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
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