Ya know, it's funny how many people instantly contradict your story with "If you had $FOO then you wouldn't have needed $BAR". Were they there? Do they know exactly what happened?
I too was saved a great deal of pain by fishtailing a car before. '87 Chevy Spectrum (no airbags) work vehicle moving at 35MPH on wet road, about 40 feet from the intersection when the light turned yellow and the idiot coming the other way thought, "Oh, it's yellow now.. I can make my left turn." Halfway through she realized that I wasn't stopping (no amount of ABS would've helped that one) and she stopped dead in the middle of my lane. Alright, I thought.. I'll aim to pass in front of her, and land in those soft bushes across the railroad tracks. Well, something in her said "keep going" and she then blocked my modified path. I believe my words were "Aww, fuckit" as I threw the car into a clockwise spin and hit her side-to-side.
By bracing my body against the door, I had absolutely no physical damage to myself, and damage to her vehicle was minimal. Both I and the passenger of her car (a Crown Vic, as I reall) walked out of the vehicles. Had I just mashed on the brakes and trusted ABS (if it was even there, which on that piece of shit it wasn't) then I may have killed her passenger and broken my neck in the process.
Does everyone get out in bad weather, find a safe spot and "play" to learn the limits of their vehicle and themselves? No they don't. I think they should. I also think that things like the gadgetry on this Jag may do a lot of good. But I agree with the sentiment that there should be a simple and quick way to turn it off when the driver knows better.
Yes, that's what they used to be. Only instead of drawers, there were pegboard racks with all those bits hanging from them - usually with a sliding rack in front of them all with more bits hanging from it as well. Resistors, capacitors, DIP ICs (like someone else in these comments mentioned, the LM555 peg usually had a few cards hanging on it), diodes (both the kind that are supposed to emit light, and those that only do it once very quickly)... those were the days. Built an alarm system out of a few IR LEDs and receivers using relays as flip-flops, before I knew what a flip-flop was - just realized that if wired properly, a couple relays could be triggered and require another circuit to manually reset (hello, digital latch).
Now, as I've become a ham and have more of an appreciation for all the gadgets I used to see hanging on those panels, I sorely miss them (along with Heathkit). There was recently a thread on a mailing list I belong to (for APRS, see here) that said a lot of the decline of Radio Shack's parts wall can be blamed on ourselves, and the fact that the store which used to actually carry ham radio equipment and parts only catered to a group of people which aren't as interested in any of that anymore and are on the decline. That may be true, and there may be catalog stores and online places to get the same stuff, but there's just something about browsing through a shelf of components to get the brain going with what you can build using all that.. stuff:>
I feel your pain... last time I went into one, the clerk asked if he could help me. I said no, I can probably find what I need. Trying to be as "helpful" as possible, he proceeded to follow me around the store like a lost puppy, and insisted he could help me find what I need.
Funniest look on his face when I said, "Fine. I need two solder-on PL-259s and reducers for RG8X." After a moment of stammering, I opened the drawer to my left without looking, and said, "They're in here."
I was playing GTA: San Andreas last night, where one of the missions I had to do was to rob a bank and a betting store.... so far have had a very productive day. Not once did the idea of robbing a bank or a betting store enter my mind
That's because you have TINY BALLS!
Sorry, got Catalina's voice stuck in my head now:P
Any linkage to back that claim up? Or is this perhaps another case where the power company did their homework first, and deployed BPL in an area with nobody around to complain?
I do have a few links that say otherwise though: here, here, and this one which actually looks like a company trying to do it right.
The problem is (and many people share the same idea and position), yes if the power goes out there will be no interference in that area. However, let's say that BPL were to cover the entire CONUS. Blackout in NYC, no phones no lights no motorcars, and no BPL blocking signals. However, I can't hear squat here in NJ because I still have BPL interference. Granted, the local area's interference is alleviated, but that does no good if anyone that could help can't hear you calling.
After the first few BPL postings here, I've learned that many think "screw hams, I want my broadband". That's fine, people are entitled to their opinion. But as others have also said, I hope that if their area gets BPL and interference from it, they never have to sit and watch their house burn to the foundation because the fire company's dispatch or lowband TAC channels were too noisy for anyone to hear the alarm call go out.
If I hear that four letter word (which is the last four letters of the word "weblog") again I'm going to start leaving steaming blogs on people's desks.
I can't say why, but it just grates on my nerves. Kinda like some people cringe at the word 'cunt'.
Someone borrowed a Netgear switch from me, and said he had a power supply for it already. Silly me thought he knew what he was doing, and didn't first demand to see the PSU. Whaddya know, a Netgear switch prefers to have 7.5VDC@1A, not 15VAC@.3A
He came back to my office in a panic, because I didn't have any other switches to lend out. Said he let out the magic smoke, something he'd heard me say about hardware before. I went down to the electronics lab with the switch and user in tow, found a 'lytic cap the same as the one that blew, and said "No problem, I'll just put in a new can of smoke. Gimme 15 minutes." Handed him a working switch (with the correct PSU) and I swear he thinks that little canister literally holds smoke inside it.
Theoretically, if you can make the transistors run at 604GHz, then you can make gates that run at that speed as well. Make a flip-flop out of the gates, and you've got a frequency halver. Now you only have to measure 302GHz. Repeat if necessary.
Well, now that a few of them have merged, they'll probably stabilize for a little while, and then start buying each other up again. Pretty soon, we'll be down to one company providing phone service.
Hey, wasn't there talk of TV over phone too? Maybe once all the companies merge, they could call themselves... American Telephone and Television? Or just AT&T for short. That has a nice ring to it. Ring! That's it, they can use a bell as their company logo! People can buy stock in it, and refer to "My Bell" phone company.
We already know what they'll find in the middle of the comet. Naquadah.
Re:Don't use Promise...
on
SATA vs ATA?
·
· Score: 1
Is their SATA card any better with simultaneous reads/writes than their PATA cards? I've got 4-5 of them at work, and especially over NFS the performance blows. Here's what one of my colleagues wrote on the subject:
Write performance: local writes are 27 MB/sec (~5MB files, unloaded CPU) If both RAIDs are written together, performance cut in half (not what we were hoping...) local writes to local disk (/scr0) are 40 MB/sec NFS writes to RAID are 200 times slower (1 minute per file) NFS writes to single disk are 20MB/sec over gigabit ethernet (a bit slower than expected, but not bad)
READ: local reads are fast (100MB/sec) off the RAID, but cut in half when both are read. NFS reads off single disk are limited only by ethernet and the disk NFS reads off the RAID are 8MB/sec, 4MB/sec when you read both.
Is this "normal" for 3Ware hardware? I've got other RAIDs, some all in software, that put this performance to shame, though you now don't have any kind of hot-swap abilities. Not too big a deal when one considers the last few times the 3Ware card lost a disk, it took the entire partition out with it and required a reboot to fix anyway, so much for hot-swap.
I like this particular line from the license agreement:
3(j) Licensee shall not use the Software or Documentation for purposes for which it is not designed or intended.
So, if you find some way to hack it, and let them know, were you using the software or documentation for purposes for which it was intended? I wouldn't think so.
It's obvious I'm no legal buff, maybe this is the right (only?) way to word what they want, but that seems like a nice way to slap a lawsuit on someone who proves the software is flawed. "We didn't mean for people to be able to do that!"
Considering my office is right down the hall from his, and I finished his book a couple weeks ago, I'll throw in my recommendation for JR Gott's "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe".
Very interesting read which explains things in a manner that I could understand (sysadmin, not astrophysicist, though I'm surrounded by them daily). Maybe I should send in a Slashdot book review too:>
"Wide band"? Where? Not until you get up to 2M (4MHz) and 70cm (30MHz), and I don't think those are even going to be affected by BPL. Your cell or cordless phone uses much more bandwidth than any of the above frequencies.
Next is that we currently are implementing push-to-talk over GSM and CDMA that would easily remove the need for the emergency bands already used. Same applies as above, when the power it down, your radios will work again.
Except for one minor detail. Think of a major emergency that has happened in any given area, and not necessarily tied to the loss of electric power (9/11 is a good example, but one that is used way too often for my liking). Everyone jumps on their cell phones to make calls to loved ones and such, and next thing you know none of them work anymore. Bands are too overloaded, busy signals abound, phones either don't work because the provider is swamped or because the other thousand people standing around you hit "send" before you did and your phone can't find an open frequency to use.
In emergencies, hams will form traffic nets which serve the same purpose (get emergency traffic into and out of a disaster area) in a controlled manner, because it's practiced and tested. Try telling someone who just heard of a plane crash in a remote part of Iowa that they should not use their phone to try to reach a loved one, but should wait until that person calls them. Riiiight. Won't happen.
Lets just accept that we are going to have to step on toes to make this happen. How much are you valuing your ability to use a radio over the ability of a rural community to have Internet access for their children, education, and entertainment?
Okay, tell that to the pilot flying at 23000 feet and falling fast who needs to get a mayday out for assistance, but those pesky downloaders are eating up the bandwidth in the HF bands, so his distress call falls on deaf ears. It's not just hams we're talking about here, there is a lot of other uses for frequencies in that area.
If you need a hobby, get a CB or something, but the rest of us want our internet.
We *HAVE* a hobby, and it's amateur radio. Try to (legally) use a CB to talk to someone half way across the world, it's not happening.
While I'm new to the debate about BPL and its effects on radio frequencies, I don't think the FCC would allow for something like this if it would completely kill other, legitimate uses of radio (such as amateur frequencies and FEMA, as the grandparent post mentioned). And either way, according to ARRL, this is a Notice of Proposed Rule Making, meaning "We're thinking about deciding on this issue, so let us know what your feelings are", not necessarily "This is what's going to happen."
As I've seen it, there's multiple camps for what to do with email bourne viruses. Those that say strip the attachment, and those that say can the whole thing. I have always belonged to the "can it" group, and Mydoom is a good example. Before our virus scanner started catching them, I got at least 5 emails about how a hacker must have broken into the email system, because they got this message returned to them that they didn't send, etc. If the mail had a virus in it, just can the message.
Next, is what to do after you've tossed the mail: to notify or not to notify. Well, I'm the type that believes that *someone* should get a notification if an email is tossed (ie, mail should never disappear without some sort of DSN going somewhere). So in the case of non-mass-mailing viruses, I send a notice back to the sender telling them their mail was canned, and why.
So my question to other mail admins (which I recently posed to the amavis-new list), is why not rely on the virus scanner's naming schemes? I use f-prot here, and all viruses that fake sender email addresses end with "@mm" (for Mass-Mailer). So I told amavis to not notify the sender if the virus name contains "@mm", but to notify the sender if it does not.
Result? I've blocked over 8000 copies of Mydoom in the last 24 hours, and not sent a single mail to the "sender"s, but when one of the professors sent a mail out with a Word document attached that had a macro virus in it, he got a mail back saying the message was stopped and why.
Simple, elegant... but why don't others do similar setups?
This causes another problem, namely that the SMTP server has to keep the connection open until the virus scanner passes/fails the mail. For some sites, this is not an issue, but for others they would run out of resources quickly (and the next Winders virus-du-jour would bring their mail systems to a screeching halt).
My wife bought me a Citizen watch for my birthday last month. Happened to be the one I sent her an email about:)
The EcoDrive Skyhawk has multiple time zones, analog and digital display, UTC display at all times (quite handy when going over logfiles sometimes), 24-hour hour display, split chronograph and countdown timer, plus three alarms. Also water resistant to 100 meters, and a slide-rule outer bezel (extra geek points if you can actually use it:>)
Not only does it look sleek, but never needs winding or batteries. Just let it see the light of day to charge it (also charges from ambient light from flourescents; Don't Panic). If there isn't enough light for it to charge, it will shut off the LCD and second hand, while still updating the other hands. Turn the lights on and the hands spring to life. All in all, neat watch to look at, and quite functional.
Think about it. They put a tax on all email. What will the geeks of the world do? They'll want to find a way around the tax. So, if the law is written just right, specifying RFCs and such (I know, it's a long shot), then this might be the kick in the rear needed to write a secure SMTP replacement that isn't succeptible to all the problems the current system is, and since the new system wouldn't fall under jurisdiction of that law it would be free. There's your reason for people to switch to it, which is always a response to the "write a new protocol" statement (that nobody would switch, since there's little reason to do so).
Not saying I want to pay a tax for my email, I'm a sysadmin and get lots of it (though a salary increase to cover the tax would be nice..) But, if the lawmakers and the code writers collaborate a little, it could knock out the spammers in a different way.
And the revenues from the taxes could pay the salaries of the coders working on an SMTP replacement:>
Slashdot Mirror
Don't forget:
Joe Walsh, WB6ACU
Patty Loveless, KD4WUJ
Kevin Mitnick, N6NHG
Steve "Woz" Wozniak, WA6BND
Yeah, all weirdos. Well, okay, I've seen Joe Walsh lately, and he is a bit strange
dah-dah-dididit didididah-dah / dah-didit dit / didah-dah dididah-dah-dah dididit didah-dit didididit
Ya know, it's funny how many people instantly contradict your story with "If you had $FOO then you wouldn't have needed $BAR". Were they there? Do they know exactly what happened?
I too was saved a great deal of pain by fishtailing a car before. '87 Chevy Spectrum (no airbags) work vehicle moving at 35MPH on wet road, about 40 feet from the intersection when the light turned yellow and the idiot coming the other way thought, "Oh, it's yellow now.. I can make my left turn." Halfway through she realized that I wasn't stopping (no amount of ABS would've helped that one) and she stopped dead in the middle of my lane. Alright, I thought.. I'll aim to pass in front of her, and land in those soft bushes across the railroad tracks. Well, something in her said "keep going" and she then blocked my modified path. I believe my words were "Aww, fuckit" as I threw the car into a clockwise spin and hit her side-to-side.
By bracing my body against the door, I had absolutely no physical damage to myself, and damage to her vehicle was minimal. Both I and the passenger of her car (a Crown Vic, as I reall) walked out of the vehicles. Had I just mashed on the brakes and trusted ABS (if it was even there, which on that piece of shit it wasn't) then I may have killed her passenger and broken my neck in the process.
Does everyone get out in bad weather, find a safe spot and "play" to learn the limits of their vehicle and themselves? No they don't. I think they should. I also think that things like the gadgetry on this Jag may do a lot of good. But I agree with the sentiment that there should be a simple and quick way to turn it off when the driver knows better.
Yes, that's what they used to be. Only instead of drawers, there were pegboard racks with all those bits hanging from them - usually with a sliding rack in front of them all with more bits hanging from it as well. Resistors, capacitors, DIP ICs (like someone else in these comments mentioned, the LM555 peg usually had a few cards hanging on it), diodes (both the kind that are supposed to emit light, and those that only do it once very quickly)... those were the days. Built an alarm system out of a few IR LEDs and receivers using relays as flip-flops, before I knew what a flip-flop was - just realized that if wired properly, a couple relays could be triggered and require another circuit to manually reset (hello, digital latch).
:>
Now, as I've become a ham and have more of an appreciation for all the gadgets I used to see hanging on those panels, I sorely miss them (along with Heathkit). There was recently a thread on a mailing list I belong to (for APRS, see here) that said a lot of the decline of Radio Shack's parts wall can be blamed on ourselves, and the fact that the store which used to actually carry ham radio equipment and parts only catered to a group of people which aren't as interested in any of that anymore and are on the decline. That may be true, and there may be catalog stores and online places to get the same stuff, but there's just something about browsing through a shelf of components to get the brain going with what you can build using all that.. stuff
I feel your pain... last time I went into one, the clerk asked if he could help me. I said no, I can probably find what I need. Trying to be as "helpful" as possible, he proceeded to follow me around the store like a lost puppy, and insisted he could help me find what I need.
Funniest look on his face when I said, "Fine. I need two solder-on PL-259s and reducers for RG8X." After a moment of stammering, I opened the drawer to my left without looking, and said, "They're in here."
I was playing GTA: San Andreas last night, where one of the missions I had to do was to rob a bank and a betting store. ...
:P
so far have had a very productive day. Not once did the idea of robbing a bank or a betting store enter my mind
That's because you have TINY BALLS!
Sorry, got Catalina's voice stuck in my head now
Not to mention the Hurricane Watch Net, which just activated today because of Dennis's approach
ARRL story, HWN homepage.
Any linkage to back that claim up? Or is this perhaps another case where the power company did their homework first, and deployed BPL in an area with nobody around to complain?
I do have a few links that say otherwise though: here, here, and this one which actually looks like a company trying to do it right.
The problem is (and many people share the same idea and position), yes if the power goes out there will be no interference in that area. However, let's say that BPL were to cover the entire CONUS. Blackout in NYC, no phones no lights no motorcars, and no BPL blocking signals. However, I can't hear squat here in NJ because I still have BPL interference. Granted, the local area's interference is alleviated, but that does no good if anyone that could help can't hear you calling.
After the first few BPL postings here, I've learned that many think "screw hams, I want my broadband". That's fine, people are entitled to their opinion. But as others have also said, I hope that if their area gets BPL and interference from it, they never have to sit and watch their house burn to the foundation because the fire company's dispatch or lowband TAC channels were too noisy for anyone to hear the alarm call go out.
If I hear that four letter word (which is the last four letters of the word "weblog") again I'm going to start leaving steaming blogs on people's desks.
I can't say why, but it just grates on my nerves. Kinda like some people cringe at the word 'cunt'.
Actually, I did.
Someone borrowed a Netgear switch from me, and said he had a power supply for it already. Silly me thought he knew what he was doing, and didn't first demand to see the PSU. Whaddya know, a Netgear switch prefers to have 7.5VDC@1A, not 15VAC@.3A
He came back to my office in a panic, because I didn't have any other switches to lend out. Said he let out the magic smoke, something he'd heard me say about hardware before. I went down to the electronics lab with the switch and user in tow, found a 'lytic cap the same as the one that blew, and said "No problem, I'll just put in a new can of smoke. Gimme 15 minutes." Handed him a working switch (with the correct PSU) and I swear he thinks that little canister literally holds smoke inside it.
Theoretically, if you can make the transistors run at 604GHz, then you can make gates that run at that speed as well. Make a flip-flop out of the gates, and you've got a frequency halver. Now you only have to measure 302GHz. Repeat if necessary.
Well, now that a few of them have merged, they'll probably stabilize for a little while, and then start buying each other up again. Pretty soon, we'll be down to one company providing phone service.
Hey, wasn't there talk of TV over phone too? Maybe once all the companies merge, they could call themselves... American Telephone and Television? Or just AT&T for short. That has a nice ring to it. Ring! That's it, they can use a bell as their company logo! People can buy stock in it, and refer to "My Bell" phone company.
We already know what they'll find in the middle of the comet. Naquadah.
Is their SATA card any better with simultaneous reads/writes than their PATA cards? I've got 4-5 of them at work, and especially over NFS the performance blows. Here's what one of my colleagues wrote on the subject:
Write performance:
local writes are 27 MB/sec (~5MB files, unloaded CPU)
If both RAIDs are written together, performance cut in half
(not what we were hoping...)
local writes to local disk (/scr0) are 40 MB/sec
NFS writes to RAID are 200 times slower (1 minute per file)
NFS writes to single disk are 20MB/sec over gigabit ethernet
(a bit slower than expected, but not bad)
READ:
local reads are fast (100MB/sec) off the RAID, but cut in half when
both are read.
NFS reads off single disk are limited only by ethernet and the disk
NFS reads off the RAID are 8MB/sec, 4MB/sec when you read both.
Is this "normal" for 3Ware hardware? I've got other RAIDs, some all in software, that put this performance to shame, though you now don't have any kind of hot-swap abilities. Not too big a deal when one considers the last few times the 3Ware card lost a disk, it took the entire partition out with it and required a reboot to fix anyway, so much for hot-swap.
I like this particular line from the license agreement:
3(j) Licensee shall not use the Software or Documentation for purposes for which it is not designed or intended.
So, if you find some way to hack it, and let them know, were you using the software or documentation for purposes for which it was intended? I wouldn't think so.
It's obvious I'm no legal buff, maybe this is the right (only?) way to word what they want, but that seems like a nice way to slap a lawsuit on someone who proves the software is flawed. "We didn't mean for people to be able to do that!"
First search yielded:
:>
The phone number "(312) 259-7809" is a Chicago, IL based phone number and the registered carrier is Southwestern Bell Mobile Systems Dba Cellular One.
If I felt like spending $85 I could get the billing address, but it's not worth it
Considering my office is right down the hall from his, and I finished his book a couple weeks ago, I'll throw in my recommendation for JR Gott's "Time Travel in Einstein's Universe".
:>
Very interesting read which explains things in a manner that I could understand (sysadmin, not astrophysicist, though I'm surrounded by them daily). Maybe I should send in a Slashdot book review too
Only a picowumpus.
Maybe I should be clearer: I don't care about your internet access.
Hmm... let's see:
160M: 200kHz
80M: 500kHz
40M: 300kHz
30M: 50kHz
20M: 350kHz
15M: 450kHz
12M: 100kHz
10M: 1.7MHz
"Wide band"? Where? Not until you get up to 2M (4MHz) and 70cm (30MHz), and I don't think those are even going to be affected by BPL. Your cell or cordless phone uses much more bandwidth than any of the above frequencies.
*plonk*
Except for one minor detail. Think of a major emergency that has happened in any given area, and not necessarily tied to the loss of electric power (9/11 is a good example, but one that is used way too often for my liking). Everyone jumps on their cell phones to make calls to loved ones and such, and next thing you know none of them work anymore. Bands are too overloaded, busy signals abound, phones either don't work because the provider is swamped or because the other thousand people standing around you hit "send" before you did and your phone can't find an open frequency to use.
In emergencies, hams will form traffic nets which serve the same purpose (get emergency traffic into and out of a disaster area) in a controlled manner, because it's practiced and tested. Try telling someone who just heard of a plane crash in a remote part of Iowa that they should not use their phone to try to reach a loved one, but should wait until that person calls them. Riiiight. Won't happen.
Okay, tell that to the pilot flying at 23000 feet and falling fast who needs to get a mayday out for assistance, but those pesky downloaders are eating up the bandwidth in the HF bands, so his distress call falls on deaf ears. It's not just hams we're talking about here, there is a lot of other uses for frequencies in that area.
We *HAVE* a hobby, and it's amateur radio. Try to (legally) use a CB to talk to someone half way across the world, it's not happening.
While I'm new to the debate about BPL and its effects on radio frequencies, I don't think the FCC would allow for something like this if it would completely kill other, legitimate uses of radio (such as amateur frequencies and FEMA, as the grandparent post mentioned). And either way, according to ARRL, this is a Notice of Proposed Rule Making, meaning "We're thinking about deciding on this issue, so let us know what your feelings are", not necessarily "This is what's going to happen."
As I've seen it, there's multiple camps for what to do with email bourne viruses. Those that say strip the attachment, and those that say can the whole thing. I have always belonged to the "can it" group, and Mydoom is a good example. Before our virus scanner started catching them, I got at least 5 emails about how a hacker must have broken into the email system, because they got this message returned to them that they didn't send, etc. If the mail had a virus in it, just can the message.
Next, is what to do after you've tossed the mail: to notify or not to notify. Well, I'm the type that believes that *someone* should get a notification if an email is tossed (ie, mail should never disappear without some sort of DSN going somewhere). So in the case of non-mass-mailing viruses, I send a notice back to the sender telling them their mail was canned, and why.
So my question to other mail admins (which I recently posed to the amavis-new list), is why not rely on the virus scanner's naming schemes? I use f-prot here, and all viruses that fake sender email addresses end with "@mm" (for Mass-Mailer). So I told amavis to not notify the sender if the virus name contains "@mm", but to notify the sender if it does not.
Result? I've blocked over 8000 copies of Mydoom in the last 24 hours, and not sent a single mail to the "sender"s, but when one of the professors sent a mail out with a Word document attached that had a macro virus in it, he got a mail back saying the message was stopped and why.
Simple, elegant... but why don't others do similar setups?
This causes another problem, namely that the SMTP server has to keep the connection open until the virus scanner passes/fails the mail. For some sites, this is not an issue, but for others they would run out of resources quickly (and the next Winders virus-du-jour would bring their mail systems to a screeching halt).
My wife bought me a Citizen watch for my birthday last month. Happened to be the one I sent her an email about :)
:>)
The EcoDrive Skyhawk has multiple time zones, analog and digital display, UTC display at all times (quite handy when going over logfiles sometimes), 24-hour hour display, split chronograph and countdown timer, plus three alarms. Also water resistant to 100 meters, and a slide-rule outer bezel (extra geek points if you can actually use it
Not only does it look sleek, but never needs winding or batteries. Just let it see the light of day to charge it (also charges from ambient light from flourescents; Don't Panic). If there isn't enough light for it to charge, it will shut off the LCD and second hand, while still updating the other hands. Turn the lights on and the hands spring to life. All in all, neat watch to look at, and quite functional.
Think about it. They put a tax on all email. What will the geeks of the world do? They'll want to find a way around the tax. So, if the law is written just right, specifying RFCs and such (I know, it's a long shot), then this might be the kick in the rear needed to write a secure SMTP replacement that isn't succeptible to all the problems the current system is, and since the new system wouldn't fall under jurisdiction of that law it would be free. There's your reason for people to switch to it, which is always a response to the "write a new protocol" statement (that nobody would switch, since there's little reason to do so).
:>
Not saying I want to pay a tax for my email, I'm a sysadmin and get lots of it (though a salary increase to cover the tax would be nice..) But, if the lawmakers and the code writers collaborate a little, it could knock out the spammers in a different way.
And the revenues from the taxes could pay the salaries of the coders working on an SMTP replacement