Path: utzoo!attcan!uunet!yale!cmcl2!phri!roy
From: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Newsgroups: news.admin
Subject: Re: Purposes of group
Message-ID: <3536@phri.UUCP>
Date: 12 Oct 88 14:28:25 GMT
References: <6798@ig.ig.com>
Reply-To: roy@phri.UUCP (Roy Smith)
Organization: Public Health Research Inst. (NY, NY)
Lines: 32

In article <6798@ig.ig.com> krone@PRESTO.IG.COM.UUCP (Larry Krone) writes:
> There seems to be a sizable minority of people on USENET that would like
> to make the net one big, boring, technical journal (no soc groups, talk
> groups...)..I feel that censorship of anything is the first step to
> bringing this about....

	Technical, yes.  Boring, I hope not.  Around here, we've got computer
resources which were bought to help us do real work, not as entertainment
devices.  The vast majority of our funding comes from NIH and NSF, which
means your tax dollars paid for it.  Which would you rather have us do with
your tax dollars, spend them on boring technical stuff like figuring out how
to make Suns deal properly with nameservers and how to make the GenBank
database more useful (being at IG, you should appreciate that example) or
spend them on arguing about the ethics of abortion, discussing the relative
merits of one TV show over another, and passing around 500 old light bulb
jokes?  Granted, I could chop out a lot of the drivel by just not getting the
soc and rec groups (we already don't get alt and talk), but sometimes I think
that the quality of comp.unix.wizards isn't much better, and certainly most
of news.* is turning into a sewer.

	I don't understand why people keep trying to equate moderation with
censorship, with all its evil connotations.  Practically everything I read,
from PNAS to SciAm, to the New York Times Letters To The Editor page is
filtered in one way or another.  Even things like Omni (which I don't read)
have somebody at the helm deciding what is worth printing and what isn't.
The key is to find a publication whose editorial policy matches your own, not
to find a publication which has no editorial policy at all.
-- 
Roy Smith, System Administrator
Public Health Research Institute
{allegra,philabs,cmcl2,rutgers}!phri!roy -or- phri!roy@uunet.uu.net
"The connector is the network"