Re: What usenet software do you recommend?

Begin <443fdd17$0$596$a726171b@xxxxxxxxxxxxxxx>
On 2006-04-14, "james <at> hal-pc.org" <"james <at> hal-pc.org"> wrote:
To say that offering up/downloading files through news is abuse is
like saying that because cell phones were "designed" to talk with, but
now they have web browsing and text messaging, then that's abuse of
the cell networks...

Not quite. Cell phones offer a service where you directly pay for what
you use. This regardless of the nature of the service that you use, you
pay for the entire infrastructure you use[1]. This doesn't go for shared
services like email and USENET: you might pay for getting to it (your
isp) and maybe separately for using a mail or a news server, but you
don't pay for the entire chain of machinery involved. This can be done
only for as long as the entirety of traffic roughly balances.

Where it doesn't, things will change soon enough. What will happen,
whether services start charging individually or go away or do something
else again, that differs, but *something* will change.

At the risk of sounding like a SUSSP advocate, it is part of what makes
spam costly for the receiver: If the sender would pay for the entire
traject, filtering would be free for the receiver as the sender'd pay
for it.

This, by the way, is an illustration, not an endorsement of email taxes.
I'd much rather have the entire ROKSO list autodarwinate, just to see if
that improves matters. To me the issue of spam isn't so much the costs
but the fact that people with no regard for others use it for their own
gains while essentially freeloading out of all proportion.

This proportion issue is the same that makes orders of magniture more
binaries than intelligent discussion, in volume, a less than stellar
idea on USENET, in about the same fashion that ``using the network
wires'', that is eternally forwarding data between hosts, as storage is
a bad idea.

There are much better ways of getting you software fix, so I would not
encourage using USENET for that. Your cellphone, perhaps?


[1] Almost. Until you enter a co-operative network.

--
j p d (at) d s b (dot) t u d e l f t (dot) n l .
This message was originally posted on Usenet in plain text.
Any other representation, additions, or changes do not have my
consent and may be a violation of international copyright law.
.

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