"Psycological(sic) addiction can still be a problem..."
Technically, no it can't--psychological addiction is a fallacy. Addiction is a physiological problem; it is a biochemical process with four clear defining characteristics. So-called psychological addiction is a vague and unclearly defined term used to apply to anyone that a particular 'expert' decides is over the line in their psychological dependency. It would be so much simpler if the mental health community quit misusing the term addiction and instead said 'harmful dependency' or something more accurate.
Also, "I don't think alcohol is really much of a physical dependence at all" It is, quite simply. Ethanol is an addictive substance. So is nicotine, in a majority of the population (but nicotine has some strange effects in a significant minority, and is non-addictive in them. This is why some people can quit cold turkey without withdrawl symptoms.)
Finally, I find the last rather ironic: "if you decide to put drugs into your body without being fully informed of both positives and negatives before you do it, you deserve what you get - and blaming it on physical dependence is not ok."
So do you drink at all? Because you apparently weren't fully informed of the positives and negatives involved with that.
Interesting points. However, error-checking is part of any properly-written code, and error-checking in such things as automatic updates or banking information is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL!
If I were Camaroon, and I owned my domain, then I would have the authority to do whatever the fuck I wanted with the data that came my way, voluntarily. Morally, I would probably discard passwords and account information, but I would (and will) not accept responsibility for people making mistakes, nor for companies too bloody stupid to properly review and test their code.
The only real failing in the ESRB rating system, is the lack of retailer support. The vendors release software, they rate it appropriately under the voluntary rating system, and the retailers ignore the rating. The solution? Make the rating mandatory!!!
First of all, it's their damned space. They have ultimate authority over it, therefore they have the right to do this if they want.
Secondly, since when have generic holding/advert pages ever (a) done any harm, or (b) generated any revenue? I don't know anyone who would say, "oh look--www.microsoft.com is now a generic advertising page. I must click on everything and buy garbage from it!"
DVDs will continue to evolve for two or maybe three more generations, because the convenience will always be limited by the picture size requirements. That will only totally go away when we can have movies projected onto our eyeballs, or fed directly into our brain. (Note that the former might happen within five years, but the market isn't ready for it yet).
Hmm. Good point. I should have said, "...how to sustain their entire existing industry..."
Online distribution has great potential, and it _will_ eventually take over. Somehow it'll shake out that the artists will make a marginal living on it, maybe better than they do now. The problem (from the industry point of view) is exactly what you suggest: that the parasites won't be able to survive. Worse, they won't be able to control the market and the acceptable content. As it stands now, the musicians can make music and the consumers can pay to recieve it online, and the RIAA has NO SAY IN whether the content should be promoted. This is scary as all hell for an industry that requires control to make a profit.
So music will continue to exist, and an industry will continue around it, but the presently existing music industry is in dire straits. And good riddance to them all.
Someone else said it very well: CDs are just too good.
There has always been a trade-off between convenience, reliability, and quality. For many decades, records (in one form or another) were the consumer cusp of this triad, although not as convenient as some (cassette and 8-track) nor as good as others (reel-to-reel). CDs came along, and provided truly superior quality, a high degree of reliability, and were very convenient. The CD was and still is a very nearly perfect physical format for consumers.[1] Really, there's no need to replace it with anything, and that's what really worries the recording industry. The only format that will successfully supplant CDs is a non-physical format, and they still haven't figured out how to sustain an entire industry on that. Thus, they keep coming out with new physical formats to delay the inevitable.
The sad thing is that they're looking for sales hooks, and know that they're not getting them. The sound quality is already flawless, the convenience is as good as it practically gets, and so they're adding 'features.' Two-channel classic recordings remastered to 5.1, video clips, and now bloody RING TONES? I don't think they're really that stupid, just desperate.
Ah well. Good riddance to yet another crappy format.
[1] Yes, I know, the CD format has a ton of little flaws: Flawless sound is difficult to achieve in 44kHz/16bit, the plastic scratches too easily, some CDs rot, the cover art isn't big enough, the CDs aren't small enough, etc. etc. But it's close.
Good comments. Two things I might add to complete the picture:
1) Good literature is always a hard sell--people don't generally want to see or read anything really intellectually challenging. 2) Good sci-fi is a doubly hard sell, because (a) it's good literature, and (b) people view SF as something fundamentally "other" than all other genres of entertainment. Horror/comedy/drama/action/romance/history/adventu re is all part of the same spectrum. SF is "different."
Unfortunately, NASA is not a group that anyone should be partnering with right now. They're going under the knife on a nearly daily basis; and with budgets dwindling and government pressure to produce 'cool stuff,' they're axing the research in favour of PR.
Pick up a copy of this month's Astronomy magazine to see just how short-sighted the federal funding policy is. Follow the science news to see how short-sighted the internal decisions are.
After decades of driving research in the largest research community on the planet, NASA is foundering and dying. I rather doubt that they'll be able to even collect data on their existing instruments in another decade.
It's tragic, but true. Furthermore, any potential solutions need to be implemented now, and not in five years when the general public hears about this. But that won't happen.
Everyone is expecting EA to gut Mythic like a just-caught fish, and they're probably right--that's what EA does.
But there was a time, when the industry was young enough to not even be properly called an industry, that a group of dedicated programmers got together to form a company with the sole purpose of taking excellence in games to a new level. That company was Electronic Arts, and they revolutionised the computer gaming world, to begin with.
Sigh. All good things eventually die or become evil.
E3 was never a competitor to GDC, and they shouldn't be viewed as an either/or pairing.
E3 was a vendor conference - a trade show. Blinky lights, half-naked women, freebies, and obnoxious...well, everything!
Have you ever been to a car show? This is where the manufacturers pimp their goods to the media and the public. The design and theory is kept in-house, or occasionally at small technical conferences.
I remember when I realised that I wasn't hot and bothered over gaming news anymore, and in fact, realised that 99+% of the 'news' in the computer industry as a whole were breathless PR releases, masquerading as reports.
Now I read computer info as a job, and not as a hobby. I also rarely play games anymore. I suspect that you're on the same path.
How much did your Sunday paper cost you? Maybe a buck, these days. It probably cost the publisher about $3 to print it, factoring in all of the news gathering and publishing costs. However, they also sold about $5/paper in ads, so they're making a net profit.
Advertising is the primary revenue generator for information content providers. TVs, websites, newspapers, radio, and now computers. The only real difference is that once you get the computer, you have the computer and can theoretically do what you want. Of course, you could do that with a newspaper as well, by ripping the ads out.
I'm not one to defend Telus very often, but I take exception to your strike complaint.
While their employees were on strike (which the union falsely claimed was a lockout--oh yeah, and the union also refused to allow its members to vote on several settlement offers that Telus put forth), the union posted pictures, phone numbers, and addresses of prominent Telus employeees who were non-union (management) or line-crossers, with a veiled suggestion that maybe something bad would happen to them. Telus blocked this information only, while trying to get a court injunction against the union regarding the posting of this information. It wasn't a smart move, but it was understandable--during a heated and potentially violent labour dispute, how would you like it if a union suddenly had encouragement to hunt you down in your home?
I had very very little respect for the Telecommunication Workers Union before the strike--I had a few run-ins with them in the past. After the strike began, however, that tiny shred was removed. They exist for no reason other than intimidation and protection of the useless, and are recognised even in BC as one of the more militant unions around.
None of which has anything to do with Telus' contract terms.:-)
Some torture test this was. Speed is the only thing measured in the article, without any attempt at measuring how these things might break under questionable conditions. Nor was there any discussion of how effective the warranty support was.
My wife had a Lexar "Jumpdrive Secure." The thing would never properly close out of Windows to be removed, and was generally a bit finicky. One day it decided to lose eleven of her students' final exams (which would normally be backed up on the college's system, but was down for maintenance that day). A call to Lexar led to several hours of support work and finally a diagnosis of "well, you're screwed." Thanks Lexar. Won't make that mistake again.
I realise that CF and SD cards aren't identical, but the technology is similar, and Lexar has lost any chance of me buying their products.
Sometimes I express myself poorly, but this time I feel as if you must have worked very hard to misinterpret what I was saying.
I'm not objecting to anything, other than the claim that any given solution that worked for any given individual is the definitive, end-all solution. There are a large number of posts in any ergonomic discussion on/. which start out, "everyone out there does 'x' wrong, except for me." This is all I caution against.
My choices here were to mod you down, or to reply. I'm chosing the high road, I think.
Your suggestion has merit--turn on the damned ports, let people plug in, and get work done. Lower admin overhead, faster response for the end user, and everyone can get on with their work.
However, you seem to have an attitude problem, and I suspect it takes three days to get you on the network because nobody really gives a shit if they get around to doing your bidding. Doing work for people who believe they know your job better than you do is about as much fun as slicing open veins, and rather less satisfying. MAC address-based port connections may not be the perfect security solution, but they are one powerful layer in a multi-tiered environment, and they're absolutely not a toy. Consider: People bring personal laptops to work, plug in to the LAN, and a virus spreads because the primary virus scanners are at the perimeter firewall. The ENTIRE FUCKING COMPANY is now down for between six and 72 hours. Oh, but that's OK because you didn't have to submit your laptop for scanning, and could start working immediately. Clearly your work is more important than anyone else's in the whole company.
Here's another scenario: A company has a mixed user environment of PCs and Unix workstations. We can declare that every port is enabled, but what ports are enabled on which network? What if the networks are split by division?
Contrary to what your fantasy world might suggest, IT is NOT there to block your progress! They want to get things up and running as fast as possible, and with as little overhead for themselves as feasible. Opening all ports in a moderately large company is neither feasible nor intelligent.
I think that you pretty much defined yourself as a legitimate troll (note: Not your post, but YOU) with this comment:
"I am so tired of the IT group doing huge make work projects in the name of security/scalabilty/Enterprise/CRM/blah blah blah. What a bunch of crap. You know us users out here... We really do have work to get done."
So you have real work to do, but they are a bunch of slackers inventing work because they have nothing better to do.
You, sir (or madam), are an asshole. I predict for you a long and frustrating career of nobody doing what you want, just for the sake of pissing you off. Good riddance.
In both this article and the one about standing vs. sitting at work, I see endless well-intentioned posts from people saying, "this is how you fix your problem." Almost always, it means (and often actually says) "this is how I fixed my problem, so you should do it to."
Bottom line here folks is that what works for you might not work for me. Your ideal mouse isn't mine. Your wrist problems might in fact be caused by the same thing as my back problems and buddy's thumb problems, with the only difference being in how we've adapted to a flawed situation. Alternatively, what caused your thumb problem (and hence what fixed it) might not be even remotely related to what caused my nearly-identical thumb problem, and so the same fix might not work.
The best advice you can get is to start with a standard configuration, identify the problem, and then explore as many potential fixes until you find the one that works. This is not an exact science! There are no single, deterministic solutions to each problem!
So in short, consider every solution offered with a grain of salt--but do consider it.
Typically with big orders from big vendors, count on 40% off the list price without any hassle. If they're fighting to make the sale, it might be more than that.
Interesting take on matters. I think the discrepancy here is between what is perceived as limiting "my" control over my rightfully bought media, and "commercial" (i.e. third party) control.
Maybe if cleanflix was a nonprofit it would be viewed differently. The fact that they're making a profit by altering the creator's work seems a bit sketchy. If they released a programming filter that would provide the same edits on the original media, somehow that would seem better. If they released it as a free download, it would be a step better again.
First of all, you can't stop spam. Filtering will always be an imperfect arms race--we build a better filter, the spammers come up with a better way of circumventing it. It's a never-ending battle.
Secondly, you can't end spam. Too many companies rely on its existence for their business model to work.
The only way to stop spam is to stop the spammers from SENDING the stuff. However if this happened, you would see a huge number of companies suffer and possibly go bankrupt. Sure, the organised crime groups behind it would suffer, but I'm thinking of the moderately legitimate companies: Symmantec, Tumbleweed, Borderware, and the like make their money from spam and viruses. They cannot afford for these threats to go away! (Well, perhaps Symmantec could survive now that they own Veritas.) Now consider the amount of network gear and bandwidth that has been sold and is being consumed by spam, and you realise that even the big gear vendors like Cisco and Nortel have a major stake in spam sticking around.
Zero tolerance of spam might have worked if we had started worldwide in 1996, but that chance is long gone. Furthermore, legislation won't work as long as their are 'safe haven' countries out there who will host spammers' gear.
The only potentially useable answer is true vigilantism--if spammers start consistently showing up dead, we might be able to reduce spam. Failing that, we can give up on email as a useful medium.
In other words; short of serial murders, the spammers have won.
HP is now a manufacturer, and completely out of the innovation side of things.
Engineering, research, and a business that tried to be a family are all things that Carly killed at HP. The company that now carries that name is no longer remotely related to what Hewlett and Packard founded.
Agilent, on the other hand, at least still has some spirit. Thank god they were spun off before The F-monster swooped in.
Slashdot Mirror
I take exception to a few of your comments.
"Psycological(sic) addiction can still be a problem..."
Technically, no it can't--psychological addiction is a fallacy. Addiction is a physiological problem; it is a biochemical process with four clear defining characteristics. So-called psychological addiction is a vague and unclearly defined term used to apply to anyone that a particular 'expert' decides is over the line in their psychological dependency. It would be so much simpler if the mental health community quit misusing the term addiction and instead said 'harmful dependency' or something more accurate.
Also,
"I don't think alcohol is really much of a physical dependence at all"
It is, quite simply. Ethanol is an addictive substance. So is nicotine, in a majority of the population (but nicotine has some strange effects in a significant minority, and is non-addictive in them. This is why some people can quit cold turkey without withdrawl symptoms.)
Finally, I find the last rather ironic:
"if you decide to put drugs into your body without being fully informed of both positives and negatives before you do it, you deserve what you get - and blaming it on physical dependence is not ok."
So do you drink at all? Because you apparently weren't fully informed of the positives and negatives involved with that.
Interesting points. However, error-checking is part of any properly-written code, and error-checking in such things as automatic updates or banking information is ABSOLUTELY CRITICAL!
If I were Camaroon, and I owned my domain, then I would have the authority to do whatever the fuck I wanted with the data that came my way, voluntarily. Morally, I would probably discard passwords and account information, but I would (and will) not accept responsibility for people making mistakes, nor for companies too bloody stupid to properly review and test their code.
The only real failing in the ESRB rating system, is the lack of retailer support. The vendors release
software, they rate it appropriately under the voluntary rating system, and the retailers ignore the rating. The solution? Make the rating mandatory!!!
Fuckwits.
First of all, it's their damned space. They have ultimate authority over it, therefore they have the right to do this if they want.
Secondly, since when have generic holding/advert pages ever (a) done any harm, or (b) generated any revenue? I don't know anyone who would say, "oh look--www.microsoft.com is now a generic advertising page. I must click on everything and buy garbage from it!"
We were discussing audio here. AUDIO.
DVDs will continue to evolve for two or maybe three more generations, because the convenience will always be limited by the picture size requirements. That will only totally go away when we can have movies projected onto our eyeballs, or fed directly into our brain. (Note that the former might happen within five years, but the market isn't ready for it yet).
Hmm. Good point. I should have said, "...how to sustain their entire existing industry..."
Online distribution has great potential, and it _will_ eventually take over. Somehow it'll shake out that the artists will make a marginal living on it, maybe better than they do now. The problem (from the industry point of view) is exactly what you suggest: that the parasites won't be able to survive. Worse, they won't be able to control the market and the acceptable content. As it stands now, the musicians can make music and the consumers can pay to recieve it online, and the RIAA has NO SAY IN whether the content should be promoted. This is scary as all hell for an industry that requires control to make a profit.
So music will continue to exist, and an industry will continue around it, but the presently existing music industry is in dire straits. And good riddance to them all.
Heh. Best post I've seen in days, both serious and sarcastic.
I agree. Solving the babelfish puzzle on my own was a landmark of my childhood. Now there's nothing to compare.
Someone else said it very well: CDs are just too good.
There has always been a trade-off between convenience, reliability, and quality. For many decades, records (in one form or another) were the consumer cusp of this triad, although not as convenient as some (cassette and 8-track) nor as good as others (reel-to-reel). CDs came along, and provided truly superior quality, a high degree of reliability, and were very convenient. The CD was and still is a very nearly perfect physical format for consumers.[1] Really, there's no need to replace it with anything, and that's what really worries the recording industry. The only format that will successfully supplant CDs is a non-physical format, and they still haven't figured out how to sustain an entire industry on that. Thus, they keep coming out with new physical formats to delay the inevitable.
The sad thing is that they're looking for sales hooks, and know that they're not getting them. The sound quality is already flawless, the convenience is as good as it practically gets, and so they're adding 'features.' Two-channel classic recordings remastered to 5.1, video clips, and now bloody RING TONES? I don't think they're really that stupid, just desperate.
Ah well. Good riddance to yet another crappy format.
[1] Yes, I know, the CD format has a ton of little flaws: Flawless sound is difficult to achieve in 44kHz/16bit, the plastic scratches too easily, some CDs rot, the cover art isn't big enough, the CDs aren't small enough, etc. etc. But it's close.
I disagree. From all I've seen, it looks like they're wearing the same shirts and jeans they had on a decade ago.
Well if nothing else, that would make Wil Wheaton shine as the best cast member by a mile, in a complete dog of a movie.
Kirk was entertainingly bad, and not nearly as bad as he's portrayed to be these days. Ben Affleck just sucks.
Good comments. Two things I might add to complete the picture:
u re is all part of the same spectrum. SF is "different."
1) Good literature is always a hard sell--people don't generally want to see or read anything really intellectually challenging.
2) Good sci-fi is a doubly hard sell, because (a) it's good literature, and (b) people view SF as something fundamentally "other" than all other genres of entertainment. Horror/comedy/drama/action/romance/history/advent
Unfortunately, NASA is not a group that anyone should be partnering with right now. They're going under the knife on a nearly daily basis; and with budgets dwindling and government pressure to produce 'cool stuff,' they're axing the research in favour of PR.
Pick up a copy of this month's Astronomy magazine to see just how short-sighted the federal funding policy is. Follow the science news to see how short-sighted the internal decisions are.
After decades of driving research in the largest research community on the planet, NASA is foundering and dying. I rather doubt that they'll be able to even collect data on their existing instruments in another decade.
It's tragic, but true. Furthermore, any potential solutions need to be implemented now, and not in five years when the general public hears about this. But that won't happen.
Everyone is expecting EA to gut Mythic like a just-caught fish, and they're probably right--that's what EA does.
But there was a time, when the industry was young enough to not even be properly called an industry, that a group of dedicated programmers got together to form a company with the sole purpose of taking excellence in games to a new level. That company was Electronic Arts, and they revolutionised the computer gaming world, to begin with.
Sigh. All good things eventually die or become evil.
E3 was never a competitor to GDC, and they shouldn't be viewed as an either/or pairing.
E3 was a vendor conference - a trade show. Blinky lights, half-naked women, freebies, and obnoxious...well, everything!
Have you ever been to a car show? This is where the manufacturers pimp their goods to the media and the public. The design and theory is kept in-house, or occasionally at small technical conferences.
Welcome to maturity, at least in one sense.
I remember when I realised that I wasn't hot and bothered over gaming news anymore, and in fact, realised that 99+% of the 'news' in the computer industry as a whole were breathless PR releases, masquerading as reports.
Now I read computer info as a job, and not as a hobby. I also rarely play games anymore. I suspect that you're on the same path.
How much did your Sunday paper cost you? Maybe a buck, these days. It probably cost the publisher about $3 to print it, factoring in all of the news gathering and publishing costs. However, they also sold about $5/paper in ads, so they're making a net profit.
Advertising is the primary revenue generator for information content providers. TVs, websites, newspapers, radio, and now computers. The only real difference is that once you get the computer, you have the computer and can theoretically do what you want. Of course, you could do that with a newspaper as well, by ripping the ads out.
"Telus sucks, therefore they're in the wrong."
:-)
I'm not one to defend Telus very often, but I take exception to your strike complaint.
While their employees were on strike (which the union falsely claimed was a lockout--oh yeah, and the union also refused to allow its members to vote on several settlement offers that Telus put forth), the union posted pictures, phone numbers, and addresses of prominent Telus employeees who were non-union (management) or line-crossers, with a veiled suggestion that maybe something bad would happen to them. Telus blocked this information only, while trying to get a court injunction against the union regarding the posting of this information. It wasn't a smart move, but it was understandable--during a heated and potentially violent labour dispute, how would you like it if a union suddenly had encouragement to hunt you down in your home?
I had very very little respect for the Telecommunication Workers Union before the strike--I had a few run-ins with them in the past. After the strike began, however, that tiny shred was removed. They exist for no reason other than intimidation and protection of the useless, and are recognised even in BC as one of the more militant unions around.
None of which has anything to do with Telus' contract terms.
Some torture test this was. Speed is the only thing measured in the article, without any attempt at measuring how these things might break under questionable conditions. Nor was there any discussion of how effective the warranty support was.
My wife had a Lexar "Jumpdrive Secure." The thing would never properly close out of Windows to be removed, and was generally a bit finicky. One day it decided to lose eleven of her students' final exams (which would normally be backed up on the college's system, but was down for maintenance that day). A call to Lexar led to several hours of support work and finally a diagnosis of "well, you're screwed." Thanks Lexar. Won't make that mistake again.
I realise that CF and SD cards aren't identical, but the technology is similar, and Lexar has lost any chance of me buying their products.
Sometimes I express myself poorly, but this time I feel as if you must have worked very hard to misinterpret what I was saying.
/. which start out, "everyone out there does 'x' wrong, except for me." This is all I caution against.
I'm not objecting to anything, other than the claim that any given solution that worked for any given individual is the definitive, end-all solution. There are a large number of posts in any ergonomic discussion on
My choices here were to mod you down, or to reply. I'm chosing the high road, I think.
Your suggestion has merit--turn on the damned ports, let people plug in, and get work done. Lower admin overhead, faster response for the end user, and everyone can get on with their work.
However, you seem to have an attitude problem, and I suspect it takes three days to get you on the network because nobody really gives a shit if they get around to doing your bidding. Doing work for people who believe they know your job better than you do is about as much fun as slicing open veins, and rather less satisfying. MAC address-based port connections may not be the perfect security solution, but they are one powerful layer in a multi-tiered environment, and they're absolutely not a toy. Consider: People bring personal laptops to work, plug in to the LAN, and a virus spreads because the primary virus scanners are at the perimeter firewall. The ENTIRE FUCKING COMPANY is now down for between six and 72 hours. Oh, but that's OK because you didn't have to submit your laptop for scanning, and could start working immediately. Clearly your work is more important than anyone else's in the whole company.
Here's another scenario: A company has a mixed user environment of PCs and Unix workstations. We can declare that every port is enabled, but what ports are enabled on which network? What if the networks are split by division?
Contrary to what your fantasy world might suggest, IT is NOT there to block your progress! They want to get things up and running as fast as possible, and with as little overhead for themselves as feasible. Opening all ports in a moderately large company is neither feasible nor intelligent.
I think that you pretty much defined yourself as a legitimate troll (note: Not your post, but YOU) with this comment:
"I am so tired of the IT group doing huge make work projects in the name of security/scalabilty/Enterprise/CRM/blah blah blah. What a bunch of crap. You know us users out here... We really do have work to get done."
So you have real work to do, but they are a bunch of slackers inventing work because they have nothing better to do.
You, sir (or madam), are an asshole. I predict for you a long and frustrating career of nobody doing what you want, just for the sake of pissing you off. Good riddance.
In both this article and the one about standing vs. sitting at work, I see endless well-intentioned posts from people saying, "this is how you fix your problem." Almost always, it means (and often actually says) "this is how I fixed my problem, so you should do it to."
Bottom line here folks is that what works for you might not work for me. Your ideal mouse isn't mine. Your wrist problems might in fact be caused by the same thing as my back problems and buddy's thumb problems, with the only difference being in how we've adapted to a flawed situation. Alternatively, what caused your thumb problem (and hence what fixed it) might not be even remotely related to what caused my nearly-identical thumb problem, and so the same fix might not work.
The best advice you can get is to start with a standard configuration, identify the problem, and then explore as many potential fixes until you find the one that works. This is not an exact science! There are no single, deterministic solutions to each problem!
So in short, consider every solution offered with a grain of salt--but do consider it.
Typically with big orders from big vendors, count on 40% off the list price without any hassle. If they're fighting to make the sale, it might be more than that.
Interesting take on matters. I think the discrepancy here is between what is perceived as limiting "my" control over my rightfully bought media, and "commercial" (i.e. third party) control.
Maybe if cleanflix was a nonprofit it would be viewed differently. The fact that they're making a profit by altering the creator's work seems a bit sketchy. If they released a programming filter that would provide the same edits on the original media, somehow that would seem better. If they released it as a free download, it would be a step better again.
Why? That's a very good question.
First of all, you can't stop spam. Filtering will always be an imperfect arms race--we build a better filter, the spammers come up with a better way of circumventing it. It's a never-ending battle.
Secondly, you can't end spam. Too many companies rely on its existence for their business model to work.
The only way to stop spam is to stop the spammers from SENDING the stuff. However if this happened, you would see a huge number of companies suffer and possibly go bankrupt. Sure, the organised crime groups behind it would suffer, but I'm thinking of the moderately legitimate companies: Symmantec, Tumbleweed, Borderware, and the like make their money from spam and viruses. They cannot afford for these threats to go away! (Well, perhaps Symmantec could survive now that they own Veritas.) Now consider the amount of network gear and bandwidth that has been sold and is being consumed by spam, and you realise that even the big gear vendors like Cisco and Nortel have a major stake in spam sticking around.
Zero tolerance of spam might have worked if we had started worldwide in 1996, but that chance is long gone. Furthermore, legislation won't work as long as their are 'safe haven' countries out there who will host spammers' gear.
The only potentially useable answer is true vigilantism--if spammers start consistently showing up dead, we might be able to reduce spam. Failing that, we can give up on email as a useful medium.
In other words; short of serial murders, the spammers have won.
HP is now a manufacturer, and completely out of the innovation side of things.
Engineering, research, and a business that tried to be a family are all things that Carly killed at HP. The company that now carries that name is no longer remotely related to what Hewlett and Packard founded.
Agilent, on the other hand, at least still has some spirit. Thank god they were spun off before The F-monster swooped in.