Slightly OT: Bastard plagiarists

At 21:27 12/01/2006, you wrote: It's often said, there is no such thing as Bad Publicity. Of course, you have to take advantage of it ... Back in the mid to late 80's, I ran a national on-line moderated chat room, called "Free Speech", on the British Telecom "Prestel" viewdata system. I think, at the time, it was the only free chat room available! Since actually buying space for this was expensive, (GBP 500 for 100 off 768-byte pages p.a.) I blagged space from all over! It had started out on the Pan-Am (airline) information pages when I took it over, and after a sojourn all over the system, we ended up using space on the British Rail on-line timetable system!! Bear in mind, this was 20 years ago, very pre-internet, and hardly anybody outside the UK travel industry and a few computer geeks had heard of Prestel, never mind knew you could actually do anything useful on it. Anyway, at some point I let through a message asking for adult contacts, which while fairly inoffensive by todays standards, somebody took umbrage, despite me censoring it, removing contact details, and commenting "no more of these" on the bottom, and it ended up being shown on TV, on a prime-time, London BBC1 chat show "look what I found while looking up my train times", complete with computer and dial-up connection on-camera. B.R. promptly pulled the plug on my space, and totally missed the opportunity to utilise that publicity of their timetable service which virtually nobody had heard of before and didn't know existed, and which was surely costing them a lot of money (because it used a direct link to their own systems, rather than being static pages, and that cost an awful lot more to set up..) You couldn't buy that sort of exposure at any price, (no ads on the BBC). Ah well. I still have all the messages archived, on dozens of floppies, even a few tapes. Some day I will sort them out and re-publish.. Rob "The Mad Sysop"