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Happy Spamiversary!
Shippy writes "Ten years ago today, a pair of Arizona attorneys launched a homemade marketing software program that forever changed the Internet. It was the birth of spam. They did this by whipping up a Perl script that flooded message boards advertising their legal services." Update: 04/14 05:26 GMT by S : That'd be ten years ago, not twenty.
the first spam was a guy who spammed on arpanet for high end computer systems. Am I crazy?
I'm actually descended of English royalty (and they killed the king at the time) and can trace that side of my family back to 660AD (base 10).
Being able to trace your ancestry back 1400 years is rare indeed.
But being descended from royalty almost certainly isn't.
Consider: you have two parents. That's one generation back -- and let's assume that each generation averages 25 years -- it's actually a bit less, but we'll say 25 to keep things simple. Two generations back, 50 years back, you have 4 grandparents. Three generations back -- 75 years ago -- you have 8 great grandparents.
At this point anyone who's ever used base 2 can see where this is going: number of ancestors is 2 to the power of generations ago, and years ago is generations ago times 25.
So ten generations back is 250 years ago, at which point we need to find 2^10 = 1024 ancestors of that generation.
Twenty generations back, around 1500 CE, we need 2^20 ancestors. That's 1,048,576, or somewhat more than one million.
Thirty generations back, in 1250, we need 2^30 or over a a billion ancestors, just for you. But the estimated world population -- even including those peoples in Australia the Americas not in contact with Europe -- in 1250 is only 400 million. We're "short" more than 600 million people.
How do we account for the "missing" ancestors? It's simple really: in the thirtieth generation back, you indeed had to have had those billion ancestors, but they needn't have been one billion unique ancestors.
Consider: Bob have whatever number of ancestors in generation N that Bob has. Alice also has some number of ancestors in generation N. If Bob and Alice have a child, Chris, together, Chris's ancestors in generation N+1 are simply the union of Bob's ancestors in generation N and Alice's ancestors in generation N. For example's sake, let's set N=2, the generation of Bob and Alice's grandparents. Bob has four grandparents, Alice has four grandparents. So Chris has eight great-grandparents. But if Bob and Alice are cousins, they share two grandparents, and while Chris still has eight great-grandparents (in a manner of speaking) he has only six unique grandparents.
So we can account for those "missing" 673 million ancestors by assuming that there's quite a bit of overlap in everybody's family trees. And indeed, when we consider that breeding most often takes place in a local area -- no Danes were having kids with Australians in 600 CE, and indeed few Frenchmen were crossing the channel to mate with the English, the overlap must be even greater.
Add to this that of the enduring perquisites of success for males -- indeed, for the Darwinist, the only measure of success -- has been access to females, we can assume that a monarch's sexual access was in most cases extensive. Historians tells us that in pre-Columbian America, sometimes a whole village's "crop" of virgin girls would be set aside exclusively for the solely for the Aztec king, on pain of death.
Or consider Moulay Ismail ("the Bloodthirsty") Moroccan Emperor from 1672 to 1727; he's said to have sired eight-hundred eighty eight children on the 500 women of his harem.
While we know of no European monarch this audacious, the tradition of droit du seigneur and the ready availability of "wet-nurses" in royal nurseries attests that kings would be men even in Christendom.
Given this Darwinian competition for sexual access, and the necessary overlapping of family trees, it seems probable that anyone alive today can proudly claim descent from at least one, if not several monarchs -- and our all being "princes of the blood" is, ironically, as good an argument for democracy as any.
Opinions on the Twiddler2 hand-held keyboard?
Actually, my guess is they were trying to get around the solicitation rules for lawyers in their state. Most states have restrictions on how lawyers can advertise, and some states are much more strict than others. It is possible they were trying to take advantage of the fact that, at the time, no court had ruled e-mail to be the same as physical junk mail, which was much more heavily restricted.