On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:07:20 UTC, "michael adams"
wrote:


"Bruce" wrote in message ...
wrote:

I've never had a problem with PayPal, but even if you do think they're
"sharp" my point was that by backing it with a credit card, it's not
your money that's at risk, it's the CC company's.


That is no longer the case. Many credit card issuers will not refund
PayPal transactions. Some even treat a PayPal transaction as a cash
advance, and charge you a 2.5% surcharge - plus you incur interest from
Day 1, not the date of your next statement.


Visa on Barclaycard don't and they're probably the largest single CC provider
in the UK. They were also among the first. There's no annual charge,
no charge for using Paypal, and zero interest payable if the outstanding balance
is cleared each month. Together with a detailed monthly statement. All
totally free to the user and paid for by the merchant.

If people instead choose to get ripped off by their clearly inferior competitors
then whose fault is that exactly ?

I dumped Barclaycard because of their hair trigger 'fraud detection'.
They declined a £50 order to CPC, despite passing larger orders for the
previous two years. That's one example of several. Perhaps they were fed
up with me paying it off in full every month.

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On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:28:41 UTC, Bruce wrote:

"Bob Eager" wrote:
On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:17:20 UTC, Sofa - Spud
wrote:

Bruce wrote:
wrote:
I've never had a problem with PayPal, but even if you do think they're
"sharp" my point was that by backing it with a credit card, it's not
your money that's at risk, it's the CC company's.


That is no longer the case. Many credit card issuers will not refund
PayPal transactions. Some even treat a PayPal transaction as a cash
advance, and charge you a 2.5% surcharge - plus you incur interest from
Day 1, not the date of your next statement.


Is that right? Hadn't heard of that.

Yes. Some even charge a flat 'cash advance' fee in addition.

That is the 2.5% I mentioned.

No. They charge a flat £3 in one case.

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"Bob Eager" wrote in message
...
On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 21:28:41 UTC, Bruce wrote:

"Bob Eager" wrote:
On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 20:17:20 UTC, Sofa - Spud
wrote:

Bruce wrote:
wrote:
I've never had a problem with PayPal, but even if you do think
they're
"sharp" my point was that by backing it with a credit card, it's
not
your money that's at risk, it's the CC company's.


That is no longer the case. Many credit card issuers will not
refund
PayPal transactions. Some even treat a PayPal transaction as a cash
advance, and charge you a 2.5% surcharge - plus you incur interest
from
Day 1, not the date of your next statement.


Is that right? Hadn't heard of that.

Yes. Some even charge a flat 'cash advance' fee in addition.

That is the 2.5% I mentioned.

No. They charge a flat £3 in one case.

Who are these people I should remember to avoid?

On Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:16:16 UTC, Froot Bat wrote:

No, the point is that you are naive to the point of absurdity.

Sigh. Yet another idiot who tries to affect Having A Clue by simply
attacking someone, without making any attempt to provide an argument,
let alone back it up. Probably because he doesn't even know what the
point of this discussion is.

Go ahead then Bob, explain what's naive.

You're naive because you expect Usenet to be provided for free. It is a
very resource hungry, expensive service to provide.

Isn't half term over? Or are you playing truant?

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On Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:43:02 UTC, Froot Bat wrote:

On 24 Feb 2009 15:27:44 GMT, "Bob Eager" wrote:

On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:37:45 UTC, Froot Bat wrote:

On 22 Feb 2009 20:18:56 GMT, "Bob Eager" wrote:

On Sun, 22 Feb 2009 18:51:35 UTC, Sofa - Spud
wrote:

I won't pay for usenet out of principle frankly , not even a few pounds.

What principle exactly? Do you expect everything to be free?

Perhaps he just expects usenet to be free. And why not, it always has
been.

Not really. I've been using it for 27 years, and someone has always had
to pay something in all that time.

But not you though. Not the user.

Who has argued that a Usenet service is free to run? Anyone? Me? Go
ahead Bob, take all the time you need. Point to _one_ time I have said
"Usenet services are free to run".

If you're too lazy and/or stupid to read and understand a discussion
before trying to join in then it's no surprise when you end up missing
the point so comprehensively. That point, despite how much you want to
argue about something that nobody even said, is that Usenet has always
been free _at_the_point_of_use_ (as Sam Nelson puts it).

But you didn't say that, or qualify it in any way. You said:

"Perhaps he just expects usenet to be free. And why not, it always has
been."

And of course it's not free. If an ISP provides it, the cost is rolled
into the subscription. And that's why ISPs are dropping it...it affects
the price people pay and the market has become too competitive.

Mainly my employer...who actually sold Usenet services to the UK years ago.

Yep, I've no doubt your employer invented the internet and sold it to
"the UK" too. Anything else?

You can choose not to believe it if you wish.
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"Froot Bat" wrote in message
...
On 24 Feb 2009 15:27:44 GMT, "Bob Eager" wrote:

On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 12:37:45 UTC, Froot Bat wrote:

On 22 Feb 2009 20:18:56 GMT, "Bob Eager" wrote:

On Sun, 22 Feb 2009 18:51:35 UTC, Sofa - Spud

wrote:

I won't pay for usenet out of principle frankly , not even a few
pounds.

What principle exactly? Do you expect everything to be free?

Perhaps he just expects usenet to be free. And why not, it always has
been.

Not really. I've been using it for 27 years, and someone has always had
to pay something in all that time.

But not you though. Not the user.

Who has argued that a Usenet service is free to run? Anyone? Me? Go
ahead Bob, take all the time you need. Point to _one_ time I have said
"Usenet services are free to run".

If you're too lazy and/or stupid to read and understand a discussion
before trying to join in then it's no surprise when you end up missing
the point so comprehensively. That point, despite how much you want to
argue about something that nobody even said, is that Usenet has always
been free _at_the_point_of_use_ (as Sam Nelson puts it).


Indeed. However, if those who have paid in the past choose no longer to do
so, or the prevailing economic climate makes this untenable, times may
change. It *happens* that it has always been free at the point of use (and
long may it continue) but there is no "given" law that says that's how it
should be. It's an economic question, not a moral one.


--
Bob Mannix
(anti-spam is as easy as 1-2-3 - not)

In article ,
says...
That point, despite how much you want to
argue about something that nobody even said, is that Usenet has always
been free _at_the_point_of_use_ (as Sam Nelson puts it).

That has never been my experience. I either paid for it, or set it up
for myself, until I discovered the FU Berlin service that became NIN,
and used that as well, in a vaguely bemused way. To me, free news-
servers are a daft idea, since it's a lot of work for precisely
nothing---there isn't even kudos or prestige involved, I don't think;
not in any public sense. Unless the equipment really was junk AND you
have the running of it so sorted-out that it's `fire&forget' (and I
don't believe there's news-server software out there that works that
well) you are quite literally offering quite a lot of something for a
big fat nothing, and I don't see how that makes sense. The motivation
must be somewhere, but it beats me where.

Mainly my employer...who actually sold Usenet services to the UK years ago.

Yep, I've no doubt your employer invented the internet and sold it to
"the UK" too. Anything else?

Anyone that comes up with a cogent argument is simply ridiculed with a
rather pathetic straw man, huh? People that know far more than you do
about the topic you're hopelessly failing to keep up with are
suggesting that when you're in a hole, you should stop digging, butcan
you put that shovel down?
--
SAm.

In article ,
says...

On 25 Feb 2009 08:22:40 GMT, "Bob Eager" wrote:

On Wed, 25 Feb 2009 08:16:16 UTC, Froot Bat wrote:

No, the point is that you are naive to the point of absurdity.

Sigh. Yet another idiot who tries to affect Having A Clue by simply
attacking someone, without making any attempt to provide an argument,
let alone back it up. Probably because he doesn't even know what the
point of this discussion is.

Go ahead then Bob, explain what's naive.

You're naive because you expect Usenet to be provided for free.

Okay give me a point in history where people had to pay to use it. Ie,
where it was not free. You may include today if you're so confident
that it's not free.

There are histories of Usenet out there. Read one. If you were a
student using a university's news server, it was bundled into fees, for
example. It wasn't free. I dunno about anyone else, but I am not here
to give you a history lesson.

On the contrary, most (if not all) of the top 100 websites (as ranked
by Alexa) are free to use, and they are orders of magnitude more
expensive and resource hungry than a non-binary Usenet server.

#1-#3 are paid for by advertising. #4 and #5 are paid for by Microsoft
and advertising. #6, MySpace? Advertising. #7, Wikipedia. Oh,
there's an interesting one. It's free at the point of use if you're a
sponger, but you can donate if you choose to. Ever donated to
Wikipedia?

eBay is most definitely not free at the point of use, unless perhaps
you only ever buy. Every single seller pays for it, during every
single sale.

Mostly, though, the model is `someone's marketing budget' be it the
owner of the site, or paid advertising. So far, the advertisers must
reckon it's worth it. Beats me how. Back in the days when I was
helping to run the world's first internet search engine, it was a
constant struggle to cope with the required capacity and were on the
edge of either giving up or asking for a real budget just when
Altavista appeared, at which point, suddenly, no-one much wanted to use
JumpStation any more. The notion of paying for it with advertising a)
never occurred to us and b) wouldn't have been possible in the
circumstances.

You not only have no idea how Usenet works, you simply have no idea
how business works either, do you?

Some might say you're naive to the point of absurdity.

Count me in.

Isn't half term over? Or are you playing truant?

Try and stick to the point, Bob, if you ever stumble across one. I
doubt even you're impressed at such lame would-be insults.

So, you're allowed to insult people, roundly, but if anyone insults you
they lose because they aren't sticking to the point?
--
SAm.

In article ,
says...
On Tue, 24 Feb 2009 15:41:50 -0000, Sam Nelson
wrote:
In article ,
says...
Someone's still paying to run it. They can stop running it at any
time. They can kick users off at a whim.

How much you pay a server does not dictate what they can and can't do.
The Terms and Conditions you agree to when you sign up do.

If you pay them nothing, how do you propose to enforce any Ts&Cs that
you may have read? Do you understand the concept of a contract? Why
would performance matter, if there's no consideration?

So? When have I said otherwise? The whole point of this argument is
about the cost at "point of use". All you're trying to argue there is
that "nothing is free", because someone has to pay for it.

Filed under: "No ****".

So, you give in, then, and have agreed with me. Someone pays for news
service, you agree, but that isn't you because you're a sponger.

If that's you trying to move the goalposts now you've been forced to
admit and accept I'm right, then it's pretty pathetic attempt.

You aren't right. You're so far from right that you look utterly
stupid.

That you don't have a
****ing clue how the internet economy works?

It depends on advertising. One of these days, the advertisers are
going to start ****ing off. There's a recession on, so it could be
soon.

By the same logic it could be soon that more people stop paying for
NIN when many good free or lower cost alternatives exist.

I, for one, appreciate that it costs effort and money to provide a news
service, and have no problem with paying for it. I take four
newsfeeds, at present, and pay for two of them (one directly, and one
indirectly via ISP fees). No prizes for guessing which two of the four
are the reliable ones. But to you, reliability and resilience are
irrelevant, it seems. You're just a sponger, and you don't care.
--
SAm.

Sam Nelson wrote:
That has never been my experience. I either paid for it, or set it up
for myself, until I discovered the FU Berlin service that became NIN,
and used that as well, in a vaguely bemused way. To me, free news-
servers are a daft idea, since it's a lot of work for precisely
nothing---there isn't even kudos or prestige involved, I don't think;
not in any public sense. Unless the equipment really was junk AND you
have the running of it so sorted-out that it's `fire&forget' (and I
don't believe there's news-server software out there that works that
well) you are quite literally offering quite a lot of something for a
big fat nothing, and I don't see how that makes sense. The motivation
must be somewhere, but it beats me where.

The motivation is to due with the people talking to one another. No-one
will ever become famous or rich running usenet servers but that's not
the point.

Russ Allbery had something to say about this, over 10 years ago now:
http://www.eyrie.org/~eagle/writing/rant.html

On Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:47:24 UTC, Sam Nelson wrote:

So, you're allowed to insult people, roundly, but if anyone insults you
they lose because they aren't sticking to the point?

I've come to the conclusion that his early posts were a troll. Time to
forget him!
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On Wed, 25 Feb 2009 09:53:04 UTC, Sam Nelson wrote:

I, for one, appreciate that it costs effort and money to provide a news
service, and have no problem with paying for it. I take four
newsfeeds, at present, and pay for two of them (one directly, and one
indirectly via ISP fees). No prizes for guessing which two of the four
are the reliable ones. But to you, reliability and resilience are
irrelevant, it seems. You're just a sponger, and you don't care.

Absolutely. I set up and ran a substantial Usenet server for some years,
as part of my job at the time. It was a major load on the system and,
eventually, in the face of no new hardware and other demands on what we
had, it had to stop. The disk requirement is bad enough, but the fact
that it's millions of variable size files makes it difficult to handle,
and to manage the filesystem. I'm more than happy to pay a small amount
(or even a larger amount) for the service.

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In article ,
says...
Back in the days when I was
helping to run the world's first internet search engine,

ROFL

It's out there. It's documented as such.

Another classic 'Uncle Albert' moment from Sam.

Is this another one of your chat up lines?

No. Just yet another conclusive demonstration that you're utterly
clueless.

I thought it was Bob's
employer that invented the internet, not you.

I made no such claim. When I state that I ran one of the computers
that hosted what is widely accepted as the world's first search engine,
it's just a statement that happens to be true. It was called
JumpStation, and it was developed by an ex-student of this department
who was, at the time, working for the site's central computing service.
I don't know where he is or what he's doing now, and at the time no-one
around here knew what he was doing was astonishing; it was just an
interesting way to spend his weekends. That's one of the reasons it's
so poorly remembered. If we'd realised, we would have made more of a
fuss.

You not only have no idea how Usenet works, you simply have no idea
how business works either, do you?

Some might say you're naive to the point of absurdity.

Count me in.

Hear that Bob? Even sam thinks you're naive to the point of absurdity.

So, you can't even follow a thread, or an argument? You don't
understand who my `Count me in' was aimed at?

Calling someone an idiot is only an insult if they're not an idiot.
Bob is. And so are you.

You're either delusional, plain stupid, or trolling, or a mixture of
any of the three. I am not continuing this until you're basically
competent to do so. Come back when you actually know something about
the situation. All this thread is achieving now is to make you look
more and more stupid, and that doesn't seem fair on anyone, including
you.
--
SAm.

On Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:46:08 UTC, Sam Nelson wrote:

I thought it was Bob's
employer that invented the internet, not you.

I made no such claim. When I state that I ran one of the computers
that hosted what is widely accepted as the world's first search engine,
it's just a statement that happens to be true.

I didn't make the claim either. But he's getting desperate now. I merely
pointed out that we sold Usenet service to people in the UK. If you
(Sam) were or are in academia, I'm sure you know where I work! :-)

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In article , rde42
@spamcop.net says...
On Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:46:08 UTC, Sam Nelson wrote:
I thought it was Bob's
employer that invented the internet, not you.

I made no such claim. When I state that I ran one of the computers
that hosted what is widely accepted as the world's first search engine,
it's just a statement that happens to be true.

I didn't make the claim either. But he's getting desperate now. I merely
pointed out that we sold Usenet service to people in the UK.

For a while, this place (indirectly, at least) paid you for it, AIUI.
Plus, your employer is a lot closer to the claim of having invented the
Internet than most.

If you (Sam) were or are in academia, I'm sure you know where I work!

I'm not hiding anything, it seems, and neither are you. Froot Bat, on
the other hand...
--
SAm.

In article ,
says...

On Wed, 25 Feb 2009 11:46:08 -0000, Sam Nelson
wrote:

In article ,
says...

I thought it was Bob's
employer that invented the internet, not you.

I made no such claim. When I state that I ran one of the computers
that hosted what is widely accepted as the world's first search engine,
it's just a statement that happens to be true.

What you stated, Sam, was that you we

"helping to run the world's first internet search engine"

Leaving aside, despite being such a self-proclaimed internet pioneer,

I'm not a `self-proclaimed Internet pioneer' and never have been. I'm
not an Internet pioneer. I run computers and networks for a living,
and have done for almost quarter of a century. What do you do for a
living? Where are you? What is your name? Why should I bother
debating anything at all with an anonymous poster that doesn't know his
debating arse from his discussing elbow?

that you don't even know the difference between the "internet" and the
"web"

********. As if I'm producing this stuff for a peer-reviewed journal?
Like I care about the odd typo, etc? You're clutching at straws
because you have no case, and never have had.

if it's the world's first _anything_ why has nobody remembered
it?

Because no fuss was ever made of it because no-one around here realised
it was a big deal. Tough ****. That one, I would admit, I lost.

Is it because, in the real world outside of your fantasies of
importance, Wandex is in fact "widely accepted as the world's first
search engine"?

Consider

http://www.maths.usyd.edu.au/jimr/pe/Peregrinator.html

where the two are mentioned in the same sentence, as equals. The World
Wide Web Worm (aka Wandex) was in development at the same time. Like a
lot of inventions (see also powered flight, incandescent lamps, TV)
several people had the same idea at the same time. This is how
progress works. It's all in the detail, and at the time, it was clear
to us that JumpStation was the superior product, because it presented
its results the way modern search engines do, while Wandex didn't until
rather later on. Wandex crawled more intelligently, though.

So basically you were doing something that is done at universities
everywhere, every day: working on a project that went nowhere and
achieved nothing, while other people were doing stuff that worked,
served a purpose and went on to be greatly successful.

If you want to see it that way, fine. You still have nothing to win
with, and never have had.

Well done. At least it came in useful eventually, namely to change the
subject yet again and try and deflect attention from a humiliating and
crushing defeat in a Usenet discussion on a subject (Usenet itself)
about which you proved you know absolutely **** all.

Crushing defeat? You haven't even found a weapon yet.

Well generally Sam, in fact always, unless otherwise stated, if you
reply to someone all your remarks are directed to that person you're
replying to.

You just made this rule up on the spur of the moment, did you? In
which RFC is it covered? Either you know fine well what the remark
meant, in context, or you're too stupid to be here.

You've been saying the same thing all through this thread, Sam. (In
between admitting I'm right.)

I have never admitted you are right. For the record, you are wrong,
completely and utterly wrong, and always have been, and if you feel
there's somewhere in this thread where I've admitted you are right, you
are indeed delusional. You've demonstrated, as detailed above, that
you can't even follow the argument, so how you can claim I've ever
admitted you're right is truly astonishing.

You didn't cry off before (in fact you
even replied to posts I made to your new chum, Bob) so why now?
Finally sunk in how boxed into a corner you are?

I'm way, way past caring.
--
SAm.

In article ,
says...
Is it because, in the real world outside of your fantasies of
importance, Wandex is in fact "widely accepted as the world's first
search engine"?

See also section 1.2, para 2, of

http://www.farcaster.com/papers/ifish/ifish-tr.pdf

The stuff about collecting only "TITLE" information isn't quite
right, I don't think, but I have no solid evidence to back that up. As
I recall, it started by looking at just the page's HEAD section, but
when he realised that mostly he was getting the whole page anyway he
started to have the crawler look at document headings as well.
Something like that.
--
SAm.

In article ,
says...
You: It does indeed cost not a lot to run a non-binary news service.

You conveniently missed off the `however, this is still an infinite
multiple of nothing' or words to that effect. I could look up the
exact quote, but in the face of blatant duplicity and continuing
anonymity, why should I bother? Hence, I don't agree with you,
concerning the costs of running news servers, and never will, because
they are not free to run, and never will be. Exactly what I mean by
`not a lot' is, of course, an undefined quantity; apart from anything
else, it cost me, personally, a great deal of entirely unrewarded time
to set up the two I did for myself. You might not set a great deal
against my time, of course; I was, after all, only scratching my arse
and cleaning toilets, after all.

OK, so I mixed up World Wide Web Worm with World Wide Web Wanderer. I
made a mistake. I apologise. It only goes to further demonstrate my
point that there were a lot of similar tools around at the time, of
which JumpStation was, in my humble opinion, easily the best. Until
Altavista arrived, when someone (DEC) had clearly large pots of
development cash to throw at the problem, it was the best search engine
available. That was just after the point where it was realised that,
in order to make it any better, someone was going to have to ask for
some money.

The others were mostly obvious extensions of web-metrics tools;
JumpStation was a genuine, first-principles attempt to use a WWW form
as the user interface to a WWW index generated by a crawler.

See also:
http://www.shef.ac.uk/mediacentre/2004/225.html

for details of a conference at which this achievement was recognised,
although JumpStation had already been in action for quite a while
before `early 1994'. The press office was very interested for a while,
but we couldn't locate the inventor, so we played it down.
--
SAm.