how does this affect moderation?
on
Slashdot Code Update
·
· Score: 3, Interesting
I'm just wondering... does the system disable itself when we get moderation points, so we can do our jobs looking at the entire available pool of posts, or does it continue to block out people we don't like?
My first thought, when seeing this new ability, was of course to add Anonymous Coward as a foe. But that's silly - just because some people troll is no reason to deny myself the ability to read some possibly insightful comments by others who can't or won't log in. If any named user is consistently trolling, he ought to simply be banned.
Now I'm thinking - okay, so marking people down is pointless, but marking them up can be quite useful, especially if we can start sorting article comments so high-rated friends go first... in essence, this is pretty much the exact same approach that I take when I moderate. I don't waste points downvoting, I use my votes to call attention to the good stuff. And so I shall do, with the friend system - if I like comments by people consistently, I want to be told when they have new stuff they've written.
That's a nice screener list, but isn't it too strict? Almost all legitimate mailing lists include removal instructions, now.
Spamcop is cool, but it only works after the fact, unless you become a paying member. Sure, you can report spammers all day and night, but the biggest ones have their IP space SWIPed to them directly, which decreases Spamcop effectiveness substantially. Also, if you run Outlook, it's very difficult to get the full message out to Spamcop for reporting, anyway.
Rather than get into what can be done on the client side, I'd like to see more on how to block it on the server side - I have a vanity domain, and I'm going to set up a box with sendmail or postfix or something... I'd like to know what filters work best in that environment.
My goal is to block the mail as it's trying to hit the server; for example, since the Excite.com admins are refusing to help me reset my password for free mail account, which is forwarding spam into my vanity domain 30 or 40 a day, I want it to find everything with a from line like @excite.com, or everything with an IP range that matches Excite.com space or a HELO statement with %excite.com% in it, to immediately get a 550 abort line back "sorry, Excite.com admins are refusing to resolve a mail issue with me, and so I'm refusing everything sent through them now. Don't complain to me, complain to them. If you are interested, please read the history of the dispute at my website; my new contact address can be found at the bottom." Or, for everything from PostmasterGeneral (a company that specifically is geared to hosting commercial lists that are supposedly opt-in, but they take their clients' word for it and only remove people when they complain, making them opt-out at best - why would anyone want anything form them?), search for PMGUID (their list tag) in the message, then make the 550 read simply:"Up yours."
Alternatively, does anyone know how to set up sendmail/postfix/some other linux mail server to bounce offending mail directly to their hosts' operations mail? And I don't mean just abuse@, I mean to their NOC, DNS admin, postmaster, IP admin, AND CEO if I can find it. Surely, if I start clogging their internal mailboxes with "hey... if you don't want to see these mails pile up in your inbox, don't let your customer send them to me - as long as your abuse team continues to ignore me, *you* will get these mails," followed by the spam I am getting, they will have to take me a bit more seriously.
Any suggestions how to make either alternative work?
I have to agree with this. With starvation-related deaths in Afghanistan (conceivably going over a million) as just the most obvious example, there are better ways to spend the money. Sure, the EFF is cool. General human rights is even cooler. But... let's keep people from dying of things like starvation, disease, and our own political expediency before we worry too much about their rights - or ours.
Wil, I like ya - I really do. I just have to wonder, though - if you had a million dollars to invest on a cause, why you'd pick the EFF. I hope it wasn't just because of some 31337 haxor image or something...
Disaster and famine relief organizations (I'm thinking Mercy Corps, not the Red Cross), Doctors Without Borders, CARE, and UNICEF have relatively low administrative overheads (Mercy Corps claims 5%!) and work to stop people from dying. If slashdotters want to concentrate on helping people at home, plenty of homeless shelters and havens for abused and/or addicted women and children, not to mention any number of cancer and disease societies and, yes, famine relief organizations in almost every city, also are desperate for funding.
A friend of mine and I each bought different models at different times, and we've had lots of problems with them:
His hard drive kept failing, and the drive he bought to replace it failed as well. That makes it sound like a bad controller, not a bad drive.
On my model (F590), at least one of the keys on the keyboard has failed (the left shift key). Sounds like a simple failure until I tell you that my parents got the identical model, too, and they are also having key problems... I think the keyboards must be very poorly designed. They're much more difficult than regular laptop keyboards to lift the keycaps off to clean, too (which I did when trying to fix the dead shift key). My LCD is nice and big, but if you leave the computer on for very long, little stripes and pixel snow start appearing in the top part of the display. Interestingly, the only way to wipe the snow off is to play a movie (DVD) full screen. This indicates some bad video BIOS, probably.
By the way, my laptop is just over a year old. Why didn't i turn it in for repair? Because the crappy registration program they make you use if you want mor ethan 90 days of warranty kept crashing and wouldn't send the info to them.
Sony's fine for audio stuff, and some video stuff too. I even think they're ok (though overpriced) for desktop computer hardware (my parents also bought a Sony desktop)... but never, NEVER buy a laptop.
My next laptop is going to be the bitchin' Toshiba coming out in February with NVidia's new chip. Unless someone here can tell me Toshibas suck, too =)
How can we prove that ATI didn't also "optimize" for 3D Benchmark 2001, or other tests?
I must admit, I have been a loyal fan of NVIDIA for a while, even though none of my gear is actually NVIDIA-based. However, when I heard how great the new Radeons were testing, they became a serious contender for my next card, which will be bought in a month or two (depends on if Santa is paying, or me). Now, of course, I cannot trust them at all, and will buy a Geforce instead.
BETTER A FIGHTING CHANCE THAN NONE.
on
More On Tragedy
·
· Score: 1
I'm sorry, but faced with a possible problem to the aircraft caused by someone defending my life, or having a hijacker take control and likely kill us all, I'd much rather take my risks with someone on my side!
We must broaden the air marshals pogram immediately.
All our love - Alaska Airlines
-- cards on flowers left at American Airlines' gates in Portland International Airport, as news of the attacks became widely known. (Alaskan Airlines is no stranger to air disaster itself, and two of American Airlines' planes were hijacked and used in the attacks on Tuesday.)
The people of our nation, still reeling in shock from the worst terrorist attack in world history, waste no time in reaching out to each other and showing solidarity:
When a call for blood donors is given, donation centers across the country are inundated with so many volunteers, so quickly, that many people have to be turned away, while others wait in line for six hours or more;
Travelers, stranded by the FAA's immediate edict grounding all air travel, offer to share rooms in hotels, or rides in their rented cars;
The United States Senate, at the end of a press conference, breaks into a ragged but heartfelt round of "God Bless America."
We are in shock. We are in mourning. We are shaken and stirred. But we are not devastated. We will have some extremely difficult days ahead. But we will go back to work, go back to school, go back to the arms of our loved ones, resolved that the grievous assault to our freedom and our lifestyle - which so much of the world is jealous of or seeks to emulate - will not go unanswered.
While our military and police forces do their jobs, it is important that we do ours. Many people wonder how they can further help. At the root of it, heroism is not about being fearless, but about doing what needs to be done despite of fear. If we as individuals in our society want to give heroic effort, we each must resolve to return to work, return to school, and be there for our loved ones.
Finally, we must explain to our children that bad things have happened and a lot of people are no longer with us, but all the police, military personnel, and mommies and daddies especially, are watching to make sure it doesn't happen again, and that we love them and promise to keep them as safe as we can. We must believe it when we say it. And we must keep that promise.
I just want to quickly remind everyone that Paypal will give you $5 to sign up (according to their front page), so you could sign and give $5 at least without it costing you a dime, theoretically.
This may not seem like much... but if enough people do it, it will be.
Verio's routing policy (viewable at http://info.us.bb.verio.net/routing.html) basically says that Verio follows allocation boundaries in accepting inbound announcements:/24s will be heard only from traditional C space, etc. Additionally, Verio will not announce longer prefixes than/24s.
This isn't "Nazi-ish." This is common sense. If everyone started aggregating properly, there would be a lot less overhead.
Frankly, I think IP allocations should be yanked from people who don't know how to announce them properly.
Perhaps you won't be able to directly rip from a CD-ROM drive, but any component audio CD player with digital output should give you a decent digital stream to splash around in.
Also, if Sony, for example, has control software and connectors for some of its higher-end CD players, like it does for some MD recorders, the process should be easily automate-able.
I've been told that if you moderate at "overrated" or "underrated" and someone metamoderates against you, it has no effect.
Of course, hiding behind this type of moderation is also detracting from the purpose of moderation, not to mention that ratings like this say more about previous moderation, and not the post itself, and should therefore be considered a type of metamoderation, as well...
what're the most challenging things you personally face in the noncomputing areas of your life? Do you find support online through websites, newsgroups, IRC, etc to assist in meeting those challenges? If so, how? And do you think you would have the same support if you did not have the ability to go online? If not, what types of support are you looking for but not finding? (Obviously, you are not "anonymous", so don't answer this if it makes you uncomfortable. I'm just interested in seeing whether you, as a representative of a new generation, are more socially integrated into the Internet than those who came before you)
What're the most challenging things you feel the world as a whole faces (that is, not just the US, or even western society)? What's your vision for how the Internet might assist in meeting those challenges? Do you see ways in which it's failing to meet those needs? Do your friends feel the same way?
I'm much more likely to run BeOS on a laptop than FreeBSD, and I'm much more likely to have a problem installing Slowlaris(on anything). Yet if I had bought a Stinkpad(instead of a Sony laptop), I wouldn't complain about the lack of support by the hardware vendor for any of these...
Did IBM sell copies of FreeBSD? If so, did they promise support? If not, then your complaint is misdirected. It's the operating system vendor who has the responsibility to make this work.
Three of the four wheels have been removed, according to the article. It sounds like probably either the thief kept, destroyed, or is planning on ransoming the other three... then again, it may not be the same one that was stolen at all?
I agree that paying off the debt is not our highest priority; in fact, we don't want to do this at all. Simply put: we should tax during expansion, spend during contraction. This cuts out the extremes, ya know?
If we want something to tell our grandkids about, though, why don't we tell them that we stopped letting people starve to death when we destroy enough food every year to feed the whole world (well, nobody really knows how many people live in China) , and stop letting little kids die of diarrhea or other diseases and sickness that we could prevent or treat with very little money?
I'm not saying that space research is invalid at all, but...
Imagine if you kept a small country's worth of people from dying for the above causes, and they became productive members of the global community. What kind of impact would that have? Who knows? It's never been done before. What an excellent and noble experiment this would be.
Sometimes when things like this happen you just have to run with it. If Carnivore and whatever opensource programs out there are monitering email transmissions for keywords i suggest everyone change thier Sig's to the following:
Terrorist, cocain, pot, doobie, bomb, secret plans, assassinate, DeCSS, libral, Natalie Portman.
Now if EVERYBODY had a sig like that i believe we could render Carnivore and programs like it quite useless.
Not gonna work. It's just as easy to filter out that specific string when found and then continue to process, as it is to search for other strings before processing...
Maybe they thought that by using CSS to link to DeCSS, the two would cancel each other out, and they could therefore maintain a "neutral" stance?
2600 is just as "valid" as CNN as far as being an organ of the press... both can have really stupid stories, neither ever has really earth-shattering scoops, and nevertheless both have their junkies. In fact, 2600 should have a more tangible claim, since it started out in print, and CNN started out on TV.
Verio isn't listed at all under ISPs with the most hosts, and yet Verio's PR says it's the world's largest business webhosting provider? Or am I missing something, here?
The Verio NOC is in Dallas, Texas. Do they have any idea what it would take to move it to Japan? Or even to remove the current crew and replace them with Japanese NTT employees?
Quite a few American employees would be affected adversely if this merger fails at this stage, and all for the sake of political posturing.
Good lord. We can't even get regular CD-Rs and CD-RWs with consistent life-expectancies... I can just imagine how flakey (literally?) a double-density format will be.
Look closely: the beginning example didn't even illustrate the point the author was trying to make: it sure sounded like the little-ISP's owner was complaining because UUNet or another T1 wasn't right nearby, and they couldn't afford to run a line to get to UUNet, not that UUNET itself is charging a lot...
A bunch of other posters have already commented on this, but I'll say it again: Tier 1 peers are "free" because they have pretty symmetrical flows of traffic. I work for a Tier 1 (not UUNET, and with two DS3s to Albuquerque) - trust me, when peers of any size, public or private, go markedly asymmetric, it's considered a problem. Public peers are the ones that get most abused, of course.
I could ramble on, but there's a nice article at internettelephony.com entitled "Can Public Peering Survive" that pretty much lays the whole dilemma out.
two final notes:
I remember when everyone predicted that the Net would die when UUNet first changed their policy on free peering. It didn't happen. If anything, it may have forced people to come up with more robust implementations of their connections, as more people shopped around for other providers and went multi-homed. This also obviously created a huge market opportunity for alternative providers, which helps the redundancy and capacity of the Internet even further... but it's still limited by the fact that
the cost of telco lines themselves is the prime driver of connectivity pricing. There's limits to the existing telco infrastructure, and it's definitely demand-priced. Remember the article's example? =) As there are still significant barriers to enter the carrier market(everything from rights-of-way to arcane telecommunications laws), I don't see this changing very soon.
Slashdot Mirror
I'm just wondering... does the system disable itself when we get moderation points, so we can do our jobs looking at the entire available pool of posts, or does it continue to block out people we don't like?
My first thought, when seeing this new ability, was of course to add Anonymous Coward as a foe. But that's silly - just because some people troll is no reason to deny myself the ability to read some possibly insightful comments by others who can't or won't log in. If any named user is consistently trolling, he ought to simply be banned.
Now I'm thinking - okay, so marking people down is pointless, but marking them up can be quite useful, especially if we can start sorting article comments so high-rated friends go first... in essence, this is pretty much the exact same approach that I take when I moderate. I don't waste points downvoting, I use my votes to call attention to the good stuff. And so I shall do, with the friend system - if I like comments by people consistently, I want to be told when they have new stuff they've written.
That's a nice screener list, but isn't it too strict? Almost all legitimate mailing lists include removal instructions, now.
Spamcop is cool, but it only works after the fact, unless you become a paying member. Sure, you can report spammers all day and night, but the biggest ones have their IP space SWIPed to them directly, which decreases Spamcop effectiveness substantially. Also, if you run Outlook, it's very difficult to get the full message out to Spamcop for reporting, anyway.
Rather than get into what can be done on the client side, I'd like to see more on how to block it on the server side - I have a vanity domain, and I'm going to set up a box with sendmail or postfix or something... I'd like to know what filters work best in that environment.
My goal is to block the mail as it's trying to hit the server; for example, since the Excite.com admins are refusing to help me reset my password for free mail account, which is forwarding spam into my vanity domain 30 or 40 a day, I want it to find everything with a from line like @excite.com, or everything with an IP range that matches Excite.com space or a HELO statement with %excite.com% in it, to immediately get a 550 abort line back "sorry, Excite.com admins are refusing to resolve a mail issue with me, and so I'm refusing everything sent through them now. Don't complain to me, complain to them. If you are interested, please read the history of the dispute at my website; my new contact address can be found at the bottom." Or, for everything from PostmasterGeneral (a company that specifically is geared to hosting commercial lists that are supposedly opt-in, but they take their clients' word for it and only remove people when they complain, making them opt-out at best - why would anyone want anything form them?), search for PMGUID (their list tag) in the message, then make the 550 read simply:"Up yours."
Alternatively, does anyone know how to set up sendmail/postfix/some other linux mail server to bounce offending mail directly to their hosts' operations mail? And I don't mean just abuse@, I mean to their NOC, DNS admin, postmaster, IP admin, AND CEO if I can find it. Surely, if I start clogging their internal mailboxes with "hey... if you don't want to see these mails pile up in your inbox, don't let your customer send them to me - as long as your abuse team continues to ignore me, *you* will get these mails," followed by the spam I am getting, they will have to take me a bit more seriously.
Any suggestions how to make either alternative work?
I have to agree with this. With starvation-related deaths in Afghanistan (conceivably going over a million) as just the most obvious example, there are better ways to spend the money. Sure, the EFF is cool. General human rights is even cooler. But... let's keep people from dying of things like starvation, disease, and our own political expediency before we worry too much about their rights - or ours.
Wil, I like ya - I really do. I just have to wonder, though - if you had a million dollars to invest on a cause, why you'd pick the EFF. I hope it wasn't just because of some 31337 haxor image or something...
Disaster and famine relief organizations (I'm thinking Mercy Corps, not the Red Cross), Doctors Without Borders, CARE, and UNICEF have relatively low administrative overheads (Mercy Corps claims 5%!) and work to stop people from dying. If slashdotters want to concentrate on helping people at home, plenty of homeless shelters and havens for abused and/or addicted women and children, not to mention any number of cancer and disease societies and, yes, famine relief organizations in almost every city, also are desperate for funding.
A friend of mine and I each bought different models at different times, and we've had lots of problems with them:
His hard drive kept failing, and the drive he bought to replace it failed as well. That makes it sound like a bad controller, not a bad drive.
On my model (F590), at least one of the keys on the keyboard has failed (the left shift key). Sounds like a simple failure until I tell you that my parents got the identical model, too, and they are also having key problems... I think the keyboards must be very poorly designed. They're much more difficult than regular laptop keyboards to lift the keycaps off to clean, too (which I did when trying to fix the dead shift key). My LCD is nice and big, but if you leave the computer on for very long, little stripes and pixel snow start appearing in the top part of the display. Interestingly, the only way to wipe the snow off is to play a movie (DVD) full screen. This indicates some bad video BIOS, probably.
By the way, my laptop is just over a year old. Why didn't i turn it in for repair? Because the crappy registration program they make you use if you want mor ethan 90 days of warranty kept crashing and wouldn't send the info to them.
Sony's fine for audio stuff, and some video stuff too. I even think they're ok (though overpriced) for desktop computer hardware (my parents also bought a Sony desktop)... but never, NEVER buy a laptop.
My next laptop is going to be the bitchin' Toshiba coming out in February with NVidia's new chip. Unless someone here can tell me Toshibas suck, too =)
How can we prove that ATI didn't also "optimize" for 3D Benchmark 2001, or other tests?
I must admit, I have been a loyal fan of NVIDIA for a while, even though none of my gear is actually NVIDIA-based. However, when I heard how great the new Radeons were testing, they became a serious contender for my next card, which will be bought in a month or two (depends on if Santa is paying, or me). Now, of course, I cannot trust them at all, and will buy a Geforce instead.
I'm sorry, but faced with a possible problem to the aircraft caused by someone defending my life, or having a hijacker take control and likely kill us all, I'd much rather take my risks with someone on my side!
We must broaden the air marshals pogram immediately.
All our love - Alaska Airlines
-- cards on flowers left at American Airlines' gates in Portland International Airport, as news of the attacks became widely known. (Alaskan Airlines is no stranger to air disaster itself, and two of American Airlines' planes were hijacked and used in the attacks on Tuesday.)
The people of our nation, still reeling in shock from the worst terrorist attack in world history, waste no time in reaching out to each other and showing solidarity:
We are in shock. We are in mourning. We are shaken and stirred. But we are not devastated. We will have some extremely difficult days ahead. But we will go back to work, go back to school, go back to the arms of our loved ones, resolved that the grievous assault to our freedom and our lifestyle - which so much of the world is jealous of or seeks to emulate - will not go unanswered.
While our military and police forces do their jobs, it is important that we do ours. Many people wonder how they can further help. At the root of it, heroism is not about being fearless, but about doing what needs to be done despite of fear. If we as individuals in our society want to give heroic effort, we each must resolve to return to work, return to school, and be there for our loved ones.
Finally, we must explain to our children that bad things have happened and a lot of people are no longer with us, but all the police, military personnel, and mommies and daddies especially, are watching to make sure it doesn't happen again, and that we love them and promise to keep them as safe as we can. We must believe it when we say it. And we must keep that promise.
(Cross-posted to Everything2.com)
I just want to quickly remind everyone that Paypal will give you $5 to sign up (according to their front page), so you could sign and give $5 at least without it costing you a dime, theoretically.
This may not seem like much... but if enough people do it, it will be.
p.s. no, I don't work for them
This isn't "Nazi-ish." This is common sense. If everyone started aggregating properly, there would be a lot less overhead.
Frankly, I think IP allocations should be yanked from people who don't know how to announce them properly.
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
Perhaps you won't be able to directly rip from a CD-ROM drive, but any component audio CD player with digital output should give you a decent digital stream to splash around in.
Also, if Sony, for example, has control software and connectors for some of its higher-end CD players, like it does for some MD recorders, the process should be easily automate-able.
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
I've been told that if you moderate at "overrated" or "underrated" and someone metamoderates against you, it has no effect.
Of course, hiding behind this type of moderation is also detracting from the purpose of moderation, not to mention that ratings like this say more about previous moderation, and not the post itself, and should therefore be considered a type of metamoderation, as well...
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
I think there was a character named CowboyNeal in Neuromancer... has that been assigned as a text in high school, yet?
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
what're the most challenging things you personally face in the noncomputing areas of your life? Do you find support online through websites, newsgroups, IRC, etc to assist in meeting those challenges? If so, how? And do you think you would have the same support if you did not have the ability to go online? If not, what types of support are you looking for but not finding? (Obviously, you are not "anonymous", so don't answer this if it makes you uncomfortable. I'm just interested in seeing whether you, as a representative of a new generation, are more socially integrated into the Internet than those who came before you)
What're the most challenging things you feel the world as a whole faces (that is, not just the US, or even western society)? What's your vision for how the Internet might assist in meeting those challenges? Do you see ways in which it's failing to meet those needs? Do your friends feel the same way?
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
I'm much more likely to run BeOS on a laptop than FreeBSD, and I'm much more likely to have a problem installing Slowlaris(on anything). Yet if I had bought a Stinkpad(instead of a Sony laptop), I wouldn't complain about the lack of support by the hardware vendor for any of these...
Did IBM sell copies of FreeBSD? If so, did they promise support? If not, then your complaint is misdirected. It's the operating system vendor who has the responsibility to make this work.
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
Three of the four wheels have been removed, according to the article. It sounds like probably either the thief kept, destroyed, or is planning on ransoming the other three... then again, it may not be the same one that was stolen at all?
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
I agree that paying off the debt is not our highest priority; in fact, we don't want to do this at all. Simply put: we should tax during expansion, spend during contraction. This cuts out the extremes, ya know?
If we want something to tell our grandkids about, though, why don't we tell them that we stopped letting people starve to death when we destroy enough food every year to feed the whole world (well, nobody really knows how many people live in China) , and stop letting little kids die of diarrhea or other diseases and sickness that we could prevent or treat with very little money?
I'm not saying that space research is invalid at all, but...
Imagine if you kept a small country's worth of people from dying for the above causes, and they became productive members of the global community. What kind of impact would that have? Who knows? It's never been done before. What an excellent and noble experiment this would be.
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
Sometimes when things like this happen you just have to run with it. If Carnivore and whatever opensource programs out there are monitering email transmissions for keywords i suggest everyone change thier Sig's to the following:
Terrorist, cocain, pot, doobie, bomb, secret plans, assassinate, DeCSS, libral, Natalie Portman.
Now if EVERYBODY had a sig like that i believe we could render Carnivore and programs like it quite useless.
Not gonna work. It's just as easy to filter out that specific string when found and then continue to process, as it is to search for other strings before processing...
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
Maybe they thought that by using CSS to link to DeCSS, the two would cancel each other out, and they could therefore maintain a "neutral" stance?
2600 is just as "valid" as CNN as far as being an organ of the press... both can have really stupid stories, neither ever has really earth-shattering scoops, and nevertheless both have their junkies. In fact, 2600 should have a more tangible claim, since it started out in print, and CNN started out on TV.
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
Verio isn't listed at all under ISPs with the most hosts, and yet Verio's PR says it's the world's largest business webhosting provider? Or am I missing something, here?
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
no. I'm not worthy.
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
If so, stand up and wave so I can cheer. =)
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
yah, I keep forgetting to. =)
sorry, I'll do it in a minute, I'm fixing my resume right now... can you guess who I work for? =)
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
The Verio NOC is in Dallas, Texas. Do they have any idea what it would take to move it to Japan? Or even to remove the current crew and replace them with Japanese NTT employees?
Quite a few American employees would be affected adversely if this merger fails at this stage, and all for the sake of political posturing.
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
Good lord. We can't even get regular CD-Rs and CD-RWs with consistent life-expectancies... I can just imagine how flakey (literally?) a double-density format will be.
---
click a button, feed a hungry person!
Look closely: the beginning example didn't even illustrate the point the author was trying to make: it sure sounded like the little-ISP's owner was complaining because UUNet or another T1 wasn't right nearby, and they couldn't afford to run a line to get to UUNet, not that UUNET itself is charging a lot...
A bunch of other posters have already commented on this, but I'll say it again: Tier 1 peers are "free" because they have pretty symmetrical flows of traffic. I work for a Tier 1 (not UUNET, and with two DS3s to Albuquerque) - trust me, when peers of any size, public or private, go markedly asymmetric, it's considered a problem. Public peers are the ones that get most abused, of course.
I could ramble on, but there's a nice article at internettelephony.com entitled " Can Public Peering Survive " that pretty much lays the whole dilemma out.
two final notes:
I remember when everyone predicted that the Net would die when UUNet first changed their policy on free peering. It didn't happen. If anything, it may have forced people to come up with more robust implementations of their connections, as more people shopped around for other providers and went multi-homed. This also obviously created a huge market opportunity for alternative providers, which helps the redundancy and capacity of the Internet even further... but it's still limited by the fact that
the cost of telco lines themselves is the prime driver of connectivity pricing. There's limits to the existing telco infrastructure, and it's definitely demand-priced. Remember the article's example? =) As there are still significant barriers to enter the carrier market(everything from rights-of-way to arcane telecommunications laws), I don't see this changing very soon.