On Fri, 06 Feb 2004 17:20:03 -0500 TTA Cherokee Driver wrote:

R.Hubbell wrote:

On Fri, 06 Feb 2004 13:21:44 GMT Kyler Laird wrote:


"R.Hubbell" writes:


Uh, when a guy makes the gathered info FREE on a website, AND publishes
it in a book, I cannot fault him.....

Since you don't seem to know what's going on I will tell you. The camping
site you say he's hosting is waiting to be filled in by anyone willing to
fill it in. Right now it's empty. Once you've put that up on his site
it's his (see the copyright on his site) then he creates a book from other
peoples' contributions and he collects the $$$.

Setting aside his poor socialization, do you really fault him for this
process? It isn't as though he tricks people into giving him the rights



I remember back when Usenet FAQs were getting pilfered and turned into books.
There are too many contributors for just one to claim ownership. It's stuff
like this that turned a lot of people away from Usenet.




wrong. What turned people away from usenet are, in order:

Wrong? No, it's definitely stuff like this that turned people away.
I know people personally that were turned away for that and other stuff
like that.



1. the fact that you need a special kind of client to participate and as
a result 99.99% of net users don't even know of usenet's existence


How does this turn people away? If they never figured it out then how
could they have been turned away? Usenet doesn't really want them.



2. the extremely poor quality of the discourse and content (this
newsgroup is a rare exception), which gets worse every year (sadly this
newsgroup, while it hasn't sunk to the level of most of usenet, is not
an exception to that rule, as evidenced by this very sub-thread of
complanining about someone's post and all the BS about whether or nt Jay
was spamming)

Spam is spam, the original poster of this thread is veiled spam.
Jay's is suitable for *marketplace really. And no amount of good-ole
boy BS will change that fact.


3. the hair-trigger posturing and ad hominem attacks that became so
common, often but not always related to #2 above.

That is definitely true and has been going on for too long but it won't
change.

4. the spam


This could be controlled better I think. Offending ISPs could either
run cancelbots or they could be blackholed. There is also some emerging
technology that will cut down on this too. I forget the TLA but essentially
it is a trusted dns record for nntp (and mx, et. al.).


5. all the people complaining about the spam and calling other people's
posts spam at the slightest provocation.


See 4.


Having responded to this I will say I'm done with this thread.

R. Hubbell


As someone who has been on usenet since 1988 and now only bothers to
look at 4 newsgroups I think I know something about this.