On Thu, 31 Jul 1997, Dr. Jai Maharaj wrote:
That is unacceptable since the users would have already paid for the account by that time and signed a contract.
Bullshit. I've had accounts on escape, dorsai, and now brainlink. Neither forced me to prepay or sign any contract. I've seen plenty of offers from NetCom and other providers for a free month of access. Even AOL gives free demo hours. Any ISP that forces you to pre-pay for access or sign a contract isn't a decent ISP by definition, and therefore any censoring they do is also unimportant since they already by definition suck. There's enough competition between mom & pop ISP's out there that it doesn't pay for them to censor or piss off their users. The users can simply tar their files and leave. i.e. Escape.com - when I was subscribed to it had a broken trn, and after two-three months of asking them to recompile it, I canceled my account and went elsewhere. (They had tin, but I prefer trn.) There are also free and not so free news servers that one can point to, DejaNews and other archive sources. If your ISP precensors your feed, you can get other feeds. This is a silly arguement when the clients themselves can simply say no to sucky censoring ISP's. For example with my own accounts I refuse to subscribe to any ISP that won't let me have a shell account. PPP is nice and fine, but I want to be able to run stuff from a shell. :) (I wonder if the next volley of censorship messages will say "Oh, that must mean you censor the ISP's because you won't subscribe to ones that don't offer shell - to which I'll answer fuck yes!) =====================================Kaos=Keraunos=Kybernetos============== .+.^.+.| Ray Arachelian |Prying open my 3rd eye. So good to see |./|\. ..\|/..|sunder@sundernet.com|you once again. I thought you were |/\|/\ <--*-->| ------------------ |hiding, and you thought that I had run |\/|\/ ../|\..| "A toast to Odin, |away chasing the tail of dogma. I opened|.\|/. .+.v.+.|God of screwdrivers"|my eye and there we were.... |..... ======================= http://www.sundernet.com ==========================