Aadiron.118 net.general utzoo!decvax!duke!adiron!brent Tue May 4 11:59:23 1982 Free speech, constitutional rights, and USENET This response is to decvax!minow (whoever he is: he did not sign his article) who wrote a news article in net.misc a day or so ago concerning free speech, constitutional rights, and the use of USENET. After writing the response, I felt that what I was writing was really for a wider audience than just him/her. Please forgive me for such a long article. I think that you miss the real point. With my company, we are very careful about what news groups that we recieve. The reason is that USENET is available because we convinced management that it was benificial to our work, and of ultimate benifit to the company. We do not want to loose USENET, so we specifically do not recieve things like net.jokes, net.cooks, net.games, and the like. I think that most companies and universities would be more inclined to accept the charges of having such a net as this (the net DOES cost money; long distance telephone charges are expensive, not to mention the cpu and I/O charges associated with recieving, sending, and reading net news) if there were less articles on such things as psi, dirty jokes, and how to make a souffle, and more articles on useful information, discussions on human interfaces, etc. This, of course, is the official purpose for such a network, but since there is no (current) restriction on the type of articles, it keeps degeneration more and more into a means of spreading dirty and racist jokes all over the country so that people who probably don't realy want to read them anyway waste there time not laughing at them. I appreciate the net, but reciently it has become less and less useful to me, and I find myself not reading news for days at a time because I really don't want to waste my time (and my employer's time) passing over articles that don't interest me and have nothing to do with computer science. When was the last time you read an article that interested you intellectually or academically, much less could use in your work? It has been a while for me. Maybe we should do something about that! Yes, you have a constitutional right to mouth off about anything you want, but institutions also have the constitutional right to refuse to allow networks to operate on their machines. Who looses? You or all of us? Let us all use a little restraint in exercising our constitutional rights to their utmost. The world would be a much better place if we did, and maybe we would not have to be constantly raising and answering constitutional questions. Remember that self-discipline is a mark of maturity. Brent D. Kornman PAR Technology Corp. ..!decvax!duke!adiron!brent ----------------------------------------------------------------- gopher://quux.org/ conversion by John Goerzen of http://communication.ucsd.edu/A-News/ This Usenet Oldnews Archive article may be copied and distributed freely, provided: 1. There is no money collected for the text(s) of the articles. 2. The following notice remains appended to each copy: The Usenet Oldnews Archive: Compilation Copyright (C) 1981, 1996 Bruce Jones, Henry Spencer, David Wiseman.