>This generalization ignores the home sites. My newsfeed charges me $2/hour
>plus $38/month. Normally my 80MB home news spool holds a couple of months
>worth of the dozen newsgroups I read at home. Filling that spool with news
>*once* costs more than the disk drive did! Over the next year I intend to
>serve a few downstream sites belonging to Greens around California. These
>will be dial-up long-distance UUCP feeds. I'd like to feed them
>alt.gathering.rainbow, since our values are so similar.
If your system can't handle the amount of blather you want to subscribe to,
you need more system. Very few people bring newsfeeds directly into their
mone computers -- and those who do are very well advised to invest in more
than 80 megs of disk space. With more and more Internet dial-up access
POPs, it's hard to imagine the need to have netnews delivered, en masse,
onto your hard disk at home. But suit yourself. Just don't scream at
everyone to quit using up *your* bandwidth if that's the way you want to
handle netnews.
>>and the really big
>>newsgroups are things like alt.sex.pictures which encode graphics.
...
>Another generalization. My most expensive home newsgroup is the mis-named
>misc.activism.progressive (m.a.p), a gold mine of information unavailable
>in the convential media.
You missed the word "like" in the above sentence. It was just an example.
>Please read the tutorial materials in news.announce.newusers.
Been there. Done that. Why do you assume that anyone who disagrees with
you must be a novice?
>Although the newcomers waste it, and the pictures are enormous, Usenet
>bandwidth is still precious. Bandwidth in the groups which *accomplish
>something constructive* is especially precious. (May I recommend
>m.a.p, alt.politics.greens, alt.sustainable.agriculture, alt.save.the.earth
>to those folks who think Usenet is all drivel.) This is one reason those
>groups are frequently attacked by bandwidth-wasting flamers; these (usually
>right-wing or "libertarian") vandals want to deprive us of the channel.
Wow, talk about generalizations. So everything that's not constructive in
your worldview is a waste of precious bandwidth, eh? Can you say "New Age
Cyberspace Fundamentalist?" Knew you could.