Path: utzoo!attcan!utgpu!jarvis.csri.toronto.edu!mailrus!tut.cis.ohio-state.edu!brutus.cs.uiuc.edu!coolidge
From: coolidge@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu (John Coolidge)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Site Admin stuff -- what if I give boneheads accounts?
Summary: not totally cut off
Message-ID: <1989Sep5.045942.16434@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu>
Date: 5 Sep 89 04:59:42 GMT
References: <2380@flatline.UUCP>
Sender: news@brutus.cs.uiuc.edu
Reply-To: coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu (John L. Coolidge)
Distribution: na
Organization: U of Illinois, CS Dept., Systems Research Group
Lines: 28

erict@flatline.UUCP (J. Eric Townsend) writes:
>Usenet is an elitist medium.  To participate, you must either own
>a system; go to school or work at a place that has a system; or own
>a terminal or computer and pay money to call into a public access system.
>People who don't have the resources can't post.  Right off the bat, it's
>an unfair (in terms of who can post and who can't) system.

Very true. You gotta get a machine before you get to talk...

>[If Eric started up a freedom-of-speech machine for offensive posters]
>(I know what would happen:  all of my neighbors would discconect from
>me. :-)

All of your neighbors, maybe. I'd carry the traffic. As long as a given
posting doesn't violate any laws, I'm perfectly willing to carry it
along. Even if it does break any laws, the odds are that neither I nor
any other sysadmins would actually notice the illegal posting, but if
we did it'd be gone asap. But as long as I'm running a site, we'll carry
anything, offensive or not (as long as we carry the group at all, of
course --- I don't want every group just to be a completist :-)), as
long as it doesn't break the law.

--John

--------------------------------------------------------------------------
John L. Coolidge     Internet:coolidge@cs.uiuc.edu   UUCP:uiucdcs!coolidge
Of course I don't speak for the U of I (or anyone else except myself)
Copyright 1989 John L. Coolidge. Copying allowed if (and only if) attributed.