From: utzoo!decvax!harpo!floyd!trb
Newsgroups: net.news
Title: Re: Getting tired of the fate of net.general
Article-I.D.: floyd.1462
Posted: Mon Apr 25 01:18:40 1983
Received: Wed Apr 27 05:20:51 1983
References: cornell.4341

"All of Europe" didn't decide to refuse net.general, a few Europeans
decided to refuse net.general for a lot of other Europeans.  Let's take
a look at cost and reason.

Data from my latest (July 1982) phone book:
At their most expensive, residential rate calls from New Jersey to the
UK cost $2.08 first minute $1.26 each additional minute, at night they
cost $1.25/$.76.  That's as opposed to $.74/$.49 premium $.29$/.20
night here to Seattle WA.  So, using lowest residential rates (which I
assume these folks would, being so economy conscious) let's assume that
one of these links transmits 40 minutes of news a night (20 minutes is
probably much more likely, I transmit about 25 minutes a day at 1200
baud, at less than 120 cps to a few systems) so it would cost about $31
per night in phone bill.  For a whole year that's well under $12000 a
year.  $12000 is something like 1/10 of my loaded salary (what Western
Electric Co pays to keep me for a year, NOT just my paycheck).  I'm
sure that all of Europe would get more value out of a years worth of
netnews that it would get by having me work at one place for 4 weeks.
So it's not much of a cost to transfer netnews to all of Europe.  Rumor
has it that there's lots of people in Europe, I never been there but I
seen 'em on TV.  (Maybe the Lady Arwen Fan Club could send me there.
Just kidding, I can afford it, I work for the Bell System.)

Let's say that the people in Europe are so busy that they don't want to
read all our trash netnews, only the good stuff.  OK, let someone at
their forwarding site moderate the netnews.  Real easy to do, just have
him read all the important groups (including net.general), and
vote go/no-go on each article to be forwarded.  So trivial it's
trivial.

Yea, netnews has too much trash on it, but thar's gold in these here
hills.  You just gotta be patient.  Rather than just telling all these
haughty continental types where they can go, I figured I'd offer the
fruits of my extremely vast creativity.  Of course they won't get to
read this because they think no one posts anything but trash to
net.general.  If you have any friends in Europe who care, feel free to
forward them this.

Again, there are some features of netnews that really stink, like all
the mindless drivel that's posted (why are you looking at me like
that?) but I really don't think that there is any better alternative.
Running netnews as a "well-controlled high-priced military dictatorship"
doesn't count as a better alternative in my book, but I fear that one
day some mindless stout-chested drone will try to break it up and might
succeed to some extent.  It's also possible that user irresponsibility
will cause the demise of netnews, but we can always deal with
irresponsible users but we can't always deal with mindless
stout-chested drones.

This (long) message will take about 30 seconds to transmit and would
cost a dollar tops to send it to Europe.

	Happy Hacking,
	Andy Tannenbaum   Bell Labs  Whippany, NJ   (201) 386-6491