Well, I can see a few things that gave Netscape the "advantage" over Mosaic
I'd say the biggest "advantage" Netscape had over Mosaic is that the people who developed Mosaic left the university and founded Netscape, leaving NCSA with nothing more than a source base. Early Netscape was almost Mosaic - bug for bug compatible, and IIRC, an early beta of Netscape went out that had the Mosaic logo in the top right corner.
Primarily, the ability to display inline jpg's and then the ability to render tables.
The version of Mosaic that rendered tables was out a few days before the first availabe Netscape that rendered tables was out. Of course, Mosaic implemented a subset of the proposed standard, while Netscape implemented something different than the standard - for obvious reasons, to gain marketshare. Webwussies^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hauthors started to use Netscape tables, which didn't work well in the handful of browsers that implemented tables before Netscape did. Effectively killing most of the browsers out there. And Netscape won the first browser war.
Most MS users use Mosaic without knowing it: Internet Explorer.
Or even Netscape. While it's probably not true that Netscape was developed used copies of the source of Mosaic, fact is that it was developed by the people developing Mosaic, in record time, and bug for bug compatible. "Netscape gray" == "Mosaic gray", for instance. That's not a coincidence.
If you can buy processor time on it, I think it'd be neat to just buy enough to get you to the top of the seti@home contributor list
That would be an inefficient use of processing power. About 20% of the CPUs are not computing nodes. seti@home clients don't need mayors, storage- or visualisation cities. You'd be better of with 1296 ordinary PCs, then only use 1024 of them in the cluster, and the other 272 for management.
Oh, and you still wouldn't beat those admins that have twice the number of workstations running seti@home.
Background information about networks, datalinks, speeds, error correction, etc, can be found in the classic "Computer Networks" from Andrew Tanenbaum. While clearly dated (he talks about ARPANET and DECNET, IMPs are still alive and kicking, and AT&T still rules), many of the topics are still relevant today.
Andrew S. Tanenbaum: Computer Networks Prentice/Hall, 1981 ISBN 0-13-164699-0.
In a previous job, people would come to me and ask I've this 700 Mb file, how do I get this to Tokyo as fast as possible?. My reply always was Put it on a tape, send it by FedEx.
Even if ftp would be faster (and not drop the connection after 500 Mb transferred), I wasn't going to saturate the connection for hours.
They should be researching new cable INSTALLING techniques.
Not quite new, but their are techniques that do not require digging up the entire length of the cable. One interesting way is sometimes used to cross a street, where closing down the street is unfeasable. What you do is, dig 2 holes, on either side of the street. Now, take a large gun, and shoot a tube from one hole to the other. After that, clear the tube and shoot down some fibres through the tube.
Another technique is used to replace old copper cables. Those cables consist roughly of an outer armour, paper or some other isolator separating the wires, and the copper wires themselves. High voltage current is send through the wires, burning the isolator. Now yank out the copper, replace it with fiber. (Many moons ago, I worked for an ISP, and our cross-country, leased 256Kb/s line connecting us the national/European backbone was upgraded that way).
Who cares how much bandwidth the trunk a half mile away has if I can't have any of it?
I would, if my connection would go via that trunk. It wouldn't matter if you were the only one going via that trunk. It might matter if you have to share that fiber with zillions of people downloading porn.
it would be much more reliable when it could do some repairs itself or let them being done by AI or remote controlled robots
Uhm, no, not really. Remember, there's basically *nothing* there, except for the odd dust particle. Certainly not enough materials to create gyroscopes from. Which means that if you want to be able to have it repair the gyroscopes itselves, you have to send spare gyroscopes. But if you do that, why waste the extra space on both a robot and spare gyroscopes? Might as well install just the spare gyroscopes.
Guess what? They did. 100% redundancy. Robots would not have helped. A seventh gyroscope, maybe. (But, that one might have gone before this fourth one). And if the mission hadn't been delayed, the 3 extra gyroscopes would have been enough.
My point is that it's wrong to accord special status to the USENET forum. Period.
But that's exactly what the judge did. However, your suggestion of Ignore their posts. Filter them out is only possible because it's usenet. Non-electronic media usually don't have that option.
I'll bet you've got a Purdue Dry Cleaner in the neighborhood, a Purdue Burger joint. You can very likely show selective enforcement.
No, as just using the name is usually not reason for a trademark infringement. You would also have to use it in a context that's potentially confusing. Noone is going to confuse a dry cleaner with a university. But a web site offering a student directory, and web access to their email (even mentioning postoffice.purdue.edu) can be confusing, no matter how many times it states there's no affiliations with the university. If the university is going for the trademark, the service offered by purdueonline will be important. He'd have a larger chance of keeping his domainname if he'd offered porn.
If they want to speak to you about the domain, they should speak to YOU and not the ISP.
Unless the ISP is the registrant of the domain. Doing a whois query reveals that purdueonline.com is owned by Vision Networks, Inc, located in some suite somewhere in West Lafayette, IN. Now, to make it more interesting, there's also a Vision Networks, Inc, located in another suite in West Lafayette, IN. They own the domain "modelamerica.com", whose primary name server is ns1.purdueonline.com. The administrative and billing contracts for "modelamerica.com" have an email address whose domain name is...purdue.edu.
Oh, BTW, according to the whois database, the record for "purdueonline.com" is less than 2 years old, not 3 years as mentioned in the story.
In my humble opinion a domain name is an adress, it's a place where you put up your stuff. If they haven't registered the domain (moved to that adress) I don't see why that would mean you are infringing on their trademark rights.
The big difference is of course that you pick the address (domainname). With a reason. Don't be so horrible naief to compare it with street addresses. The guy pick "purdueonline.com" himself. And he didn't pick it from a list with pre-made names either. No. He intended to target students from Purdue University. That's why he picked purdueonline.com, and not say, harvardonline.com, or templeonline.com. He willingly put the name of the university whose students he's targetting in his domain name; without asking the university.
I don't think there's a reason to be surprised that at one point the university says "uhm, listen, we don't really like this".
If I came across the domain in a search I could just as easily think it was for Frank Purdue the "chicken man".
In a search for what? Yeah, if you were looking for random addresses, sure. But what if you were searching for "Student directory Purdue University", and http://www.purdueonline.com came back as a result? Both "Student directory" and "Purdue University" are mentioned on the page, so it's not unlikely some search engine out there will return that as a result. It's also not a constructed request.
I have a problem with domain names that try to get something out of it, just based on the domain name. Be it a possible misspelling of a popular one (like some porno sites do), be it a domain name based on a brand or name that's well-known, and isn't owned by the owner of said domain, or something like "localhost.com". And of course, cybersquatting.
purdueonline.com is borderline. Yeah, it does mention it's not affiliated with Purdue University, but it does target its students. And ask yourself, he wouldn't have picked purdueonline.com if he had lived in Boston and went to MIT, would he?
It would have been nice had they explained you can add another LILO entry for your "new" kernel while leaving the old entry
That was my first reaction as well. But then I realized they were assuming the reader was unfamiliar with a text editor. Given the limited amount of space, I don't think there was enough room to explain both which lines you would need to copy and how to do that. Of course, you might wonder how sane it is for someone not knowing a text editor to configure and compile kernels....
Or he could go through a secondary such as friend or dejanews to post, again making proof near impossible.
Well, I won't claim posting anonymous to Usenet is impossible, but with a court order in my hand, I don't think I won't have much problem in tracing a dejanews posting. Just like most websites, dejanews will have access logs. It'll take a bit of digging, but the IP address from which the posting was made, and the time it was posted can be retrieved from the logs. Now, off we go to the provider, who has logs which account logged in when, and which IP address was handed to them. Those are all fairly standard logs.
You can commit the "perfect murder" as well. That doesn't mean murder is legal. It also doesn't mean no murdered is even caught.
Its not a public place if you have the option of silencing the 'yelling of curses' with a killfile.
You are mistaken how killfiles work. Killfiles don't silence the flamer at all. Killfiles are like earplugs. You don't hear the flamer insulting you. But all your friends do.
Slashdot proves that building a moderation system is easy within the confines of a single web site where everyone is authenticated, and the information isn't distributed across a wide area. You could do the same thing with a single private NNTP server with authenticated access, and kill files.
I find Slashdot's moderation utterly pointless. Often I see comments that are clueless, and it has 3 moderation points "Insightful". Which just means the moderators are clueless as well, and they were just hearing what they liked to hear. I've made postings myself that had little content and were just a silly attempt to be funny, and got it moderated as "Insightful". Yeah.... great moderators. Really know what they are doing.
People on/. aren't really authenticated either. Nicknames or handles, yeah. I can reasonable be assured that "Abigail-II" of this posting is the same "Abigail-II" on the next one. But I can have as many nicknames as I want.
Slashdot doesn't compare to Usenet.
That is so true. I think so many times "if only Slashdot had a Usenet interface". It would be so much better. Then you could for instance say "Ok, show me all postings in this thread I haven't read yet." Or have personal killfiles. Or not having to choose between two evils: either download 250kb and get all the postings at once, or download the postings one by one, and by the time you are done, have downloaded 20Mb in ads. Oh, and being to be able to use an editor instead of a silly FORM. Automatic archiving of your postings. Autoquoting. Etc, etc. Slashdots interface is about the most horrible one can come up with. I guess it's the 98% of the Internet users of today who don't realize Internet is more than Netscape or MSIE.
Also, Slashdot can't even be viewed properly unless you use non-free software like Netscape or Internet explorer.
I have to grant Slashdot that it is useable with Lynx. Not great, but useable.
Postings are owned by the poster or by the newsgroup owner, constituting it a private publication. I'd say this is a violation of free speech.
There is no such thing as a "newsgroup owner". If you say this is a violation of free speech, could you care to point out where any case of libel, harassment, or making of threats that "wins" in court in cases not related to Usenet isn't a violation of free speech? Or do you think it's ok to insult anyone, make death threats whenever the moon is full, etc, because your have a huge stack of labels with the text "Freedom of speech"?
Bad laws are a danger for society. Stupidly applying good laws on the wrong cases is even more dangerous.
Not to mention the fact that part of the ruling was intended to force people to act like civilized adults...that definitely violates my rights.
No, it doesn't. All it does is make clear where you rights are. While you certainly have lost your right to make death threats, you *gained* the right not to be harassed.
Most people call that a win. Perhaps you think it's ok to receive death threats. *shrug* Perhaps you think it's not much of a loss to get shot either - after all, the person shooting was exercising his right to "freedom of speech".
-- Abigail
Re:Somebody is way to sensitive here
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Usenet Gag Order
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· Score: 1
That's not quite like Usenet. Your mailbox and your phone are ways of contacting you privately, and Usenet is a public forum.
But public harassment is way worse than private harassment. I can ignore the phone as easily as ignoring usenet postings. I can ignore letters as easily as email. However, when you call me, or write me a letter, or email me, noone else knows. If you harass me in a newsgroup, everyone knows. That's the big difference.
-- Abigail
Re:Somebody is way to sensitive here
on
Usenet Gag Order
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· Score: 1
If you get tired of a flame war, or fed up with a pesky user, just don't read it anymore! I don't think their is any legal authority for what the judge did. Clearly, (s)he doesn't understand the issue.
This is so horrible naieve, that it's +1 moderation point only strengthens my believe/.'s moderation scheme is pointless.
Having said that, let me explain why it's naive. It assumes that Usenet groups are only read by 2 people. The harasser, and the harassed. But that's not true. If you harass me, I can ignore you, but there are thousands and thousands of people who will still read you. And unless you're a pretty stupid harasser, a large fraction of those thousands of people will get a bad impression of me.
Public harasment is a lot worse than public harassment.
Don't like a poster? Ignore their posts. Filter them out. Easy to do. Too lazy to filter, fine. DON'T READ THEM.
That doesn't work that way. As you said, it's a *public* discussion. If you harass me, tell lies about me, etc, I can ignore you, sure. They other 25,000 people in the group still hear you - and not my defense because I'm ignoring you. Even if only 5% believes you, that's still more than 1,000 people getting a real bad impression of me.
Harassment in public is a lot worse than in private.
Seems a bit unrealistic to me. And even if the guy does have a restraining order from posting, then couldnt post on another identity?
Whether something is possible or not isn't the point. You can have a restraining order not to come within 500 yards of someones house; that doesn't mean there's a forcefield around that house that prevents you from being within 500 yards of the house.
What it does mean that if you violate the order, all that needs to be proven is the violation of the order. A much simpler case, and most likely with more severe penalties than a restraining order.
But you cannot close someone elses newspaper. It's easier to ignore threats in the mail - noone else sees them. Threats and harassement in public however...
-- Abigail
Re:This is why there are moderated groups
on
Usenet Gag Order
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· Score: 1
The Usenet, on the other hand, does not belong to anyone, individual or organization, and is not for anyone to decide who can or cannot post to it.
He wasn't banned from posting to Usenet. He was banned from posting to one single newsgroup, for one year. That's like saying "you cannot be in front of this restaurant for a year". He's still free to stand naked in front of another restaurant. He can still post to all other newsgroups, and he's still allowed to read that one newsgroup.
At most, it is up to the poster's ISP to decide whether or not they want such a nuisance posting from their system, and if they don't, then they can nuke his/her account.
Let me get this straight. After a proper trail, a judge deciding he's not allowed to post in one particular newsgroup for one year is not ok, but it's ok for an ISP to ban him all together, permanently, at their sole discretion?
If the authorities wish, they can arrest him for the actual threats, etc. posted to the Usenet, but banning him from posting altogether is exercising their control to an unacceptable extent
Ok. Banning him from one newsgroup for one year isn't ok, but arresting him instead would be? I've heard of Usenet addiction, but rather be in jail than losing write access to one newsgroup for one year strikes me as absurd.
-- Abigail
Re:This is absolutely ludicrous..
on
Usenet Gag Order
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I always thought that was sort of outlawed by that pesky little thing called...um, what was it? Oh yeah.I remember. the First Amendment to the Constitution.
Uhm, no. Please read the first amendment, and its explainations. It makes it illegal for the government prohibit freedom of religion, speech, and press. Intended to make it possible for the citizen to critize their government, the first amendment would make it illegal for the US government to prohibit Usenet.
The First Amendment doesn't give individuals the right to harass others, and get away with it by calling it "freedom of speech".
Slashdot Mirror
I'd say the biggest "advantage" Netscape had over Mosaic is that the people who developed Mosaic left the university and founded Netscape, leaving NCSA with nothing more than a source base. Early Netscape was almost Mosaic - bug for bug compatible, and IIRC, an early beta of Netscape went out that had the Mosaic logo in the top right corner.
Primarily, the ability to display inline jpg's and then the ability to render tables.
The version of Mosaic that rendered tables was out a few days before the first availabe Netscape that rendered tables was out. Of course, Mosaic implemented a subset of the proposed standard, while Netscape implemented something different than the standard - for obvious reasons, to gain marketshare. Webwussies^H^H^H^H^H^H^Hauthors started to use Netscape tables, which didn't work well in the handful of browsers that implemented tables before Netscape did. Effectively killing most of the browsers out there. And Netscape won the first browser war.
Most MS users use Mosaic without knowing it: Internet Explorer.
Or even Netscape. While it's probably not true that Netscape was developed used copies of the source of Mosaic, fact is that it was developed by the people developing Mosaic, in record time, and bug for bug compatible. "Netscape gray" == "Mosaic gray", for instance. That's not a coincidence.
-- Abigail
That would be an inefficient use of processing power. About 20% of the CPUs are not computing nodes. seti@home clients don't need mayors, storage- or visualisation cities. You'd be better of with 1296 ordinary PCs, then only use 1024 of them in the cluster, and the other 272 for management.
Oh, and you still wouldn't beat those admins that have twice the number of workstations running seti@home.
-- Abigail
Andrew S. Tanenbaum: Computer Networks Prentice/Hall, 1981 ISBN 0-13-164699-0.
-- Abigail
Even if ftp would be faster (and not drop the connection after 500 Mb transferred), I wasn't going to saturate the connection for hours.
-- Abigail
Not quite new, but their are techniques that do not require digging up the entire length of the cable. One interesting way is sometimes used to cross a street, where closing down the street is unfeasable. What you do is, dig 2 holes, on either side of the street. Now, take a large gun, and shoot a tube from one hole to the other. After that, clear the tube and shoot down some fibres through the tube.
Another technique is used to replace old copper cables. Those cables consist roughly of an outer armour, paper or some other isolator separating the wires, and the copper wires themselves. High voltage current is send through the wires, burning the isolator. Now yank out the copper, replace it with fiber. (Many moons ago, I worked for an ISP, and our cross-country, leased 256Kb/s line connecting us the national/European backbone was upgraded that way).
Who cares how much bandwidth the trunk a half mile away has if I can't have any of it?
I would, if my connection would go via that trunk. It wouldn't matter if you were the only one going via that trunk. It might matter if you have to share that fiber with zillions of people downloading porn.
-- Abigail
Uhm, no, not really. Remember, there's basically *nothing* there, except for the odd dust particle. Certainly not enough materials to create gyroscopes from. Which means that if you want to be able to have it repair the gyroscopes itselves, you have to send spare gyroscopes. But if you do that, why waste the extra space on both a robot and spare gyroscopes? Might as well install just the spare gyroscopes.
Guess what? They did. 100% redundancy. Robots would not have helped. A seventh gyroscope, maybe. (But, that one might have gone before this fourth one). And if the mission hadn't been delayed, the 3 extra gyroscopes would have been enough.
-- Abigail
But that's exactly what the judge did. However, your suggestion of Ignore their posts. Filter them out is only possible because it's usenet. Non-electronic media usually don't have that option.
-- Abigail
No, as just using the name is usually not reason for a trademark infringement. You would also have to use it in a context that's potentially confusing. Noone is going to confuse a dry cleaner with a university. But a web site offering a student directory, and web access to their email (even mentioning postoffice.purdue.edu) can be confusing, no matter how many times it states there's no affiliations with the university. If the university is going for the trademark, the service offered by purdueonline will be important. He'd have a larger chance of keeping his domainname if he'd offered porn.
-- Abigail
Unless the ISP is the registrant of the domain. Doing a whois query reveals that purdueonline.com is owned by Vision Networks, Inc, located in some suite somewhere in West Lafayette, IN. Now, to make it more interesting, there's also a Vision Networks, Inc, located in another suite in West Lafayette, IN. They own the domain "modelamerica.com", whose primary name server is ns1.purdueonline.com. The administrative and billing contracts for "modelamerica.com" have an email address whose domain name is...purdue.edu.
Oh, BTW, according to the whois database, the record for "purdueonline.com" is less than 2 years old, not 3 years as mentioned in the story.
-- Abigail
I think Purdue University isn't so much worried about the .com, as the purdueonline part.
-- Abigail
The big difference is of course that you pick the address (domainname). With a reason. Don't be so horrible naief to compare it with street addresses. The guy pick "purdueonline.com" himself. And he didn't pick it from a list with pre-made names either. No. He intended to target students from Purdue University. That's why he picked purdueonline.com, and not say, harvardonline.com, or templeonline.com. He willingly put the name of the university whose students he's targetting in his domain name; without asking the university.
I don't think there's a reason to be surprised that at one point the university says "uhm, listen, we don't really like this".
-- Abigail
In a search for what? Yeah, if you were looking for random addresses, sure. But what if you were searching for "Student directory Purdue University", and http://www.purdueonline.com came back as a result? Both "Student directory" and "Purdue University" are mentioned on the page, so it's not unlikely some search engine out there will return that as a result. It's also not a constructed request.
I have a problem with domain names that try to get something out of it, just based on the domain name. Be it a possible misspelling of a popular one (like some porno sites do), be it a domain name based on a brand or name that's well-known, and isn't owned by the owner of said domain, or something like "localhost.com". And of course, cybersquatting.
purdueonline.com is borderline. Yeah, it does mention it's not affiliated with Purdue University, but it does target its students. And ask yourself, he wouldn't have picked purdueonline.com if he had lived in Boston and went to MIT, would he?
-- Abigail
That was my first reaction as well. But then I realized they were assuming the reader was unfamiliar with a text editor. Given the limited amount of space, I don't think there was enough room to explain both which lines you would need to copy and how to do that. Of course, you might wonder how sane it is for someone not knowing a text editor to configure and compile kernels....
-- Abigail
Well, I won't claim posting anonymous to Usenet is impossible, but with a court order in my hand, I don't think I won't have much problem in tracing a dejanews posting. Just like most websites, dejanews will have access logs. It'll take a bit of digging, but the IP address from which the posting was made, and the time it was posted can be retrieved from the logs. Now, off we go to the provider, who has logs which account logged in when, and which IP address was handed to them. Those are all fairly standard logs.
You can commit the "perfect murder" as well. That doesn't mean murder is legal. It also doesn't mean no murdered is even caught.
-- Abigail
You are mistaken how killfiles work. Killfiles don't silence the flamer at all. Killfiles are like earplugs. You don't hear the flamer insulting you. But all your friends do.
-- Abigail
I find Slashdot's moderation utterly pointless. Often I see comments that are clueless, and it has 3 moderation points "Insightful". Which just means the moderators are clueless as well, and they were just hearing what they liked to hear. I've made postings myself that had little content and were just a silly attempt to be funny, and got it moderated as "Insightful". Yeah.... great moderators. Really know what they are doing.
People on /. aren't really authenticated either. Nicknames or handles, yeah. I can reasonable be assured that "Abigail-II" of this posting is the same "Abigail-II" on the next one. But I can have as many nicknames as I want.
Slashdot doesn't compare to Usenet.
That is so true. I think so many times "if only Slashdot had a Usenet interface". It would be so much better. Then you could for instance say "Ok, show me all postings in this thread I haven't read yet." Or have personal killfiles. Or not having to choose between two evils: either download 250kb and get all the postings at once, or download the postings one by one, and by the time you are done, have downloaded 20Mb in ads. Oh, and being to be able to use an editor instead of a silly FORM. Automatic archiving of your postings. Autoquoting. Etc, etc. Slashdots interface is about the most horrible one can come up with. I guess it's the 98% of the Internet users of today who don't realize Internet is more than Netscape or MSIE.
Also, Slashdot can't even be viewed properly unless you use non-free software like Netscape or Internet explorer.
I have to grant Slashdot that it is useable with Lynx. Not great, but useable.
-- Abigail
There is no such thing as a "newsgroup owner". If you say this is a violation of free speech, could you care to point out where any case of libel, harassment, or making of threats that "wins" in court in cases not related to Usenet isn't a violation of free speech? Or do you think it's ok to insult anyone, make death threats whenever the moon is full, etc, because your have a huge stack of labels with the text "Freedom of speech"?
Bad laws are a danger for society. Stupidly applying good laws on the wrong cases is even more dangerous.
-- Abigail
No, it doesn't. All it does is make clear where you rights are. While you certainly have lost your right to make death threats, you *gained* the right not to be harassed.
Most people call that a win. Perhaps you think it's ok to receive death threats. *shrug* Perhaps you think it's not much of a loss to get shot either - after all, the person shooting was exercising his right to "freedom of speech".
-- Abigail
But public harassment is way worse than private harassment. I can ignore the phone as easily as ignoring usenet postings. I can ignore letters as easily as email. However, when you call me, or write me a letter, or email me, noone else knows. If you harass me in a newsgroup, everyone knows. That's the big difference.
-- Abigail
This is so horrible naieve, that it's +1 moderation point only strengthens my believe /.'s moderation scheme is pointless.
Having said that, let me explain why it's naive. It assumes that Usenet groups are only read by 2 people. The harasser, and the harassed. But that's not true. If you harass me, I can ignore you, but there are thousands and thousands of people who will still read you. And unless you're a pretty stupid harasser, a large fraction of those thousands of people will get a bad impression of me.
Public harasment is a lot worse than public harassment.
-- Abigail
That doesn't work that way. As you said, it's a *public* discussion. If you harass me, tell lies about me, etc, I can ignore you, sure. They other 25,000 people in the group still hear you - and not my defense because I'm ignoring you. Even if only 5% believes you, that's still more than 1,000 people getting a real bad impression of me.
Harassment in public is a lot worse than in private.
-- Abigail
Whether something is possible or not isn't the point. You can have a restraining order not to come within 500 yards of someones house; that doesn't mean there's a forcefield around that house that prevents you from being within 500 yards of the house.
What it does mean that if you violate the order, all that needs to be proven is the violation of the order. A much simpler case, and most likely with more severe penalties than a restraining order.
-- Abigail
But you cannot close someone elses newspaper. It's easier to ignore threats in the mail - noone else sees them. Threats and harassement in public however...
-- Abigail
He wasn't banned from posting to Usenet. He was banned from posting to one single newsgroup, for one year. That's like saying "you cannot be in front of this restaurant for a year". He's still free to stand naked in front of another restaurant. He can still post to all other newsgroups, and he's still allowed to read that one newsgroup.
At most, it is up to the poster's ISP to decide whether or not they want such a nuisance posting from their system, and if they don't, then they can nuke his/her account.
Let me get this straight. After a proper trail, a judge deciding he's not allowed to post in one particular newsgroup for one year is not ok, but it's ok for an ISP to ban him all together, permanently, at their sole discretion?
If the authorities wish, they can arrest him for the actual threats, etc. posted to the Usenet, but banning him from posting altogether is exercising their control to an unacceptable extent
Ok. Banning him from one newsgroup for one year isn't ok, but arresting him instead would be? I've heard of Usenet addiction, but rather be in jail than losing write access to one newsgroup for one year strikes me as absurd.
-- Abigail
Uhm, no. Please read the first amendment, and its explainations. It makes it illegal for the government prohibit freedom of religion, speech, and press. Intended to make it possible for the citizen to critize their government, the first amendment would make it illegal for the US government to prohibit Usenet.
The First Amendment doesn't give individuals the right to harass others, and get away with it by calling it "freedom of speech".
-- Abigail