Path: utzoo!dciem!nrcaer!scs!spl1!laidbak!att!pacbell!lll-tis!lll-winken!abhg!carpet!bill
From: bill@carpet.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: minimum age for voting on new groups
Message-ID: <80@carpet.WLK.COM>
Date: 4 Jun 88 06:50:08 GMT
Article-I.D.: carpet.80
References: <441@wpg.UUCP> <346@comdesign.UUCP>
Reply-To: bill@ssbn.WLK.COM (Bill Kennedy)
Followup-To: news.groups
Distribution: na
Organization: W.L. Kennedy Jr. and Associates
Lines: 78

In article <346@comdesign.UUCP> pst@comdesign.uucp (Paul Traina) writes:
>From article <441@wpg.UUCP>, by russ@wpg.UUCP (Russell Lawrence):
[ deleted some stuff ]

Speaking only for myself, the three sites I administer [five I feed]

>Net "property owners"?  Perhaps we should limit sufferage to TRUE net
>property owners -- those of us that:
>	(a) pay the phone bill                                       yes [no]
>	(b) actually own the hardware                                yes [yes]
>	(c) pay for the maintenance on the hardware                  yes [no]
>	(d) pay for the added disk drive that was needed to hold news yes [?]
>
>It would make the voting process much simpler for the vote taker :-), but

I answered your questions but you failed to describe your eligibility to
make the proposal.  I feel eligible to criticize since I met your criteria.
Sure, I carry on and generally try to protect my economic turf since it's
mine and mine alone (in truth, lately I have been getting some help from my
neighbors with LD bills), but you don't establish your own position.  Would
you qualify within your own conditions?  If so, good!  Let's proceed.

I'm not sure what this has do do with anything, but I don't see where it is
pertinent to the content of the net.

>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
don't know    don't know        yes

I think that you are overlooking a *VERY* important point here.  Each of the
individuals that you have mentioned by name has made countless hours of
contributed labor, gratis.  They have created and maintained, for the rest
of us, one of the most fascinating (and sometimes, like now, frustrating)
information networks on earth.  Can you reach Dennis Ritchie on CompuServe?
Can you get Brian Reid's recipes from The Source?  Does Henry Spencer cull
and digest Aviation Week and Space Technology on Delphi?  I'm not making
any suggestions one way or the other about the above, but I think that
Spaf, Rick, Mark, Larry Wall, and many many others too numerous to mention,
deserve some respect from the rest of us.  They didn't insist that they be
canonized before pitching in and getting it done, they just hunkered down
and got it done.  It's here in living color for us to study, enjoy, and use.
That's not an opinion, it's a fact.  The trio that you mention spends hours
and hours of their own unpaid time keeping the wheels on for the rest of us.

>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)).

For shame!  Re-read what you said,  Bob has every bit as much right to
his opinions and postings as you do.  Sure, he's controversial and I'm
not one of his fans, but when I've used him in a cartoon it was in private,
via email, you do it on the net and in an example that doesn't
have anything to do with him.  Yup, I've attacked him in private, but I
think it shabby for you to make a caricature.  It should be beneath your
dignity.  Bob is certainly capable of defending himself, I am criticizing
_you_.

>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?

Pooh!  Sorry Paul, I'm not buying it.  I have disagreed with people on the
net before but I don't think I've ever posted a flame.  This article
certainly qualifies as that and my apologies to the rest of the group.
I'm weary of the self appointed experts who needlessly nit pick and take
cheap shots at the very people who make this whole thing work, i.e. your
thoughtless article and my ineffectual flame.  They aren't perfect, I'm
not, I don't know you.  They don't claim to be perfect, I don't, but when
votes start being qualified and being made into fractions, I don't think
that you are either.

Please don't trivialize something that's important, or if you do, please
post to a group that encourages trivia.  Your flatulence has nothing more
to do with news.admin than does my follow up.  If you posted to something
else and crossposted to news.admin, then double Pooh!
-- 
Bill Kennedy  Internet:  bill@ssbn.WLK.COM
                Usenet:  { killer | att-cb | ihnp4!tness7 }!ssbn!bill