Conflicting Models: Trusteeship vs. Representative Government

[Terminator]

-- The board has seized power that does not belong to it. Power is a
zero sum game. The board has taken power away from the masses and
concentrated it unfairly in its own hands.

You can't take away something that has never existed.

Agreed.
But those who mourn the passing of the CFV system or
who are outraged that the n.a.n mods appointed
new n.a.n mods without conducting a public vote speak
in terms of a loss of a civil right and civic power.
As far as I can tell, their claims are based on the
model of a zero sum game. If the board has the power

There is no board, you lil nazi puppet.
Such a thing is not possible in principle
as there exists no authority that can possibly
authorize such Stalinist committee you call board.
About the ONLY reference on this is International
Conventions on Basic Human Rights.

Ever heard?

Enough.

to make decisions about the list, then the citizens
of the big-8 are powerless, and that is an outrage,
and the whole board should be ashamed of itself and
resign immediately. Their slogan is "Power to the
people!"
I think that is the wrong model to use when thinking
about the board.
Marty

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Not all of us. I "mourn the passing of the CFV system" for one simple
reason: The system that was good enough for your predecessors isn't
good enough for you.

How about, "The world changed and the system that worked for years
stopped working?"
Since its beginning, Usenet has evolved. Newsgroup creation used to be
as simple as posting an article to a new group and watching the software
create it on the fly.

Which is the best model possible.

Then we "evolved"

Good you used quotation marks around it.
Because that "evolution" was an establishment
of dictatorship.

into votes conducted by the
proponent for a new group.

Which was a fraud on the first place,
just as Brad Templeton stated on a public record.

This procedure morphed into the UVV. Times
changed,

Times may change till your nose goes blue.
But the fascist dictatorship experience
was done with and a long, long time ago.

And your Stalinist style committee
has as much chance as Adolph Hitler.

and that model didn't fit the environment.

Depends on how perverted you are.

Enough.

You seem to think that it's possible for you to
have better ideas or do a better job than those who came before you,
and that's been the basis of all my objections to the concept of the
board all along.

"Different" does not imply "better" or "worse". When change is
necessary, it's unlikely that everyone will be pleased by the new
arrangement. You suggest that change wasn't necessary in this case, but
it's obvious to the casual observer that Usenet today is much different
than Usenet of only a few years ago. Wishing that things could continue
forever without change is simply that . . . a wish.

Things used to be run by a single person who used an
advisory vote; thus it always should be done that way, and those running
things now and in the future should recognize that they never can be as
good as those who first put that system into place.

Uh, right. So you've fixated on a point in time when things were "the
best", and putting the administrative procedures back to the way they
were at that point will magically work perfectly, even though the
environment being administered has changed dramatically.
Wishing for the good 'ole days won't bring 'em back, Wayne. I yearn for
the days when I could conduct a vote in the UVV, but I recognize that
those days are long gone for any number of reasons. When it's simply
not possible to continue to use the old ways, new ways must be
developed. Pining about the good 'ole days doesn't help, even though it
can be pleasant if done with the right mindset.

[Rev. 11D Meow!]

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Not all of us. I "mourn the passing of the CFV system" for one simple
reason: The system that was good enough for your predecessors isn't
good enough for you.

That system was shut down by our predecessors.

I meant your *legitimate* predecessors. I consider Russ, Todd, et
al. part of the same category as the board: Clueless jerks who ought
to be banned from USENET for life. We haven't had a decent Big-8 admin
since Tale, and even he was marginal.

tale was the only one-man show. He collected the pieces that
other people had created and combined them.
tale chose Russ to inherit the wealth

What "wealth", you power hungry sicko,
obscessed with the ideas of totalitarian
dictatorship?

--or Russ, Todd, and

All perverts. That transvestide piranha
with its shark teeh,
that satanist Todd, whose picture with
bloody red eyes and horns on his head
as presented on www.usenet2.org,
and that pedo-sadistic Russ,
are nothing more than nazi degenerates,
doing all they can to suffocate the very
principles of Democracy.

Enough.

Longtime news.announce.newgroups moderator David C. Lawrence aka
"Tale" is unable to continue in his public role, as he will be
dedicating more time to his private life. We hope the entire Usenet
community joins us in wishing him well, and thanking him for his
years of service.
The PGP key to issue control messages in the Big 8 (comp, humanities,
misc, news, sci, soc, talk) hierarchies has been passed to Russ
Allbery. Russ's long association with Tale and dedication to the
Usenet community serves to insure that there will be no disruption
to the affairs of the Big 8 or news.announce.newgroups.
In fact, some elements of Usenet administration which had been
unavoidably neglected in the recent past will be returned to a
healthier footing. For instance, checkgroups will be issued shortly.
In order to improve the administration of the Big 8, more teamwork
and team decision-making have been instituted. Immediately joining
Russ in overseeing the Big 8 process are Group Advice members
piranha and Todd M. McComb. A broader group of volunteers will
be collected in order to better cover the needs of news.announce.newgroups
and the various Big 8 databases during periods when any one volunteer
might be overwhelmed.
This plan has the explicit approval of Tale and will be undertaken
with continued cooperation and support from ISC.org, as per his
desire. At this time, the formerly-unofficial group creation
guidelines prepared by Russ Allbery will appear as the new official
guidelines, also with the full consent of Tale.

So your hero is the one who decided that a group of people
should inherit what he had inherited. The group to whom
tale passed the keys, n.a.n, and Checkgroups passed them
on to us.

I'd be ecstatic if we could have Spaf back again and freeze things as
they were in 1988 in perpetuum.

"If wishes were horses then beggars would ride."

Spaf is off doing other things in computer science.
He said good-bye in 1993 and hasn't shown any interest
since then.

Yes, and in his absence the best anyone can do is to try to imitate him.

Spaf made changes in the system that he thought were
best for the system. He handed it on to two people
Spaf was not the n.a.n mod; that sequence went Woods to Lear to tale

You should be watching over the inheritance the way a museum curator
watches over a precious artifact: By preserving it unchanged. If the
beneficiaries can't appreciate the system as it was, they don't deserve
to be beneficiaries.

You think Usenet is a fossil.
I think Usenet is alive.
It would be a betrayal of trust not to use the tools
that we have inherited to do what the creators of the
tools did: modify the canonical list of big-8 newsgroups.
Marty

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On Fri, 23 Mar 2007 20:45:01 -0600, Dave Balderstone

You trust each other so little? Amazing.

I think it's amazing to trust life that much. Someone should have the
whole thing. What if one or two of the persons sharing the key is
disabled or dies or simply can't get 'Net or email or whatever access
at the proper time?

There are cryptographic techniques that allow a key to be distributed
between N people such that any group of at least K of them can
collabarate to recover the key, for any chosen values of N and K.

The whole idea of a "key" is about the sickest idea
in the entire history of usenet.

With current state of technology, speeds and storage
capacities, you must be utterly out of your mind to
even bother about controlling the group creation/status
process.

IRC functions perfectly without any "committees".
Just type the name of the channel, and it is instantly
created. If you find some people interested in that
subject, they'll join.

The same exact thing is with usenet.
By today's standards, even if it had hundreds of thousands
of groups, it wouln't even be noticable.

NNTP protocol fully supports the automated group creation
in real time. Groups that are not used do not represent
any load on your resources.

Unless you, news admins, modify your configuration files
to allow the automated group creation with newgroup
messages, usenet is doomed, and so is your job.

There are all sorts of new ways and means of communication
beyond usenet and people can create their groups and channels
at will, without ANY "voting" sado-masochistic frenzy,
ran by assorted nazis with megalomaniacal tendencies
trying to "moderated" the concepts of Democracy.

Simple as that.

I have no idea whether the Board has used this method, but it does exist.
--
Andrew, Supernews
http://www.supernews.com - individual and corporate NNTP services