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From: newman@bgsuvax.UUCP (Tim Newman)
Newsgroups: net.news.stargate
Subject: Options available which should be considered
Message-ID: <218@bgsuvax.UUCP>
Date: Tue, 29-Jan-85 10:30:14 EST
Article-I.D.: bgsuvax.218
Posted: Tue Jan 29 10:30:14 1985
Date-Received: Wed, 30-Jan-85 07:30:41 EST
Organization: Bowling Green State University, OH
Lines: 34

All of the talk about the censorship of the newsnet has, quite frankly,
got me worried.  Whenever a forum of ideas is restricted, it is time
for all Americans to wake up and scream bloody murder.
	But lest this merely become one more in a mounting pile of complaints
about the relative merit of such a Stargate system, perhaps it should be
most appropriate to investigate a few ways of saving the net.  I don't know
for sure how transmission is presently accomplished, but it seems to me that
if phone bills are too high, then communication in code ought to be possible.
For instance, build system software which would encode at a sending sight
and decode at a receiving sight.  A symbol dictionary could be built which
would minimize transmission time.  Software like Multimate and many other
word processors have a dictionary of 50,000 words (or whatever), so this
type of system ought not to be impossible.  Instead of transmitting ASCII codes
for each letter of a word, why not transmit ASCII codes for an entire word?
Text could be compressed down quite remarkably.
	Also, I seem to get the impression that moderation would be done by
humans.  Why not program a machine to do much of the moderation.  For instance,
white space could be minimized.  On net.jokes, often 20 lines are transmitted
and only 4 contain text.  Elimination of white space could be accomplished
mechanically.  Furthermore, perhaps redundancy could be eliminated by
machine.  If two people each submit the same answer to a trivia question or
a question about a joke, why post both?  
	Simple moderation, without censorship, could be accomplished easily
by machine.  Encryption and limited (very limited) moderation both could, I
feel, substantially reduce telephone bills.  This would avoid any ethical 
questions about censorship and would mean that no possible fraudulent behavior
would be possible; it would not be possible for moderator X to delete my
article because it contains anti-American comments, or some such idea(s).
	I really think that adoption of these and like suggestions would
make full-scale moderation unacceptable.  Phone bills would be lowered and
a free forum of thought exchange would be preserved.

					Please consider my thoughts,
					Tim Newman @ BGSU