Google Expands Usenet Archive to 20 Years

Paul Boutin writes "The Ghost of Usenet Postings Past has returned to haunt many more of us: Google just announced the expansion of their Usenet archive back to May 3, 1981."Check out the past on Groups.google.com

Comments

Re:massive copyright violation

[Anonymous Coward]

Think this guy has something to hide?

Re:Kinda cool

[grammar fascist]

To AC or not to AC? Oh, well, I can take the hit...

C64, Lisa and Mac, AIDS (a purely homosexual disease?!?!- really weird 'cause I just found an old copy of Discover magazine that had a first mention of AIDS; blew me away due to difference in info we know now)

Change the word from "purely" to "primarily" and you've just about hit the nail on the head, even right now. So the author wasn't that far off (not that I'm exactly defending him), and it's really, really easy to see why people thought that initially.

What bothers me, though, is that we've done a complete about-face on this. It seems, when I was in my 7th-12th year, all our sex education classes told us that this was an "equal opportunity" (or some other nauseatingly misapplied phrase) disease. Until recently, I thought that more heterosexual people had it. (Wrong - dead wrong.) The problem with this political correctness is that we're not allowed to contain the disease like we would every other epidemic: identification and of at-risk groups ("No way! That's anti-homosexual!"), some sort of isolation of those individuals tested positive ("No way! I have a right to have sex!"), shutting down operations that deal in high-risk activities (we already tried it with gay sex clubs, but they put up such a civil rights stink that it never went anywhere), and so on.

That's right, kids - our concern for appearing to give everyone a fair shake is going to keep this epidemic around much, much longer than it has to be. I wonder if our civil rights heroes of the past would approve...