🚀 go-pugleaf

kadie@herodotus.cs.uiuc.edu (Carl M. Kadie) writes:
>feit@ERA.COM (Mark Feit) writes:
>
>[...]
>>When most colleges/universities give you an account, you get it for
>>the sole purpose of completing assignments in a course, for research,
>>etc.
>
>Happily, more and more schools now have the resources to provide free
>accounts for general use. This is consisent with the academic ideal in
>which members of the academic community have some freedom to explore
>their own interests. It is analogous to most academic libraries that
>don't ask to know and don't care why you are browsing and borrowing
>books.

Keep in mind, however, that this notion does not apply to *all* computer
systems on a given campus.  This is not a campus-wide decision; it is
determined separately for each system.  Your college/university may very
well allow almost anything on system X; that does NOT imply that such
liberties exist on system Y.

>When resources are scarce, priorities have to be established. These
>priorities should not, however, be used to removed material just
>because some find it offensive. For example, if there are no resources
>for "recreational" newsgroups, then both alt.sex and
>rec.sport.football should go, not just alt.sex.

Unless, of course, the entire alt.* hierarchy is deleted before rec.*.
I have read of several sites that "conserve resources" in the following
manner:
	- delete alt.*
	- delete talk.*
	- delete rec.*
	- delete [...]
If your site is following this sort of plan, it would be difficult to
call it censorship.  If, however, they are nuking only "certain" alt.*
groups, you've got a legitimate beef.

Find out *exactly* what's going on before crying censorship; it will make
your arguments much more effective.

--Wes

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MORGAN@UKCC         |       Wes Morgan       |        ...!ukma!ukecc!morgan 
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