90-686: Richard William "Wil" Wheaton III (born July 29, 1972) is an American actor and writer. He portrayed Wesley Crusher on the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation , Gordie Lachance in the film Stand by Me , Joey Trotta in Toy Soldiers , and Bennett Hoenicker in Flubber . Wheaton has also appeared in recurring voice acting roles as Aqualad in Teen Titans , Cosmic Boy in Legion of Super Heroes , and Mike Morningstar/Darkstar in
180-472: A deus ex machina plot device. Commentators have observed at least seven times in which Crusher, "who has trouble getting into the Starfleet Academy" and is on a ship "filled with Starfleet's best and brightest crew members", has come up with "the needed solution". Fans' dislike for Crusher has become something of a pop-culture meme , reflected in other TV shows such as The Big Bang Theory ,
270-538: A Revision3 syndicated video podcast called InDigital along with Jessica Corbin and Hahn Choi. He hosted a NASA video on the Mars Curiosity rover which landed on Monday August 6, 2012. He has hosted "2nd Watch", interviews with cast members and producers of the science-fiction series Falling Skies that appears online after each episode. On April 3, 2014, Wheaton announced on his blog that his new show called The Wil Wheaton Project would premiere on
360-509: A technology evangelist for the product. Afterward, he returned to Los Angeles, attended acting school for five years, and then re-entered the acting world. In the late 1990s and early 2000s, Wheaton appeared in several independent films , including the award-winning The Good Things (2001), in which he portrays a frustrated Kansas tollbooth worker. For his performance in Jane White Is Sick & Twisted (2002) he received
450-598: A charter, a rationale, and a moderation policy if the group is to be moderated. Discussion of the new newsgroup proposal follows, and is finished with the members of the Big-8 Management Board making the decision, by vote, to either approve or disapprove the new newsgroup. Unmoderated newsgroups form the majority of Usenet newsgroups, and messages submitted by readers for unmoderated newsgroups are immediately propagated for everyone to see. Minimal editorial content filtering vs propagation speed form one crux of
540-426: A child and his mother as being an enabler of that abuse. He also stated that his parents forced him to become an actor; he is currently estranged from them. Wheaton made his acting debut in the television film A Long Way Home (1981), which starred Timothy Hutton . He voiced the character of Martin in the animated film The Secret of NIMH (1982), the film adaptation of Robert C. O'Brien 's book Mrs. Frisby and
630-603: A cross post to the *.answers group at the head of the hierarchy seen by some as a refining of information in that news group. Some subgroups are recursive—to the point of some silliness in alt.* . Usenet was originally created to distribute text content encoded in the 7- bit ASCII character set. With the help of programs that encode 8-bit values into ASCII, it became practical to distribute binary files as content. Binary posts, due to their size and often-dubious copyright status, were in time restricted to specific newsgroups, making it easier for administrators to allow or disallow
720-1089: A different author, to commemorate the 40th anniversary of Star Wars . Wheaton married Anne Prince on November 7, 1999, and lives in Arcadia, California , with her and her two sons from a previous relationship. Upon reaching maturity, both sons asked Wheaton to legally adopt them, which he did. Wheaton was roommates with Chris Hardwick while Chris attended UCLA . They met at a showing of Arachnophobia in Burbank, California. Wheaton has struggled with alcohol addiction. In January 2021, Wheaton announced he had been sober from alcohol for five years. Wheaton lives with complex post-traumatic stress disorder , generalized anxiety disorder , and chronic depression . He supports mental health nonprofit organizations in raising awareness for these conditions. He criticized Dave Chappelle for making jokes about transgender people during Chappelle's comedy film The Closer . Wheaton said popular comics had influenced him to think homophobic humor
810-457: A disproportionately high volume of customer support incidents (frequently complaining of missing news articles). Some ISPs outsource news operations to specialist sites, which will usually appear to a user as though the ISP itself runs the server. Many of these sites carry a restricted newsfeed, with a limited number of newsgroups. Commonly omitted from such a newsfeed are foreign-language newsgroups and
900-679: A live audience. The game was hosted and recorded by Wizards of the Coast with Chris Perkins as the dungeonmaster. Wheaton starred in the Kickstarter -funded game There Came an Echo by Iridium Studios. In Dungeons and Dragons Online , he became the dungeon master of the Temple of Elemental Evil quests. Nintendo of America announced on Twitter that Wheaton would be voicing Abraham Lincoln in Code Name: STEAM . Wheaton does
990-578: A moderator must bear the Approved: header line. Moderators ensure that the messages that readers see in the newsgroup conform to the charter of the newsgroup, though they are not required to follow any such rules or guidelines. Typically, moderators are appointed in the proposal for the newsgroup, and changes of moderators follow a succession plan. Historically, a mod.* hierarchy existed before Usenet reorganization. Now, moderated newsgroups may appear in any hierarchy, typically with .moderated added to
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#17327765381261080-499: A news server might attempt to control the spread of spam by refusing to accept or forward any posts that trigger spam filters , or a server without high-capacity data storage may refuse to carry any newsgroups used primarily for file sharing , limiting itself to discussion-oriented groups. However, unlike BBSes and web forums, the dispersed nature of Usenet usually permits users who are interested in receiving some content to access it simply by choosing to connect to news servers that carry
1170-687: A newsgroup under the Big Eight which contains discussions about children's books, but a group in the alt hierarchy may be dedicated to one specific author of children's books. Binaries are posted in alt.binaries.* , making it the largest of all the hierarchies. Many other hierarchies of newsgroups are distributed alongside these. Regional and language-specific hierarchies such as japan.* , malta.* and ne.* serve specific countries and regions such as Japan , Malta and New England . Companies and projects administer their own hierarchies to discuss their products and offer community technical support, such as
1260-468: A person because they didn’t like a character I played on a TV show, I wanted to put Star Trek behind me and forget that it was ever part of my life." In a 2016 issue of Wired magazine, Wesley Crusher was ranked 31st of the 100 most important Starfleet characters in the Star Trek science fiction universe. Usenet Early research and development: Merging the networks and creating
1350-412: A readership which is potentially widely distributed. These protocols most commonly use a flooding algorithm which propagates copies throughout a network of participating servers. Whenever a message reaches a server, that server forwards the message to all its network neighbors that haven't yet seen the article. Only one copy of a message is stored per server, and each server makes it available on demand to
1440-551: A recurring character in season 2 of Star Trek: Prodigy (2024). He is the son of Beverly Crusher and Jack Crusher and is portrayed by actor Wil Wheaton . In the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation , Wesley Crusher first arrives on the Enterprise -D with his mother, soon after Captain Jean-Luc Picard assumes command. Crusher's father was killed while under Picard's command, with Picard delivering
1530-706: A server, just (local) telephone service. The name Usenet comes from the term "users' network". The first Usenet group was NET.general , which quickly became net.general . The first commercial spam on Usenet was from immigration attorneys Canter and Siegel advertising green card services. On the Internet, Usenet is transported via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) on Transmission Control Protocol (TCP) port 119 for standard, unprotected connections, and on TCP port 563 for Secure Sockets Layer (SSL) encrypted connections. Usenet
1620-457: A takedown petition to be most effective across the whole network, it would have to be issued to the origin server to which the content has been posted, before it has been propagated to other servers. Removal of the content at this early stage would prevent further propagation, but with modern high speed links, content can be propagated as fast as it arrives, allowing no time for content review and takedown issuance by copyright holders. Establishing
1710-528: A telecommunications service, and assert that they are not responsible for the user-posted binary content transferred via their equipment. In the United States, Usenet providers can qualify for protection under the DMCA Safe Harbor regulations , provided that they establish a mechanism to comply with and respond to takedown notices from copyright holders. Removal of copyrighted content from
1800-418: A tree-like form. When a user posts an article, it is initially only available on that user's news server. Each news server talks to one or more other servers (its "newsfeeds") and exchanges articles with them. In this fashion, the article is copied from server to server and should eventually reach every server in the network. The later peer-to-peer networks operate on a similar principle, but for Usenet it
1890-460: Is a fictional character in the Star Trek franchise. He appears regularly in the first four seasons of the television series Star Trek: The Next Generation ( TNG ), and sporadically in its next three seasons. He also appeared in the feature film Star Trek: Nemesis (2002) in one episode apiece of the television series Star Trek: Picard (2022) and Star Trek: Lower Decks (2023), and as
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#17327765381261980-405: Is also used by individual users to store backup data. While commercial providers offer easier to use online backup services , storing data on Usenet is free of charge (although access to Usenet itself may not be). The method requires the uploader to cede control over the distribution of the data; the files are automatically disseminated to all Usenet providers exchanging data for the news group it
2070-403: Is contained within nine hierarchies, eight of which are operated under consensual guidelines that govern their administration and naming. The current Big Eight are: The alt.* hierarchy is not subject to the procedures controlling groups in the Big Eight, and it is as a result less organized. Groups in the alt.* hierarchy tend to be more specialized or specific—for example, there might be
2160-504: Is normally the sender, rather than the receiver, who initiates transfers. Usenet was designed under conditions when networks were much slower and not always available. Many sites on the original Usenet network would connect only once or twice a day to batch-transfer messages in and out. This is largely because the POTS network was typically used for transfers, and phone charges were lower at night. The format and transmission of Usenet articles
2250-476: Is one such web based front end and some web browsers can access Google Groups via news: protocol links directly. A minority of newsgroups are moderated, meaning that messages submitted by readers are not distributed directly to Usenet, but instead are emailed to the moderators of the newsgroup for approval. The moderator is to receive submitted articles, review them, and inject approved articles so that they can be properly propagated worldwide. Articles approved by
2340-572: Is only one where life in the galaxy doesn't end in endless suffering and that involves the seven cadets sticking together. As extra-dimensional scavengers called the Loom move to destroy the universe, Crusher helps the cadets find the Protostar and vanishes after promising to distract the Loom to buy them time. In the second half of the season, Crusher is captured by Asencia and his mind probed to create temporal weaponry that she intends to use to destroy
2430-624: Is posted to. In general the user must manually select, prepare and upload the data. The data is typically encrypted because it is available to anyone to download the backup files. After the files are uploaded, having multiple copies spread to different geographical regions around the world on different news servers decreases the chances of data loss. Major Usenet service providers have a retention time of more than 12 years. This results in more than 60 petabytes (60000 terabytes ) of storage (see image). When using Usenet for data storage, providers that offer longer retention time are preferred to ensure
2520-491: Is similar to that of Internet e-mail messages. The difference between the two is that Usenet articles can be read by any user whose news server carries the group to which the message was posted, as opposed to email messages, which have one or more specific recipients. Today, Usenet has diminished in importance with respect to Internet forums , blogs , mailing lists and social media . Usenet differs from such media in several ways: Usenet requires no personal registration with
2610-400: Is sufficient storage allocated to handle the amount of articles being added. Without sufficient retention time, a reader will be unable to download all parts of the binary before it is flushed out of the group's storage allocation. This was at one time how posting undesired content was countered; the newsgroup would be flooded with random garbage data posts, of sufficient quantity to push out all
2700-612: Is the author of Dancing Barefoot (2004) and Just a Geek (2004). He released a revised follow-up, Still Just a Geek , in 2022. Wheaton runs his own blog , Wil Wheaton Dot Net . In June 2005, he became that month's featured Tech writer for the SuicideGirls Newswire. In 2017, Wheaton wrote the short story "Laina" for the Star Wars anthology From a Certain Point of View . The book features 40 short stories, each by
2790-591: The Ben 10 franchise's original continuity. He appeared regularly as a fictionalized version of himself on the sitcom The Big Bang Theory and in the roles of Fawkes on The Guild , Colin Mason on Leverage , and Dr. Isaac Parrish on Eureka . Wheaton was the host and co-creator of the YouTube board game show TableTop . He has narrated numerous audio books, including Ready Player One and The Martian . Wheaton
Wil Wheaton - Misplaced Pages Continue
2880-502: The alt.binaries hierarchy which largely carries software, music, videos and images, and accounts for over 99 percent of article data. There are also Usenet providers that offer a full unrestricted service to users whose ISPs do not carry news, or that carry a restricted feed. Newsgroups are typically accessed with newsreaders : applications that allow users to read and reply to postings in newsgroups. These applications act as clients to one or more news servers. Historically, Usenet
2970-679: The 2016 general election . Immediately following the Sutherland Springs church shooting on November 5, 2017, Wheaton on Twitter stated in response to Congressman Paul Ryan 's call for prayers for the victims that "The murdered victims were in a church. If prayers did anything, they'd still be alive, you worthless sack of shit." Wheaton subsequently clarified his opinion after receiving criticism, writing "I apologize to those of you who are sincere people of Faith, who felt attacked by me", but accused "the right wing noise machine" of using his comments "to deflect attention and anger away from
3060-632: The SyFy network at 10 pm on May 27 for an initial projected run of twelve episodes. However, on August 29, Wheaton blogged that SyFy canceled the show after only one season. Wheaton has hosted Star Trek aftershow The Ready Room since the second season in 2020. Wheaton is a Dungeons & Dragons player, and played during the PAX 2010 event using the 4th edition rules. Wheaton, along with webcartoonists Jerry Holkins and Mike Krahulik of Penny Arcade , and Scott Kurtz of PvP , played in front of
3150-599: The Traveler tells Captain Picard that Wesley possesses a unique intelligence and great potential when provided encouragement and opportunity, comparing him to a child prodigy like Mozart . Picard soon appoints Crusher as acting ensign . In the episode " Coming of Age ", Crusher takes the Starfleet Academy entrance exam, but fails to pass it. In the episode " Ménage à Troi ", he misses his second chance to take
3240-425: The sci.* hierarchy. Or, talk.origins and talk.atheism are in the talk.* hierarchy. When a user subscribes to a newsgroup, the news client software keeps track of which articles that user has read. In most newsgroups, the majority of the articles are responses to some other article. The set of articles that can be traced to one single non-reply article is called a thread . Most modern newsreaders display
3330-452: The (typically local) readers able to access that server. The collection of Usenet servers has thus a certain peer-to-peer character in that they share resources by exchanging them, the granularity of exchange however is on a different scale than a modern peer-to-peer system and this characteristic excludes the actual users of the system who connect to the news servers with a typical client-server application, much like an email reader. RFC 850
3420-629: The English dub of Steins;Gate , and in a 2009 Family Guy episode, " Not All Dogs Go to Heaven ", which included the main The Next Generation cast and featured Wil Wheaton in character as Crusher being bullied by Patrick Stewart . Wheaton wrote: "When I was younger, people gave me such a hard time about Wesley Crusher, there was a time in my late teens and early twenties when I resented Star Trek . It felt so unfair that people who had never met me were so cruel and hateful toward me as
3510-555: The Federation in a war. Crusher is eventually rescued by the cadets, but reveals that he had allowed himself to be captured in order to guide Asencia into creating the technology that they will need to send the Protostar back in time and restore the timeline. Although the Doctor is able to treat Crusher's injuries, the damage to his brain puts Crusher's Traveler powers out of commission for the time being. Working with Janeway to rescue
3600-519: The Internet: Commercialization, privatization, broader access leads to the modern Internet: Examples of Internet services: Usenet ( / ˈ j uː z n ɛ t / ), USENET , or, "in full", User's Network , is a worldwide distributed discussion system available on computers. It was developed from the general-purpose Unix-to-Unix Copy (UUCP) dial-up network architecture. Tom Truscott and Jim Ellis conceived
3690-628: The Rats of NIMH (1971). Wheaton also appeared in Hambone and Hillie (1983), The Buddy System (1984) (opposite Richard Dreyfuss and Susan Sarandon ), and The Last Starfighter . He had a few lines in Starfighter which were ultimately cut from the theatrical release, but Wheaton is still visible in several scenes. Wheaton first gained widespread attention for his work in Stand by Me (1986),
Wil Wheaton - Misplaced Pages Continue
3780-690: The Traveler to explore other planes of reality. Crusher is next seen sitting next to his mother in the background of the wedding scenes in the feature film Star Trek: Nemesis . In a scene deleted from the film, Captain Picard asks Crusher if he is excited to serve on board the USS Titan (Captain Riker's ship). Crusher tells him that he will be running the night shift in Engineering, which would have indicated that Wesley returned to Starfleet prior to
3870-558: The Usenet community. One little cited defense of propagation is canceling a propagated message, but few Usenet users use this command and some news readers do not offer cancellation commands , in part because article storage expires in relatively short order anyway. Almost all unmoderated Usenet groups tend to receive large amounts of spam . Usenet is a set of protocols for generating, storing and retrieving news "articles" (which resemble Internet mail messages) and for exchanging them among
3960-400: The articles arranged into threads and subthreads. For example, in the wine-making newsgroup rec.crafts.winemaking, someone might start a thread called; "What's the best yeast?" and that thread or conversation might grow into dozens of replies long, by perhaps six or eight different authors. Over several days, that conversation about different wine yeasts might branch into several sub-threads in
4050-661: The award for Best Actor at the Melbourne Underground Film Festival . Wheaton regularly portrayed a fictionalized version of himself on The Big Bang Theory , becoming a recurring guest star and then side character on the show. In June 2024, Wheaton announced that he was retired from on-screen acting. Wheaton is known for his voice acting career. He voiced the role of Martin Brisby in The Secret of NIMH in 1981. In August 2021. Wheaton voiced
4140-493: The cadets, Crusher struggles to adjust to not being able to rely on his powers before Janeway reminds him that Crusher was a Starfleet officer before he was a Traveler and his natural talents are more valuable to them than his space-time powers. Given a confidence boost, Crusher plays a pivotal role in the rescue mission using his skills as a pilot and later his intellect to reprogram a tricorder to remotely bring their ship in for departure. Crusher later helps to figure out how to open
4230-464: The character. Wheaton commented about his critics in a 2004 interview for WebTalk Radio: Later, I determined that the people who were really, really cruel – like the Usenet weenies – really are a statistically insignificant number of people. And I know, just over the years from people who've e-mailed me at my website and people who I've talked to since I started going to Star Trek conventions again in
4320-447: The content to be suppressed. This has been compensated by service providers allocating enough storage to retain everything posted each day, including spam floods, without deleting anything. Modern Usenet news servers have enough capacity to archive years of binary content even when flooded with new data at the maximum daily speed available. In part because of such long retention times, as well as growing Internet upload speeds, Usenet
4410-559: The data will survive for longer periods of time compared to services with lower retention time. While binary newsgroups can be used to distribute completely legal user-created works, free software , and public domain material, some binary groups are used to illegally distribute proprietary software , copyrighted media, and pornographic material. ISP-operated Usenet servers frequently block access to all alt.binaries.* groups to both reduce network traffic and to avoid related legal issues. Commercial Usenet service providers claim to operate as
4500-494: The entire Usenet network is a nearly impossible task, due to the rapid propagation between servers and the retention done by each server. Petitioning a Usenet provider for removal only removes it from that one server's retention cache, but not any others. It is possible for a special post cancellation message to be distributed to remove it from all servers, but many providers ignore cancel messages by standard policy, because they can be easily falsified and submitted by anyone. For
4590-643: The events of the film and held the rank of Lieutenant. Crusher returns in the Star Trek: Picard season 2 episode Farewell . In the years since Star Trek: Nemesis , he has rejoined the Travelers, traveling across space and time. In the year 2024, he approaches Kore Soong and reveals that he and his fellow Travelers were responsible for creating the Supervisors and the Watchers to help ensure
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#17327765381264680-513: The exam; but when he helps the Enterprise -D crew rescue Riker, Deanna Troi and Lwaxana Troi from hostile Ferengi , Picard grants him a field promotion to full ensign. In the third-season episode " The Bonding ", Crusher reveals that following his father's death, he felt animosity towards Picard, because Picard was in command of the Stargazer during the mission in which Wesley's father
4770-529: The feeds they want. Usenet is culturally and historically significant in the networked world, having given rise to, or popularized, many widely recognized concepts and terms such as " FAQ ", " flame ", " sockpuppet ", and " spam ". In the early 1990s, shortly before access to the Internet became commonly affordable, Usenet connections via FidoNet 's dial-up BBS networks made long-distance or worldwide discussions and other communication widespread, not needing
4860-399: The files reaches a server. Binary newsgroups can be used to distribute files, and, as of 2022, some remain popular as an alternative to BitTorrent to share and download files. Each news server allocates a certain amount of storage space for content in each newsgroup. When this storage has been filled, each time a new post arrives, old posts are deleted to make room for the new content. If
4950-482: The film adaptation of Stephen King 's novella The Body . In Stand by Me , Wheaton played the lead role of Gordie Lachance, a 12-year-old storyteller mourning the loss of his elder brother. In her review of the film, Sheila Benson of the Los Angeles Times wrote that "Wheaton makes Gordie's 'sensitivity' tangible, but not effete. He's a gem". In addition to being successful at the box office, Stand by Me
5040-738: The group concerned; information need not be stored on a remote server; archives are always available; and reading the messages does not require a mail or web client, but a news client. However, it is now possible to read and participate in Usenet newsgroups to a large degree using ordinary web browsers since most newsgroups are now copied to several web sites. The groups in alt.binaries are still widely used for data transfer. Many Internet service providers, and many other Internet sites, operate news servers for their users to access. ISPs that do not operate their own servers directly will often offer their users an account from another provider that specifically operates newsfeeds. In early news implementations,
5130-480: The group name. Usenet newsgroups in the Big-8 hierarchy are created by proposals called a Request for Discussion, or RFD. The RFD is required to have the following information: newsgroup name, checkgroups file entry, and moderated or unmoderated status. If the group is to be moderated, then at least one moderator with a valid email address must be provided. Other information which is beneficial but not required includes:
5220-684: The historical gnu.* hierarchy from the Free Software Foundation . Microsoft closed its newsserver in June 2010, providing support for its products over forums now. Some users prefer to use the term "Usenet" to refer only to the Big Eight hierarchies; others include alt.* as well. The more general term "netnews" incorporates the entire medium, including private organizational news systems. Informal sub-hierarchy conventions also exist. *.answers are typically moderated cross-post groups for FAQs. An FAQ would be posted within one group and
5310-425: The idea in 1979, and it was established in 1980. Users read and post messages (called articles or posts , and collectively termed news ) to one or more topic categories, known as newsgroups . Usenet resembles a bulletin board system (BBS) in many respects and is the precursor to the Internet forums that have become widely used. Discussions are threaded , as with web forums and BBSes, though posts are stored on
5400-620: The identity of the person posting illegal content is equally difficult due to the trust-based design of the network. Like SMTP email, servers generally assume the header and origin information in a post is true and accurate. However, as in SMTP email, Usenet post headers are easily falsified so as to obscure the true identity and location of the message source. In this manner, Usenet is significantly different from modern P2P services; most P2P users distributing content are typically immediately identifiable to all other users by their network address , but
5490-543: The last five years, that there are so many more people who really enjoyed everything about the show, including my performance, including the character. Wheaton left Star Trek: The Next Generation due to concerns over how the production team addressed a scheduling conflict related to his wish to appear in the 1989 film Valmont . Wheaton returned to Star Trek in 2002, 2022 and 2024, reprising his Wesley Crusher role in cameo appearances in Star Trek: Nemesis ,
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#17327765381265580-435: The local one, while the local server will receive any news its peers have that it currently lacks. This results in the automatic proliferation of content posted by any user on any server to any other user subscribed to the same newsgroups on other servers. As with BBSes and message boards, individual news servers or service providers are under no obligation to carry any specific content, and may refuse to do so for many reasons:
5670-674: The manual deletion of infringing material using the provisions of World Intellectual Property Organization treaty implementations, such as the United States Online Copyright Infringement Liability Limitation Act , but this would require giving notice to each individual news server administrator. On the Internet, Usenet is transported via the Network News Transfer Protocol (NNTP) on TCP Port 119 for standard, unprotected connections and on TCP port 563 for SSL encrypted connections. The major set of worldwide newsgroups
5760-555: The message to Wesley and to his mother, Beverly. Picard initially found Wesley irritating, as he is often uncomfortable around children, a fact he discloses to his first officer, Commander William Riker , in the pilot episode " Encounter at Farpoint ". In early episodes of the series, Picard does not allow Wesley on the ship's bridge. However, during the first season, Picard comes to realize that Wesley understands many things beyond his age, having inherited his mother's intelligence, and grants him more opportunities onboard. An alien known as
5850-419: The network bandwidth available to a server is high but the storage allocation is small, it is possible for a huge flood of incoming content to overflow the allocation and push out everything that was in the group before it. The average length of time that posts are able to stay on the server before being deleted is commonly called the retention time . Binary newsgroups are only able to function reliably if there
5940-460: The newly developed news software such as A News . The name "Usenet" emphasizes its creators' hope that the USENIX organization would take an active role in its operation. The articles that users post to Usenet are organized into topical categories known as newsgroups , which are themselves logically organized into hierarchies of subjects. For instance, sci.math and sci.physics are within
6030-412: The origin information for a Usenet posting can be completely obscured and unobtainable once it has propagated past the original server. Also unlike modern P2P services, the identity of the downloaders is hidden from view. On P2P services a downloader is identifiable to all others by their network address. On Usenet, the downloader connects directly to a server, and only the server knows the address of who
6120-491: The rise of the World Wide Web (WWW), web front-ends (web2news) have become more common. Web front ends have lowered the technical entry barrier requirements to that of one application and no Usenet NNTP server account. There are numerous websites now offering web based gateways to Usenet groups, although some people have begun filtering messages made by some of the web interfaces for one reason or another. Google Groups
6210-475: The role that unfettered access to weapons of mass murder played in the latest incidence of mass murder in America". In September 2024, Wheaton joined other actors from the Star Trek franchise on a livestream to support the campaign of Vice President Kamala Harris in the 2024 United States presidential election . An asteroid was named after him: 391257 Wilwheaton . Wesley Crusher Wesley Crusher
6300-486: The season 2 finale of Star Trek: Picard , and as a voice actor in the second season of the animated show Star Trek: Prodigy . Wheaton played Joey Trotta in the action film Toy Soldiers (1991). After leaving Star Trek , he moved to Topeka, Kansas , to work for NewTek , where he helped to develop the Video Toaster 4000 doing product testing and quality control and later used his public profile to serve as
6390-435: The server and newsreader were a single program suite, running on the same system. Today, one uses separate newsreader client software, a program that resembles an email client but accesses Usenet servers instead. Not all ISPs run news servers. A news server is one of the most difficult Internet services to administer because of the large amount of data involved, small customer base (compared to mainstream Internet service), and
6480-544: The server sequentially. A major difference between a BBS or web message board and Usenet is the absence of a central server and dedicated administrator or hosting provider. Usenet is distributed among a large, constantly changing set of news servers that store and forward messages to one another via "news feeds". Individual users may read messages from and post to a local (or simply preferred) news server, which can be operated by anyone, and those posts will automatically be forwarded to any other news servers peered with
6570-438: The shadows, sending disguised messages to the crew. Crusher eventually brings the young cadets to meet him in person, explaining that the temporal paradox is destroying their universe and while the other Travelers have abandoned it as a lost cause, Crusher is unwilling to give up on the universe that was his home and more importantly where his mother still lives. Crusher reveals that having studied billions of possible futures, there
6660-492: The squadron's efforts to cover up the truth. Although the Enterprise crew's intervention and Crusher's own testimony saves him from expulsion, Crusher's academic credits for the year are revoked; he is required to repeat the year and graduate after most of the rest of his class. He remains in the Academy until the Traveler recontacts him in a later season 7 episode, " Journey's End ", where he resigns his commission and goes with
6750-516: The traffic. The oldest widely used encoding method for binary content is uuencode , from the Unix UUCP package. In the late 1980s, Usenet articles were often limited to 60,000 characters, and larger hard limits exist today. Files are therefore commonly split into sections that require reassembly by the reader. With the header extensions and the Base64 and Quoted-Printable MIME encodings, there
6840-468: The universe's survival. He offers Kore a position with the Travelers, although he can't guarantee her safety, and she accepts. Crusher returns in the second season of Star Trek: Prodigy where he tries to help the young crew of the Protostar rescue Captain Chakotay from the future and then to deal with their inadvertent alterations to the timeline. In the first half of the season, Crusher acts from
6930-694: The villainous John Juniper in the video game, I Expect You to Die 2: The Spy and the Liar . Wheaton appeared in 12 episodes in a recurring, guest-starring role on Eureka , playing Dr. Isaac Parrish, the head of the Non-Lethal Weapons Lab at Global Dynamics and a thorn in Fargo 's side. Wheaton also voices the character of the former scoutmaster and current sous-chef Earl Harlan in the popular dark, surreal-comedy podcast Welcome to Night Vale . From September 2006 to September 2007, Wheaton hosted
7020-580: The voice narration on the Secret Hitler companion app for the Secret Hitler social deduction game. Wheaton has spoken out against misogyny in video game culture , and wrote a profile of Anita Sarkeesian for the 2015 Time 100 . A fictionalized version of Wheaton was included in the comic book PS 238 , in which he harbors the power of telekinesis . Wheaton's debut comic book The Guild: Fawkes, which he wrote alongside Felicia Day ,
7110-496: The wormhole and chooses to accompany the Protostar along with the crew to see the mission through. Privately, Crusher reveals to Dal R'El that the important thing that he had predicted for the group to do that will shape the future of the galaxy is still yet to come. After the crisis is over, Crusher visits his mother for the first time in years and is introduced to his little brother Jack, having been rebuked by Janeway for not seeing his mother more often. The Wesley Crusher character
7200-515: Was a new generation of binary transport. In practice, MIME has seen increased adoption in text messages, but it is avoided for most binary attachments. Some operating systems with metadata attached to files use specialized encoding formats. For Mac OS, both BinHex and special MIME types are used. Other lesser known encoding systems that may have been used at one time were BTOA , XX encoding , BOO , and USR encoding. In an attempt to reduce file transfer times, an informal file encoding known as yEnc
7290-587: Was acceptable when he was young. In 2022, Wheaton participated in Celebrity Jeopardy! , playing for the National Women's Law Center . He reached the finals, defeating Troian Bellisario and Hasan Minhaj in the quarterfinals, and John Michael Higgins and Joel Kim Booster in the semifinals. He finished in third place, behind winner Ike Barinholtz and runner-up Patton Oswalt , earning $ 100,000. Wheaton campaigned for Hillary Clinton in
7380-466: Was associated with the Unix operating system developed at AT&T , but newsreaders were soon available for all major operating systems. Email client programs and Internet suites of the late 1990s and 2000s often included an integrated newsreader. Newsgroup enthusiasts often criticized these as inferior to standalone newsreaders that made correct use of Usenet protocols, standards and conventions. With
7470-640: Was born July 29, 1972, in Burbank, California , to Debra "Debbie" Nordean (née O'Connor), an actress, and Richard William Wheaton Jr., a medical specialist. He has a brother, Jeremy, and a sister, Amy, both of whom appeared uncredited in the Star Trek: The Next Generation episode " When the Bough Breaks ". Amy appeared alongside Wil in the 1987 film The Curse . As an adult, Wheaton described his father as being abusive to him as
7560-638: Was conceived in 1979 and publicly established in 1980, at the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill and Duke University , over a decade before the World Wide Web went online (and thus before the general public received access to the Internet ), making it one of the oldest computer network communications systems still in widespread use. It was originally built on the "poor man's ARPANET ", employing UUCP as its transport protocol to offer mail and file transfers, as well as announcements through
7650-429: Was introduced in 2001. It achieves about a 30% reduction in data transferred by assuming that most 8-bit characters can safely be transferred across the network without first encoding into the 7-bit ASCII space. The most common method of uploading large binary posts to Usenet is to convert the files into RAR archives and create Parchive files for them. Parity files are used to recreate missing data when not every part of
7740-420: Was killed. By the end of the episode, he no longer harbors these feelings. The following year, Crusher is invited to re-take the Academy exam. He is accepted, and joins an elite group of cadets known as Nova Squadron. In the fifth-season episode " The First Duty ", a squadron-mate is killed attempting a dangerous and prohibited flight maneuver and, under pressure from the team's leader, Nick Locarno, Crusher abets
7830-538: Was nominated for the Golden Globe Award for Best Motion Picture – Drama and became known as a coming-of-age classic. Wheaton played Wesley Crusher, a "boy genius and Starfleet hopeful", during the first four seasons of Star Trek: The Next Generation . He appeared in an additional four episodes of the remaining three seasons. The Wesley Crusher character is a "polarizing" character; while some Star Trek fans love him, others are vocal about their hatred for
7920-617: Was released on May 23, 2012. Wil Wheaton has been a narrator for dozens of audiobooks, including his own works. He has been a finalist for the prestigious Audie Award multiple times, and received an Earphones Award from AudioFile magazine. Wheaton has performed improvisational and sketch comedy at the ACME Comedy Theater in Hollywood. He has a traveling sketch comedy/improv troupe called "EarnestBorg9" that performs science fiction-related comedy at conventions. Wheaton
8010-450: Was the first formal specification of the messages exchanged by Usenet servers. It was superseded by RFC 1036 and subsequently by RFC 5536 and RFC 5537. In cases where unsuitable content has been posted, Usenet has support for automated removal of a posting from the whole network by creating a cancel message, although due to a lack of authentication and resultant abuse, this capability is frequently disabled. Copyright holders may still request
8100-408: Was unpopular among some Star Trek fans. Many considered the character a Mary Sue , and a stand-in for Gene Roddenberry (whose middle name was Wesley). The character's role in the show was greatly downplayed after the first season when Roddenberry's involvement in the show's production became more peripheral. Some fans disliked the idea of a boy who seemed to regularly save the whole ship using
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