O.T. Actual airline pilot conversations

In article ,
Larry Dighera wrote:
On Tue, 07 Dec 2004 19:53:16 GMT, David CL Francis
wrote in
::

No such thing as an authority of usenet as far as I know.

What ever happened to Gene Spaford? In the beginning, the 'backbone'
policed its news nodes and denied a feed to those that were
problematic. Today, due to the massive influx of Usenet-naive users,
and the loss of power by the backbone cabal, the system has begun to
devolve a bit.

Gene Spafford (aka spaf) is still around, but gave up on USENET sometime
around the start of the September that never ended[1]. I can't seem to
find his "screw you guys, I'm going home" message in Google Groups.
It might have just been in the local Purdue groups.

Emily Postnews is still recommended reading, but of course no one
bothers any more.

John
[1] In the early days of USENET, every September the influx of
college students would increase the noise level in the newsgroups.
September 1993 is referred to as the September that never ended
because AOL users got access to USENET around that time.
--
John Clear - http://www.panix.com/~jac

On 8 Dec 2004 00:25:15 -0800, (John Clear) wrote in
::

Emily Postnews is still recommended reading, but of course no one
bothers any more.

A large part of the reason "no one bothers any more" is a result of
the current crop of news reading client software failing to impose the
mandate that the monthly postings in news.newusers
news://news.newusers.questions be visited before permitting the
reading of articles in other newsgroups. IIRC, rn and trn were
distributed with such an imperative.

It's interesting how such a simple omission can assist in
precipitating devolution. As the recent message below indicates, AOL
is not part of the solution either:


The original message was received at Sun, 5 Dec 2004 12:50:11
-0500 (EST) from mtiwmhc12.worldnet.att.net [204.127.131.116]

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----- Transcript of session follows -----
... while talking to air-xj03.mail.aol.com.:
RCPT
552 newsmaster MAILBOX FULL
554 ... Service unavailable