A half-litre beer cost 25NOK at a student pub (run by students, for the student societies), 29NOK at the cheapest regular pub I know about, and around 50NOK (say 45-60) at most others. At least in Oslo, where I live.
To rent an apartment.. well, that really varies depending on where in Oslo you live. Say between 2500 and 10000, most student get apartments for around 2500-3500NOK/month
Bus ticket: 30NOK if paid when you get onto the bus (in oslo), 20NOK if you've got a prepaid ticket.
Hamburger: Depends on where you buy it. 37NOK for a Big One, 75NOK if you buy yourself a good one at a REAL Hamburger-kiosk.
Coca Cola: aprox 10NOK for a 0.5 litre bottle. Aprox 15NOK for 1.5 litre bottle.
Loaf of bread: really depends on the type of bread. Between 10 and 25 NOK
>i>And fleeing is simply unthinkable for the average Norwegian -- not only is the culture different, but there's no state borders to hide behind to avoid prosecution, like in the US.
That is only half-true. IAAN (I am a Norwegian;-) - and I now of at least one case where a guy from where I live fled to Spain to avoid prosecution. He's currently hiding in Spain - and has been there for three or four years or something like that.
He was charged with nacotics-related crime, having caused severe bodily harm, and some other stuff. The severe bodily harm part was kidnapping a guy that had ratted him out to the police, and torturing him for a weekend (basically whipping the hide of his back off, breaking some bones and other bad things).
But of course, that is the exception to the rule.;-)
For those of us who remember "motion sickness" in the original Doom - I guess it's just a matter of time before people get accustomed to the feelings.
I remember I needed to take hours of breaks after just half-an-hour of Doom the first couple of weeks, because of motion sickness. Far worse than "car sickness" which I used to have when I was a kid.
I grew up from "car sickness". I grew up from "motion sickness" in games. I guess it'll just take some weeks/months of playing with these electrode-things before one get used to it - and thus simply doesn't need the barf-bag.
Actually, having a development environment on a publically accessible server is a BAD THING(tm). If someone manages to compromise the server, then the first thing that they'll probably do is install a rootkit.
I fail to see exactly how this is prevented by not having development tools installed. If there is a writeable area on the server (and there probably are), it's as simple as statically compiling the kit before pushing it.
Not to mention that the cracker would have no problems shoveling in a working gcc.
Now, the thing to remember about most rootkits is that they require development tools so they can be compiled on the compromised server. Leave them without dev tools and they can't get the rootkit to do anything.
Okay, not that important, but you either need two boxes, one with and one without development tools, or one with.
The point is that there is a bigger probability that you'll need to patch the firewall from time to time - than the probability of a cracker breaking into it and abusing the tools.
Also, it's _very_ conventient to have the development tools ready when you need that little tool on the firewall Right Now, and don't want to fiddle with using the identical box WITH development tools to build it, then transfer the new libraries and programs to the firewall box.
Okay, I'll probably be ridiculed for this post by some pedantic bastard - but what the heck.
I'm Norwegian. When I went to primary school, english courses started in the 4th grade. I sucked. Couldn't understand shit, and was among the few that really couldn't get a grasp on the language. Never was any good at human languages.
The summer between 6th and 7th grade I got my first PC. I had had various Consoles, and mostly "arcade-game"-computers before that, but now I had a PC. Think Monkey Island. Think Police Quest. Hey - think Leisure Suit Larry;-D
In addition, I forced myself to read "PC-Format", an english computer rag.
Guess what happened? Went from one of the worst to one of the best in less than 6 months. These days I read english just as well as norwegian - and type both languages equally bad.
(Okay you pedantic bastards, rip this post to shreds. Point out my spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes and so forth;-)
Games (and interest in the subject) are good teachers!
It has changed the way we get information (could you get instant answers to very detailed, very obscure questions before the internet? No, because as good as reference librarians are, they don't have the sheer scope of details that Google can provide)
While google certainly is a quick way to search for something, and a very good "librarian" - it doesn't have the sheer scope of details that the libraries themselves can provide. Unfortunately the Internet doesn't contain anywhere NEAR as much usefull information as a good library - at least not easily accessible - nor is all that information indexed by google.
While the Internet certainly can give you great pointers for books, most information is still in books form, not available for download.
Computer geek types who want to be clever need to understand one thing. Much of the law is based on intent and result. It doesn't matter if you print a file out, fax it, then send it via piegon droppings.
Actually, I've got a funny little story about exactly that. The US have (had?) this funny law about exporting strong crypto.
Now, this law only covered the electronic implementation of the crypto systems. If you remember Phil Zimmerman of PGP fame.. well.. he got into a lot of trouble for releasing PGP.
To make it _legal_.. what did he/they do? Well, they _printed out_ the source code. Then they mailed it to the University of Oslo (Norway), where the entire source code was scanned in and checked for errors - then compiled and distributed.
Legally.
If my memory served me right this was in the late 80s of the early 90s.
There is a difference between trolling and being outright frustrated by idiocy.
It's not a total block, as I pointed out.
I appologize for flaming you for that. I seem to have been a bit hasty reading your post. However, when I look at your first point again, I just have to ask.. how much work do you think that webinterface and the following filters would be to implement? I can't fathom the amount of ugly hacks needed. I can't see any good way to implement in any of the systems I've worked on.
Luckily I've never worked with dialup;)
Unless someone is running their own email server... but then that's a business use not residential.
Bullshit. It's quite practical to run ones own mailserver for ones own private domains. Of course, many people "don't see the use", and think that "one can just use the ISP's outgoing mailserver". Bollocks I say.
There will always be ISPs to cater to the business/poweruser market
Indeed, and usually more expensive. What I want is quite simply a link with some bandwidth - no tech support (but a competent NOC, when things fail on their side), no bullshit. They don't need to provide a webserver, mailserver, newsserver or anything - just give me the damn bandwidth and an IP address and shut up about it. Oh, and please - they could have a good abuse department to cut off actual abusers.
How many mail clients *don't* support sending mail via proxy these days?
I have to admit that I haven't checked whether pine, mutt,/bin/mail or any of the other clients I tend to use have that option -- never _Seen_ it though.
And for really old clients which don't support outbound mail via proxy, instead of sending your email out through mail.yourserver.com, you simply send it out through mail.yourisp.com.
No thanks - and I should't be required to give a better reason than that.
It's up to the ISPs as to whether this hell would be worth it to implement. Customer protection + bandwidth savings + good netizen karma > implementation hell?
Good netizen? To break end-to-end connectivity by random blocking? bullshit.
All of which are idiot solutions. It's a hack, and it's a damn ugly hack. Blocking outbound port 25 breaks the option of having an external host with authentication which you can connect to and do your stuff. Which is irritating to say the least.
A proxy server would have to be supported by all the pieces of software in use. Not fscking likely
The "allow 10 hosts per dialup connection per DHCP lease, per hour" option _could_ be alright, hadn't it been for the _slight_ problem that it would be hell to implement in most cases.
You could always try out contacting webjedi@lucasarts.com , but read http://www.lucasarts.com/contact/ first. Not sure wheter this is an "unsolicited submission" - but quite frankly, it's the only contact address they actually list.
This is exactly the kind of anal-retentiveness he is commenting on. If you put a box on the internet, it will receive packets. As long as it isn't flooding the network, nor tries to exploit anything - shut up about it.
You left Mandrake off of this list because of what?
Not that I want to start a distro war, but my personal experience with Mandrake is that it has decayed since mdk8.1 . The 8.2 release was b0rken in so many ways that it wasn't even funny (for me). When I tried participating in betatesting of 9.0 (I think), i reported lots of bugs. None of which even got a single reply. None of which was fixed. (hangups, not able to mount fat12/16 properly, and others (At least I couldn't get them to work:)).
I've never had such problems with SuSE, which seems well tested when released. Personally I used mdk on all desktops from 7.0 to 8.1, used 8.2 on a couple of machines, both which broke so horribly that I've never been able to trust the distro since. I've tried 9.0, but wasn't overly impressed. SuSE on the other hand has worked flawlessly, and is my new favorite.
RedHat is, imho, only good for some server tasks where it is/was the only certified distro. But that is just my opinion.
Not entirely correct, I think (IANAL though). My understanding is that anyone can appeal to lagmannsretten - but one may be rejected if its an obvious case.
This case is not obvious - and probably will not be rejected if there is an appeal. A thypical 'rejected' case is if some graphitti-punk is caught by the police, and wants to appeal the lower-court ruling claiming "I didn't do it" - when it is obvious that he did.
If you are an ISP, the users are your customers, and they are right (as customers always should be).
Yes and no.
Of course, they are the ones that pay you - but one should always try to explain what is the proper way to do things.
In my opinion, at least.
Education instead of cushioning.
on
E-Mail Size Limits?
·
· Score: 4, Insightful
Okay, I'm sure I'll sound like a elitist prick to some people, but I really don't care. What you should do, is to _educate_ people in what the Internet consists of, and what medium you should do to do what.
Explain to people that sending large emails really isn't very nice, that you'll most likely increase the overhead due to the way the files are encoded, and so forth.
Explain to people, the difference between ftp, smtp, http, pop3, nntp, imap and so forth. If you're daring, even explain them how to use telnet. Don't go into the very _details_ of the protocols unless they ask, of course. Just explain how things should be done.
If people use instant messenging, explain the difference between IM, ICQ, IRC, and whatever they want to use.
Explain things instead of just choosing the easy way out and adapting to them - except if their way really _is_ better.
That's my opinion. Now flame me for beeing an elitist bastard.
based on your comments on this story, i used to think you probably just a bit immature. reading the comment above i now see that you're just plain stupid!
Actually, you're just not well educated about the issue at hand.
You didn't even read the post you answered to. I didn't claim that the US denies entry to all norwegians. However, they are quite strict against certain other nationalities. Of course, there are exceptions - but EFNet supported +e (exception) a while ago. Not sure if they do it anymore though.
Killing protesters kinda works for china, too. It is shocking to see how easily people fall back to uncivilized measures when their comfort might be reduced by the smallest amount ("People didn't understand the system"). Banning 99.9% innocent users is not a solution to a 0.1% problem, unless you desire a segregated net.
Not a good example from your side. Killing people is quite different from refusing someone access.
Why doesn't the US let anyone that wants enter their country? Isn't that _unfair_?
Why doesn't Canada let anyone that wants enter their country? Isn't that _unfair_?
Why doesn't Norway let anyone that wants enter their country (well, we almost do *sigh*)? Isn't that unfair?
And so forth.
No, its not unfair.
On IRC, on the internet - you can even start your own irc-server, or your own irc-channel, if you do not like the alternatives you have, or you're denied access to other peoples resources.
booohooo, i feel SO sorry for those that are refused. Booohoooo.
It would seem that your definition of idiot is even broader then mine. Based on the above paragraph it seems you place about 99.9% of Internet users in this category. And you're a ChanOp on #norge? (for our international readers: norge is Norwegian for Norway).
I did indeed generalize, and I did indeed make the problem larger than it is. But the main point stands. If you're running, say, #usa or whatever - and three out of four norwegians that join the channel acts like idiots. What is the natural thing to do? Ban the damn country - of course.
The same goes if 3 out of 4 users from one ISP acts like idiots.
Norway unfortunately have far too many 13-year-olds online on IRC, which does reflect negatively on us. Our country get banned from far too many channels. I fully understand and support those that ban us however.
Not everyone has the possibility to get an account on another computer, not everyone has the opportunity to pick and choose their ISP. Me, i work in the industry, and would have no problems finding a host that would allow me access, but you're missing the point...
IRC is a priviledge, not a right. If you're having problems getting onto IRC, its YOUR problem, nobody elses. Maybe its elitist, in my eyes - you don't have a _right_ to join any channel, any network, nor a _right_ to join any channel. Its a priviledge, and it may be revoked for whatever reason those that run the channel finds appropriate. Wheter YOU find it appropriate is quite irrelevant.
I think a have a fairly good idea about how much noise a "few" noisemakers can generate, yes! My point is that this is (to me) a completely unacceptable approach for controlling noise. On my list of really bad ideas, it's right up there with reducing SPAM by blocking all mail from Korea and China.
If I don't want to receive email from those countries, then I block them. Which I've done on several on my accounts. I wouldn't implement it on a mailserver-wide though.
Why would _I_ want to receive any mail from Korea or China? If people I know there want to send me email, they may ask me to give them a shellaccount on one of my machines, which they can send their mail from.
I really don't care enough about this to apply by brain to that problem. All I was saying was that I'd rather not hang out on a channel where thinks that blocking ~70% of all Norwegians is an acceptable solution to the noise control problem.
Don't do that then. I'm sure you won't be missed. You're getting irritated because you're blocked, but nobody else really cares about it.:-) too bad.
Slashdot Mirror
You are aware that some people don't like to be contacted electronically? :)
. ht ml
For a good example. Try Donald Knuth.
http://www-cs-faculty.stanford.edu/~knuth/email
Just because you choose to be ignorent of the fact that when you purchase and play a DVD you are agreeing to certain things,
I suggest that you read up on norwegian instead of US law.
bah. Stupid me. 37 NOK for a "Big Mac", "Big One" is a pizza. ;)
A half-litre beer cost 25NOK at a student pub (run by students, for the student societies), 29NOK at the cheapest regular pub I know about, and around 50NOK (say 45-60) at most others. At least in Oslo, where I live.
To rent an apartment.. well, that really varies depending on where in Oslo you live. Say between 2500 and 10000, most student get apartments for around 2500-3500NOK/month
Bus ticket: 30NOK if paid when you get onto the bus (in oslo), 20NOK if you've got a prepaid ticket.
Hamburger: Depends on where you buy it. 37NOK for a Big One, 75NOK if you buy yourself a good one at a REAL Hamburger-kiosk.
Coca Cola: aprox 10NOK for a 0.5 litre bottle. Aprox 15NOK for 1.5 litre bottle.
Loaf of bread: really depends on the type of bread. Between 10 and 25 NOK
Cinema ticket: 75 in Oslo.
Because this is Norway. We generally don't sue for insane amounts - and such demands would be flat out denied by the court.
I'll be quite surprised if he actually gets as much as he has demanded. Especially since this has led to him getting a quite good job.
>i>And fleeing is simply unthinkable for the average Norwegian -- not only is the culture different, but there's no state borders to hide behind to avoid prosecution, like in the US.
;-) - and I now of at least one case where a guy from where I live fled to Spain to avoid prosecution. He's currently hiding in Spain - and has been there for three or four years or something like that.
;-)
That is only half-true. IAAN (I am a Norwegian
He was charged with nacotics-related crime, having caused severe bodily harm, and some other stuff. The severe bodily harm part was kidnapping a guy that had ratted him out to the police, and torturing him for a weekend (basically whipping the hide of his back off, breaking some bones and other bad things).
But of course, that is the exception to the rule.
For those of us who remember "motion sickness" in the original Doom - I guess it's just a matter of time before people get accustomed to the feelings.
I remember I needed to take hours of breaks after just half-an-hour of Doom the first couple of weeks, because of motion sickness. Far worse than "car sickness" which I used to have when I was a kid.
I grew up from "car sickness". I grew up from "motion sickness" in games. I guess it'll just take some weeks/months of playing with these electrode-things before one get used to it - and thus simply doesn't need the barf-bag.
Read about this when I went to highschool.. which should be.. 5-7 years ago
Actually, having a development environment on a publically accessible server is a BAD THING(tm). If someone manages to compromise the server, then the first thing that they'll probably do is install a rootkit.
I fail to see exactly how this is prevented by not having development tools installed. If there is a writeable area on the server (and there probably are), it's as simple as statically compiling the kit before pushing it.
Not to mention that the cracker would have no problems shoveling in a working gcc.
Now, the thing to remember about most rootkits is that they require development tools so they can be compiled on the compromised server. Leave them without dev tools and they can't get the rootkit to do anything.
One word: Bullshit.
Where exactly did you learn to be an admin?
Okay, not that important, but you either need two boxes, one with and one without development tools, or one with.
The point is that there is a bigger probability that you'll need to patch the firewall from time to time - than the probability of a cracker breaking into it and abusing the tools.
Also, it's _very_ conventient to have the development tools ready when you need that little tool on the firewall Right Now, and don't want to fiddle with using the identical box WITH development tools to build it, then transfer the new libraries and programs to the firewall box.
Okay, I'll probably be ridiculed for this post by some pedantic bastard - but what the heck.
;-D
;-)
I'm Norwegian. When I went to primary school, english courses started in the 4th grade. I sucked. Couldn't understand shit, and was among the few that really couldn't get a grasp on the language. Never was any good at human languages.
The summer between 6th and 7th grade I got my first PC. I had had various Consoles, and mostly "arcade-game"-computers before that, but now I had a PC. Think Monkey Island. Think Police Quest. Hey - think Leisure Suit Larry
In addition, I forced myself to read "PC-Format", an english computer rag.
Guess what happened? Went from one of the worst to one of the best in less than 6 months. These days I read english just as well as norwegian - and type both languages equally bad.
(Okay you pedantic bastards, rip this post to shreds. Point out my spelling mistakes, grammar mistakes and so forth
Games (and interest in the subject) are good teachers!
It has changed the way we get information (could you get instant answers to very detailed, very obscure questions before the internet? No, because as good as reference librarians are, they don't have the sheer scope of details that Google can provide)
While google certainly is a quick way to search for something, and a very good "librarian" - it doesn't have the sheer scope of details that the libraries themselves can provide. Unfortunately the Internet doesn't contain anywhere NEAR as much usefull information as a good library - at least not easily accessible - nor is all that information indexed by google.
While the Internet certainly can give you great pointers for books, most information is still in books form, not available for download.
At least, that is my experience.
Computer geek types who want to be clever need to understand one thing. Much of the law is based on intent and result. It doesn't matter if you print a file out, fax it, then send it via piegon droppings.
.. well .. he got into a lot of trouble for releasing PGP.
.. what did he/they do? Well, they _printed out_ the source code. Then they mailed it to the University of Oslo (Norway), where the entire source code was scanned in and checked for errors - then compiled and distributed.
Actually, I've got a funny little story about exactly that. The US have (had?) this funny law about exporting strong crypto.
Now, this law only covered the electronic implementation of the crypto systems. If you remember Phil Zimmerman of PGP fame
To make it _legal_
Legally.
If my memory served me right this was in the late 80s of the early 90s.
[Ignoring your trolling...]
.. how much work do you think that webinterface and the following filters would be to implement? I can't fathom the amount of ugly hacks needed. I can't see any good way to implement in any of the systems I've worked on.
;)
/bin/mail or any of the other clients I tend to use have that option -- never _Seen_ it though.
There is a difference between trolling and being outright frustrated by idiocy.
It's not a total block, as I pointed out.
I appologize for flaming you for that. I seem to have been a bit hasty reading your post. However, when I look at your first point again, I just have to ask
Luckily I've never worked with dialup
Unless someone is running their own email server... but then that's a business use not residential.
Bullshit. It's quite practical to run ones own mailserver for ones own private domains. Of course, many people "don't see the use", and think that "one can just use the ISP's outgoing mailserver". Bollocks I say.
There will always be ISPs to cater to the business/poweruser market
Indeed, and usually more expensive. What I want is quite simply a link with some bandwidth - no tech support (but a competent NOC, when things fail on their side), no bullshit. They don't need to provide a webserver, mailserver, newsserver or anything - just give me the damn bandwidth and an IP address and shut up about it. Oh, and please - they could have a good abuse department to cut off actual abusers.
How many mail clients *don't* support sending mail via proxy these days?
I have to admit that I haven't checked whether pine, mutt,
And for really old clients which don't support outbound mail via proxy, instead of sending your email out through mail.yourserver.com, you simply send it out through mail.yourisp.com.
No thanks - and I should't be required to give a better reason than that.
It's up to the ISPs as to whether this hell would be worth it to implement. Customer protection + bandwidth savings + good netizen karma > implementation hell?
Good netizen? To break end-to-end connectivity by random blocking? bullshit.
All of which are idiot solutions. It's a hack, and it's a damn ugly hack. Blocking outbound port 25 breaks the option of having an external host with authentication which you can connect to and do your stuff. Which is irritating to say the least.
A proxy server would have to be supported by all the pieces of software in use. Not fscking likely
The "allow 10 hosts per dialup connection per DHCP lease, per hour" option _could_ be alright, hadn't it been for the _slight_ problem that it would be hell to implement in most cases.
You could always try out contacting webjedi@lucasarts.com , but read http://www.lucasarts.com/contact/ first. Not sure wheter this is an "unsolicited submission" - but quite frankly, it's the only contact address they actually list.
This is exactly the kind of anal-retentiveness he is commenting on. If you put a box on the internet, it will receive packets. As long as it isn't flooding the network, nor tries to exploit anything - shut up about it.
You left Mandrake off of this list because of what?
:)).
Not that I want to start a distro war, but my personal experience with Mandrake is that it has decayed since mdk8.1 . The 8.2 release was b0rken in so many ways that it wasn't even funny (for me). When I tried participating in betatesting of 9.0 (I think), i reported lots of bugs. None of which even got a single reply. None of which was fixed. (hangups, not able to mount fat12/16 properly, and others (At least I couldn't get them to work
I've never had such problems with SuSE, which seems well tested when released. Personally I used mdk on all desktops from 7.0 to 8.1, used 8.2 on a couple of machines, both which broke so horribly that I've never been able to trust the distro since. I've tried 9.0, but wasn't overly impressed. SuSE on the other hand has worked flawlessly, and is my new favorite.
RedHat is, imho, only good for some server tasks where it is/was the only certified distro. But that is just my opinion.
This was a criminal case. JJ was charged for breaking criminal law, paragraph 145, second WhateverTheEnglishTermIs.
There is no such thing as 'double jeopardy' in Norway.
Not entirely correct, I think (IANAL though). My understanding is that anyone can appeal to lagmannsretten - but one may be rejected if its an obvious case.
This case is not obvious - and probably will not be rejected if there is an appeal. A thypical 'rejected' case is if some graphitti-punk is caught by the police, and wants to appeal the lower-court ruling claiming "I didn't do it" - when it is obvious that he did.
This is not such a case.
If you are an ISP, the users are your customers, and they are right (as customers always should be).
Yes and no.
Of course, they are the ones that pay you - but one should always try to explain what is the proper way to do things.
In my opinion, at least.
Okay, I'm sure I'll sound like a elitist prick to some people, but I really don't care. What you should do, is to _educate_ people in what the Internet consists of, and what medium you should do to do what.
Explain to people that sending large emails really isn't very nice, that you'll most likely increase the overhead due to the way the files are encoded, and so forth.
Explain to people, the difference between ftp, smtp, http, pop3, nntp, imap and so forth. If you're daring, even explain them how to use telnet. Don't go into the very _details_ of the protocols unless they ask, of course. Just explain how things should be done.
If people use instant messenging, explain the difference between IM, ICQ, IRC, and whatever they want to use.
Explain things instead of just choosing the easy way out and adapting to them - except if their way really _is_ better.
That's my opinion. Now flame me for beeing an elitist bastard.
based on your comments on this story, i used to think you probably just a bit immature. reading the comment above i now see that you're just plain stupid!
Actually, you're just not well educated about the issue at hand.
You didn't even read the post you answered to. I didn't claim that the US denies entry to all norwegians. However, they are quite strict against certain other nationalities. Of course, there are exceptions - but EFNet supported +e (exception) a while ago. Not sure if they do it anymore though.
Killing protesters kinda works for china, too. It is shocking to see how easily people fall back to uncivilized measures when their comfort might be reduced by the smallest amount ("People didn't understand the system"). Banning 99.9% innocent users is not a solution to a 0.1% problem, unless you desire a segregated net.
Not a good example from your side. Killing people is quite different from refusing someone access.
Why doesn't the US let anyone that wants enter their country? Isn't that _unfair_?
Why doesn't Canada let anyone that wants enter their country? Isn't that _unfair_?
Why doesn't Norway let anyone that wants enter their country (well, we almost do *sigh*)? Isn't that unfair?
And so forth.
No, its not unfair.
On IRC, on the internet - you can even start your own irc-server, or your own irc-channel, if you do not like the alternatives you have, or you're denied access to other peoples resources.
booohooo, i feel SO sorry for those that are refused. Booohoooo.
It would seem that your definition of idiot is even broader then mine. Based on the above paragraph it seems you place about 99.9% of Internet users in this category. And you're a ChanOp on #norge? (for our international readers: norge is Norwegian for Norway).
:-) too bad.
I did indeed generalize, and I did indeed make the problem larger than it is. But the main point stands. If you're running, say, #usa or whatever - and three out of four norwegians that join the channel acts like idiots. What is the natural thing to do? Ban the damn country - of course.
The same goes if 3 out of 4 users from one ISP acts like idiots.
Norway unfortunately have far too many 13-year-olds online on IRC, which does reflect negatively on us. Our country get banned from far too many channels. I fully understand and support those that ban us however.
Not everyone has the possibility to get an account on another computer, not everyone has the opportunity to pick and choose their ISP. Me, i work in the industry, and would have no problems finding a host that would allow me access, but you're missing the point...
IRC is a priviledge, not a right. If you're having problems getting onto IRC, its YOUR problem, nobody elses. Maybe its elitist, in my eyes - you don't have a _right_ to join any channel, any network, nor a _right_ to join any channel. Its a priviledge, and it may be revoked for whatever reason those that run the channel finds appropriate. Wheter YOU find it appropriate is quite irrelevant.
I think a have a fairly good idea about how much noise a "few" noisemakers can generate, yes! My point is that this is (to me) a completely unacceptable approach for controlling noise. On my list of really bad ideas, it's right up there with reducing SPAM by blocking all mail from Korea and China.
If I don't want to receive email from those countries, then I block them. Which I've done on several on my accounts. I wouldn't implement it on a mailserver-wide though.
Why would _I_ want to receive any mail from Korea or China? If people I know there want to send me email, they may ask me to give them a shellaccount on one of my machines, which they can send their mail from.
I really don't care enough about this to apply by brain to that problem. All I was saying was that I'd rather not hang out on a channel where thinks that blocking ~70% of all Norwegians is an acceptable solution to the noise control problem.
Don't do that then. I'm sure you won't be missed. You're getting irritated because you're blocked, but nobody else really cares about it.