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Requiem for Usenet
xoip writes "Jack Kapica at The Globe and Mail reports that '[Canadian ISP] Rogers is removing [Usenet] service without changing its rates, suggesting subscribers turn to portal technology controlled by Rogers/Yahoo, or to subscribe to an outside Usenet service -- at extra cost.'" From the article: "Aside from being based on the written word, which many game-playing kids would rather not make the effort to compose, Usenet is deeply flawed. Its democratic dream offers no defence against viruses, spammers, criminals, hucksters or deranged individuals. Rummaging about in Usenet is like slumming through the tenderloin district during the plague years -- your chances of catching a computer virus or a handful of invitations to unspeakable sexual acts is much greater than finding what you were looking for in the first place."
I'm looking for invitations to unspeakable sexual acts?
No, I don't want a free iPod
your chances of catching [...] a handful of invitations to unspeakable sexual acts is much greater than finding what you were looking for in the first place.
;- )
I think they're missing on what people are looking for on usenet in the first place
You can't take the sky from me...
Indeed, Slashdot seems to be losing its positions in the dupe posting market fast...
Man is a slave because freedom is difficult, whereas slavery is easy.
> Already posted on digg three times now.
Woah! Digg already duped this article twice! That's it Slashdot, I'm switching!
In other news today, the Atlantic ocean is rather wet, the Great Attractor is rather far away, and the Pope is rather religious.
I thought the creationist mob were blockheaded... then I went to sci.physics and met the relativity deniers. Wow.
Real Daleks don't climb stairs - they level the building.
Don't talk about usenet!
alt.fading.usenet.dwindles.declines.ain't-what-it
alt.remote.past.!dead.!gone.!forgotten
alt.sacred.format.preserve.continue.cherish
alt.noble.cry.resound.ring.echo:
"alt.adjective.noun.verb.verb.verb!"
Whence? Hence. Whither? Thither.
What exactly are "pirate stimulating late-night conversations?" and why would I want to have them?
How does a 7-person democracy cut a pie? Into 4 pieces.
/ Summon Bevets.
Athletic Scholarships to universities make as much sense as academic scholarships to sports teams.
1337/IM $p3k wair u h4a 2 d3c!p3r wh47 1$ $4!d
There are times when I think "I'm not that much of a geek." Then I read something like that with ease and realize, yes, yes I am.
God invented whiskey so the Irish would not rule the world.
I suppose like, "Yarrr, matey, before we go sleep it off in our racks, pass me that bottle of rum and I'll tell ye o' the time we caught this fat merchant freighter off the coast, yarr..."
Tom Swiss | the infamous tms | my blog
You cannot wash away blood with blood
Me too. ;-)
According to this article you could post a picture of that to Usenet and probably satisfy somebody's sexual food fetish.
.agrippa.
I'm a SysAd at a small (5000 subscriber) ISP in California for about 5 months. We recently stopped offering Usenet after I did an audit on the NNTP server. I found we only had 2 separate IPs in the logs using NNTP and the server was downloading 2-6Gb a day. So I took the files in the spool and filtered for names of Usenet groups. What did I find? Mostly foot pr0n. Were were paying I don't know how much for how long so 1 or 2 users could feed their foot pr0n habbit. I had seen enough, it was going down. We got 1 call to complian and that user left us (quite angry too, don't mess with a man's foot pr0n habbit =). On the plus side we made money since the useage on our OC3 has gone down 30% since I offed the server. I still have the output of my filter. We keep it on one of the file servers here for amusement.
And there is the difference between USENET and Slashdot right there..
On USENET, there is absolutely zero chance that someone would have failed to quote "Don't talk to me about naval tradition. It's nothing but rum, sodomy and the lash." This, of course, would be followed with an off topic conversation twenty threads long about whether Churchill ever said such a thing or not, finally ended when the entire thread degenerates to a discussion of Nazi's.
On Slashdot, someone will backhandedly mention rum, sodomy and lashes, and from there we'll just drift off-topic three threads deep, moderators slamming us with "Offtopic" all the way while we slowly degenerate to a fascinating treatease on totalitarian regimes circa 1940.
Frankly, I'm much more proud of my Slashdot contributions. If it weren't for bad karma, I'd have no karma at all!
- Zarq