I used to work for an anti-spam company (called stamplets - now defunct). We did the same as you but found that the best way to get your email address onto spammers lists is to put it on a website somewhere. It took be 24 hours from hosting my current website to getting the first piece of spam!
We are developing software for this, you as a user can specify how much people have to pay you to get their email delivered. For friends/family (e.g. people in your address book) its free, but you could decide that everyone else in say *@*.com has to pay you 20 cents to get a mail though. For more details see http://www.stamplets.com
My company is working on a way to make people pay you for delivering spam. Our software either blocks (at the mail server itself) any unwanted email, or depedning on your settings will let some of it through for a fee.
We are currently rolling a service out in the UK (a free UK ISP providing the service will be avaliable in the next month or so), and we aim to launch in the states soon. If anyone is interested check our website at http://www.stamplets.com/. We'd appreciate any comments you have.
Java is cross platform, has a few good IDE's (such as JBuilder, or the better netbeans - see http://www.netbeans.org/). As far as the job market goes, Java jobs pay better than C++/VB (in the UK finance industry anyway), and its much nicer to program in than VB.
Read about a guy (don't know if its the same one) in New Scientist who did this - it made the cover so should be fairly easy to track donw. The guy used a GA to program a FPGA to detect a singular tone. He managed to break the previous record for the minimum number of gates required for the task by some amount. However, altering the temperature in the room by more than 1 degree caused it to fail. As did using the same setup on a different chip. It seemed that the result was partially being worked out using minute quatum variations on the original chip. As is often the story with GA's, he managed to provde a highly efficent solution for an incredibly specific problem domain - so it was pretty useless all round. Still a very interesting read if you can find the article
Padark
Copyright law only lasts 75 years or so after the death of the originator. Hence you can quite happily churn out Mozart CD's without paying his (no doubt many) decendents a bean, but you still have to keep paying Yoko money for the beatles stuff
I'd agree on the wimpy weapons thing for the most part - that said, from the last series one of them had a huge bugger of a fly-wheel up front which caused absolute carnage iin its first round (thwo of its opponents were carried off in bin bags!). Not sure if you have this series yet in the states....
Much of the reasoning behind the limitation on weapon systems (no hardened blades for example) is down to crowd saftey - I say keep the crowds at home and bring on the explosive harpoons!
padark
IBM not being mentioned may just be an oversight. Your certainly right about the amount of effort they put into Java (they spend more money, time and resources into producing JVMs than Sun do, and they're far quicker). They've been consistantly producing useful tools (Jikes is a god send) and code (see http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/), and seem quite happy to release stuff OpenSource. Coming back to the issue at hand, It's a shame that sun didn't feel it could put Java though the normal standard bodies (whatever the reason), they obviously want to keep as tight a control over the language as possible.
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Been done, patents issues accordingly, never took off. How do I know? Tried developing the idea a couple of years back :-)
I used to work for an anti-spam company (called stamplets - now defunct). We did the same as you but found that the best way to get your email address onto spammers lists is to put it on a website somewhere. It took be 24 hours from hosting my current website to getting the first piece of spam!
We are developing software for this, you as a user can specify how much people have to pay you to get their email delivered. For friends/family (e.g. people in your address book) its free, but you could decide that everyone else in say *@*.com has to pay you 20 cents to get a mail though. For more details see http://www.stamplets.com
My company is working on a way to make people pay you for delivering spam. Our software either blocks (at the mail server itself) any unwanted email, or depedning on your settings will let some of it through for a fee. We are currently rolling a service out in the UK (a free UK ISP providing the service will be avaliable in the next month or so), and we aim to launch in the states soon. If anyone is interested check our website at http://www.stamplets.com/. We'd appreciate any comments you have.
Java is cross platform, has a few good IDE's (such as JBuilder, or the better netbeans - see http://www.netbeans.org/). As far as the job market goes, Java jobs pay better than C++/VB (in the UK finance industry anyway), and its much nicer to program in than VB.
Read about a guy (don't know if its the same one) in New Scientist who did this - it made the cover so should be fairly easy to track donw. The guy used a GA to program a FPGA to detect a singular tone. He managed to break the previous record for the minimum number of gates required for the task by some amount. However, altering the temperature in the room by more than 1 degree caused it to fail. As did using the same setup on a different chip. It seemed that the result was partially being worked out using minute quatum variations on the original chip. As is often the story with GA's, he managed to provde a highly efficent solution for an incredibly specific problem domain - so it was pretty useless all round. Still a very interesting read if you can find the article Padark
Copyright law only lasts 75 years or so after the death of the originator. Hence you can quite happily churn out Mozart CD's without paying his (no doubt many) decendents a bean, but you still have to keep paying Yoko money for the beatles stuff
Padark
I'd agree on the wimpy weapons thing for the most part - that said, from the last series one of them had a huge bugger of a fly-wheel up front which caused absolute carnage iin its first round (thwo of its opponents were carried off in bin bags!). Not sure if you have this series yet in the states.... Much of the reasoning behind the limitation on weapon systems (no hardened blades for example) is down to crowd saftey - I say keep the crowds at home and bring on the explosive harpoons! padark
IBM not being mentioned may just be an oversight. Your certainly right about the amount of effort they put into Java (they spend more money, time and resources into producing JVMs than Sun do, and they're far quicker). They've been consistantly producing useful tools (Jikes is a god send) and code (see http://www.alphaworks.ibm.com/), and seem quite happy to release stuff OpenSource. Coming back to the issue at hand, It's a shame that sun didn't feel it could put Java though the normal standard bodies (whatever the reason), they obviously want to keep as tight a control over the language as possible.