Splitting the group?

I filter on that and anything crossposted to the survivalist group. And Cliff.

If you feel strongly about it, you can call for a shun. It's been effective in the past on flat-out troublemakers. It's doubtful there would be enough of a consenses to get it to work on Cliff, however.

I've recommended that before but it hasn't made a dent. Cliff is an extremely good troll who finds people's hot buttons and pushes them continuously. This will happen as long as people react and post before thinking.

Hey, maybe Tom Gardener's breakins are instant karma for his responding -continually- to the trolls. What do you think?

========================================================== CAUTION: Do NOT look directly into laser with remaining eyeball! ==========================================================

It would help a lot if posters would stop cross-posting, at least on the political crap. Not likely to happen though and it's more productive to just move on. Some do so, by remaining here and just ignoring the crap, others seem to have given up all together and gone elsewhere. Fitch Williams and Jack Erbes, amongst others fall into the latter group.

Mike

It takes more time to keep setting up filters than to just skip through the list. If it was only a single thread, fine, but there are new bunches of them every day. I have yet to see a filter smart enough to set itself with what is relevant to a particular newsgroup by itself. Plus it takes extra time to download titles anyway, for filter to work on. Filter (at least on my newsreader)only keeps titles from showing in window, doesn't keep from downloading them. I'm a poor guy- only have dialup, so time to download titles is significant.

Try using XNews as a newsreader.

If you think that 56KB download is slow, try using a cell phone connection at 14.4 KB or less.

Right on! Cell phones were never intended to carry data at any appreciable speed. Anyone that thinks otherwise is merely being led around by the nose with advertising from unscrupulous communications companies. IMO, unless in the unlikely event the FCC sets aside some of the other comm. spectrum specifically for data transmission over cellular telephony, it will never become a reality. Some have been severly mislead by the so-called "camera phones" where slow-scan data can transmit a picture of sorts. Gimme a break, already! "Voice" is inherently a low bandwidth medium, despite the claims of Qualcom and others - as throughput expands, such as with CDMA, GSM and other "Hedy Lamar" types of modulation, available bandwidth shrinks. Don't expect wideband data over cell phones in a long, long time, if ever.

Bob Swinney

FWIW, in Digital Service areas, many of the newer phones can achieve 56KB (or more).

When we're out RVing we often have 2 machines online through a single cell phone that's providing ~14.4KB.

Ya gotta be *patient*!

If you think 14.4K bps is slow, try 300 bps.

When I first started using Usenet, I had a 300 baud modem at home. That was a big improvement over the previous generation of 110 baud modems with acoustic couplers. Flamewars and trolls wasted HUGE amounts of time back then. If you were paying for your dialup connection by the minute (as almost everyone did), it could get very expensive. At work, my terminal connected to the machines at 9600 bps, that was screaming fast.

Recall that it was once thought that the 300-3000 Hz bandwidth of telephony could not transfer digital data at greater than 1200 baud.

Shannon, at Bell Labs, proved that the error-free information capacity of a channel is determined by it's entropy. He left figuring out how to actually approach that as an exercise. 70 years or so later, we're still working on that, and making some progress.

Yeah, but we've about run up against the old Frequency-Bandwidth continuum limit thing.

Nyquist's theorem states that an arbitrary waveform can uniquely reconstructed without error from periodic samples taken at a frequency at least twice the highest frequency present in the waveform. Channel bandwidth limits the number of samples per second, but it does not limit the number of values each sample might have. Let's say the arbitrary waveform can have any one of 1024 values. Each sample can then convey 10 bits of information -- 2^10 = 1024.

In a noiseless channel, the information rate thru a channel of given bandwidth could therefore theoretically be arbitrarily high, simply by having arbitrarily many possible values for each sample.

Real channels do have random noise which adds a degree of uncertainty to each sample, so the maximum possible error-free information rate, or channel capacity, is determined by the ratio of signal power to noise power.

Shannon merely proved mathematically what's possible; he didn't show how to do it. That's the part we're still working on and keep getting better at.

Does XNews actually have the ability to filter a thread without first downloading all subject lines?

Nyquist, Shannon, etc. primarily address analog transmission and give some insight into the effects of noise in the channel. CDMA and other "modern" schemes essentially utilize very random bits of signal which taken as the whole, synthesize noise in the channel. Effective bandwidth is limited by the numbers of users on any given frequency (frequency loosely meaning "channel") Bandwidth will be inverse to the numbers of users on a channel. Good original bandwidth will be degraded as the carrier puts more users on channel.

While I haven't seen the internal code, it seems to do that.

It *does*, however, do a pretty good job of filtration.

All transmission is analog. Bits of information are somehow represented by a voltage, a frequency, or some other electrical (analog) quantity. As we learn more, and as computing power gets cheaper and faster, we keep discovering ways to do that better.

More users in a channel do increase the information load of that channel, leaving less information rate capacity per user in a given channel. That'll always be true.

Great point, Don! I have long contended that all transmission is analog - but try to tell that to a byte head.

PS to previous: I wonder why my Hedy Lamar modulation comment didn't draw any fire.

I knew what you meant. I still have an article somewhere describing her non-cinematic wartime contribution.