If they could design it so it looks at least halfway decent, then it'd be a possiblity. It looks so darn cheap with the buttons and all. Am I the only one who thinks this way?!?!?
Exactly.... The Nex II seemed to get poor reviews as it was cheaply made -- where are the high quality mainstream MP3 players that use Compact Flash memory? I'm surprised there isn't more people asking for this since many digital camera's use Compact Flash cards. Wouldn't you want to share your memory cards with your electronic devices? Buy one 1GB CF card and use it for MP3 (music) or for JPG (camera) when the need arises.
I thought the government was "by the people, for the people". Why doesn't the FBI care to investigate an issue if its an individual who has the problem? Why does only companies rate the "privilage" to have their issues looked into?
I thought the government was present to help protect the CITIZENS!
This reminds me of a hit and run incident I was involved with, and the Worcester, Massachusetts police didn't want to invest it because their wasn't enough monetary damage to my car (after I chased the drunk driver down the roads to get their license plate number).
I was working on a research project at RPI in the early 1990's (1992-1994) that used links to dynamic content. It was a program called HyperGlyphs and it was originally implemented with the Asymetrix ToolBook program. It linked to multimedia content as well -- images, movies, text. I had no idea that someone got a patent on this -- I don't claim I was the first, as I know there was many other projects going on before me in this field.
I used to read the alt.hypertext newsgroup (an old posting of mine from 1992) when it only got a few postings a day... I remember in 1993 when it first started picking up with this Mosaic stuff (first post about Mosaic?)....
Funny, when I first read the article title I was curious what it was going to be about. The way I figred, you could probably sum up "your rights online in 2004" in just one word:
none
but then again, I'm sure its more compex than that because there will be various corporations vying for various parts of "you" and the rights will really be dictacting what they can do amoungst themselves more than "your" rights.
And if you look closely Microsoft didn't really do any contributions before that in the past... And I tihnk they learned that it came back and bit them as the other companies like Oracle who have been donanting money politically for a while was able to get more of a foot in the door to even open up the case against Microsoft.
Microsoft just learned late in the game that the moeny donated isn't really an optional thing... Its a cost of doing business if you don't want them meddling in your affairs (or helping your business!).
I'm not sure how this sort of philosophical moral relativism can be adequately defended. The actions were immoral -- it doesn't matter if he planned it from the beginning or not.
Its as if I had a bank account for 10 years at the local bank before I knocked it off instead of the guy who wandered into town one day and held it up. Its still a bank robbery. Maybe one would make a better made-for-tv movie than the other though.
And I was totally surprised to see my website http://www.mtnhike.com wasn't in the list of the top companies controlling the Internet!
Seriously, this is typical to see and makes sense as consumers continue to demand more and more features. How can a small fry like MTNhike afford to give all the features and benefits a multi-million or billion dollar company can?
Is this bad? No, unless they start to make the rules just help them and work against me (or other small-time websites). I never expected a top-rated mountain hiknig website to have mass appeal (nor want it) but the 'net is still open enough that I can make my mark however I want (register domain name, buy server-space, post content to the web).
And I was hoping it would make me a cup of coffee too. I guess it doesn't really do all that much, although I've heard it rumored that it includes a kitchen sink.
CO2 comes naturally from the respiration of all living organisms and from
decaying vegitation. It is also injected into the atmosphere by volcanoes
and forest and grass fires. Carbon dioxide from man made sources comes
primarily from burning fossil fuels for home and building heat, for
transportation, and for industrial processes.
Hydrocarbons come from growing plants, especially coniferous trees,
such as fir and pine, and from various industries. In the transportation
area, hydrocarbons result from incomplete oxidation of gasoline. Both
hydrocarbons and methane also enter the atmosphere through the metabolism
of cows and other ruminants. It is estimated that American cows
produce 50 million tons of these gases per year. Methane seeps into the
air from swamps, coal mines, and rice paddies; it is often "flared" from
oil wells. The largest source of greenhouse gas may well be termites,
whose digestive activities are responible for about 50 billion tons of
CO2 and methane annually. This is 10 times more than the present world
production of CO2 from burning fossil fuel. Methane may be oxidized in
the atmosphere, leading to an estimated one billion tons of carbon
monoxide per year.
But now this balance appears to be disturbed as CO2 and the other
major greenhouse gases are on the rise, increasing their concentration
in the air at a rate of about one ercent per year. CO2 is responsible for
about one half of the increase. Analysis of air bubbles trapped in
glacial ice and of carbon isotopes in tree rings and ocean sediment cores
indicate that CO2 levels hovered around 260 to 280 parts per million from
the end of the last ice age (1O,OOO years ago) till the mid-ninteenth
century, except for anomolous rise 300 years ago. And these measurements
also show that CO@ concentrations have varied widely (by 20%) as the earth
has passed through glacial and interglacial periods. While today's 25%
increase in CO2 can be accounted for by the burning of fossil fuels, what
caused the much greater increases in the prehestoric past?
The present increase has brought the CO2 level to 340 parts per million,
up about 70 parts per million. If we add the greater amounts of methane
hydrocarbons, and so forth, there is now a total of about 407 parts per
million of greenhouse gases. This is large enough so that from the green-
house effect alone we should have experienced z global warming of about 2
to 4 degrees F. But this has not happened.
The observed and recorded temperature pattern since 1880 does not fit with
the CO2 greenhouse woarming calculations. During the 1880s there was a period
of cooling, followed by a warming trend. The temperatre rose by one degree
from 1900 to 1940, then fell from 1940 to 1965, and then began to rise again,
increasing by about.3 degrees F since 1975. And if the temperature
measurements taken in the northern hemisphere are corrected for the urban
effect - the so-called "heat island" that exists over cities due mainly
to the altered albedo from removing vegitation - then it is probable that
not only has there been no warming; there may have been a slight cooling. It
all depends on whose compouter model you choose to believe.
Clearly, there is still something that is not understood about global
conditions and about the weather links between the oceans and the atmosphere.
Have the experts fully taken into accountthe role of the sea as a sink or
reservior for CO2, including the well known fact that much more CO2
dissolves in cold water than in warm? The ocean hold more CO2 than does the
atmosphere, 60 times more.
The ocean covers 73% of the earth's surface. When people, including scientists
talk "global" it is hard to believe that they can ignore 73% of the globe,
but obviously they sometimes do.
Once agian, since the greenhouse gases are increasing, what's keeping
the earth from warming up? There are a number of possible explanations.
Perhaps there is some countervailing phenomenon that hasn't been taken
into account; perhaps the oceans exert greater lag than expected and the
warming is just postponed; perhaps the sea and its carbonate-depositing
inhabitants are a much better sink than some scientists believe; perhaps
the increase in CO2 stimulates more plant growth and removal of more CO2 than
calculated....The fact is, there is simply not enoough good data on most of
these processes to know for sure what is happening in the enormous, turbulent,
interlinked, dynamic systems like atmosphere and oceanic circulation. The only
thing that can be stated with certianty is that they do affect the weather.
A forest of young, growing trees will remove five to seven tons more CO2
per acre per year than old growth.
Mt St. Helens erupted with the force of more than 500 atomic bombs. Gases
and particulate matter were propelled approximately 15 miles into the
statosphere and above the ozone layer. More than 4 billion tons of earth
were displaced in about 12 hours after the volcanic eruption.
Because Mt St. Helens is relatively accessible, there were many studies
conducted and good data availible on the emissions. For the next seven
months of 1980 from the eruption on May 18, Mt St. Helens released 91O,OOO
metric tons of CO2, 22O,OOO metric tons of sulfer dioxide, and an unknown
amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere. Gigantic as it was, Mt St. Helens
was not a large volcanic eruption. Some estimates from large volcanic
eruptions in the past suggest that all of the air polluting materials
produced by man since the beginning of the industrial revolution do not
begin to equal the quantities of toxic materials, aerosols, and particulates
spewed into the air from the just three volcanoes:Krakatoa in Indonesia in
1883, Mount Katmai in Alaska in 1912, and Hekla in Iceland in 1947.
We can conclude from these volcanic events that the atmosphere is enormous
and its capacity to absorb and dilute pollutants is also very great. This
is no excuse, of course, to pollute the air deliberately, which would be
an act of folly. But it does give us some perspective on events.
GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE:HUMAN AND NATURAL INFLUENCES, edited by S. Fred Singer,
1989
Hansen, James E., 1988, THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT:IMPACTS ON CURRECT GLOBAL
TEMPERATURES AND REGIONAL HEAT WAVES
"Hansen vs. the World on the Greenhouse Effect", Science, Vol 244, pp1041-43,
June 2 1989
Broecker, Wallace S. and George H. Denton, 1990, "What Drives Glacial Cycles,"
Scientific American, Vol 262, No 1, p 48ff
THE 1980 ERUPTIONS OF MOUNT ST HELENS, Washington Geological Survey Professional
Paper 1250, Peter Lipman and Donald Mullineaux, editors, 1981
Maize, Kennedy, 1989, GLOBAL WARMING SCIENCE FLAWED?, Vol 17, No 109,9 June 1990
Did you see what you need to do for a right click? I'll illustrate:
Put you hand on the table in front of you. Now raise all your fingers except your thumb, index finger and pinkie. Now put them all back down again. Maybe I'm not that dexterious, but I certianly had to think and stare at my hand to have it happen as opposed to an instinctive response.
I didn't bother check out all the rest of the methods, although some of the "file operation" methods looked pretty much like putting my left pinkie blue and my right thumb green
On the contrary, your point proves there is a need for a machine like this! I think the value is in that you don't need to keep all the inventory of the popular books. Barnes and Noble or any other large bookstore needs to keep a large volume of "popular" books in order to satisfy demand, but its hard to forecast accurately to keep all customers happy. You overstock and then have to sell books at a huge discount. When Oprah goes on TV and raves about a book there is a quick and great demand for this before-unknown book that the lcoal B&N only has a copy or two on the bookshelves. A machine such as this corrects the problem by allowing it to print all it wants and none it doesn't.
What a grand idea!
Of course, this is even more useful to areas where shipping books is difficult or takes longer. It also helps the environment because less trucks carrying books will be on the road. Less trees to cut down to print books that were just overstocked and collect dust. Need I go on?
By the way, Business 2.0 had an article about this in last month's issue.
What monopoly? I can have either RCN or MediaOne (well, AT&T now) cable to my home -- I can get either a cable modem through either one of them in addition to cable. I can choose between Verizon and RCN for phone too...
Where do I live? Somerville, MA... I think its one of the few places where there is a choice, but I'm sure it will expand to more areas as time goes by.
The article is about EMAIL being sent t users for a different product than what is advertised (bait and switch?). It sounds like the company probably used a spam-mail person to send out the junk mail and don't know how to make it stop. I'm sure some spammers don't know how to stop since they never seem to slow down (and nobody stops them) -- they just keep on sending out MORE spam. Its gonna kill the net, I say!
Too bad spam isn't illegal. Or they don't prosecute for spam alone.
Sounds good... Do you have a couple of $billion$ you could spare so I can start digging?
I think the proper way to deal with this is make sure there's plenty of things available on the Internet so there's no need to have the AOL content delivered to you (or is that force-fed to you?).
People in the US are always thinking "bigger is better" (see the latest trophy houses as an example) and thats why AOL keeps on getting bigger. Your local ISP can provide a heck of a lot more service than AOL can. As far as I'm concerned, AOL can take a hike!
-Mike
The $379 is a good deal --- and with the Compact Flash option, you can always get one of those micro hard drives IBM makes and stick a gig of web content on it and let 'er rip! How reliable are those drives?!?!?
I wonder if an Intrinsyc server got./ it could handle it?
Careful about writing bad code and putting it on one of those things -- the bugs might be big enough to carry it off!
I can definitely see why the spammer would panic and rebel against this law -- even if its just Washington state. Since spammers are so indiscrimanate, they have absolutely no idea WHERE they are sending their spam mails to... And they have no idea on trying to figure out the WHERE (easily) without having to dramatically reduce the size of the spam mailing list. I'd be frightened to if my data revolves around no really knowing what it is...
The new guar, 'Noah,' is due to be born next month -- in other words, the project is a success.
Haven't people heard the phrase, "Don't count your chickens before they hatch?" If the guar hasn't been born yet, who knows if its a success -- there's stil plenty of time for things to go wrong. Typically a lot of development is done in the last trimester (or whatever gestation period you have with guars!).
Slashdot Mirror
The darn dell digital juteboxes as butt ugly!
If they could design it so it looks at least halfway decent, then it'd be a possiblity. It looks so darn cheap with the buttons and all. Am I the only one who thinks this way?!?!?
So is the discharge rate just as quick? I hate short-lived batteries (or power-hogging devices).
Exactly.... The Nex II seemed to get poor reviews as it was cheaply made -- where are the high quality mainstream MP3 players that use Compact Flash memory? I'm surprised there isn't more people asking for this since many digital camera's use Compact Flash cards. Wouldn't you want to share your memory cards with your electronic devices? Buy one 1GB CF card and use it for MP3 (music) or for JPG (camera) when the need arises.
I thought the government was "by the people, for the people". Why doesn't the FBI care to investigate an issue if its an individual who has the problem? Why does only companies rate the "privilage" to have their issues looked into?
I thought the government was present to help protect the CITIZENS!
This reminds me of a hit and run incident I was involved with, and the Worcester, Massachusetts police didn't want to invest it because their wasn't enough monetary damage to my car (after I chased the drunk driver down the roads to get their license plate number).
I was working on a research project at RPI in the early 1990's (1992-1994) that used links to dynamic content. It was a program called HyperGlyphs and it was originally implemented with the Asymetrix ToolBook program. It linked to multimedia content as well -- images, movies, text. I had no idea that someone got a patent on this -- I don't claim I was the first, as I know there was many other projects going on before me in this field.
I used to read the alt.hypertext newsgroup (an old posting of mine from 1992) when it only got a few postings a day... I remember in 1993 when it first started picking up with this Mosaic stuff (first post about Mosaic?)....
That's $60k or $60,000 USD per YEAR not month. There's a big differrence between that and what you wrote.
Funny, when I first read the article title I was curious what it was going to be about. The way I figred, you could probably sum up "your rights online in 2004" in just one word:
none
but then again, I'm sure its more compex than that because there will be various corporations vying for various parts of "you" and the rights will really be dictacting what they can do amoungst themselves more than "your" rights.
-Michael
Take a hike! Go to http://www.mtnhike.com
And if you look closely Microsoft didn't really do any contributions before that in the past... And I tihnk they learned that it came back and bit them as the other companies like Oracle who have been donanting money politically for a while was able to get more of a foot in the door to even open up the case against Microsoft.
Microsoft just learned late in the game that the moeny donated isn't really an optional thing... Its a cost of doing business if you don't want them meddling in your affairs (or helping your business!).
I'm not sure how this sort of philosophical moral relativism can be adequately defended. The actions were immoral -- it doesn't matter if he planned it from the beginning or not.
Its as if I had a bank account for 10 years at the local bank before I knocked it off instead of the guy who wandered into town one day and held it up. Its still a bank robbery. Maybe one would make a better made-for-tv movie than the other though.
-Michael
Take a hike! Go to http://www.mtnhike.com
The Tick is gone?!?!?
I bet its because PBS put Frontline against it!
-MichaelTake a hike! Go to http://www.mtnhike.com
And I was totally surprised to see my website http://www.mtnhike.com wasn't in the list of the top companies controlling the Internet!
Seriously, this is typical to see and makes sense as consumers continue to demand more and more features. How can a small fry like MTNhike afford to give all the features and benefits a multi-million or billion dollar company can?
Is this bad? No, unless they start to make the rules just help them and work against me (or other small-time websites). I never expected a top-rated mountain hiknig website to have mass appeal (nor want it) but the 'net is still open enough that I can make my mark however I want (register domain name, buy server-space, post content to the web).
Mike
Take a hike! Go to http://www.mtnhike.com
You want cheap? Is FREE cheap enough for ya? How about running it on any platform too? Sound good? Well, its ral and you can get it today!
POVRAY, an excellent raytracing and rendering tool at http://www.povray.org
Blender, a top-notch tool for many platforms as well is available at http://www.blender.nl
Both have animation options as well. How's that for cheap?
Michael
Take a hike! Go to http://www.mtnhike.com
How about AOL. They had their updates download autoatically into their application.
And I was hoping it would make me a cup of coffee too. I guess it doesn't really do all that much, although I've heard it rumored that it includes a kitchen sink.
CO2 comes naturally from the respiration of all living organisms and from decaying vegitation. It is also injected into the atmosphere by volcanoes and forest and grass fires. Carbon dioxide from man made sources comes primarily from burning fossil fuels for home and building heat, for transportation, and for industrial processes. Hydrocarbons come from growing plants, especially coniferous trees, such as fir and pine, and from various industries. In the transportation area, hydrocarbons result from incomplete oxidation of gasoline. Both hydrocarbons and methane also enter the atmosphere through the metabolism of cows and other ruminants. It is estimated that American cows produce 50 million tons of these gases per year. Methane seeps into the air from swamps, coal mines, and rice paddies; it is often "flared" from oil wells. The largest source of greenhouse gas may well be termites, whose digestive activities are responible for about 50 billion tons of CO2 and methane annually. This is 10 times more than the present world production of CO2 from burning fossil fuel. Methane may be oxidized in the atmosphere, leading to an estimated one billion tons of carbon monoxide per year. But now this balance appears to be disturbed as CO2 and the other major greenhouse gases are on the rise, increasing their concentration in the air at a rate of about one ercent per year. CO2 is responsible for about one half of the increase. Analysis of air bubbles trapped in glacial ice and of carbon isotopes in tree rings and ocean sediment cores indicate that CO2 levels hovered around 260 to 280 parts per million from the end of the last ice age (1O,OOO years ago) till the mid-ninteenth century, except for anomolous rise 300 years ago. And these measurements also show that CO@ concentrations have varied widely (by 20%) as the earth has passed through glacial and interglacial periods. While today's 25% increase in CO2 can be accounted for by the burning of fossil fuels, what caused the much greater increases in the prehestoric past? The present increase has brought the CO2 level to 340 parts per million, up about 70 parts per million. If we add the greater amounts of methane hydrocarbons, and so forth, there is now a total of about 407 parts per million of greenhouse gases. This is large enough so that from the green- house effect alone we should have experienced z global warming of about 2 to 4 degrees F. But this has not happened. The observed and recorded temperature pattern since 1880 does not fit with the CO2 greenhouse woarming calculations. During the 1880s there was a period of cooling, followed by a warming trend. The temperatre rose by one degree from 1900 to 1940, then fell from 1940 to 1965, and then began to rise again, increasing by about .3 degrees F since 1975. And if the temperature
measurements taken in the northern hemisphere are corrected for the urban
effect - the so-called "heat island" that exists over cities due mainly
to the altered albedo from removing vegitation - then it is probable that
not only has there been no warming; there may have been a slight cooling. It
all depends on whose compouter model you choose to believe.
Clearly, there is still something that is not understood about global
conditions and about the weather links between the oceans and the atmosphere.
Have the experts fully taken into accountthe role of the sea as a sink or
reservior for CO2, including the well known fact that much more CO2
dissolves in cold water than in warm? The ocean hold more CO2 than does the
atmosphere, 60 times more.
The ocean covers 73% of the earth's surface. When people, including scientists
talk "global" it is hard to believe that they can ignore 73% of the globe,
but obviously they sometimes do.
Once agian, since the greenhouse gases are increasing, what's keeping
the earth from warming up? There are a number of possible explanations.
Perhaps there is some countervailing phenomenon that hasn't been taken
into account; perhaps the oceans exert greater lag than expected and the
warming is just postponed; perhaps the sea and its carbonate-depositing
inhabitants are a much better sink than some scientists believe; perhaps
the increase in CO2 stimulates more plant growth and removal of more CO2 than
calculated....The fact is, there is simply not enoough good data on most of
these processes to know for sure what is happening in the enormous, turbulent,
interlinked, dynamic systems like atmosphere and oceanic circulation. The only
thing that can be stated with certianty is that they do affect the weather.
A forest of young, growing trees will remove five to seven tons more CO2
per acre per year than old growth.
Mt St. Helens erupted with the force of more than 500 atomic bombs. Gases
and particulate matter were propelled approximately 15 miles into the
statosphere and above the ozone layer. More than 4 billion tons of earth
were displaced in about 12 hours after the volcanic eruption.
Because Mt St. Helens is relatively accessible, there were many studies
conducted and good data availible on the emissions. For the next seven
months of 1980 from the eruption on May 18, Mt St. Helens released 91O,OOO
metric tons of CO2, 22O,OOO metric tons of sulfer dioxide, and an unknown
amounts of aerosols into the atmosphere. Gigantic as it was, Mt St. Helens
was not a large volcanic eruption. Some estimates from large volcanic
eruptions in the past suggest that all of the air polluting materials
produced by man since the beginning of the industrial revolution do not
begin to equal the quantities of toxic materials, aerosols, and particulates
spewed into the air from the just three volcanoes:Krakatoa in Indonesia in
1883, Mount Katmai in Alaska in 1912, and Hekla in Iceland in 1947.
We can conclude from these volcanic events that the atmosphere is enormous
and its capacity to absorb and dilute pollutants is also very great. This
is no excuse, of course, to pollute the air deliberately, which would be
an act of folly. But it does give us some perspective on events.
GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE:HUMAN AND NATURAL INFLUENCES, edited by S. Fred Singer,
1989
Hansen, James E., 1988, THE GREENHOUSE EFFECT:IMPACTS ON CURRECT GLOBAL
TEMPERATURES AND REGIONAL HEAT WAVES
"Hansen vs. the World on the Greenhouse Effect", Science, Vol 244, pp1041-43,
June 2 1989
Broecker, Wallace S. and George H. Denton, 1990, "What Drives Glacial Cycles,"
Scientific American, Vol 262, No 1, p 48ff
THE 1980 ERUPTIONS OF MOUNT ST HELENS, Washington Geological Survey Professional
Paper 1250, Peter Lipman and Donald Mullineaux, editors, 1981
Maize, Kennedy, 1989, GLOBAL WARMING SCIENCE FLAWED?, Vol 17, No 109,9 June 1990
Did you see what you need to do for a right click? I'll illustrate:
Put you hand on the table in front of you. Now raise all your fingers except your thumb, index finger and pinkie. Now put them all back down again. Maybe I'm not that dexterious, but I certianly had to think and stare at my hand to have it happen as opposed to an instinctive response. I didn't bother check out all the rest of the methods, although some of the "file operation" methods looked pretty much like putting my left pinkie blue and my right thumb green
On the contrary, your point proves there is a need for a machine like this! I think the value is in that you don't need to keep all the inventory of the popular books. Barnes and Noble or any other large bookstore needs to keep a large volume of "popular" books in order to satisfy demand, but its hard to forecast accurately to keep all customers happy. You overstock and then have to sell books at a huge discount. When Oprah goes on TV and raves about a book there is a quick and great demand for this before-unknown book that the lcoal B&N only has a copy or two on the bookshelves. A machine such as this corrects the problem by allowing it to print all it wants and none it doesn't.
What a grand idea!
Of course, this is even more useful to areas where shipping books is difficult or takes longer. It also helps the environment because less trucks carrying books will be on the road. Less trees to cut down to print books that were just overstocked and collect dust. Need I go on?
By the way, Business 2.0 had an article about this in last month's issue.
What monopoly? I can have either RCN or MediaOne (well, AT&T now) cable to my home -- I can get either a cable modem through either one of them in addition to cable. I can choose between Verizon and RCN for phone too...
Where do I live? Somerville, MA... I think its one of the few places where there is a choice, but I'm sure it will expand to more areas as time goes by.
The article is about EMAIL being sent t users for a different product than what is advertised (bait and switch?). It sounds like the company probably used a spam-mail person to send out the junk mail and don't know how to make it stop. I'm sure some spammers don't know how to stop since they never seem to slow down (and nobody stops them) -- they just keep on sending out MORE spam. Its gonna kill the net, I say! Too bad spam isn't illegal. Or they don't prosecute for spam alone.
Sounds good... Do you have a couple of $billion$ you could spare so I can start digging?
I think the proper way to deal with this is make sure there's plenty of things available on the Internet so there's no need to have the AOL content delivered to you (or is that force-fed to you?).
People in the US are always thinking "bigger is better" (see the latest trophy houses as an example) and thats why AOL keeps on getting bigger. Your local ISP can provide a heck of a lot more service than AOL can. As far as I'm concerned, AOL can take a hike! -Mike
The $379 is a good deal --- and with the Compact Flash option, you can always get one of those micro hard drives IBM makes and stick a gig of web content on it and let 'er rip! How reliable are those drives?!?!?
./ it could handle it?
I wonder if an Intrinsyc server got
Careful about writing bad code and putting it on one of those things -- the bugs might be big enough to carry it off!
I can definitely see why the spammer would panic and rebel against this law -- even if its just Washington state. Since spammers are so indiscrimanate, they have absolutely no idea WHERE they are sending their spam mails to... And they have no idea on trying to figure out the WHERE (easily) without having to dramatically reduce the size of the spam mailing list. I'd be frightened to if my data revolves around no really knowing what it is...
Cheap sale (auction) on OnSale [I always liked OnSale better before EggHead bought them) --
5 770.htm
http://www.egghead.com/category/inv/00046627/0359
This is a barebones type of thing -- but most geeks can handle that, right? Current bid (at time of writing) is $142. Cheap!
Haven't people heard the phrase, "Don't count your chickens before they hatch?" If the guar hasn't been born yet, who knows if its a success -- there's stil plenty of time for things to go wrong. Typically a lot of development is done in the last trimester (or whatever gestation period you have with guars!).