Slashdot Mirror

I don't know how many links are still good, but there seems to be a good list of news clients at the Open Directory. If you're in Windows, FWIW, the readers I've liked the most are Xnews and Forte Agent.

I figure that if we can all pick a particular group, it will be a good place to coordinate/discuss any protests (Slashdot is deleting posts/sigs that even suggest anything) and hang out during the boycott at the very least.

Yep. About US$9.00 a month to NewsGuy in my case.

WELL worth that modest expense for access to practically all the USENET groups and alt. hierarchy.

To Madison, "regulation" meant to keep commerce regular, by enforcing the rule of law, and providing a court system to adjudicate contract disputes.

-jcr

Really! He does mention that the vast majority of the population should be excluded from political power,( So they could not regulate the economy.) That was earlier, during the Constitutional convention.Is that what you are hinting at? That earlier quote is included in the article.
FP #10 Principle Task of Government.

"A landed interest, a manufacturing interest, a mercantile interest, a moneyed interest, with many lesser interests, grow up of necessity in civilized nations, and divide them into different classes, actuated by different sentiments and views. The regulation of these various and interfering interests forms the principal task of modern legislation, and involves the spirit of party and faction in the necessary and ordinary operation of government."

Unlimited plans $20 per month, but all the plans offer SSL.

"We shared our files via USENET ! And we LIKED IT!"

And we still like it, too.

Newsguy subscription : US$8.95 a month.

One time fee to NZB Matrix : US$10.00.

Being almost impossible to trace by the MPAA/RIAA: Priceless!

(Yes, you do need an NZB client . Mac OS, Windows, Linux all have clients. It's almost as easy as using BitTorrent!)

Buy them used. You get music, the RIAA gets nothing. Rip the CDs yourself and then sell the CDs back to the shop you bought them from.

Don't use BitTorrent. That can be traced easily. Instead, use the Alt.Binaries hierarchies in USENET . Using NZB , downloading is a couple of mouse clicks, and it's faster than BitTorrent. There are diverse websites which track the latest uploads to alt.binaries.foo.bar.baz and will generate the NZB for you at the click of a mouse button.

USENET usage is damned difficult for the RIAA to trace.

USENET also can provide you the latest movies and television. Ever run into a movie torrent that was full of files with the .rar suffix that you had to run through an application to assemble? That file was originally on USENET.

I pay about US$6.00 a month to a newsgroup provider and get almost 11 GB in data transfers a month. As I almost NEVER use all that in one month, it rolls over to the next month. I now have almost 40 GB of data transfer available to me, so it's unlikely that I will ever run up against any download limits in a month ever again.

US$6.00 a month equals the cost of one pack of cigarettes or a small pizza or a six pack of inferior beer or a 12 pack of Coke or half a movie ticket, etc, etc, etc.

The Boston Public Library has CDs and DVDs, free to borrow with a BPL library card. As do most other libraries across the US. Likely, your University library has them as well.

Yes, I am talking about copyright infringement. It's illegal. YOU have to decide about the morality of it.

I don't want YOU doing something stupid and getting caught by the MAFIAA.

USENET is your friend.

I get a monthly $9.95 per month dial-up service from http://newsguy.com/ and it includes 3 GB of usenet. Includes pop email and web space. Most people just use it as a back-up ISP.

They also provide a basic individual USENET for $7.95 Month /10GB, but that seems pricey if you are not downloading binaries.

I have no financial interest in NEWSGUY.COM, other than as a customer. If you think USENET is out of date, I started out with FIDO NET! Anybody remember that?

Old Guy

I think your familiarity with Adam Smith is limited.

To found a great empire for the sole purpose of raising up a people of customers may at first sight appear a project fit only for a nation of shopkeepers. It is, however, a project altogether unfit for a nation of shopkeepers; but extremely fit for a nation whose government is influenced by shopkeepers.
....Snip...
But a company of merchants are, it seems, incapable of considering themselves as sovereigns . . . Their mercantile habits draw them in this manner, almost necessarily, though perhaps insensibly, to prefer upon all ordinary occasions the little and transitory profit of the monopolist to the great and permanent revenue of the sovereign . . . As sovereigns, their interest is exactly the same with that of the country which they govern. As merchants their interest is directly opposite to that interest.
(Book_Four*Chapt_VII*Of_Colonies)

I_Voter

Political Power in the U.S.- an under construction web site.
http://web.newsguy.com/politicaleconomy/

Anyone know a good company to buy a cheap block access (*not* monthly) usenet account from?

I don't know what you mean by "block access" but I get excellent service from Newsguy for $40/year. They offer a number of different plans at various rates.

Ooh, carry overs like EasyNews. I think this would be useful since my transfers vary each month (1 GB to 25 GB).

On http://newsguy.com/roadrunner.htm ... what are the differences between $9.95 for 50 GB per month (Express) and $14.95 for 50 GB per month (Premium)?

I also read that any left overs per month will be carried over to the next month. Is there a limit on how high I can hold? On EasyNews, I can go up to 500 to 750 GB depending on the packages I purchase.

Thank you in advance. :)

I used to use Newsguy when I still did the Usenet thing. They have rollover, extra capacity on demand, and an unlimited account option. Some of the account types come with mailboxes and web space.

Heh, I see they heard about this story already. Roadrunner customers get a free month with a new account.

Our election system is a joke, and the people with the power to fix it rely on it being broken to stay in power.

-----

If you are committed to more democracy voting for 3rd parties is normally the best action -UNLESS (see below )

Presidential Frontrunners Support Instant Runoff Voting

The two frontrunners for their party's nominations, Republican John McCain and Democrat Barack Obama, are both active backers of instant runoff voting (IRV). In 2002, Sen. McCain recorded a message for backers of IRV in Alaska, while that year Sen. Obama was the lead sponsor of legislation to implement IRV for certain Illinois elections. With most third party candidates also supporting IRV, we may see a rare issue of consensus this November, although neither McCain nor Obama have yet secured their party's nomination.

I_Voter

The Political Power of the U.S. Citizen

Perhaps the Bill of Rights needs be extended,...
----------

The weak link in that theoretical argument is that the U.S. Supreme court and our judicial system would have to enforce this piece of paper. Assuming civil liberties are defined as protections or privileges of the general population, as opposed to the political state or class, the fact that the U.S. Supreme court is about our most unrepresentative institution makes it totally unsuited for this enforcement.

The U.S. founding fathers were not so stupid as to expect that to be the case. They avoided the term democracy, and the francise was very limited, but they ultimately relied on a very democratic institution. They relied on the standard political institution of the citizen jury.

However, as is not surprising, the U.S. Supreme court has reinterpreted that institution.

For more information about what one book on the subject calls "The Evolution of a Doctrine" -

The U.S. Constitution and the Function of the Citizen Jury

We do things differently in Canada. Instead of trying to tilt one way or the other, we try our best to come up with compromises ..

-------------

IMO One of the reasons this is less common in the USA, at least in political discourse, is that we lack "real" political parties. Political parties used to be organizations that could field politicians that reflected the organizations interests, and would carry the organizations name on the ballot. By requiring, (in most states) party nomination by public primaries, the state can specify the requirements for ballot access for the primary elections. A modern US "party" candidate is just an individual that competes in a single election district. By registering with the state as a member of the party of their choice - just like any voter who wishes to vote in primary elections. They are individually free to choose to run under labels such as Republican, Democrat, or any other party that has achieved ballot status! There is no enforceable party platform

One important benefit of "real" political parties is their ability to facilitate political deals between different interests in society. A political party in a two-party system is a gigantic coalition of many different interests. Lacking an enforceable party platform - the other forces that decide which of these interests will get rewarded ( after the votes are counted ) are not very clear in either major party.

My short polemic text on the subject -

Do You Know What a Political Party is?

http://web.newsguy.com/politicaleconomy/DefinePoliticalParty.html

I wondered how many posts I'd need to read before someone ranted about Prolific's USB/1394-ATA bridge chips. Not many!

I submitted an entry for Linux's unusual_devs.h to say that the PL-3507 USB/1394 bridge misreports the number of blocks by 1 (a common bug, based on a misinterpretation of the SCSI spec, IIRC). That's fair enough - everyone gets stuff wrong from time to time, but a later firmware revision fixes the problem without making it distinguishable from the version with the bug (e.g. by incrementing the USB ProductID or something). To make matters worse, some devices that use the PL-3507 store the firmware on flash chips that aren't programmable in-circuit, so they're stuck at the firmware level they ship with.

Further, many firmware revisions have serious problems with their 1394 implementation. There are various hacks to work around them, but is it really worth the trouble?

To give you an idea of the video quality, here is a short video from work last night:

http://www.newsguy.com/~dattaway/Movie_005.avi

This has got to be the easiest to use camcorder ever. The binary utility to download the video is only 13KB too!

I think the only software I've ever seen made with pascal was Cubic Player

The brilliant (and free) Xnews client is written in Delphi (Pascal).

Pascal still lives on as Delphi and is still widely used, albeit mostly for win32 development.

Seconding FileZilla! It's been a godsend.

I'd love to see Xnews and QCD player up there as well. Just wish Xnews wasn't in such a stagnant state. :-/

This is why when all else fails, I turn to the alt.binaries groups to find my VCDs, SVCDs, etc. Use an excellent free news reader like XNews, browse to alt.binaries and then filter the groups based on your keyword ("enterprise" or "simpsons" or whatever). Many of the most popular shows have their own groups. And even the less popular show up in alt.binaries.vcd, alt.binaries.svcd, etc.

I second that. Xnews all the way, been using it for years, and while it isnt updated all that often, it still gets updated several times a year.

It does yEnc support, and multithreaded transfers via multiple servers if you need it to.

Its search and sort features are excellent too.

Xnews homepage

I used to use Forte Agent or Outlook Express to read news on my Windows machine, but I've long since switched to Xnews.

Which interpreter do you mean, the CLI, the X, or the Palm interpreter?

>CLI.

Frotz is a great CLI interpreter with lots of ports to other OSes. A very good place to start, keeps it simple, and brings back all the nostalgia of white-on-black text.

>OOPS, X.

If you're dedicated to X, try Zoom. It handles later versions of Z with graphics and sound as well.

>OOPS, PALM.

For those on the go, Frobnitz is a Z-Code machine for Palm Pilots, but I've found it has some weird display kinks. One really nice feature, though, is that you can extended-click a word on the screen and get a pop-up menu of common commands like Take, Examine, and so on, all pre-selected with the word in mind. It takes longer to explain than to learn how to use.

This is also a good sheet to use.

• Ability to open multiple newsgroups at once; this is useful to download the headers from a binaries newsgroup while reading a discussion newsgroup.
• Ability to automatically filter a binaries newsgroup to show complete multi-part attachments only. Pan can show complete attachments, but can't filter single-parters from multi-parters. In multimedia newsgroups, this is nice to filter out all the "txt"/"nfo"/"sfv"/"par"/etc attachments and just see the actual media files.
• Automatically jump to watched threads when opening a newsgroup.
• A plonker. (A bit redundant with a score file, but it's quicker to hit "K" and begone with a troll than have to edit the full score file; personal preference I suppose.)
• Cleaner UI for adding entries to the score file, especially when you want the entry to apply to all newsgroups. In Pan, you have to edit the newsgroup name to read ".", which isn't intuitive. The format of the score file under Pan isn't quite as friendly as XNews, either, but that's also kind of a personal preference.

Hopefully in a couple more releases Pan will close the gap and surpass XNews.

To relieve the slashdotted server, a similar review:
The actual spec (PDF!):
Intel's info about it:

http://reptilian.net/BTX_Spec_1_0.pdf
http://web.newsguy.com/nstrom/BTX_Spec_1_0.pdf

Mac users are seeing the light.

Xnews kicks ass.

Don't let the name fool you. It is a Windows program. I usderstand it works in Wine, although I haven't tried it yet.

In regards to mIRC, I also find it to suit my needs perfectly. Again, it could be because it's what I'm used to. But then again, I have tried numerous IRC clients, especially for Linux. I've also tried pIRCh, Klient and some other clients I don't remember the name of. Then there's X-chat, Kvirc and so on for Linux.

I generally consider myself quite open-minded about software. If there is a clearly superior product out there for my needs, I will use it. I use The Bat! for my e-mail needs, Agent for Usenet (never quite got the hang of Xnews, and Netscape is terrible, as is Outlook Express).

As a browser, I use Mozilla, Phoenix and Opera. I used to be a die-hard Netscape 4 user, but then Opera won me over with its superior ease of use, convenience and power surfing. When Mozilla became a real alternative, I found myself using it too, because I can't quite decide what is better for me. Opera is small, fast, and very polished. Mozilla has all kinds of "bells and whistles", many of which are actually useful, and you can "plug in" new functionality. I'm not sure I would recommend anyone new to PCs to use Mozilla, though.

Anyway, the point of this is that I use mIRC because I haven't found anything to better serve my needs. And since I generally use "alternative" software, apart from the operating system itself, I'd say that mIRC isn't actually all that bad. Unless it doesn't serve your needs. But to categorically judge it as crappy software is more a sign of narrow-mindedness than a nose for quality.

But hey, if you know of any other IRC clients for Windows I should have a look at, let me know.

Here it is before slashdotting.

I found out the RIAA is using a patented software package to create and distribute low quality original works designed to saturate the market. What you heard is true.

You've tried Frobnitz, right? It runs Z-Machine games, aka The Only Ones That Matter. ;)

All the guys, who are actively engaged in USENET should try Hamster a local Mail- and newsserver with great filtering capabilities and many other features. For reading newsgroups, there is IIRC no good Open-Source-newsreader, but if freeware is enough, you should try xnews

I've noticed this for a long time now. A lot of ISP's are doing that. I don't mind too much since my organization is "Crime" but it is a bit annoying yes. However if you want much better news service at not too much a year, try Newsguy. I used them back when I did a lot of usenet posting and for like $25/year (its gone up a bit since then) I was able to get non-binary access to all my favorite newsgroups. If you want access to binaries you have to pay a bit more, but the service is very customizable to fit your needs. They filtered out 95% of the spam and kept articles for a month, while roadrunner is lucky to keep them a week and seems to have cut corners on spam filtering. So I'd suggest if you are serious about usenet, buy your access (its less then $5/month for basic access) and get higher quality news feed with less spam and full control over those important headers.

Then get a better news server.

newsguy and usenet.com sell newsfeeds.

The newsgroup alt.binaries.multimedia is already bloated with traffic from people capturing and uploading tv episodes. Go here and search for "Enterprise" or "Buffy" in that group. You don't even need a Replay or a capture card to download every episode of these series, with patience.

The barn door is already wide open. If they shoot down Replay, will they go after my "Personal Cinema" card next?

It is here. Also check out this place for more cool z-machine and other interactive adventure stuff.

The Palm is such a great platform for interactive fiction. Why limit yourself to just reading? Go get pilot-frotzfrobnitz and some text adventures.

A company called NewsGuy has varying levels of access, including a basic free web-based service. http://www.newsguy.com (Their paid "Extra" usenet feed has all the binaries groups and is killer.)

For "Bob" learned that the Yeti were the original race,
and the humans came later, and there went the place!
They both were created by creatures from space.

The genes of the Yeti to this day survive
in those called SubGenius, those few left alive,
who are different as different as different can be.
Do you think one is you? I know one is me!

(from The Slack FAQ)

Also check the Fobonics Institute, accept no imitation!

Look at it here.
--

There is also Talkway, Randori, Extra Newsguy and Liquid Information

The list goes on an on and on.

If you want some background info on Pine Gap and Alice Springs and the whole UKUSA/SIGINT bit, check out:

The Puzzle Palace : A Report on America's Most Secret Agency, by James Bamford. Its an older book, but you'll learn quite a bit. I actually ended up having a lot more respect for the NSA when I had finished reading the book.

Another book you may want to check out is Pine Gap : Australia and the US Geostationary Signals
Intelligence Satellite Program. It may be harder to find this one. Its ISBN is 0043030025.

You can always look them up on Amazon.com

Here is one URL on Echelon to get you going.

By the way I think its very silly for Australia to openly or honestly admit this stuff in any fashion or form.