From: nop@alt.net 
  
 Kibo informs me that kaih=9GjyoD8mw-B@khms.westfalen.de (Kai Henningsen) 
 stated that: 
  
 >You seem to be under the mistaken impression that this is about rights of 
 >posters and/or lurkers. 
 > 
 >Instead, it is about people paying for Usenet servers and for bandwidth to 
 >connect them. 
 > 
 >It seems they like to have group lists informed by market research: and 
 >market research is what this voting is all about. 
 > 
 >And lurkers are, of course, important there, because they are customers of 
 >those server owners. Posters are less important, actually - there are 
 >probably orders of magnitude fewer than lurkers, they don't pay any more, 
 >and in fact they produce all this traffic that must be paid. 
  
 This is possidly the the saddest, most cynical rationale for the 
 existance of Usenet that I have ever heard. If that is actually an 
 accurate description of the situation, those operators deserve to be in 
 charge of a zero-content Usenet that no longer contains anything but 
 crossposted cascades & flamage. 
  
 > Too bad 
 >lurkers aren't interested in empty groups much. 
  
 Gee, then maybe those people /should/ give priority to the wishes of the 
 posters? After all, why would a new user bother to participate in (or 
 even read) newsgroups that are flooded with off-topic garbage? 
  
 OTOH, it seems that Google has generously decided to fill Usenet with 
 the content of its proprietory groups system, & bypass the annoying 
 inconvenience of the traditional rules of Usenet, so maybe news.groups, 
 etc, will just end up being as vestigial & ineffectual as 
 news.admin.net-abuse.usenet is now. 
  
 -- 
    W 
  . | ,. w ,   "Some people are alive only because 
   \\|/  \\|/     it is illegal to kill them."    Perna condita delenda est 
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 --- SoupGate-Win32 v1.05 
  * Origin: you cannot sedate... all the things you hate (1:229/2)