[Pan-users] Re: New version of pan ?

[Duncan]

David Shochat posted on Sun, 16 Jan 2011 18:45:03 +0000 as excerpted:

> On Sun, 16 Jan 2011 16:58:03 +0000, Duncan wrote:
> 
>>... despite "eternal September" (which seems to
>> have ended, ...
> 
> It's still working for me, at least for reading. I did have to re-sign
> up for it yesterday, but that may just be because I hadn't accessed it
> in a while. Once I put in my new password for it in pan, I was able to
> read alt.coffee; before that it had said that I had "invalid
> credentials".

You had me /very/ confused for a bit... until I remembered that there's 
actually a server called "Eternal September"! =:^0

Meanwhile, I believe you'll find /my/ post makes more sense if you read 
the "eternal September" bit as the original metaphorical reference that 
the server in question is named after.

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Eternal_september

IOW, I'm saying now that the ISPs have pretty much stopped bundling USENET 
and thus the "eternal" influx of newbies (and the generally less 
technically inclined) has ceased, the relative obscurity of USENET (as 
compared to the web, email, IRC/IM, etc) has increased even further.  I 
was debating whether the effect of that was likely to be an even better 
treasure trove of both binary and text content, since an increase of 
obscurity means both that the relative "noise" level should have decreased 
AND that the would-be censors (copyright/moral/political/whatever) should 
tend to ignore it even more than they have historically, in favor of 
targetting more popular protocols, OR whether it's /so/ obscure now that 
the quality of the content is likely to suffer, despite the lower 
censorship targeting.  In theory, I'd say the former, at least near-term, 
altho over time, the obscurity is likely to increase further and the level 
of content decrease, as the source of new blood has to a large extent 
dried up.

-- 
Duncan - List replies preferred.   No HTML msgs.
"Every nonfree program has a lord, a master --
and if you use the program, he is your master."  Richard Stallman