: Re: In Moderation: A Moderator's Response
Message-ID: <32547@apple.Apple.COM>
Date: 20 Jun 89 15:44:13 GMT
References: <632@biar.UUCP> <2213@qiclab.UUCP> <2258@drilex.UUCP>
Organization: Life is just a Fantasy novel played for keeps
Lines: 58

>Don't forget also that the precise meaning of non-profit is something that
>is defined by the tax codes of the various political entities in the U.S.A.
>I'm sure that they don't even agree 100% (maybe 99% though).

This is why I prefer to use the term non-commercial to non-profit. Both In
Moderation and Brad's service are commercial operations, so the term would
hold while avoiding the specific legal definition attached to non-profit
(besides would that mean they had the rights to distribute as long as they
lost money? non-profit doesn't imply lack-of-intent-to-make-a-profit... Most
of what I've seen people seem to be really trying to restrict it to
non-commercial situations).

As an aside, OtherRealms is limited to non-commercial enterprises without
permission. Neither service, as far as I'm concerned, will carry
rec.mag.otherrealms or the electronic OtherRealms (Brad, actually, has asked
me about it, and I declined to join the service. In Moderation hasn't
contacted me, so I assume they don't plan on carrying it. The two commercial
services that do carry OtherRealms or subsets (Delphi and CompuServe) both
have written agreements with me to do so....).

>1. You could get your feed from anywhere, and transmit it anywhere.
>In Moderation Network would supply you with a list of cruft article IDs;

Gads. Erik Fair wrote an article for 'login:' a few years back that covered
something very similar to this concept. Called the "accolade" named by yours
truly, it had people sending control messages around the net
'congratulating' a specific article -- and you could set your system to only
read messages with a specific minimum number of accolades. Alternatively,
you could look for accolades by a given net-address who's judgement you
trusted. Good ideas always seem to come back, although I don't believe it's
practical large numbers of accoladers. A few specific editors, though...

>2. You could get your feed from anywhere, and transmit it anywhere.
>In Moderation Network would supply you with a feed of cancel messages.
>Each of these would be frobbed up to ensure that they will be accepted
>by your news software

Unfortunately, both of these ideas carries one serious negative (at least,
from the point of IMN). Once a site trashes an article, it won't retransmit
downstream. This means that a site like mcvax could buy the IMN service and
all of Europe would live on its coattails. Any group of sites willing to
funnel through a single point could then accept the services of IMN
passively without paying for them.

Besides, one of the main advantages of IMN that I see is getting the trash
off my modem. Doing the deletion after the fact actually increases traffic
load rather than decreases. It also has timing problems -- if you read your
news between the time the article comes in and IMN pops in it's batch of
deletion messages, you see all the articles you're paying to not see.

chuq

Chuq Von Rospach      =|=     Editor,OtherRealms     =|=     Member SFWA/ASFA
         chuq@apple.com   =|=  CI$: 73317,635  =|=  AppleLink: CHUQ
      [This is myself speaking. No company can control my thoughts.]

You are false data. Therefore I shall ignore you.