Stupid reposting service (was Re: SLIP/getty/printers on Terminal Servers)

[Randal Schwartz]

In article <10282 at stag.math.lsa.umich.edu>, rossc at extro (Ross Cartlidge) writes:
                                            ^^^^^^^^^^^ not really!
| Original-posting-by: rossc at extro.ucc.su.oz.au (Ross Cartlidge)
| Reposted-by: emv at math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti)
| Posting-id: 891208.1915
| Posting-number: Volume TEST, Number TEST
| Archive-name: tcpcon -- connect an arbitrary process to a device
| 
| [This is an experimental alt.sources re-posting from the
| newsgroup(s) comp.protocols.tcp-ip.
| No attempt has been made to edit, clean, modify, or otherwise
| change the contents of the original posting, or to contact the
| author.  Please consider cross-posting all sources postings to
| alt.sources as a matter of course.]
| 
| [Comments on this service to emv at math.lsa.umich.edu (Edward Vielmetti)]
[a gizillion lines of code that anyone reading tcp-ip has seen DELETED]

Yeah.  I started this conversation in email, and after three rounds,
Edward told me to take it to alt.sources.d, which I am now doing.

To summarize rounds 1-3:

My main point:

Edward is not generating any new information, but rather using up
bandwidth with his reposting service.

My request:

If he wants to provide a "clipping service", he could post an article
to alt.sources once a week (or even once a day) with:

	topic/title, newsgroups posted-to, article-id

so that I could go fetch it as I wanted and needed it.

His reply (paraphrased):

(1) what about sites that don't get that group?
(2) what about sites with short expiry times?
(3) what about auto-archivers of alt.sources?
(4) it takes work to look up the articles

My reply:

(1) they don't get it for either political or functional reasons,
the problems of which are not solved by reposting articles from that group.
(2) short expirations are likely to apply to alt.sources too, if so.
(3) [didn't communicate this one to him] the archivers could be made
smarter to recognize his articles and do the proper extraction.
(4) tough.  My newsreader does it with two keystrokes.

My second proposal: [not communicated to him]

If he really wants to make this service available, why doesn't he just
*archive* the "useful stuff", and provide a *mail-server* so we can
access his archive if we desire.

Another comment:

Redistribution like this may be in violation of the Berne Convention.
But, I'm not a lawyer.

Anyway, whadda y'all think?  I want to see these silly repostings of
very long sources *stopped*.  This is not in the spirit of UseNet to
be doing these repostings.

Just another news oldtimer,
-- 
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