My school has had napster blocked for several months now. initially, there was quite an uproar, with people spouting off about freedom of speech, and how their daddy pays taxes so they can have whatever they want. (Its a public school).
The problem isnt even necessarily that the legality of the whole thing is questionable at times.
the problem is that while we have a very fast internet connection, it is intended for educational use. This doesnt mean that you cant use it for other purposes. No one is going to stop you from looking at porn or whatever else, SO LONG AS IT IS NOT INTERFERING WITH THE MISSION OF THE UNIVERSITY. When napster is pulling hundreds of gigs a day thru our campus, that is to the point where the bandwidth used is infringing on what other people need to use for legitimate university business. I shouldnt be having to wait forever to download patches for solaris because a bunch of kiddies are in their dorm rooms serving up a veritable library of mp3's.
And adding a faster connection isnt an easy solution. It costs money. A lot of money. We have OC-3's, T-1s and all sorts of other stuff running all over the place, and normally i can download stuff at a very reasonable rate (> 200K/s)....you cant justify adding higher bandwidth for mp3s...... my $0.02
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Its not just a matter of whose dime it is.
My school has had napster blocked for several months now. initially, there was quite an uproar, with people spouting off about freedom of speech, and how their daddy pays taxes so they can have whatever they want. (Its a public school).
The problem isnt even necessarily that the legality of the whole thing is questionable at times.
the problem is that while we have a very fast internet connection, it is intended for educational use. This doesnt mean that you cant use it for other purposes. No one is going to stop you from looking at porn or whatever else, SO LONG AS IT IS NOT INTERFERING WITH THE MISSION OF THE UNIVERSITY. When napster is pulling hundreds of gigs a day thru our campus, that is to the point where the bandwidth used is infringing on what other people need to use for legitimate university business. I shouldnt be having to wait forever to download patches for solaris because a bunch of kiddies are in their dorm rooms serving up a veritable library of mp3's.
And adding a faster connection isnt an easy solution. It costs money. A lot of money. We have OC-3's, T-1s and all sorts of other stuff running all over the place, and normally i can download stuff at a very reasonable rate (> 200K/s)....you cant justify adding higher bandwidth for mp3s......
my $0.02