"My sense is that this is an area currently full of potholes and badly in
 need of some general understandings."
 
I think most administrators are more concerned with liability than anything
else. Systems aren't public utilities. Until communication - and in partic-
-ular, telecommunication - becomes a public utility, a recognized right and
responsibility we all share ... much as carrying a letter, in the days of
the Old West, before the Pony Express, was regarded as a sacred responsibility.
No one knew when they might not be needing to send a letter, and few could
afford to pay someone exclusively to do such a thing, so all were equal ...
 
Would *you* give a network address to anyone who wandered in off the street ?
And an account on your system ? Only accredited scholars ? Hm, I'm a scholar,
but I'm self-educated. Dropped out of high school, passed lightly through the
regional junior colleges, studied assembler and electronics and programming on
my own, became an administrator to have better access to netnews ( as well as
control over it, since, clearly, network administration is better in the hands
of responsible people than machiavellian people ) and here I am helping run a
world empire, of sorts.
 
How about students ? Students of other colleges ? It gets fuzzy ...
 
I think it's their responsibility to provide the terminal and modem if they
care about it. I have a 1200-baud laptop, it sux but it works. Dialups are
all over the place, and Unix boxes also. Membership is cheap, you can get a
lot for $20.00 a month, and an increasing number *do* have 800 numbers. It's
sort of like renting a postbox ...
 
Or maybe they should consider setting up their own node, which they could take
with them, and make *that* their mailbox, a sort of sophisticated answering
machine, with a whole lot more ...
 
-- richard
 
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-- richard childers		[log in to unmask]		1 415 506 2411
         oracle data center  --  unix systems & network administration
 
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